[mauve]

I kinda want to do a short thing on the Antarans and how to smack them but I have no idea if anyone'd be interested.

Also they're being really uncooperative in the last game I started, invading at weird times with boring, easy fleets and then suddenly battleships for no reason.
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twit

[nothingxs]

Do it gatdam
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i've gotta let go. i've gotta get straight. why'd you have to make it so hard? let me get away.
3DSFC 1736-1476-0518

[mauve]

I was testing out some stuff specifically to show what you can/can't do vs Anatarans last couple nights, and the AI player did something really, really strange that I'd never seen before.

Also I crashed the game in combat, which is a first.

Definitely gonna write that up sometime when I'm not buried.
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twit

[Broco]

I won my first game on impossible yesterday finally, thanks for all the tips mauve. I went Unification/Tolerant/Warlord/-20ground/-20defense. You're right that Tolerant is better than Subterreanean, I was able to have like 7 planets that are able to pump out a battleship in about 10 turns. The planet layout was strongly in my favor: I started on the bottom-left side of the map, the top-left civ (Meklar) was a pushover I was able to annihilate with MIRV nuke frigates, and the whole left edge was filled with Barren/Toxic Rich/Ultra Rich with a vertical buffer of empty/gas-giant stars offering natural defense from the center. I went for Merculite MIRV/EGS battleships and titans like in your last game and didn't have trouble defeating everybody once I had built enough.

There was one close call where the strongest civ, Gnolam, without declaring war sent five battleships to my homeworld which only had 2 battleships and a starbase; I had like 6 other battleships at that point but they weren't within reach. I barely lost the battle and got my homeworld destroyed, which put me in a very bad place farming-wise since I had exactly 3 terran planets supplying a large empire of Barrens. I reloaded a game 2 turns before the battle, set 50% tax + trade goods everywhere for one turn, then scrapped 3 other battleships scrape together the money to buy one at my homeworld, which was enough to turn back the attack (given that a single volley of EGS missiles would destroy an enemy battleship). After that I had no further difficulties.

[mauve]

UniTol is considered one of the strongest race combinations in the game. To the point of being imbalanced even with respect to other custom races. Doesn't make it any less fun to run though.

Tolerant is why Androids are actually awesome; They are inherently Tolerant even if you're not, so you can usually slap a few extra on top of your maximum population without problem. If you're a production race, Android Scientists are fine, otherwise go for Android Workers. That +3 bonus for workers turns every planet they're on into at least a Rich. And once you get Androids you can just start building your population up in a hurry. It's expensive, as they don't generate revenue directly, but workers pumping out trade goods never hurt anyone; it's not like the planet would be heavily populated otherwise. I considered going for those in my first game but I opted for cloning centers on Sakkra hordes instead. Second game I was too busy with investing in just conquering my enemies and using them for my own gain.

Always assume the AI is going to hurl ships at you if they're nearby. Even without Repulsive they tend to turn their back on you on a whim and wars just happen when the AI feels like it.(Particularly pay attention to treaties though, someone who doesn't like you can sic another race on you.) As stated earlier, they do tend to respect treaties.
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twit

[Broco]

The AI seems to decide whether to attack based on how well-defended your systems are relative to its fleet. If you're already at war with them they'll attack your systems as soon as their fleet is roughly at parity with yours. If you're not at war, they'll attack when they think they have an overwhelming advantage, so why not eat your planets for lunch? There's definitely an advantage to being at peace in that you don't have to deal with constant low-grade harassment, even though it doesn't save you from the big attacks.

I'm not sure whether or not they take technology level into account when making those decisions. I've noticed building a bunch of scouts can be an effective scarecrow in the early game, even though they'd likely steamroll them if they tried.

[mauve]

Couldn't sleep, wrote it up hastily in an hour and a half. Probably badly written.




So the Antarans are one of the main gimmicks of Master of Orion 2, although they usually end up disabled in any sort of serious game for what should be obvious reasons as this goes on.

First up, going to show capturing in all of its unreliable, yet effective, glory.


The way they work is they pick whichever race is overall in the lead at the time, and send an invasion fleet. The fleet itself only has the weakest drive and moves at a whopping one parsec per turn, but spawns anywhere between 2 and 5 turns away from one of your star systems. The fleet attacks once, and then disappears. So the absolute worst they can do is wipe out your defending fleet and destroy whatever planet they attack.

