OSG-37 - 1ooming Lizards

[RefSteel]

New speaker's leadership log follows.  Any answers people could give to my various ponderings contained therein would, as always, be greatly appreciated.

I'll see what I can do!

Am wondering whether to get round to retiring the scout design.  We seem to be actively using several of them still around various planets but they are using up one of the fleet slots.

That's the right way to look at it.  I'd actually have scrapped the warp-1 beam designs first, then built Warp-3 Scouts to take over the role of the old Scouts and scrapped the Scouts when their function was taken over, but if a design slot is needed and the others are all in more-important roles, that takes precedence.  And if we manage to expand to (and hold) enough far-flung worlds, everything will be within range 7 and we can dispatch single (small) fighters to play sentry over different stars and obviate the Scouts completely.

Anyway, to that end, I've decided to scrap the slow Monitor 1.0 design which we only had 2 of, orbiting local systems, and create a new monitor design with fast engines and reserve fuel tanks for extra long-range exploration.

Sure; makes sense to me!

Kronos will be tasked with building 5 of these over the next few years with the aim of exploring the unexplored stars to the north-east of the galaxy.

That does seem pretty expensive if they're getting used as scouts, since I'm pretty sure our ship design slots still have fat to trim, but that's not the end of the world given our massive production base.

The other major change made was that Thrax was spending equal on defence, industrial, and eco.  Have changed spending to terraform about 4 million extra population per year, as that's the maximum likely growth rate, and the rest on factories.  Defence will be built too slowly right now.

My rule of thumb for terraforming is, "Either as much as possible or none at all."  The way you set it up isn't bad, but I'm a big proponent of getting planets up to size (and therefore to their maximum growth rates) ASAP; if a planet can't do much terraforming yet (and isn't mineral poor) I usually take that as a sign that it needs more factories before it can afford to terraform or do anything else.

The Bulrathis now have Controlled Radiated, so perhaps this changes the outlook rather for the likes of planets such as Hyades?

Yep - for everything within Bulrathi range.  We'll have to make a bigger effort to defend the likes of Hyades now than we did previously.

The Bulrathi can just land on them now and take them.  I guess maintaining good relations with them is pretty important.

True, although the AI actually never sends transports unless and until they have a fleet in orbit (and if they're not allied with the planet's owner, they always send transports if they do get an orbiting fleet!) so we just have to keep their ships from winning control of our planets' skies.

I'd imagine we want to colonize these as well, starting with Rana, because - well - we want to colonize everything?

The Paladia-bound colony ship is built on Obaca, and I'm continuing production of a couple more for colonizing Denubius and Collassa, even though this will annoy the enemy races, on the basis of received wisdom saying that "more planets is always better."

I'll probably send the next colony ship, in fact, to colonize Rana, as it's a rich planet.

This all sounds right to me!  There can be special cases when it's best to avoid colonizing worlds (mostly when trying to stop the High Council from meeting or when there's an enemy fleet en route to the world that you can't spare the resources to beat).

Should Kulthos, poor as it is, be building its factories up anyway, or spending on tech (where it's only giving us 117RP per turn)?  Despite all the advice thus far, I'm still not at all sure.

I think that's because there's a lot of conflicting advice!  I almost never build factories on Poor worlds, but they do help the planet's production, and that can be important:  The longer the game goes, the more important it becomes.  Building factories with RC3 and no improved industrial tech on a poor world is really slow though, especially with IIT7 in the pipeline (though I don't know how close it is to complete).

(is this the first High Council of the game?  I think so.  I'm getting the exciting stuff!)

Yup!  The first Council meeting is the only one that occurs outside of a quarter-century year.

Asked the Alkaris to declare war on Mrrshans.  They wanted Controlled Toxic so we refused.

