Part 36: Micro All The Day Long

Micro All The Day Long

It's been a while since we looked at the overall domestic situation.




The status of scientific knowledge everywhere outside of Klackon space is a bad joke, and soon there won't be any Klackon space. Meanwhile, even with over 160 operational freighters at the moment - leaving only a handful in reserve - that is barely a blip and we're paying a bit for some extra ship maintenance etc. The imperial economy is very healthy with over a 50% surplus, and I don't see any reason for that to ever change.




We're the top spacefleet around - the Battle of Willow decimated the Silicoids, and the Sakkra tin cans actually come in second. Anywhere we want to go, we're going.




That's a lot of unassimilated Klackons, and there'll be more. Getting Alien Control Centers up soon is a priority.

Labor Division

** 287M total citizens: 7M Mrrshan(2.43%), 73M Klackon(25.4%), 207M TechnoGeek(72.1%).
** Farming - 35M (12.2%)
** Industry - 149M (51.9%)
** Research - 103M (35.9%)

I've decided to just leave the Mrrshans on Tah II - they can do whatever with that planet, and right now that's just do a bit of research and make stuff to sell since it's fully developed. They aren't useful for widespread distribution so it's very much a tribal sanctuary kind of situation. The Klackons are breeding quickly and their share of the empire is growing rapidly. It's a good thing their loyalty is assured. It is assured, right?? I'm sending them to the rich systems as work force, where they build the latest titan-class designs as quickly as possible which then replace more outdated ships. They're going to do that for the rest of this journey, and there will come a time when I have to stop their population explosion but we haven't gotten there yet.

We have 27 planets in 16 systems, and when it comes to those numbers we're really just getting started.

Standing Orders

** Sagan builds freighter fleets whenever we need them, and that's clearly not enough - a second planet will be added to that duty. Between our increasing needs for food shipments and the explosion of Klackon transporting, there is no end in sight. 175 freighters and I think we're probably going to eventually get close to doubling that.

** Mentar and one of the Bogina planets are pumping out Troop Transports without end as well. It's barely enough to feed the ravenous needs of our invasion fleet, which is headed to another Klackon system. I've toyed with the idea of splitting into two attack groups to speed things up, in which case I would need even more ground troops - which would easily be done. I think I'm going to wait for the fleet to get just a bit larger but I'll be doing that soon. Right now though, there are enough frontier systems that need protection to delay an expansion of our attack. I've reached the point where our enemies can't even threaten us in that limited way right now.

** Combat ships are only built on Rich/Ultra-Rich planets these days. Standard or worse ones are relegated to research and trade goods, unless they are occupied by one of the above two initiatives. Once in a while we invent something new to build, but that never takes long.

** I'm continuing the same food approach of having all sub-rich mineral planets grow enough to support themselves once they are terraformed, with any additional needed coming from Alaozar II.

** All of this actually leaves me currently with only Willow as a suitable planet to construct colony ships to grab up everything in sight and make sure we have spares available. Every system that has the ability to do so will be adding Artificial Planets out of whatever space dust they can find as well. The more planets we have, the more command points and income and therefore the larger fleet we can support.

In short, all is well in the TechnoGeek Empire, and our vengeance will soon be felt in all corners of the galaxy. And that will only be the beginning. Every remaining space monster, the Guardian at Orion, and ultimately the Antarans themselves will be made to submit. WE SHALL NOT BE STOPPED!!




The other Klackon planet in Polaris is smaller, but also rich, and there lots of raw material here for making more balls of rock. This should be fun, though we'll have to wait a bit for en route transports to arrive.




The Android Farmer. Scientists are clad in white, Workers in metallic copper and blue hues. I think the point by Guava about the farmers is a good one. I wasn't using better farming races because of our aquatic bonus, but the androids should well surpass that. It's sure worth trying. Problem is, we don't have any developed systems available. That's due the transports, colony ships, and freighters being needed. I could use a couple of poor planets that just have the automated production buildings pumping out trade goods - but we don't have a freighter surplus right now. I'm just going to wait a bit. #GrowingEmpireProblems.




Each form of government has an advanced type. It's time to snag ours, the Federation. Our research and income boosts increase to 75%, and alien assimilation time is halved. Since the military stuff is basically irrelevant to us for the time being and we'll get it all eventually anyway, I'm prioritizing economics. Researching stuff that will get us more research is a win, even as fast as we're going.




Polaris is ours, and its on to the Klackon home system. The other planet is small, Radiated, and Ultra Poor. We'll still take it and work on it, but it won't be anything special. We can always use another Rich one though.




And on we go with our shiny new symbol.




A word about Sociology - there was one more field to research there but we already stole it; the whole Galactic Currency thingy. So now we have nothing else to get and are up to hyper-advanced. Seven more fields to do that in. So Galactic Networking:

** Galactic Cybernet continues on where the Planetary Supercomputer left off. +15 research, +3 per-scientist bonus.
** Virtual Reality Network is a galaxy-wide 20% buff to morale. This is of course obscenely powerful, as we saw in the first game with one of the leaders who has it.



SD 3528.9

We finally know what it looks like. There was no notification in the end-turn stuff, but I also got my first revolt - Polaris V reverted to Klackon control. More troops will be sent to show them the error of their ways. Meanwhile our freighters shows signs of catching up, only to fall behind again, despite 10 new ones (2 fleets) being built each turn.