When you first run into them, it's just a single frigate. It ramps up over time, though.


And here's their weakest ship. Note that its beam defense is sky high, so if you run a beam heavy fleet you're going to get completely mauled. Don't bother, stick with missiles. This is a theme for pretty much all Antaran ships for a really long time, even after you get decent beams, since their later ships have Reflection Fields.

Every single Antaran ship has Particle Beams, a Damper Field, an Ecm Jammer, and a Quantum Detonator in addition to a Moleculartronic Computer and Xentronium Armor. Particle Beams ignore shields entirely, unless you have the Hard Shields upgrade on the ship, so be careful of that.

Quantum Detonator, as mentioned last time around, is kinda the 'screw you' of exotic tech. When a ship equipped with it gets captured, it has a 50% chance of self destructing for massive area damage. If you immobilize an Antaran ship, they straight up self destruct right then and there. (If you just want to kill them, though, spamming tractor beams is actually a decent way to make them freak out.) This solely exists to make them a pain in the ass to capture.

But as much of a pain as that is, Damper Field is the really obnoxious one when it comes to capturing. You can't have both a Damper Field and Shields equipped, but it reduces all damage to 1/4 of its original value. This has an extra effect where it also cuts the damage again for bonus effects, like killing marines. And worse, if you use Transporters to invade the ship, the Damper Field has a 50% chance of killing all invading marines straight up.

So what can you do?


This.

Assault Shuttles are secretly really really awesome, at least vs the AI. Not so much humans. Each one you put on a ship takes 25 space and adds 4 marines worth. They function like fighters and have to transit to the ship, but they ignore shields and are fairly durable. If you have the advantage in ground combat, you stand a very high chance of being able to just capture every ship you run across.

Also, if the ship that launches the shuttles gets blown up, the shuttles keep going anyway. So throwaway capture ships are entirely viable.


Stacking tractor beams and then boarding is also viable, if you can get close enough to capture them in a single turn, but I prefer these as the other techs in the category aren't too hot. (Advanced Damage Control usually gets into a game from Sparky showing up, and Fast Missile Racks is kinda unimpressive. While Tractor Beams compete with Planetary Gravity Generator and Graviton Beam, both of which are exremely good picks.)

Of course, Antaran marines have a whopping +100 bonus. So you really do need strong ground combat, which often means sacrificing both race picks and other essential technology for ones that upgrade marines. Of particular note are Fusion Rifle(+15, sacrifice Fusion Beam) and especially Personal Shield(+20!, sacrifice Stealth Suit). Anti-Grav Harness only competes with Inertial Stabilizer, which is fairly optional.

Second to last pack of assault shuttles barely manages to kill all the soldiers...


First pass had it self-destruct, so I reloaded and did this. Normally I wouldn't reload but, well, this is for demonstration purposes.

As a ship this isn't very useful for us, it'll get blown up by most AI defenses before it ever gets a chance to do anything, so instead we'll head to the fleet window and break it down to scrap.


When you scrap a ship, you get some random technology that was on the ship at the time. This is is a fairly lucky roll, I could have gotten a useless one like nothing but a Quantum Detonator as well.

Note that I was actually incorrect about something in a previous post; You get nothing from scrapping the Avenger, even though it has some pretty sweet tech on it.

Game's over at this point, but you might have noticed it's pretty unlikely to succeed, much less get something good. Still, if someone can bank on a risk like this and pay off it sorta ruins the game.

The main reason it usually ends up disabled is both that it's not really that interesting as a gameplay mechanic (power equalizers are horrible mechanics, guys), and the Antaran homeworld victory condition can cut games short.

...

...

So normally I'd close this out here and start the next part, but I had a really weird run that I'd like to comment on...


On one of my attempts I made an organic rich galaxy, and the enemy Sakkra that spawned eclipsed me pretty quickly. I actually couldn't get the Antarans to attack me because they were too busy harassing the other guys.

Of course, since I wasn't really looking, they found me before I found them.


that is the best spy uniform in all of history

This AI had a really unusual strategy. Rather than getting strange technologies all across the tree, it focused on exactly two technologies: Shields and fuel cells. It never had any weapons beyond nuclear missiles and laser cannons, but it teched all the way straight to Thorium Fuel Cells(infinite range).

