Fun WAR story--post yours, too!

Cool. What AI level? Always curious to know how it's working at what levels.

~SDC~

Great writeup! You've got excellent style. I'd share something of my own, but (a) I play for Cultural victories and avoid war as much as possible, and (b) it's 3:30 a.m. here and I *really* need to get some sleep.

- Ash

~SDC~

Beginner AI level, I forgot to mention. I played two games on Sub-Normal before this and got completely owned. Small Galaxy. I was in 2nd place to the Torians' first before the war, and the standings haven't changed. Shortly afterweards the Arceans lost to some weird disaster. The slugs are actually offering fair tech trades instead of threats now, even though they never took those 18 DN's from what's arguably my best star system (the one I sacrificed half my people to take from the Yor).

Glad you like the writeup so far. The way I lost the last game is kind of funny; the Drengin pulled a classic move usually reserves for human players by sneaking a couple combat transports along the edge of the map into my rear areas. My jaw dropped with awe.

Excellent story.

I did notice however the so called war "behind enemy lines" is a awesome tactics. If you have a couple of very fast ships destroying trade routes, constructors and transports of your enemy after a while he will beg for mercy. Thats what I did to Drengin and without ever managing to take even one of their planets (most of the war was on my territory) they asked for peace and paid me 250bc/turn (which really helped my economy recover from a long war)

-TLA-Russian

I posted one in Apolyton about my encounter with space sharks.

I don't know how to put a link in a message, so I'll just let you cut and paste the URL:

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=82110

I have just updated the story with the aftermath!

M

I have a couple, but the funniest was the galactic zoo. I KNEW this thing was going to back fire. It came up as the first UP resolution...the toughest ship out there was a battle axe. So I voted it to my neighbors the cuddly Drengin. Within 2 years the sharks had busted loose. Kept the Drengin occupied for ALONG time. I kept sending drones up there to check it out. They lasted just long enough to show a never ending steam of battleaxes and corvettes smashing uselessly against the the sharks. Finally many years later, a lone shark survivor with 20 hps left made his way down to me. I blasted him wih my newly built dreadnaught.

The Drengins never recovered. I was then ground into dust by the Yor...but that's another story.

LOL.

And the sneaking trasnports along the edge of the map by the AI (yet to see that myself) is AWSOME as long as it occurs regularly enough to make me paranoid!

~SDC~

First game I ever played (all AI on Beginner).
Had a lot of fun, built up enough military to be left alone (small galaxy).

I arranged some great trade routes (and found out they're really worth it), when pirates showed up, making a lot of trouble with the trade ships.
Once I got rid of them, the Yor civilization suddenly grew a lot, and controlled way more sectors then me, putting me firmly into second place, culture-wise.

Then the Yor had a problem as a group started blowing their planet cores. Within a year or so, the Yor collapsed, while I contacted the group and was immediately offered peace.

Won by cultural victory shortly afterwards

Just finished my first domination victory. Game setup: default alignments, all AI set to "Normal", 8x8 map with default stars/habitability. I started off in the southwest corner. I was planning on a cultural or tech victory by means of economic dominance, maybe an alliance victory, as I just don't have the go-for-the-throat instincts it takes to run a real military campaign.

I spread out fast, though there weren't many good planets nearby. I encountered the Torians to the east, and they were obviously my only near neighbors, as north was a huge gulf, an area three sectors high and 5 wide, without a single star in it.

Got on well enough with the Torians, started trading with them. Found three resources on the Torian border, and managed to snag two of them, one econ, one morale. Missed the tech, but with one tech and one military in my rear area, I was well rounded in that area. Continued to scout, and found the Drengin on the other side of the void, fairly isolated in a cluster of stars that only spanned two sectors. Felt sorry for him until I found out that he had more good planets in that area than I had in my 5 sectors with stars in them. Also found another tech, morale, and two econ resources in the void, and managed to grab one econ resource, with the Drengin beating me to the tech and morale, and the Arceans beating me to the other econ. Then one of my scouts ran through the Yor area, northeast of the Torians, the Arceans, wrapped around the Yor from north to south in a clockwise direction, and the Altarians, east of the Torians and south of the Arceans.

Trade started, and it wasn't long before I was earning more in trade than I was in taxes. I had no military to speak of, though I had upgraded the defenses of all my starbases to the best my tech could do.

Then things got a little less peaceful. The Drengin declared war on everyone but the Yor and me. The Yor declared war on the Arceans. That was a short war, with the Yor gone. They didn't start off well, and never had more than two planets, so that wasn't a surprise.