I should note that in the base game, request a DoW against an ally is actually more likely to succeed than asking for the alliance to be broken.  This is no longer the case in kyrub's patch though, and I think it's also not true in fixbugs/Classic+ 1oom.  (If you can get them to declare war though, that tends to "stick" longer than a breach of alliance though, so there's definitely an advantage if you can get it!)

Needed to free up a ship design slot, so scrapped Hydrogen 1 (only 2 of them, around local planets, seemed rather weak).

Anything with less than our best engines is fair game for scrapping as far as I'm concerned, and with just two small ships in the class, that's another argument for putting them on the chopping block.

Maybe someone can give me a breakdown of what's good and bad about this design given the current situation.

The good:  A large ship like this always does well with a battle scanner, computer, and (nearly always) armor and shield, and of course our best weapons, and combat speed is always valuable too.  The bad:  5-ammo rockets are almost always a poor investment, and the result here is a kind of hybrid between a missile boat that fires only five Hyper-X rockets per round and a gunship with only four guns.  So how would I do this differently?

The first question is always, what do you want this ship to do?  This seems like a case of a ship intended to meet and defeat enemy fleets in space, and ships I design for the purpose fall broadly into two categories:  High-damage gunners, meant to take out enemy ships as quickly as possible, though they may suffer heavy attrition in the process; and high-survivability fleet anchors, designed to slug it out in a long fight without taking losses.  Fleet Anchors usually want special systems like repulsor beam, warp dissipator, auto-repair, or some combination, but don't strictly need any of these.  In a situation like this one, with our highly productive worlds and a long wait before the enemy comes in, now that we have good engines, I'd consider a huge ship for an anchor and see if I can get one to the battle in time!  The idealized Anchor is big rather than numerous.  For a case like this, knowing we're facing hundreds of Mrrshan Hyper-V rockets when we have only Class II shields, I'd want a Huge anchor if any, and it wouldn't mount any missiles; just battle scanner, Mark II computer, Class II shield, Duralloy, Sublights, Maneuver 2 (because though 3 gives an extra defense bonus, that doesn't help very much in comparison with its price for a giant ship - though it could well be worthwhile against non-Mrrshan enemies with poor battle computers) and all the beam weapons (here probably meaning regular or heavy Fusion Beams) that I can fit on board.

The idealized gunner is a fighter with our best engines, titanium armor, no shields, max even-numbered maneuverability (for combat movement speed) the best available beam weapon, the best computer that still fits, and that last point of maneuverability if there's still room after that.  There are cases when this gets scaled up to a Medium or Large ship though, usually because of space considerations or to get the initiative and to-hit bonuses of a battle scanner and advanced computer.  I tend to call the large versions "gunships" and these are a big enough investment that in addition to their battle scanner and possible stabilizer, they do almost always get shields and especially armor, with a few special exceptions.  The main thing about gunships is that firepower is their life:  Their goal is to hit the enemy so hard and so fast that (ideally) their targets will be destroyed before they ever have a chance to fire back.  (Except with missiles; small fighter-gunners are great against missile boats, even though they take attrition, and huge anchors may be able to absorb and ignore all the hits, but large gunships hate fighting missile boats unless they have a huge defensive advantage in maneuverability and/or shields.)  In this case, I'd have blotted out the sky with a cloud of ion cannon fighters with our best battle computer and maneuverability, but a bunch of large gunships would work too.

Now for the weapons, and the big exception:  The one type of large ship on which I (almost) never put armor and shields is a missile boat.  This is really a special case of the gunner, but it's absolutely dedicated to the best 2-rack missiles it can carry.  On a large, it still always gets a battle scanner, computer, and generally max even-numbered maneuverability because this ship's whole purpose is to launch its two salvos of missiles, do as much damage with them as it can, and retreat, before enemy beamers can close to range.  It might mount e.g. a laser if there's room, so that it can move back on the same round it fires its second missile salvo.  (For the same reason, you can put e.g. a nuclear missile 2-rack on a beam ship and then click on "Missiles" on the combat screen when the ship is selected so it doesn't fire them, as this allows you to move after firing your guns.  Secretly, I never do either version of this as a private handicap, but it's a common tactic.) I normally try to make my missile boats smaller, but sometimes the larger ones are actually more cost-efficient ways of getting missiles (or rather missile hits) into space. Note there are two reason 2-racks are better than 5s: First, they move faster (and therefore are harder to dodge and have better range). Second, you can generally get two 2-racks of missiles on a ship for the price of one 5-rack, and I'd rather hit with four missiles in the first two rounds of a fight than try to survive five rounds to eventually launch a fifth.

