How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Jagged Knife

A lot of people are put off by this mega event, so I wanted to post my recent experience with it. I will start by saying that I was in a decent position when the Jagged Knife happened, not evena t war with anyone else at the time, and I still had the gut reaction of "Well, this game is about over." But I don't like to give up without a fight, and I decided to make the best of what was left.

The JK took six of my fourteen planets, all around the rim of my civilization - they don't seem to grab your core planets anymore like they did in the beta. All of the captured planets had 16-18 billion population and were in the last stages of upgrading to industrial centers and VR centers, so in that one turn I lost a lot of production capacity, and the newly hostile planets had huge populations and would be hard to get back. I lot my tech capital, and four of the other taken planets were PQ 16 and above.

However, they did not get my two starship-building powerhouses, my Tir-Quan Training, my Hyperion Shrinker, or my gravity accelerators. I revived an old DL practice and started bulding Vengeance-class transports - a tiny hull with one advanced troop module and a single warp IV engine. Every starport-equipped planet could build one every 1-3 turns, and they didn't have to go far, so they didn't need to be fast. I also had two neighbors at war with each other, so I was able to buy a big transport off one of them to supplement my invasion forces.

I sold a lot of my older starships to one of my neighbors for ready invasion cash, leaving my top-of-the-line spacefleet to deal with JK defenders. Once the transports started to build up, I started taking back my planets, one bloody invasion at a time.

Finally, I had all of my planets back, though my economy was sagging from lack of taxpayers. I stopped building starships at all and ratcheted down my production until my population could build back up.

The best part of the whole event was the fact that I build too many transports. Oops! Well, some of my neighbors had also lost planets on the fringe of my empire to the JK, so I started taking them. Including a pink star PQ26 planet that turned out to be a fully-built-up manufacturing capital.

Now, only a few months after the initial JK event, I have all of my planets back and I gained seven more, and I'm not at war with anyone. To top it off, the JK forked over a treaty and a bunch of cash when I offered peace (after I had used up all of my transports

). I finally got there about 1:00 am last night; now I just have to figure out wherether it's worth it to lower taxes and quit building anything to get the 100% population bonus, or should I try to have it both ways?

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The only thing that irks me about the JK is the crash when you try to get planets from them. Once that's resolved, I'll have no problem with them. To me, these guys can't be any worse than the old school neutral empire that would rise up against evil nations in DL. So now the sides are even.

My first run in with the JK resulted in me switching from Constructors to Transports, and instead of Influencing the Thalan Empire and Drath Legion into obivion, I just picked off the worlds the JK took from them (while retaking my own worlds).

Now, while I'm careful about taking my own planets, I'll happily smash the crap out of enemy planets I'm taking, because frankly, going to war is annoying, and I could care less whether I take planets intact or not. Most border worlds change hands a couple times during the course of a war with a large and advanced neighbor, so its not usually in my best interest to make border worlds too valuable. So using Tidal Disruption or Mass Drivers is no big deal to me when I've got to invade on a budget. It gets the job done faster, and I can rebuild that much more quickly when its done.

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Mistralok1

Join Date 05/2006

+22

Kudos to you, Marshall, for choosing to play the game out. Too many times on these forums, I have read posts from players who, after some event or other, chose to retire from the game since it had become too 'hard'. My most satisfying victories have always been those most dearly fought, and nearly lost. It is a simple matter to win when things are going well, but the greatest test of playing skill is being able to deal with disaster. Bravo.

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I love the Jagged Knife event. They are easy pickings, especially in one game I played. I was an aggresive, influential, pure good empire. My enemies (evil civs) were crumbling. Then, the Jagged Knife appeared, capturing a bunch of my conquered worlds.

Now, I had been building up starships for battle for a while now, but I suffered from the problem that I didn't have enough Transports. So literally half of my worlds were building invasion ships, and the rest were on warships and constructors. But after the enemy was driven back, I had surplus transport ships.

Quickly, I sent them out, and crushed at least a third of the Jagged Knife. This let me take planets from other races that had also defected to the Jagged Knife. It turned into a struggle later on as I went to finish them off, but they gave me a bunch of free (well, at the cost of billions of soldiers) planets.

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Too many times on these forums, I have read posts from players who, after some event or other, chose to retire from the game since it had become too 'hard'.

That's exactly why I posted this. Sometimes the best thing you can do is step back from the game, have a homebrew (or do whatever helps you relax) and think your way through the ramifications before deciding to quit or continue.

I do wish it were possible to edit silly spelling errors out of the first post in a thread.

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I never thought of doing that w/ a tiny hull ship.
Got to add that to my ship inventory ASAP.
Thanks, Marshall.

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I have to agree--the Jagged Knife hurts at first, but its really a blessing in disguise. In my games, it gave me the opportunity to take a lot of worlds my allies used to have without harming relations. Plus I can usually get a lot of tech from planetary invasions.

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I never encountered a Jagged Knife Event I didn't like. In fact, for some time I thought that they were a pro-player Mega Event, until I heard that none of the MegaEvents were supposed to be pro-player!

I always stockpile a bunch of Transports at the ready when I've stabilized my economy. They're useful for when someone declares war unexpectedly, or for transporting restive populations to border planets that need them. When my Starfleet is up and I've nothing more to do, I'm forced stockpile even more Transports.

They're relatively cheap to build and effectively cost nothing to maintain, especially if all you're doing is siphoning off excess pops - this even increases your income because you can ratchet the taxation higher over more worlds.

Every time the Jagged Knife Event occurs, I'll have recovered all my planets within a few months, and then I conquer the planets everyone else has lost! Conquest eithout the negative repercussions! I almost feel dirty exploiting the Jagged Knife this way.

The Pirate Event is similar! It's an open invitation to build super-fast transports to take over your neighbors.

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