What was, was as soon as that war was over, they started demanding protection money for me. When it was a few hundred a year, I didn't mind, but when it suddenly jumped to 3K, I told him to stuff it. We wound up in a war, and he started throwing corvettes up against my starbases, and not getting very far, seeing as those were my only obvious targets (I did have a defender or two on every planet).

The AI realized that it wasn't winning, so the Arceans formed an alliance with the Alterians, who already had an alliance with the Torians (this is the second game in a row that the Arceans pulled this stunt).

So, now we have a big ugly war, and the Torians, who were my neighbors, had better ships. To make matters worse, I just lost my best trade routes, and my budget wasn't at all happy. I lost one planet and both border starbases, but I rebuilt one of them. The Torians had just researched Dreadnoughts, and were starting to deploy them when fate decided that I needed two Precursor Rangers. The Arceans figured out that they were spending more money on the war than they had demanded for protection money, and that was before the sudden increase in my military, and so asked for peace. I'm a forgiving guy, and while I normally don't let a war lapse when I've lost territory, it was the Torians that had gained the territory, and I had no beef with them, just with the Altarians choice of allies.

The war in the void with the Drengin started to heat up now that I wasn't the primary target. The Drengen had taken out the Arcean starbase while the Arceans were preoccupied with me, and now the Arceans were returning the favor. Seeing this, I sent out large quantities of constructors into the void, ready for the starbases to fall. Within a year, I had starbases on every resource in the void except for the tech one, and every one of them had maxed defenses and maxed mining.

By this time, I had caught up with the Torian military technology, though I was still dead last amongst the surviving major powers in actual military might. Which of course, queued, the Arceans to demand protection money again.

This time, the war got violent fast, probably because the alliances were already in place, and this time the Altarians had some military to contribute. This time I was cranking out Dreadnoughts which were better than the Torian Dreadnoughts. I was also being careful to keep them in supported sectors so that they'd get the various starbase bonuses. I was constantly pulling heavily damaged ships off the front to repair at planets a sector back from the front. The initial offensive kicked me out of the sector that had been the Torian front during the entire first war. At this point, I didn't know if I was going to survive. One thing the Torians did that annoyed me was in taking one colony, they blew the planet class down to 13 from 16. Ouch! They'd pay for that, I now had reason to dislike them.

I realized that the sector that was going to become the front held one critical planet, my primary manufacturing/shipyard planet. So I set up three extra starbases to boost the production and military capacity of that sector. The war between that sector and the next lasted for two years, and the sectors north and south of that sector changed cultural ownership to the Torians. So, I had little choice but to buff up the 4 starbases with cultural improvements. This worked quite well. In fact, so well that both sectors immediately flipped back to my ownership, and all three planets in the sector to the east started "flying the jolly roger." Interesting, my culture plan may actually support the war. Then, I remembered something I read in the manual. One of the ways you prevent a culture flip is to garrison starships at the system in question. So, with that in mind, I sent out an expeditionary force to blow away the garrison on each of those planets (didn't have any transports, and the economy was too weak to let me buy them). Sure enough, while enroute to the second system in the sector, the first flips. Same thing next turn. Took all three planets without invading a single one.

Now all of a sudden, except for the morale starbase and the class 16 planet that is now class 13, I'm in a better position, than I was at the start of the war, and my Avatars are just coming off the line. I don't know if Avatars are that nasty against Dreadnought normally, but mine were eating the Torian dreadnoughts and Rangers like candy. My Dreadnoughts could more than hold their own, but the Torians were out-producing me.

However, I soon felt comfortable enough to go after the starbase that the Torians replaced mine with. Turns out they hadn't upgraded the defenses at all, so it fell fast, and I managed to slip in enough constructors to max out the new starbase in all areas but culture. I didn't have any planets in this sector, so I didn't think that a starbase with cultural magnification would help, but I decided to try it, and this time I had tech for the Cultural Palace. 5 turns later, the Torian homeworld defected, shortly followed by the other system in that sector. This is when I realized that cultural warfare and ship warfare were quite complementary, even if you didn't have planets anywhere near the sector in question.

About this time, two of my new trade partners, both minor races, started having problems. The Alexians with the Drengin, and the Fur?? with the Arceans. So, at this point I was cranking out 4-6 constructors a turn, so I set up a starbase in the same sector as the homeworld of each race, built it up to max out its defenses and culture, then gave it to the appropriate race. Funny thing happened. Both major races called off their war in a few turns. Funnier thing happened with the Alexians. One of the reasons I had maxed out the cultural value of the starbase I gave them was because both their worlds were in danger of defecting. Now, they were both still in danger, but so was the Drengin planet in that same system.