Missiles aside, for either an anchor or a gunship, I tend to pick the beam weapon I consider my "best" and cram as many on board as I can.  Then I add extra smaller beams if there's room.  "Best" usually means the basic version of my most powerful weapon (fusion beams here) - using the heavy version only if there's a specific reason (heavy shields in comparison with my beam technology, repulsor beams or warp dissipator on either side, etc.) but there can be exceptions; for instance, if I'm facing a lot of small and/or poorly-shielded ships or if no one has shields strong enough to seriously cut into a "lesser" gun's damage and miniaturization gives the larger one much less space efficiency, I might stack up the "lesser" ones instead. And, as mentioned, the ideal gunner would use a beam that fits on a small hull. A book could indeed be written on ship design, but these are the basics of the way I like to design ships for space superiority. That, and...

The AI, however, will already be programmed (or should be, if it's competent) to knock out efficient, sensible designs.  Pretty intimidating.

Ahahahahahaha no. Remember, this game is nearly thirty years old. The AI's ship design routines are in no way sensible or efficient except occasionally and almost (or in fact) accidentally. I've seen some decent ones, especially under kyrub's patch, but generally speaking, the AI is not good at designing ships, and it doesn't understand how to use the ones it's built effectively. Just by putting our best engines on the Crocodile, you immediately made it a better strategic asset than an AI with our tech is likely to have built.

Not sure whether we've scanned Leopards before.  One thing that really shows this game's age is the lack of any kind of interface to show you stats on ships you've already scanned.  Or can our scientists not afford the hard drive storage space it would take to, ya know, remember past scans?

Heh. When you originally asked which patch to use, the glib answer would have been, "Remnants of the Precursors" - a complete rebuild of the game from the ground up with new graphics - which fixes this, among other things (e.g. its AI makes better ship design choices too) ... but there are enough subtle differences in the design to make the game play differently from the original in unexpected ways.

Also set Kulthos to building a planetary defense shield, and boosted it (production at 277(298)).  Don't know whether it'll be ready in time.  How many BC does a class V planetary shield cost?

I believe Class V planetaries cost 500 BC; Class X planetaries cost an additional 500, and Class XVs cost an additional 500 beyond that.

In addition, a Monitor 3 got into a scrap with Mrrshan ships at Xudax, giving an opportunity for some up-to-date scans on some of their ship designs, before retreat.

Oh - hey, cool! So, those Panthers are actually dangerous, apart from being ridiculously slow! If we had to face this fleet (or more to the point, a fleet with multiple Pumas and Panthers) we'd want a real combined-arms force, with large shielded gunships (or a huge anchor) to shred the Pumas when they got out ahead and a cloud of ion-cannon smalls to avoid them and go after the Panthers. For example. On defense though, we don't really have to worry once our planetary shields go up, since they don't have any bombers.

The Crocs held up relatively well although in hindsight I think I should've held them back to avoid losing two thirds of them to the Bobcat missiles.  Then again, if I'd done that, the Bobcats would probably have just run away before I could get any laser hits in, so I wouldn't have taken many Bobcats out.  Not sure what the best tactic is.  The 63 remaining Bobcats retreat back to Crypto.