I'd never run Huge Galaxy 2 player game before, so I suspect what's happening is the AI sees I'm out of range and decides that the most important thing to research is fuel cells so it can get closer to me. This would explain why my buffer zone strategy is successful; the AI focuses on Chemistry technologies at the expense of everything else. Need to go back to my old saves and check this out...

So it just spent a very large portion of the game harassing me with ships at whatever bases I wasn't defending at the time. Class V shields with bonus defensive techs were too much for my starbases to take down at the time, as I still didn't have Transporters available. As I was equipped for Antarans at this time instead of Sakkra, I didn't really have a lot of offensive capabilities, but I did have Assault Shuttles, and placing one or two Destroyers at every system warded them off from minor harassment. But, since I ended up passing on Subspace Communications to pick up Warp Gate so I could actually respond to stuff fast enough, my income was seriously hurting.


The results are fairly inevitable. Assault Ships are very much viable against all kinds of technology if you have the Ground Combat rating to support it and ships durable enough to survive long enough to toss them. Recommend trying them for kicks. Can capture starbases too, but you still need something to take out planetary defenses.

The downside is that they're very slow and will not hit on the turn you fire them on, so if you're not at point blank they can just retreat their ships away. (The AI will do this a lot, and a human won't even let you get close most likely. Be warned; Transporters are going to be the better option there.)

Since the only technology their ships have that I don't is shields, I don't get anything from scrapping their ships, so I might as well just use them myself. You can't refit captured ships, only use them as-is, so might as well send them to their doom. They make okay meat shields but aren't good for pretty much anything else. Well, I can send them in and have them self-destruct for some decent damage at least.


You know the tide has turned when the Antarans are attacking you instead. I can't get any of my ships there in time, but there's a relatively useless planet I've been using for a housing colony up there which takes the brunt of the assault.

I've been making extensive use of housing colonies this entire run so far, just letting the planet fill up, have the game notify me of such, move dudes to another planet and set housing back on. Well worth the cost of purchasing factories and robominers on the planet, I think.


Some time later, they attack the other system in the nebula, wiping it off the face of the universe. Bye Borea.


To make up for having less viable planets, I start jamming huge amounts of Androids on every planet, some populated only by them and nothing else.

Supposedly Androids don't get Morale bonuses, but this seems to say that my Virtual Reality Network is working? What's going on?


I was real proud of this ship. Note that ECCM Zeons means I am absurdly high tech at this point. The game's over now, I'm just being silly.

Sakkra's planets have Planetary Flux Shields, which reduce damage by 10. Since damage against planets is halved, not even my Merculites did any damage. I could have done some form of Torpedoes instead but eh.


Yesss, give me your sweet technologies, Antarans.

From these ships, I get all the exotics except for Death Ray and Reflection Shield. Good enough for me.

Death Ray can only be acquired from Orion, where it is a guaranteed gift.


If you research Dimensional Portal, you get a planetary structure you can build which will let you send a fleet to attack Antares. If you fail, nothing really happens. If you succeed, game over.

22 ships, away we go.


Antares actually doesn't have a lot of ships on it, but what is there is really tough. There's a guaranteed Star Fortress and a guaranteed Titan, the other ships vary based on how long the game has gone on, the difficulty setting, and how strong your fleet is. When you invade, the Antarans always go first, so get ready to lose a ship or two straight up.

The planet itself has no defenses, which is a real relief honestly. It also seems to have no population, so you can't bomb it away to win, either.

And yes, my fleet is utterly overkill, but maybe not as much as it looks.

Antaran ships look really cool, wish I could use them!


The Star Fortress has a leader in it for some reason. This is sorta annoying because I can't place leaders in my space stations, which would be the perfect duty for some of the more useless ones I pick up. Also, the Titan has Subspace Teleporter, which actually lets it evade my capturing for a little while, and a Black Hole Generator which kills any ship in three turns, flat, regardless of any other considerations. It also immobilizes them. (vs Antarans this is usually a guaranteed self destruct.)

The leader bonus is bonus beam attack and beam defense for the entire fleet, and, you guessed it, a bonus to marine strength, bumping Antarans up to a whopping +135.


