The Bloodbath.... a tale of war and conquest.

Wargazmo

Join Date 03/2006

The Bloodbath.... a tale of war and conquest.

Greetings, this is my first AAR. I hope you guys enjoy it. I've put strategy tips in brackets, feel free to skip over it if you already know the game inside out.

I decided to try out a custom race I believe to be extremely powerful. Basically they're Torians on speed

Super: Super Breeder.
+20 Morale (3 points)
+30 Economics (4 points)
+20 speed (8 points)
Political party: Populists. (+10 morale & diplo)
Starting techs were steller cartography, xeno engineering, new propultion tech and ion drive.

(The basic premise of this set up is to counter the two things I find hardest in this game, early economy and early speed... both super breeder and the extra speed came in extremely useful throughout this game)

Galaxy size: Large with Random everything.
tech rate: Normal.
7 opponents, all random,
Difficulty: Crippling

Day1:

Obviously habitable worlds were going to be slim pickings in this galaxy, the competition was going to be tough as well with the Korath, Drengin, Yor, Krinn, Korx and Drath. Quite an evil bunch really.

My home planet was pretty nice, with a manufacturing tile, a research tile and a farm tile which would be useful later on.

Scouting around there were 0 colonisable worlds nearby so I decided to fast tech to ground invasion and try to take out the minor civ next to me, and hopefully the Drath who were right next door afterwards.

I quickly researched xeno labs and set about filling up my homeworld. Between fast buying and 99% social spending I was able to get it up and running within a few turns.

Then it was time to set the slider to 100% reserach and get some troops

(One of the great things about super breeder is you can have planets at max pop not long after you invade them as well as replenishing the worlds you took the troops from, so an early invasion strategy isn't nearly as taxing on your economy with this ability)

Fortunately while researching ground invasion I found an anomoly that reduced my research by 25% so it only took about 7 turns to get. I designed a troop ship with 4 troop pods and 0 speed (this is one of the advantages of taking +2 speed, you can have speed 3 ships early without engines). Switching back to 99% social/1% military the troop ship was going to take 6 turns to complete, luckily the Scottlingus didn't have any defensive ships yet, but I fast bought it after 3 turns anyway just to be safe.

It was going to be a close call... My 2000 troops versus 2700 for the Scotts, traditional warfare was the call as by this time I was a bit low on cash, and my troops were victorious with 1388 remaining. Ahh the spoils of war, and it looks like the new world would make a lovely research capital.

Meanwhile I set about rectifying my financial woes by building a farm on the farming tile on my homeworld and converting some of the xeno labs to entertainment centres, with a view to building an economic capital there when I researched trade.

A short while later I had my research planet full of labs, my homeworld filling up with people and two troop transports heading over to the Drath homeworld. The plan was to knock out most of their troops with my first troopship using core detonation or mass drivers (whichever the one that planetary bombardment gives you) and then sweep in with my second ship using traditional warfare to claim the undamaged planet. It was the perfect plan until.... DISASTER:

when my troop ship was within a turn, the Drath built a 3 attack defender, and my only attack ship at that time was a pathetic 1 attack and it was going to take at least 2 of them to dislodge that defender. I would have to pull my troop ships away.

Meanwhile my financial woes were critical, I was in the red and needed my economic capital up asap. So back to 100% research it was, I picked up Xeno economics and Trade. While my economic capital was building on my homeworld I built two more attack ships with my other planets and made a fleet of 3. Hopefully this would be enough to dislodge that defender.

aars

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The plethora of SS's is nice. Especially when you're dealing with the map. You could probably skip the Diplomacy screen SS's and just summarize the transaction in a me/them format.

If you spend time making detailed ship models, show them off. If they're just functional parts bolted to a hull, the condensed highlight version is fine.

I much prefer a play-by-play AAR to the story based ones. I want to learn new strategies and see how people use things in ways I hadn't thought of. Maybe they need a sub-forum for the prose style AAR's?

Yeah I could probably can some of the diplomacy screens - I do think some of them are funny though, especially when you can sue for peace and get half the enemy's tech

Unfortunately, you won't see any detailed ship models from me, besides my lack of artistic and design skills I play on fairly low graphics settings because the game runs like a dog on my PC so there's not much point me even trying to make something that looks cool. Also extra detail on ships would probably slow it down even more.

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I'm impressed that you won; it looked like a very difficult game up until the end. I enjoyed it.

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I second the motion. Very nip and tuck. I like how you used your abilities to the hilt, had a clear strategy to optimize your bonuses, and kept focus. Small and rare is not necessarily less epic! Every planet counts, and it does avoid the huge grind and tedium of big galaxies.