I also donated my Dreadnoughts, as while they were the equals of anything my opponents had, I had better, and wanted to distract the other major powers.

I continued the strategy of culture-push/nuke the garrison until I had the Torians down to a single planet that was in danger of defecting to the Arceans. That's when I gained my first Alterian planet via the culture rush, one that I wasn't even trying for. I took out the rest of the Alterians using normal combat, since I wanted to get a feel for it before going after the Arceans.

At this point, I had some tough decisions to make. Momentum was definitely on my side, and there was little doubt that I was going to win. However, if I continued my current methods, I was going to get a cultural victory, and at this point the blood was boiling, and I wanted a miltary victory. There's the Arceans, who have the most sectors, but most of them are empty, and there's the Drengin, who have the most planets. There's still the one Torian planet, but however I deal with the Arceans will determine how I deal with them. The Drengin are also my major trade partner, so I decide to build three full-boat cultural starbases in their two home sectors. Even without the garrison-smash trick, and with the nearest system I owned three sectors away, they all revolted within 10 turns. Meanwhile, I have a pair of Overlords followed by combat transports smashing their way through the Arcean empire from south to north. Not much to say other than it was my best score to date, and the endgame went very quick, unlike the endgame of other 4x games.

Hey, I'm not an Ensign anymore After all that typing, I'd expect a promotion!

Rock on, Malleus. Good posts. If that zoo is anything like the prison, I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. :notsure: I'd VOTE for him to get it, but I wouldn't wish it.

Think my favorite "whoops" moment was fairly early in a game on a small map... Had just finished exploring the map, all the initial planets were colonized, and I was going to try a little bit of quick genocide against the minor races (need all the planets I can get on small) before they inevitably got out of hand later.

So, against their one defender, I line up 3 corvettes and a 1-bil transport which should have been plenty to take out their 2.5-3bil population. As always, I try to take out any race in one turn if possible to avoid "hey, we were trading with them" issues with the other races.

The defender goes down easy after 1.5 corvettes and I commence the ground battle. The forcast is for a 12-2 advantage for me, so I think no sweat, I'll not use anything nasty on it and get it intact.

Meter is swinging from around 6 to 18... hit spacebar.... roll a 7... lose the battle by 81 million people. Ack!

It's pretty early, so I don't have another transport anywhere nearby and they're moving at 1 speed anyway, so this could be bad. Sure enough, the very next turn, the Drengin say "hey, we were trading with those guys" and declare war on me. Neato. I take out the minor race a few turns later and turn on the Drengin since I have a decent military edge on them. Take down one of their planets and... The Yor jump in against me as well. 2 turns later the Torians jump in to the aid of their ally the Yor and suddenly I'm at war with 3 races *way* too early in the game to sustain it. Defeat comes mercifully swiftly, although I did at least take the Drengin bastards down.

Moral: Don't get too bloodthirsty early on. I was annoyed when the Drengin attacked, but figured fine, I was going to want someone to attack next anyway. But man, oh man, should I have made peace with them immediately after finishing off the minor. So if you're not ready to crush the enemy in a few turns, or don't mind potentially going up against *everyone*, make that peace treaty. Give away a planet if you have to, you'll get it back soon enough, but boy you sure don't want the hole you dug to keep getting deeper on you...

~SDC~

I remember one of my games I played on beginner. A new minor race called the Venge had appeared and colonized a few star systems. They then launched a few terrorists attacks, one against the Altarian Republic, the other against the Yor Collective. Both the Yor and Altarians came to me asking to declare war. Finally I decided to. Fortunately, their home system was close to my territory. I sent a Ranger and a couple of battlecruisers to take out their defenses. After that I invaded their home system and took it with minimum casualties. That basically broke them and a couple of turns later the Altarians took their last systems and a Message came on saying that the galaxy was rejoicing that the terrorist known as the Venge had been exterminated.

Biffman:

So you're saying that even if there isn't a formal alliance, the AI will declare war if your actions hurt their economy? That's nice, since it's the flip-side of what I was dealing with. I imagine the Altarians and Arceans didn't gang up on me because I was doing trade with them. Or maybe their Torian allies were killing off their trade with me. Hm.

Popup:

kick-ass.

Delphic: Yep, one of the coolest things about the game is that everyone is really looking after themselves. If you have good espionage on a given power, you can sometimes tell how much of their trade is from who and have an idea if you're going to really make someone angry.