Yeah. I actually ran out of assault shuttles even though I brought hundreds of the damned things. Eventually it falls from sheer force of throwing marines at it until it self-destructs.


I wanted to link a video here but I couldn't find one on youtube. You get a pretty crappily rendered animation of you bombing the Antaran homeworld with their leader getting blown up, and then the normal ending plays.


Whee!

This actually is hilariously sidetracked from what I wanted to cover, which is actually practical ways of dealing with Antaran harassment, but I can save that for another time. Assault shuttles are definitely viable vs the AI, at the very least.

Also imgur seemed to splat partway through this posting, so let me know if something didn't come through.
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twit

[mauve]

http://www.gog.com/gamecard/master_of_orion_1_2

it's down to $3 now for anyone who cares. Along with a whole pile of other tbs games.

I tried streaming from my Linux box the other day but the quality was absolutely godawful. You can watch a botched run where the ai decides I need to die asap in chop-o-vision. Need to do it on a computer that is not 6+ years old.
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twit

[mauve]

Still rocking this game now and again. Found the AI really can't deal with Telepathic races, and did some more dinking around with research/build paths.

Might do another thing here focusing on how race/build/research strategies work together, or try to get some multiplayer going sometime. (or maybe someone has something in mind...)

[username]

I admit that I would most likely never play this game as it just isn't my thing, but it's been rather fascinating to see it clearly broken down like this.
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http://www.audioatrocities.com/games/castlevania-sotn/clip1.mp3

[Broco]

What surprised me revisiting this game on Impossible difficulty is how much depth and complexity there is to the weapons loadouts. I'm certain 95% of players never learned much about it because it's not very well-explained and on any lower difficulty (including Hard) you can just steamroll the AIs with superior macro, not caring too much about details like what sort of defense module is effective against what weapon. Those systems were likely carefully designed on paper in advance rather than evolved through playtests.

[mauve]

I played a game the other day which actually made it past turn 300 with no clear victor in sight.. Psilons were strong that game, so the other AIs stole a shitload of tech off of them, making their ships Abnormally Strong. There wasn't much chance I could catch up with the AI's beam damage, but I noticed that their ships were generally built w/o accuracy in mind, I just made a ship design focused on defense and shields/autorepair. Two of them took out an entire fleet, though it took awhile. Though, it was pretty funny getting past this starbase and fleet of 10 battleships to find I couldn't do enough damage to get past the planet's shield.

There's a lot of interesting things going on in the game with miniaturization and tech tree synergies due to it. I kinda wish they'd expanded on it, really. I'm just trying to get a better handle on how all of the various systems work together here as I keep messing with the game, as from a design standpoint it's really interesting even if not everything works. (Chemistry tree is too strong, there is really little reason to not rush it through to Zortium early on.)
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twit

[mauve]

Time lapse of current game. Quick summary:

• Game mode: Medium galaxy, 8 players, Impossible difficulty, Prewarp start.
  
• Started as this race: Dictatorship, Creative, Aquatic, Artifacts Homeworld, Large Homeworld, +1 Research, Repulsive/-20 Ship Defense/-10 Ground Combat. Human portrait. (FISHMEN)
  Fastest prewarp start I've found for Creatives, can get everything needed for a powerful war machine by turn 80 or so. (Note that both research and production races are capable earlier.)
  
• AI races turn out to be: Mrrshan, Silicoids, Alkari, Sakkra, Psilons, Trilarians, Elerians.
  
• Mrrshan sent a cruiser at turn 70, before I was ready. They were too afraid of my planetary defenses to attack, so they just blockaded (-50% food/production) until I could shoo them off about 20-30 turns later, and then quickly conquer their homeworld Fieras.
  
• I am annihilating native races this go round. I don't have time to deal with rebellions, so they just die and get replaced by my humans.
  
• Run the force fields tech category through, getting Mass Drivers and Class 3 Shields. At that point Mass Drivers have shrunk enough that they are completely viable as a main ship weapon.
  
• Realize I'm going to have to expand quickly if I stand a chance, so I conquer the Alkari to my left. Their ship defense was really obnoxious for beams but they went down all the same.
  
• Silicoids quickly defeated by the Elerians and Sakkra.
  
