Part 44: Palpatine Was a Child Playing With Toys
Palpatine Was A Child Playing With Toys
Just to see the flip side of the coin - minimum profits were up to 17,360 BCs after Necron's promotion. If, on the other hand, we put everyone on trade goods - there's no point in research now - we get this. It's not much higher. And the reason it's not much higher is that I've broken the MOO2 economy for the second time.
Basically, I'd need to blow up some buildings to make more profit. I have a theoretical capability of getting something like 70k or thereabouts in income, but it remains theoretical because the magic 32,767 BC limit.
Returning to that first shot, let's see how many more ways we can break things! Next up is fleet size. 1022 Command Points, 4 of which are used for the Avenger. 1018 left, and each Doom Star consumes six of them, so that's 169 of the behemoths. Then we can support addition ships at 60 BCs each in extra maintenance costs at the 10x rate. That's another 443. So the theoretical - within the previously established economic limitations of the engine - maximum size is 612 or 613 Doom Stars. Now I'm quite sure I'll shatter something else well before we get to that point.
For sake of simplicity, I'm limiting myself to the five available ship slots.
The Artillery class combines my original concept with the suggestions of MechaCrash to lock down the enemy with these specials. Added the BHGs and Gyro Destabilizers just because.
The LotsOfGuns class will have an obscenely strong first strike. Even with a handful of PD Phasors added, if 134 heavy-mount Plasma Cannons can't solve a problem ... well, it's probably not getting solved.
The MyShipNow class is the spiritual successor to the Confiscator, boasting 71 Assault Shuttle teams.
Good luck to the PD commander on any opposing ship. Capable of targeting up to eight ships at once (the maximum there in number of weapon slots), each ShootThis will be capable of launching 292 Zeon Missiles immediately, which will then MIRV into over a thousand warheads. It's a one-shot, alpha-strike deal, but we may well blot out the star field of view with this much ordnance.
Finally, our 'carrier' representative, is Too Many of Them. Each of these ferries 25 squads of Heavy Fighters, for a total of 100 strike craft added to the fray at the start of battle.
Each of these designs will have as close to an even number of planets assigned as possible from the Rich/Ultra Rich pool. From this point forward, there will be 26 Doom Stars, at least five of each type, under construction at all times until we commence our attack.
Antaran Threat (0:16)
I ... do not think so.
Yay!
Stop interrupting me with your pointless goings-on.
First 'anomaly' event type we've seen. I'm not a fan of them. They just seem arbitrary, and largely pointless. It lasts for several hammerings of the Turn button.
Figures. It's SD 3550.1, and we've now exhausted our command points. I admit to being simultaneously disappointed and impressed that nothing has obviously broken yet. I say obviously, because it had broken, I just didn't realize it.
Freeing up more farmers to ... do nothing, because there's nothing useful for them to do.
More Antaran Words (0:07)
Would you just shut up? Kthxbye. They are sending two Battleships at a time now. *Yawn*. That's basically a match for one of our Star Fortresses, so I have to bother moving ships in.
By the time I realized that I'd hit the effective combat limit, this was the earliest save I had that I could use to commence the attack. Dozens of turns past the actual point of usefulness here. We can ignore the impending Antaran attack on Wolf. Also as you can see, there appears to be no upper limit on how much you can have in the treasury. All ships are converging on Mentar, our home system where the Dimensional Hogwash Space Magic Device is.
I must click 'Attack Antares' to send them through, on the following turn.
And then I have to make sure I really want to do that. The fleet popup then says "Destination: Antares".
Note: this next video ends the game and includes the cinematic for it.
Antaran Victory! (4:18)
So the limitation here is that the combat screen will only load in 99 ships, no matter how many you send. Basically two-thirds of my ships were irrelevant, and I could have stopped building well before using up my command points for all the good it did me. 99 Doom Stars is 594 points. We get to see the Stellar Converter, capture the most powerful Antaran ship (Harbinger-class Titan), and note that they have no planetary defenses - clearly they weren't expecting us. And I particularly like doing thousands of points of damage through Damper Fields with a blast from one of the Plasma Cannon ships.
My memory was clearly off here - I thought the Antaran fleet would be a LOT bigger and that it increased throughout the game. But I'd only done it once before, and years ago. Now that we've bombed the malignant spider threat into oblivion, we have I think seen all the possible endings.
It's time for a new adventure.