Eh ... you could probably have dodged all the missiles and let the Bobcats live (missile dodging is a whole different game once your ships have actual speed, although we're still not as fast as we want to be; your Crocodiles are nearly as fast as 5-rack Hyper-Vs themselves!) but it's nice to whittle their numbers down because the attrition they can cause when accompanying real ships is annoying (for now).

Kulthos finally finishes its planetary shield, ready for the next Mrrshan battle.

Note this means it's completely immune to hyper-V rockets now. In fact, the only weapons we've seen on the entire Mrrshan fleet that can hurt our bases are the Panthers' fusion beams ... and those will do an average of less than one point of damage per round per Panther!

OK, I believe I am now up. Life has calmed down a bit (thankfully!), so I will try to get the turns in tomorrow morning about 16 hours from now. Thoughts and suggestions from other speakers are most welcome.

Yup! And I'm glad to hear things have calmed down for you!

Roster:

- RefSteel (on deck)
- DaveV
- jez9999 (just played)
- haphazard1 (Has It!)

[jez9999]

Yeah, I think there's a case for saying that ship design is actually the most complicated aspect of the whole game.

Note this means it's completely immune to hyper-V rockets now.  In fact, the only weapons we've seen on the entire Mrrshan fleet that can hurt our bases are the Panthers' fusion beams ... and those will do an average of less than one point of damage per round per Panther!

When you're saying this sort of thing, do you have to look up the numbers, or do you know them by heart? Like, the whole calculation of shield level + planetary shield level for defence, then attack level + damage range of weapon? If you know them by heart, roughly how long did it take you to memorize all this?

Do you actually consider, when designing a ship, something along the likes of "these 10 weapons will have a x% chance to hit per roll against ship A (and B and C and D and E, etc.), and per hit they will do an average of Y damage", or is it much more instinctual, like "i think that 10 fusion beams will be good enough against their ships with level 2 shields given my experience of the game"?

Also, when you're designing ships, do you take into account the weapon's power rating? People always talk about size but power is apparently also a thing. I much more rarely hear that talked about.

Oh, and just perusing the ship design screen, I've noticed another thing; each weapon has a value for "size" and "space", which are different, sometimes hugely so. The laser, for example, has a size of 2 but takes up a whopping 20 of 'space'. What the heck is this difference about? The 'space' value seems to be the thing that matters, and the value that is actually counter per weapon installed, but the manual with its reference numbers appears to be talking about 'size'.

[DaveV]

Good turnset, jez9999. As the others have said, mere survival will probably win us this game. So, avoiding defeat in the Council and protecting our planet rates a thumbs up.

For your size/space question, beam weapons need additional engines to power them. The more inefficient the engines (i.e., the higher on the tech tree), the more space the "power" component consumes. So Fusion beams, for example, will become smaller in size as we advance in Weapons tech, but will consume less space for power if we use outdated, but miniatured, engines. I loaded my 2410 save to check: total space per fusion beam = 74 with sub-light engines, 62 with retro engines. Old engines, however, are generally not a good idea: one of the worst weaknesses of the AIs is that they have no concept of fleet speed, and will send fast ships in a fleet with slow ones. As the equation says, momentum = mass * velocity. It's worth skimping a little on the mass portion (total firepower) if the velocity compensates.

[jez9999]

Yeah, the whole thing about size, power, space, and engine newness affecting it all seems hugely overcomplicated to me. Also, it goes against the way tech works; newer techs are generally MORE miniaturized than old ones. What they should've done is just made new engines much more expensive, but made them smaller. and removed the whole "power/space" stuff.

[haphazard1]

Lots of good discussion. Ship design is one of the most complicated aspects of the game, because the random aspects of which techs you have available make it difficult to plan for specific situations the way you can in a game with standardized units like Civ. As RefSteel said, the AI does a very mixed job of creating ship designs. Sometimes it will come up with good ones and be very difficult to fight, but often it does very sub-optimal things.

OK, I will be starting my turns as soon as I finish lunch. Hopefully I can keep the Mrrshan off our planets.

