Part 4: - 2350
2337-2350Next up, we ran into something that generally will freak out a new player the first time they see it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWAwKzKh19M
For anyone who isn't familiar with it, that's the Guardian, who always guards Orion. Just how badass it is depends on the difficulty: I think I remember escaping from it on the lower ones before. Just to put those 10k hitpoints into perspective, the largest ships we can build right now would have 900 HP, or just under 1/11th of that. And that's with sacrificing a significant amount of cost and space for extra armor. Other aspects of the Guardian are pretty equally advanced as well. In the early stages of the game, that makes Orion a no-fly zone for any ship that isn't suicidal. It's far from invincible, but it might as well be a deity at this point.
In 2337, we snagged another tech advance, Terraforming +10M. The video here is a bit longer, but still well under a minute.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSeRFuLCe2k
The purpose of this was to show off a couple of things: the 'research music' at the beginning, and then also the post-discovery dialog about changing planetary spending. Whenever prompted to increase to buy something new in this way, I always decline. The decision of when to invest, and we'll definitely want to terraform all planets, is best made on an individual rather than one-size-fits-all basis like this.
Then we hit Tier II of Planetology and are given some useful new options: Improved Terraforming +20, Controlled Dead Enivironment, and Death Spores. The first two we've already seen earlier versions of, while the last is a biological weapon that we will discuss when getting into warships. As shown though, this is a case where we are going to take another Tier-I option, because Eco Restoration will have a huge benefit to our economy by slashing our required waste-cleanup budget. That's more important here than pushing up the tech ladder.
Now we've got a new question to decide: where and how much to invest in terraforming?
ProTip: There's no point in investing in terraforming before the population of a planet hits the half-full mark. It won't benefit at all before that. I usually do it when the population is between half and two-thirds; after that growth will start slowing down. Hopefully by that point the industry can handle it in a reasonable time-frame.
Right now that means Mentar is the only planet that really is worth the investment.
Here's our homeworld before investing: the Eco line does say T-FORM but that's a very small amount, one click left and it reads WASTE. We don't want that. The granularity doesn't allow for perfect control; you can't put exactly X amount in a category. Planetary spending is split up into 25 sections of 4% each, tech spending into 50 sections of 2%. Also notice the population display is 100+, not just 100. the '+' indicates that it can be increased with currently available technology. The description noted that the price is 5 BC per million, so we need to invest 50 BC here.
A little math and a few adjustments later, and voila! We should have the process complete next year with this investment, and we're still doing plenty of research to keep things moving. I also sent another 5M population from Tyr to Imra. Imra itself doesn't need it, but once our colony ship reaches the red star Denubius in four turns I'm going to want to balance those three systems in a line left-to-right proportionally. In other words, I'll want to balance them out with a third or half or whatever I can get of their population max on each so that all can be growing well at about the same rate. I don't want to send any more citizens from Mentar; the homeworld's job is to do research and otherwhise support the colonies.
All of that went well, Mentar's max population is up to 110M, and it'll grow towards that: when it starts getting close we'll need to build more factories there. Our initial push of colonists to Imra is finished so the factory buildup can start there as well. The purpose of this shot though is to highlight the fact that we have some uninvited guests; the Darloks are coming back to Arietis. Four scouts won't do them any more good than one did. It seems likely they've run out of places to expand and are making another try here, but we'll just shoo them away once more.
It's 2340, and the Silicoids have shown up. On the galaxy map in-between turns, it looked like they moved further than usual ... meaning they have advanced engines. Because of that, they were out of range last year and we didn't even see them coming. If they brought more than scouts, this could be trouble.
As it turns out, it's just a lone scout and we turn it back.
This gives us some new information about the galaxy, and we can now have a pretty good idea where everyone is.
The Darloks pretty much have the lower left quadrant on lockdown. They had the best starting position with a sizable portion of the galaxy to themselves with no competition(no other yellow stars in that area). In the lower right, we had the second-best though, so we're not exactly roughing it ... and if you have to pick a race to start off behind, you can't do better than the Darlok.
The Alkaris(A) are totally screwed with just about as bad a starting position as is possible. Stuck between an uninhabitable system and the Guardian(G). The Silicoids(S) have to have come from the white star in the middle-center; there's just nowhere else they could have gotten to Arietis(yellow oval) from. That means they came from one of the yellow stars in the upper right. The two ?s, one of which doesn't even really look like one but that's just my hideous Paint skills, are in the upper corners. By process of elimination, that's where the Human and Sakkra, who aren't likely much happier than the Alkari, must be. The three green stars in the upper left will be fought over by probably the Darlok and Silicoid, as they look too far away for whoever is in that corner to reach soon.