• Psilons declared war on Trilarians, I realized that if I didn't expand right now they'd be the ones taking those planets, so I immediately abandoned all other plans and sent my fleet to conquer what remained. Psilons seemed to prefer destroying planets and building colony ships, so some of the planets were already destroyed when I got there.
  
• Psilons and Sakkra then handily destroyed the Elerians.
  
• Sakkra had been harassing me to vote for them in the council meeting all game long "or else", which is funny when I'm the other race that's up for voting. Psilons scared the hell out of me at the time, so I conquered Sakkra first instead. THIS IS THE DUMBEST MOVE
  
• Psilons took Orion. Yeah, that's bad.
  
• What you see now, the holding pattern.
  

So what happens if I attack Psilons? well...



On the bright side, they don't have Xentronium Armor. Dodged a bullet there.

I appear to have sent this current game to an unwinnable state, with both me and Psilons at max tech level. I have superior star systems and planets, with considerably greater population/production power than they have, but they have AI Bonus so their fleet is about twice the size mine is. No hope of victory through conventional means. All of our planets have warp indictors, so there will be no surprise attacks. We both have max physics, so we can teleport to any of our colonies in a single turn. I've never managed to win a game when it comes down to this, since it happens relatively infrequently and I'm not really sure how to approach it.

Actually sorta want to scrap all of my indictors and abuse the AI's tendency to go for the 'easiest target' whenever possible, going for the mutually assured destruction route. If I axe enough of their starbases it might feel the need to prune its fleet a bit.

Also thinking of just making my ships empty except for massive amounts of weaponry, and hoping I get the first strike on their armada, toasting their major ships before they can move.

Probably going to try a few different attempts off my savegame , but honestly I should have taken out Psilons much earlier when their fleet was not as insurmountable.
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twit

[Broco]

Hmm, the AI's defense prioritization isn't the greatest either, you might be able to spook it into defending some frontier worlds while you take over Orion.

I wonder if troop pods could take over enough of their fleet to turn the tables. Probably at max tech they'll black hole them all before they touch them though.

Maybe just brute force Doom Star fleet? I've never really used them but maybe they crush battleships like battleships crush destroyers?

[Torma Usuda]

In late game situations like that, I cheat. Phasing Cloak and Hyper-X Capacitors have a bug associated with them: the second turn the Hyper-X Capacitors give you counts for the "no actions taken" requirement to re-engage the Phasing Cloak, so it's safe to fire once and recloak before the enemy can fire back. And, since you didn't fire that turn, your Hyper-X Capacitors recharge then, too.
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"Some traditions should be dumped, and widow burning and giant robots are two of them." --Agness Kaku, MGS2 Translator
3DS: 1289-9199-0775

[mauve]

So I tried the 'ships built with very minimal defensive stuff but massive amounts of firepower.' Lots of SP/AF Phasors, some Maulers to deal with planetary shields, High Energy Focus(+50% beam damage), Hyper-X Capacitors (double attacks, as mentioned above). Didn't have a really massive fleet, still whatever I had leftover from beating up the Sakkra and a Doom Star.

And it went from this...



To this.



I didn't have enough firepower to take out that last ship in the first turn, though I definitely tried.

My leading doom star ate about 12 ships just by itself. It's kinda unreal how much damage it did and I need to think about how to apply this to real strategies. I read somewhere that, aside from just attacking first, the equipped computers affect who goes first in battle, and building an aggressive strategy around that makes a lot of sense to me... Especially with Creatives, who normally have stronger computers than other races. Going to re-evaluate my strategies for this.



Humans have the most variance in costumes out of all the races. The spy has a hilarious James Bond type outfit going on.

Also, remember: FISHMEN



AI's cheating again. Barrier Shield is only 20 damage blocked. Actually, all of their planets have a bonus of 10 shield defense, even ones with no shields. What's going on? Did I miss something?

Either way I made some ships loaded only with disruptors specifically to take out planetary defenses and they couldn't even dent the things, as you have to break 60 damage per hit to do anything at all. Planets take half damage etc.



See, 20! Also that's all the structures in the game and my usual 'new planet' build order.



payback?



I wasn't even trying to get 400 turns but I'll take it. New high score. I forget if this game has a genuine turn limit or not. Sorta wished I'd left Antarans on, so I could jack their stuff late in the game.
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[mauve]