There's a lot of micro right now, so I thought I'd show how a turn goes. Now to be fair, a lot of this is just because of the extreme ending we're going for in this run. But I like giving people who are micro-averse a headache. I'm an asshat like that. So here goes:

Anatomy of a MOO2 Turn: SD 3529.0




Combat first. I've long since taken to doing the orbital battles on Auto since they are totally mindless at this point. We're fighting somewhere just about every turn - the Klackons haven't given up, periodically sending a battleship or two at us. It's been some while since it did them any good though. So we've retaken Polaris V here and can move on to a new target.




Now we'll check on all the planets that built stuff.




Carcosa IV is getting fairly close to the end, and will soon be able to grow its own food. For developing planets like this, I make sure there is at least two items in the queue, so that when one finishes the leftover production will get stockpiled in the next thing in the list.




Planets that are building transports/colony ships/freighter fleets are just set to repeat, so I don't have to worry about them unless we have too many which hasn't happened in a while. For this turn I have 14 notifications to investigate, enough to fill three pages and spill onto a fourth. Plus I'm then prompted to set up production queues for any planets I just colonized and/or conquered, like Polaris V.




Now it's time to move the fleet around. We'll head to Smon next, as always leaving the most advanced Titan I have at the moment behind for defense. The Klackon incoming is a group of four destroyers. I'm not exactly concerned. All the combat and troop ships are relocating to Tatiana, where I send them on to wherever they are needed. In doing this, I realize that we've finally reached critical mass on the transports and don't need as many of them. So I switch one of the two planets (Bogina III) building them onto freighters. Until we get ahead on being able to ship people and supplies around, I can't invest in androids.




Checking on the colony ships is next. We've got some newly-fashioned planets to settle and a Colony Ship is ready to do the job, so Willow IV will be our latest addition.




That means wading through the microscopic list at the left and setting up the build queue for the umpteenth time. Thankfully the list does go back to larger fonts once you've built some of them and lowered the amount, but this gets boring really fast.




Now I'll spend some quality time tweaking the Colonies screen, aka the ledger. Here's what it looks like before I do anything, for purposes of comparison. The first thing is to Optimize Food, so that I'm producing just enough to ship everywhere. Note that Alaozar II is no longer sufficient for this, and Alaozar I has joined the effort recently. When we get new-growth citizens in various places, they'll sometimes be put in farming even on planets where they produce very little if any, so all that has to be sorted out.




Those adjustments were made, and something else occurred to me. I don't have many planets on trade goods, but I had a couple. The automatic production buildings get just as much value on poor planets as any other ones, so I've set those to building freighter fleets as well. You can see why; I have 265 freighters, but only 14 free before I even start shipping citizens around. So now we're up to I think 5 fleets (25 freighters) getting built this turn, and the next one Alaozar I will join in and we'll get 6 (30). I'll keep escalating that wherever I can for as long as I need to until we get over the hump.

The next priority is moving extra Klackon citizens from the three incubator worlds. I've been trying more and more to find destinations that are close to the origin, so that the freighters aren't occupied for as long. The first goal is to get them to any planets that are rich.




This citizen is headed from Alaozar III to nearby Unuk V, that huge ultra-rich planet you may recall that discovered early but didn't colonize for a while. It's mostly full but not quite there yet. Mentar I sends a citizen to Wolf as well.




I also sent one from the Tatiana system to Anchat, but you can see there are a bunch more waiting. Kholdan has a rich system, and two in Polaris, so they can stay put, but there are a lot more assimilated bugs here waiting for their transports. And they're going to keep waiting, because we're out of freighters for now. This issue will only get more acute as we continue conquering Klackon planets and systems. Eventually it'll slow down, but right now it's all hands on deck with the freighters. I can only imagine how much a lowly freighter captain is getting paid these days. Anyone who demonstrates the ability to form complete sentences on occasion is getting slapped into service at the helm of one.

Finally, it's time to throw some cash around. Any planetary structure that can be bought at the cheapest rate (half done or more, 2 BCs per production) is purchased. Overall the treasury is staying pretty stable with this. It's a slightly busier turn than normal, with 694 BCs handed out to eight different planets.




And that leaves us here. Now I can hit the Turn button and do the whole thing all over again. And again. And again. Yay! Of course, every few cycles we get a new research in, which means picking another one to work on, and quite possibly queueing up a bunch more planetary buildings and/or redesigning our warships and putting those in production. Can't forget about that fun. Android farmers are still coming too, once we have the rest of the freighter movement under control.

So basically it's going a bit slow right now, and I'm looking forward to getting over the hump.




One final thing about moving population around. A feature that is quite helpful most of the time is that the game moves multiple citizens at once. If you have a big stack, it'll take whatever one you click on and everybody to the right of it. So if there are five of them, clicking the middle one takes the last three, leaving the first two there. Gets difficult to select exactly the amount you want when dealing with this many, but I suppose that's largely my fault for maxing out planets. I also just recently discovered that it respects different species; here at Bogina V I can take - if I manage to click on the precise pixel necessary - a single TechnoGeek while leaving all the Klackons there. So that's pretty nice.