But yeah, if someone's making 50% of their income from another power and you start munching on that power, they're going to look after their own self-interests and come after you. Best plan is to have more trade going and be the more indespensable trading partner, but you can't me the main trader with everyone...

~SDC~

So true. This game is the FIRST to have me tamed in such a way that I adhere to my friends and feel damn lucky I have them at all... no back and forth raping/pillaging making up with the stoopid AI of yore... What FUN!!!!!!

~SDC~

A tale of beginner's idiocy... with the end still uncertain!

This is still my first game - not a lot of time to play. I chose to make a race focussed on diplomacy, trade, and influence.

I began with a number of beginner's mistakes - discovered how to colonize a planet by colonizing Mars, for example - and was in a low-star-density area in any event. I gained one good colony, one bad colony, and that was it.

Then my morale collapsed. I'm still not sure why, really. This caused me to lose the Senate, which nuked my economy. I'd bought stuff on the credit plan, and wound up buying more than I can pay for.

What put me back into the game was the UP tech bill, which, somehow, wound up giving me lots of techs my neighbors did not get.

So I traded them away for cash.

However, the only way I could maintain morale was to have zero taxation, so I still have to buy everything. As a result, the tech-sale system has become like crack cocaine: it feels really good, but you have to do more and more of it to keep going, and it's really going to hurt when I stop.

I also stumbled across the fact that I could (haven't played with the latest patches) buy ships for much less than I could sell them. So far, so good - I've specialized in trade, after all. What's weird is that I can buy and sell *the same ship* multiple times per turn; this is an exploit, frankly. Ship purchases has helped me keep the Evil Chinless Rubber Puppets [aka Torians, who are pure evil in this game] off of the backs of my Altarian buddies: every time they try to attack, I buy the Torian ships and sell them to the Altarians - making a hefty profit in the process. It's nifty the game lets that happen.

Still pursuring my cultural victory, I've rush-built starbases and succeeded in taking over a planet, even, with cultural subversion.

The problem, though, is that I'm deeper and deeper in debt. If I ever cannot trade, I'm toast, and the debt is almost 100% long-term Mitrosoft debt, so it won't disappear anytime soon.

It would be interesting to have to opton to try to pay off some of the debt early.

Also, it would be nice to be able to TAB between the two sections of the "cash for N months" proposal mini-screen; and to keep it open when you submit the proposal; it would save some clicking when engaged in a lengthy negotiating process to get the best deal.

The first game that I played I was on a medium galaxy with begginner AI. I started in the middle, and managed to take out the yor and torians plus push everyone else to the right side of the map.

I was moving in for cultural victory, and with ~12 months remaining the dragonil (sp?) appeared on one of my planets in the upper left. Since I was going for cultural victory at this point I had the worlds largest supply of constructors, but not cap. ships. Not wanting to reload the game I sent all of my constructors over to the right side of the map, and tried to build faster on the right than the dragonil destroyed on the left.

I started pumping out anti-matter missles, and hit a number of their ships reducing their fleet to 1 or 2. I then asked for peace, got it, and won by cultural victory a few turns later.

Biffman, if you dump enough trade-boosting starbases in a small area, and noone is in a position to trade through you to someone else, you most certainly can be best trading partners with everyone. In fact, that's one really good part of getting a starting position in the corner. I've been told that I was as much as 45% of all trade in the galaxy, and given that the people I was trading with made up another 45%, that left 10% of the total trade that I wasn't at one end or the other Of course, you still shouldn't do like I did, and assume that just because you are everyone's major trading partner that they won't try to extort protection money from you, and that if they do, they're bluffing. You still need some military to stay out of trouble.

Forgot to point out, if you have such an area, the AI isn't stupid, it will send freighters your way to benefit from that.

Yeah, that debt nearly killed me, but I won. The Torians never attacked again, and I held a tech+military+culture lead the rest of the game. The Torians and Altarians each had one or two systems by the end. Cultural victory for my first 237 Mpoints. Hey, it's something, considering Simple difficulty and all. I'm just glad the clinch was mid-game instead of at the end; my trade income was three times all other sources combined.

Popup Target said: "Forgot to point out, if you have such an area, the AI isn't stupid, it will send freighters your way to benefit from that."

Man, if this is true, I'm going to have to rethink my Constructor/Starbase build philosophy

For my curiosity's sake, what is the typical game date year (22xx) that you wrap the game up in?

Mine was 235x

M