The point of all this is that Arietis looks like it's becoming Ground Zero, the focal point for a border dispute. We're not at war with anybody, haven't even met anybody, but the appearance of the Silicoids there takes this to a new level because they can colonize it, ignoring hostile environments as they do. Sooner or later they or the Darlok or both WILL come back with escorts and chase our Recon ship away. The question is when, not if. With the Darloks it's no big deal, because they can't do anything with the system. A size-15 planet, even being rich, isn't that great -- but terraform it a bit and it could easily become a 35 or more, and that's just for starters; that means the equivalent of a size-70 in terms of shipbuilding, and getting better as the game goes on. It would also of course extend their range so they could go after even more targets.
All of this leaves me with a choice to make. The Silicoids are potentially making a bid here to make this a 3-way competition for supremacy, whereas right now it's pretty clear Darloks #1, Psilons #2. We've got a strong interest in stopping them from doing that. One might say 'what about Kronos', the star above and left of Arietis? That's a barren and the rocks could seize that to -- but we've got basically no chance of doing anything about that. Also, we haven't seen anyone challenging our scout there(yet), though they'll probably get to it eventually. Somebody's going to research barren environment soon if they haven't already. The one thing we might be able to do is send some armed ships to Arietis and at least delay the Silicoids taking it. To do that, we've got to head over to one of the two main screens we haven't looked at yet, Design.
As far as I know, Master of Orion was the first game to do this whole ship-designing thing. It was certainly the earliest one I've already seen it in. Instead of churning out pre-defined, pre-fabricated units, there is a great deal of strategy to be found in just what kind of ships to build. A quick note here, I didn't change anything once entering the screen. You can see it's started out with the configuration of a colony ship: that's because it's the last ship I designed. Another one of those places where the game saves your last settings in case you want to tweak something. Not everything in Master of Orion is user-friendly by a long shot, but we've all played games where they didn't make the effort to do things like this, resulting in extra work for the player to make stuff happen that should be automatic. I'm somebody who appreciates this kind of thing.
For now let's just look at the three buttons in the lower right. CANCEL exits without adding the design to our fleet, CLEAR erases everything and lets you start from scratch, and BUILD accepts the design as it is and adds it to your fleet. If you already have the maximum of six, you'll be prompted to scrap one of the existing ones to make room.
After clicking CLEAR and changing the ship size, the view changes to this. And here's where I have to go into Exposition Overdrive(TM). Ships and space combat aren't overly complex, but the amount of options is. From the player point of view this is the most complex part of the game simply due to the number of different possible configurations.
Let's get started on this monstrosity then. I think it'll work best to combine the explanations for the design and combat systems elements. There's three basic sections in terms of equiment from top to bottom: Basics, Weapons, and Specials. Starting at the upper-left box, there are three Basics systems there: Computer, Shield, and ECM. ECM is dark while the other ones are light because there is nothing you can add to that category. In this case that's because we don't have any ECM devices at all; other times it will be because we've already got the best one in the design, or because the design is out of space. That makes it easy to tell at a glance whether a particular aspect can improve things. The Basics systems are:
Computers -- improve a ship's attack level(i.e., weapon accuracy) and initiative. More on initiative later as it's not an obvious concept, and not directly displayed anywhere. Definitely gotta call that a UI fail. Default accuracy is 50%, and increasing accuracy by merely +1 makes that 60%, so it is quite important. The Mrrshan and Alkari combat bonuses are considerable when you factor this in.
Shield -- absorbs damage. These are not Star Trek shields; you can't knock them out. They work on a principle of simple subtraction, not a fixed absorption strength. The starting Class I shield absorbs 1 point of damage from all weapons on a per-attack basis. A Class IV shield absorbs 4 points, and so on.
ECM -- These add to missile defense, increasing the chance an incoming missile weapon will simply miss. You might ask why missile defense is already 3 here. That's because smaller ships are inherently harder to hit. Larger ships get -1 to their defense with each successive size.
Armor -- Determines the amount of hit points(HP), or damage a ship can survive before being destroyed. We only know of Titanium, but it's still an option to be selected here because double hulls are a thing. They allow for a 50% HP increase, but at a significant cost in terms of space.
Engine -- Determines warp speed(speed on the galactic map) and maxiumum combat speed. Maximum because you can build a fast-warp ship that is still a turtle in combat; combat speed can't be higher than warp speed but it can be lower.
Maneuverability -- Thrusters can be added here up to or equal to the warp speed, increasing combat speed and initiative. Better combat speed means better DEF, defense against beam weapons. I mentioned initiative early; that's a fancy way of saying 'who moves first' in fleet combat. There is a racial component with the Mrrshan and Alkari being the best, but aside from that it's a combination of your battle computer and maneuverability. Moving, and therefore firing, first gives you a chance to tilt the odds in your favor.