[haphazard1]

First half of the turn set played. I will get a full report up later once I complete all the turns, but a quick summary:

- Mrrshan fleet attacked Kulthos, driven off with minor losses to us and somewhat bigger losses to them. They had nothing that could get through our planetary shield, so I probably should have just retreated and let them retreat as well.
- We have founded another colony at Escalon (I think that was the name), but the Alkari have ships incoming there.
- Our scouts found some more habitable worlds in the northeast, and I have colony ships on the way to all of them.
- The Psilons beat us to one of those worlds. Their colony ship was heavily armed, so our monitor could not hold the system. I have some crocodiles moving to provide fleet defense in that area, but it is a long ways off even with our newer drives.
- Lots of money going into research, but no new tech yet. Construction is being stubborn at ~45%.
- We survived the council vote. The Alkari abstained, everyone else voted against us and for the Bulrathi. We had 11 of 34 total votes, so if the Alkari had voted against us....

[shallow_thought]

Really enjoying following this - so good to see MOO(ish) back after so long a break. Thanks to everyone for such full reporting.

- We survived the council vote. The Alkari abstained, everyone else voted against us and for the Bulrathi. We had 11 of 34 total votes, so if the Alkari had voted against us....

And yeah, this is the tense time of the game (at least one that leans into "peaceful builder" to start): big enough to draw lots of aggro, not big enough to block the vote. At least you've got 25 more turns: is it time to think about reducing enemy numbers?

[haphazard1]

Really enjoying following this - so good to see MOO(ish) back after so long a break. Thanks to everyone for such full reporting.

It is good to be playing some MOO again.

At least you've got 25 more turns: is it time to think about reducing enemy numbers?

Fairly soon, I think. I have been focusing on protecting and developing our existing worlds, while also trying to grab more in the northeast. If those pesky Psilons don't beat us to them, we should add three more colonies during my turnset (along with the one already claimed). Once we grow lizards to fill those up, we should hopefully have a blocking vote (we are almost there already). We also have multiple very useful techs nearing completion, which should allow us to put a much stronger fleet into action. Switching to offense at that point should be a workable option.

I should have the rest of the turns played and my report up later today. Hopefully I have solved the tiny image problem, but we shall see.

[DaveV]

And yeah, this is the tense time of the game (at least one that leans into "peaceful builder" to start): big enough to draw lots of aggro, not big enough to block the vote. At least you've got 25 more turns: is it time to think about reducing enemy numbers?

The problem is: the only race with whom we're in hot war, the Mrrshans, have Scatter V missiles. I don't see how we can get past those to do any damage to their planets. Are we friendly enough with any of the other races to ask them to join in our righteous war? Having the AIs reduce each others' numbers would be just as useful.

[RefSteel]

Yeah, I think there's a case for saying that ship design is actually the most complicated aspect of the whole game.

Depends on what you call an "aspect," but the ship design screen is certainly the one with the largest number of sub-menus and interface elements in the game, and it interacts heavily with lots of other decisions, both upstream and downstream, so I'm with you.  Ship design is one of the core elements of the game.

When you're saying this sort of thing, do you have to look up the numbers, or do you know them by heart?  Like, the whole calculation of shield level + planetary shield level for defence, then attack level + damage range of weapon?  If you know them by heart, roughly how long did it take you to memorize all this?

I generally "look it up" and do the calculations mentally if I'm posting about it or if I feel it's important enough to work out in detail.  I do know the damage range for the early weapons by heart, but I had to look up Fusion Beams to be sure of the actual max damage, for instance.  (Now that you called my attention to it though, I notice there's an almost correct simple pattern for the "standard" beam weapons:  Laser -> Ion Cannon -> Neutron Blaster -> Fusion Beam -> Phaser add 1 to minimum damage and 4 to max damage each, with the lone exception of the Ion Cannon's minimum damage of 3.  The heavy version of each beam has the same minimum damage, but roughly double the max damage of the basic beam.  (1 less for lasers and ions, 2 less for fusion, specifically.)  It might be easier to remember that than a bunch of specific numbers.  When I'm actually playing though, outside of unusual circumstances, I judge all of it much more approximately/~~qualitatively:  "Fusion cannons do lots of damage to a single ship.  Gatling lasers hit four times and barely get through even early shields."  I like to be more precise when I'm posting on the forum about specific situations though!

