Kay, Phaedyme, here's the low-down report on the essentials of the Lemon-Game... all of this from short-term memory though since i keep on testing miscellaneous contexts very often while i develop the X-Worlds Mod.
SETUP;
Galaxy; Small, Abundant/Planets, Occasional/Habitable, Scattered/Stars, etc.
AIs; 6 Majors (AE-YC-TA-TE-DK-IR... mostly random picks), & 4 Minors.
Me; As a Custom race from XW -- the all omnipotent and quite strong "Magnetics" from TFTD, so i thought at first.
PS; Here are the Magnetic figures to somehow prove a point...
Super-Dominator, Eco/10, SoP/30, Def/20, Wea/10, MiP/20, Cre/25 &
Governed by the Illusionist party (customized as; Inf/30, DiP/20, Esp/15, Luk/5).
** Which means a relatively good spread of key-items, making it a versatile race. So i thought too.
COLONY RUSH:
Well, T'leth(16) + M-Earth(22) + IoM(9) + Mercury(3) was basicly a fairly strong starting-system. Bought the colony-ships and started to slowly stack Factories & Research while keeping economy/happiness at reasonable levels with a few buildings on the biggies. So, i thought.
Managed to grab 6 more planets close enough and a last (gasp) 14PQ far away by luck.
Within some 25/30 turns, all was gobbled up... with the AE having a quantity edge (the darn boys had an 18-plus empire in no time!) and a 30+ influence territory with mine hovering around 15%.
(PS... i normally GO for the Influence victory, call me lazy.)
DEVELOP PHASE:
Spoon fed the Minors with High-techs for Money (in a matter of about 50 turns to some 50,000Bcs treasury, and a chart yellow line peeking waaaay above anybody else, and my military rating low enough for good defensive numbers), only to realize my techno-edge was slowly eroding since the damned Minors found a way to give all of this superiority factor directly to Arceans for peanuts, it seems.
I got rich, fast. But the kinky Lemons were not far behind in all aspects just because they had most Minors right under their thumbs.
Everybody had strengthen their fleets and starbases networks (Lucky me, i was able to pull off a lonely Morale-resource, began to econo/boost my local but small region, tried to strip the remaining black space with inFluence/Bases).
Everything was ready and willing for a quick re-organization of the living beings still weak enough to invade.
ATTACK & DESTROY - the
right ones:
In a matter of about 150 turns, YC & TE had just about wiped out IR/TA/DK, AE was still getting stronger and me, well, i screwed away at all but THREE minor systems.
Current status; AE/40%, YC/20%, TE/15%, Magnetic/25%... weeeeew, time for another round of invasions. The targets? TE, then YC and then AE (at the remaining 5/10% missing for the all elusive 75% Inf/minimum). So i thought.
STRATEGY DEAD:
In a swooping twilight type of processing anomaly... the stupid TE surrendered to AE only to be followed soon after by YC (which really puzzled me since they were plenty ahead in a number of areas). I begin to suspect conspiracy, even build-up paranoia scenarios in my mind and realized one important fact about war; please, carefully watch the ratios, unless you HAVE actual obvious superiority. So i thought.
BANG:
Suddenly... all i could see is a nicely drawn lemony mini-map.
With me, still stuck dead-smack middle of nowhere. Bazillions in the bank, but not enough (or even strong) ships to compete against the fast yellow gizmos all over the place.
CONCLUSION:
Surrendering sucks. So much in fact, it's the legendary lemon pie sliced unfairly.
Yup, a really amazing Lemon game.
- Zyxpsilon.