That's it for the Basics. As shown, you can't build a ship without basic armor and an engine. Everything else is optional. Next up are Weapons, of which there can be up to four different types per ship.
Selecting one of the weapons slots brings up this box, where we can select from the various options. We have five different possibilities now and will have many more later. However we can only pick the Laser. The relevant stats are all listed, though you can ignore the Power. There was a mechanic, apparently dropped late in development, that required more engines to power all of the devices on a ship. If you select the engines you'll also see a 'num of engines' listed, but you don't actually pay the cost or space for these since that aspect was removed. You want to look at SPACE, not SIZE here as well. All of the others matter though. Weapons are of three basic types.
Bombs -- Can only be used against planets. Each can be fired 10 times.
Missiles -- Can be used effectively against both planets and ships, but they are also limited by ammunition. Note the lack of a damage range; if a missile hits, it hits for the same amount of damage each time. Many come in two different types, as with the two different types of Nuclear Missiles shown here. Missiles are the weapon of choice for hit-and-run tactics; launching a big alpha strike and then retreating before the enemy has enough time to react.
Beam Weapons -- Basic beam weapons(there are other varieties to come) will always come in a standard and heavy version, aka the Laser and Heavy Laser. The Heavy variety does more damage and has a longer range -- but firing at a longer range comes at a cost of reduced accuracy. Accuracy impacts damage even if the weapon hits the target, but there are times when the longer range is worth the cost. Also, all beam weapons have their damage cut in half due to the atmosphere when attacking planets, so they are not optimal for that role. The main advantage of beam weapons is that they can be fired an infinite number of times; there is no ammunition to deal with.
On to Specials, of which three are allowed by class of ship.
They pretty much speak for themselves here, with descriptions for what they do. This is a good place to talk about scaling. Some parts of a ship scale, and others do not. Looking at the three options here, reserve fuel tanks will be larger and more expensive for a larger ship; battle scanners and standard colony bases will be the same size and cost wherever you try to put them. It's 95 space for a Battle Scanner no matter what at our current tech. This is true for other items on the ship as well; computers, armor, shields, etc. all are bigger and more costly for larger ships.
As far as ship size itself goes, that's in the lower left. I prefer to refer to the sizes as strike craft, destroyer, cruiser, and capital ships rather than small/medium/large/huge. However you think of them, the difference is that bigger ships take more damage and cost more, while being a little easier to hit. Along the bottom you can select different ship icons with up and down arrows, and then you get all the relevant information on the ship itself(name, cost, total space, and space available). The names are generated based on your race, so I will sometimes use the ones they give you as an immersion thing. You can change them though.
Ok, so that's ships and space combat. We'll discover a lot more toys to plug in here; the right designs and military stances is an ever-changing chess game between ourselves and our galactic rivals. Right now though, the question is this: is there a useful ship that we can build to try to ward off interlopers at Arietis, or should we not bother with that and continue working on research and our economy? I'd rather do the second one, but every hunk of rock is crucial in a small galaxy and given the apparent AI focus on Arietis(they do like their rich worlds, and for good reason, even though I don't think they've scouted it yet), I think it's worth making a play for it.
This is one of the things that I think is fascinating about Master of Orion. All of this big long-winded discussion and explanation is sort of a powder keg that was lit by a single Silicoid scout showing up and getting chased away. The double-edged decisions you can end up making are really interesting to me. How much we need to send there initially, and then the game-within-the-game of escalating that, when/if to pull back, etc. are things that take a lot of experience, and I haven't played very many Impossible games so I'm far from there yet. I do know that the Psilon Empire, such as it is, can't afford to invest in a bunch of cruiser or larger ships, and we also can't afford to divert funds for very long. We need something that can fight but can't afford to spend a lot of resources on it. So I'll try the most basic warship you could ever build:
A laser mounted on the smallest hull we have; that's a Starfighter. You just don't get any more simple than that. It's less than the price of two recons. The laser takes up 33 of 39 space: there isn't room for anything else. It'll hit half the time if we're lucky, and with a damage range of 1-4, anything that's shielded at all, even with the starting Class I variety, won't be damaged about a quarter of the time. Now the question of how many do we build versus the resources required, how much diversion from research, etc.
