Imperium Seven - Reports and Discussion

[Factoid]

Hi Maniac,

I enjoyed your report, though my mediocre 56K modem struggled downloading all those pictures. Now that my browser has cached the pictures I am really happy with all the detail you provided. I wish I had put more detail in my report so you could more clearly see the points of comparison and difference.

I note that your (Windows-level) pictures were 24bpp, roughly twice the size of the 8bpp DOSBox screenshots I took. Of course I had to resize and generally stuff around with the piccies which would have been an effort with all the pictures you had. Umm, looking closer I see you cropped some or all of your pictures from full Windows desktop? What a HUGE effort! I fully understand you slowing down on screenshots and reporting as the game wound down, been there done that.

I really like your condition of going for only one tech in each field then solely computers and espionage, added a lot of colour. Going for extermination in a large/huge galaxy is a hard ask! It was also in character but maybe next time stick to conquest, i.e. you have 2/3 population by yourself.

Our games seemed to go in parallel for a long time but diverged interestingly in the late 2300s. Kholdan going poor in 2367 may have slowed the Bugs down a bit in your game compared to mine - my first council in 2394 (Klackons population 9), your first council in 2411 (Klackons still 9). Taking Xengara off the Bulrathis made you much more popular with other races ("enemy of my enemy") than I was. The Bulrathi hot war and your tech research restrictions slowed your northward expansion down some relative to my game.

I am impressed with your efforts to take and hold Xengara. I looked at Ursa only four parsecs away and decided not to try. On the other hand I beat off some Bulrathi ships at Mobas with such ease I didn't think it was even worth reporting. This *may* be a plug for the worth of Nuclear engines, the defenders of Mobas were about 50 Nuclear engine combat speed 2 smalls armed with 1xLaser (no BC, deflector etc). All in all I prefer your outcome (losing Xengara and Mobas briefly then regaining them) to mine.

Your 2424 council *was* a close-run thing, though you were probably advanced enough to slug out a final war by then if you wanted to.

After that you steadily took over the galaxy with no huge setbacks. The Klackons DO seem to be disposed to building pathetic small ships, don't they? I think they would be more dangerous if they preferred larger ships like the Meklars do, got to take advantage of the production bonus somehow.

I find I can't play Imperium games for too long in a single stretch if I want to sustain the effort of playing well at a *strategic* level and also taking good enough notes/screenshots to write the report. You have my sympathy about making strategic errors because you just want the game to end, why don't they give up???

Well played and well reported!

- Factoid.


On a side note, DOSBox 0.62 is out. I DON'T recommend you do as I did and change versions while playing a game (Imperium 7). There are a number of changes to the configuration file layout so you really should edit a copy of the new config file to put in your own customisations (eg. frameskip, cycles setting, autoexec commands). 0.62 seems to have fixed a problem I had where Alt-Tabbing in and out to write Imperium report notes eventually stops F2,F3 and any other keypresses (to rename ships, save files etc) being seen by MOO1. Ctrl-F10 seemed to have the same problem, maybe not so bad.

[Maniac Marshall]

I note that your (Windows-level) pictures were 24bpp, roughly twice the size of the 8bpp DOSBox screenshots I took. Of course I had to resize and generally stuff around with the piccies which would have been an effort with all the pictures you had. Umm, looking closer I see you cropped some or all of your pictures from full Windows desktop? What a HUGE effort! I fully understand you slowing down on screenshots and reporting as the game wound down, been there done that.

I croped all of those pictures, and yes it took like 10 hours or so. I didn't put a stopwatch on it, but it took forever. That's just the 1/2 of it though. I then had to upload all those croped pics to a host server.... on 56k. That took AT LEAST as long. I'd guess it was a good 20+ hours of work.

Not only that, but to try to compress the # of pages the report took ( Remember, the old lurkerlounge board had a 20 img limit per post ) some of those pics in a series were "glued togeather" using Photo Studio which took even longer. Even so this STILL would have been a 13 post report over there, and that's with smiles OFF . Do NOT expect many more 200+ picture reports from the Maniac . Btw, I took about 40 or so screens I didn't use heh.

I really like your condition of going for only one tech in each field then solely computers and espionage, added a lot of colour. Going for extermination in a large/huge galaxy is a hard ask! It was also in character but maybe next time stick to conquest, i.e. you have 2/3 population by yourself.