Do you actually consider, when designing a ship, something along the likes of "these 10 weapons will have a x% chance to hit per roll against ship A (and B and C and D and E, etc.), and per hit they will do an average of Y damage", or is it much more instinctual, like "i think that 10 fusion beams will be good enough against their ships with level 2 shields given my experience of the game"?

For me, as noted above, it's in between.  It takes a pretty unusual situation for me to design a ship specifically to beat an individual existing AI design or fleet in any case.  I mostly follow the design rules I described in my previous post, although I do run calculations for how much I'll need to beat a specific fleet in some specific emergencies.  This might be because I happen to really like the equations I get to use.  (What?  Doesn't everybody have favorite equations?)

Also, when you're designing ships, do you take into account the weapon's power rating?  People always talk about size but power is apparently also a thing.

Nope!  Not even slightly!  I haven't the faintest idea what any weapon's "size" or "power requirements" is; when I'm designing a ship, the only thing I worry about is the total "Space" it takes up (I see you from later in your post that you've now noticed it as well) which I'll sometimes sloppily refer to as its "size."  "Space" combines the size of the weapon itself and the extra engine size needed to meet its power requirements given the current engine type to give the total amount of space needed to actually install the weapon on-board.  As you'll notice from my ship design description above, the very first thing I put on a ship is our best engine, and once that's been established, I don't have to worry about how changing the engines could change weapon efficiency, because I'm never going to use an obsolete engine anyway.  In theory, there could be edge cases where it's worth dropping down to a smaller engine to fit more beams on a defensive fleet, but in practice the only times I have ever actually done this (I'm pretty sure this is the one and only exception in my entire history of playing MoO) were cases when I needed a Dissipator or Repulsor ship to defend a planet, don't have the production to get a large ship there in time, and could fit the device on a medium by - and only by - downgrading the engine.

Yeah, the whole thing about size, power, space, and engine newness affecting it all seems hugely overcomplicated to me.  Also, it goes against the way tech works; newer techs are generally MORE miniaturized than old ones.  What they should've done is just made new engines much more expensive, but made them smaller.  and removed the whole "power/space" stuff.

Yeah.  I think the "power" requirement was an artificial attempt to avoid making Better Engines of even more overwhelming importance than they are as it is.  This being a pure space opera game, the realism question doesn't really matter, though I could make up something about how the weapon mass - or maybe better, its "energy flux" or some other handwavium - creates some kind of "hyperspace drag" so the power requirement isn't about providing energy to the weapon itself but about propelling the weapon-laden craft through hyperspace at the speed the drive is meant to allow.

Really enjoying following this - so good to see MOO(ish) back after so long a break. Thanks to everyone for such full reporting.

Thanks! It's great to see you around and I agree with Haphazard: I'm really enjoying getting back to playing and reporting MoO, even with the unfamiliarty of 1oom!

The problem is: the only race with whom we're in hot war, the Mrrshans, have Scatter V missiles. I don't see how we can get past those to do any damage to their planets. Are we friendly enough with any of the other races to ask them to join in our righteous war? Having the AIs reduce each others' numbers would be just as useful.

This does make it harder, but there are four possible solutions:
1) Get better engines and stabilizers and dodge the missiles (offensive missile dodging is a whole different ballgame.)
2) Get better shields and build a larger bomber that laughs at Scatters
3) Overwhelm them with massive numbers in spite of attrition (not recommended)
Or...
4) Get into another hot war - and just make sure we win!