I've always run a fairly even split for military/social/research. I'll have to try maxing one or the other.

So, congrats on a well earned win!

General comments: you have a good narrative voice, and provided a lot of nice tidbits for your readers to consider. There was a helpful mix of detail, sidebar comments, and background explanation. I enjoyed the discussion of development and military strategy. The abundant screenshots were good, but perhaps you could provide a bit more on strategic objectives on the map shots.

A few questions:
• I’m also a fan of a population based strategy, but I haven’t tried the Super Breeder. Can I assume you kept morale at 100% to get the double bonus? Or is this bonus present without the 100% morale stat?
• You mentioned errors. I didn’t notice anything glaring. Care to elaborate?
• Do you feel there was wasted effort in building out your homeworld as a research world, then converting to an economic capital? Or was that part of the strategy?
• It looked like the AI neglected defense on their ships (which sure makes research decisions easy). How do you see the balance between attack and defense?
• Did the pirates every do anything, or perhaps the AI’s fleets took care of them?
• When do you think the turning point occurred?

Hydro

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Thanks for your kind words Hyrdo, I really like your AARs as well. I'll try to answer your qustions as best I can.

I’m also a fan of a population based strategy, but I haven’t tried the Super Breeder. Can I assume you kept morale at 100% to get the double bonus? Or is this bonus present without the 100% morale stat?

Yeah you need it at 100% to get the bonus, practically it's actually an 8x bonus, because you get the 2x bonus for having it at 100% anyway then a 4x on top of that from the super ability.

From experience, I've found the best way to play super breeder is to take every Morale bonus you possibly can at the start, then tweak your tax rate so that every population that isn't max (or close to max) is at 100% approval. So once your homeworld fills up for example (after about 6 turns) you can raise taxes so only your secondary world is at 100%. I use the colony management screen to keep an eye on morale. Practically speaking, once your homeworld fills up your tax will be around 39% to keep your other worlds happy, once you research xeno entertainment you can often go as high as 49%. Even with this low tax rate you'll still be earning a lot more than someone without super breeder who has empty worlds running at 59% or 69% tax. Neutral is probably the best alignment for this ability because of the morale bonus they get. Generally the power of super breeder increases exponentially as morale increases, so try to seek out any morale resources.

You mentioned errors. I didn’t notice anything glaring. Care to elaborate?

Not wiping out the Drath in a single turn was the main one, they only had 3 worlds so it would have paid to wait a bit longer to get 3 troopships camped outside all their worlds then taken them out all at once, if I had done this the drengin wouldn't have attacked and I could have taken out the Thalans and other weaker Civ's one by one for an easy win.

Do you feel there was wasted effort in building out your homeworld as a research world, then converting to an economic capital? Or was that part of the strategy?

The original research plan wasn't wasted because an early invasion strat was my only option and reseraching planetary invasion takes a long time if you don't have a buttload of research. Obviously if there are colonisable worlds nearby it's better to colonise than to invade straight away (execpt possibly if you're the Korath) but without all those labs it would have taken forever to get invasion.

Once I saw there was no colonisable worlds nearby I knew my economic capital would have to be either be my homeworld or the Scottalingas world. In the end the Sottlingas world had so many great research tiles that I was pretty much compelled to make that my research world, so my only real alternative for an economy world was my homeworld.

It looked like the AI neglected defense on their ships (which sure makes research decisions easy). How do you see the balance between attack and defense?

The more I play the more and more I find that hull space spent on defence is almost always better than spent on attack. Nowadays I'll only get one or two of the best weapons I have, and then fill the rest of my ships up with defence. Defence is cheaper than attack, defensive ships build faster, the good defensive techs are much, much cheaper and quicker to research than attack. And given the AIs tendancy to keep a lot of weaker ships around rather than upgrading them, a defensive ship can tear through much of their fleets without having to retreat to repair.

While it didn't apply in this game, I think a great research strategy for attack/defence is to play evil, research up to psyonic beam and then focus all research on defence from then on. Medium hulled ships with 1 psyonic beam and the rest packed with defence are just obscenely effective early on.

Did the pirates every do anything, or perhaps the AI’s fleets took care of them?

I have no idea, the only pirates I saw all game were the Drengin fleets after they got wiped out.

When do you think the turning point occurred?

Probably being able to take four of the drengins worlds while only losing one minor planet to the Thalans was the main turning point, those drengin worlds were some of the most productive in the galaxy and taking them put me streaks ahead of the AI in research and production. It meant that even though the Korx and Korath had far bigger military, I was able to quickly research and produce a counter when they attacked and once the back of their forces were broken they just couldn't keep up production with their smaller number of worlds to replenish their lost ships.

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