If this was a private game, I wouldn't have finished it. I'd have quit once I saw how pathetic the Klacon "response" was. I left the steping stone planets totally unprotected a couple times, figuring I could save the fleet /w Hyperspace Comm redirections. Other than the one play for my Rich planet a couple turns into the war, they never even TRIED to counter attack. This despite most of their fleet being composed of fusion bombers

Taking Xengara off the Bulrathis made you much more popular with other races ("enemy of my enemy") than I was. The Bulrathi hot war and your tech research restrictions slowed your northward expansion down some relative to my game.

Not true. At the time I was battling for Xengara, only the Klackons were at war with the Bulrathi. In fact, the Borgs and Kitties were their allies almost the entire game. It wasn't until much later that the Alkiri were at war with them. The Bears were the LAST race to dogpile the Birds even IIRC. While it's true it helped with the Klackons eventually, I didn't have contact with the Klackons till much later.

I got relations boosts with the Klackons and Alkiri from taking Ursa, Aurora et al durring the "Bulrathi Offensive" part of the report, sure, but the Klackons hadn't ever bothered attacking me, so I'd probably have been able to get peace anyhow as they had easier fish to fry. The Alkiri were beeing hoplessly crushed by the Klackons at that point. The Alkiri were already friendly to me beforehand anyhow.

I am impressed with your efforts to take and hold Xengara. I looked at Ursa only four parsecs away and decided not to try. On the other hand I beat off some Bulrathi ships at Mobas with such ease I didn't think it was even worth reporting. This *may* be a plug for the worth of Nuclear engines, the defenders of Mobas were about 50 Nuclear engine combat speed 2 smalls armed with 1xLaser (no BC, deflector etc). All in all I prefer your outcome (losing Xengara and Mobas briefly then regaining them) to mine.

You make a good point here about Neuclear Engines. I do believe that, if I had had them, I might have been able to save Xengara the first time, though it would have been a close thing. I will say this though: On maps of this size, its RARE that losing one planet is a make or break deal. This planet WAS a big deal, though it wasn't obviously so for a while. Also, if the fighter squadron is a few turns late and you lose a planet, but can regain air superiority a few turns later, you can often retake the planet with your own ground invasion a few turns later. Of course, when its the BEARS taking a planet...... that sorta changes the equation a bit ya know .

The cheif thing in favor of neuclear engines is their cost. I usually don't research them on a non huge map. If I have only range 4, I'll nearly allways research range 6. If I have range 5 and it doesn't appear that it's necessary to have range 6, I'll usually do something widely regarded as and research stabilizer. I like to build fighters and fusion bombers right up until somone shows up with repulsors. Maybe it's weed, but it's my weed and I'm sticking to it .

I actually never lost ground control of Mobas, just orbital controll. Looking back on it, maybe that npg theft wasn't THAT big a deal right at first. 1-4 BCI vs 2-5 BC0 is kind of a toss up vs unshielded ships. It definately helped later though when the Bears and Meklars showed up with shielded ships. The npg/no comp design was also cheaper to build which helped for sure.

This is annother point of discussion. Which "gun" in that generation is better? npg is MUCH cheaper to research, fits better on fighters than IC, and stays effective longer. But IC's are better for whacking unshielded ships, and have the nice 2 space option to mount on your repulsor ships.

Lastly to that.... I gotta say you are giving me too much credit. I was, quite frankly, amazed to recapture Xengara. I would speculate that the reason I managed that was because the Eratic Bugs declared war on the Bears (or the Borgs or Cats who then demanded help from their alliance mate) right about the time the Bears took Xengara. This caused them to move their fleet off Xengara, and leave it off for SEVERAL turns while I whittled it down and recaptured it.

After that you steadily took over the galaxy with no huge setbacks. The Klackons DO seem to be disposed to building pathetic small ships, don't they? I think they would be more dangerous if they preferred larger ships like the Meklars do, got to take advantage of the production bonus somehow.

Yeah, I agree. Too often the AI just doesn't get what to do with small ships, especially when it makes bombers. The Humans are pretty good at ship designs really. They build fighters early, then like to build larges a lot later on. The Meklars can build some scary huges, especially if they get lucky enough to put auto repair on them.

The AI designs that usually give me the most to worry about are the Large Missile boats. If the AI designed more of those and more bioweapon ships as opposed to standard bombers, I think it would perform better on the whole.

-Maniac