Mentar can crank out 9 of these per year, and Tyr is on research duty while it mostly just transports people over to Imra. I decide it's worth about three years worth of effort right now, relocating all of these ships to Tyr. That's more time to than I want to spend but also less ships than I'd like to have. It's a compromise, and if it's not enough -- and it might not be -- it'll end up being a complete waste of time. But I just want to try, having ended up on the business end of an early-game Silicoid Stampede(TM) and I'm not interested in repeating the experience if I can avoid it. One might ask what about the maintenance? If we end up with 9 each year, after 3 years that's 27 Starfighters at 14 BC each, 2% of that is 7-8 BC. That's 2-3% of current production, so we're not breaking the bank here. It'll take a bite, but not a very noticeable one. I spend quite a while thinking about this and I'm still nervous about it -- MOO on Impossible has a way of doing that to you. You know you can't afford to screw up or you are just going to get rolled. But it's the best call I can come up with.
Here we've set up a RELOC route to Tyr. This is another time-saving move. When a ship is finished, it will depart immediately ... BEFORE the next turn. It'd take a turn longer if I wait for them to be finished and then send them on. By the way, I'm not cutting off research completely -- Tyr is pouring in it's paltry 35-40 RP per year right now while it stays at half population and sends the rest on to Imra. There's enough factories there for that many people right now. It's not much, but it's not nothing and will keep us gaining some progress; more importantly, we won't get the 'atrophy' penalty and start losing any. I do adjust the tech sliders to be just a bit more even though, ensuring at least some goes into each project.
Our initial expansion phase is now officially complete. Time to work on spreading out the population more as well. It's still good to get that 12 BC maintenance off the books, even though it's not nearly as much of a headache as it was at first.
13M colonists are sent from Imra to Denubius. That'll put things at about a third for both of them, and that's good enough to stop the population shuffling. On to the building-up phase.
Then the Humans show up at Arietis. Where did they come from? Then it occurs to me ... they or the Silicoids must be allied with somebody. Probably the Alkaris. They met the Alkaris or Darloks(we'll get to this, but alliances are the top level of diplomatic relations, and can use each other's planets for refueling).
I really should have remembered that. We chase the Humans away, but that makes three species interested in the same planet.
After three years, we end up with 26 of them. Would have been more, but I had to pull some production on Mentar back to research with Tyr going back to factory-building. We'll see what happens. Time to knock out a couple more of these research projects.
The first construction result comes through: Reduced Industrial Waste 80%! Nice boon to the economy, but a key point here is this dialog option. I used to always say NO and then go adjust things myself. That's the wrong move here.
ProTip: The reason is that this change will actually take place before the spending for this year is processed. That means that if you don't reduce it you'll end up with extra ecology spending, going(inefficiently) towards population growth. YES will dump that extra ECO spending into research, the default place for surplus to go ... and of the two, that's a far better option.
A couple of Tier-II Construction options are up next, and both are useful.
The current factory price is 10 BC, so this is a 20% reduction. There is also a 9-BC option, but that's one of the advances we are 'missing' in this particular game. These help with the speed of building up industrial base on our worlds.
Armor upgrades are particularly nice, because as it reads here they help with both ground and space combat. I go with the armor, and if we don't get another factory cost-reducing option soon I have the option of coming back for that.
It's been a couple of years since Denubius was colonized, so here's how our planets look right now. Tyr is at the point where I'd like to start the terraforming process there, but right now the factory building is keeping pace evenly with population growth. I'm going to wait a bit longer until the factories get ahead. Imra's knocking out about 3 factories a year but has a long ways to go, while Denubius is just started of course. Mentar is still the source of the lion's share of the economy.
In other matters, construction research has mostly been shoehorned into planetology, to get that eco restoration out ASAP. The first group of Starfighters is almost to Arietis and no sign of more visitors. So far so good.
Only a year later, 2346, and Tyr reached the point where it had extra production not needed for factories: terraforming commenced there.
Took it's sweet time to come in, but it's finally here. Same question as before, and same answer.
No new choices here because Eco Restoration was from an earlier tier. This really boils down to Dead Environment or Terraforming +20. At this point I'm of the opinion that if we can get to range 6(our current propulsion project) before anyone else takes Kronos(unlikely), then we want to make a play for it. Another +10M pop everywhere is always useful, but why not go for another planet if we can get it? And who knows what might happen if we can take a system in the middle of everything. Really surprised we haven't seen anyone around there, and it'll take a while to get this research done, but why not try.
In terms of overall research, it's now time to settle in for the long haul. Usually I'll emphasize the fields a race is best at, because of the ability to gain an advantage there and because they'll have more stuff to research. With the Psilons being equally good at everything, I want to go fairly equal.
Fairly equal, not completely in this case. That's because until proven otherwhise, I consider the Darloks our top rival. Computers is emphasized a bit here since that helps combat their spying prowess; otherwhise I probably would have completely equalized things. We're about to finish our first project in that field, while having some work towards Weapons and Force Fields. With an average tech level of 3, we now suck slightly less than we did originally.
Terraforming is finished on Tyr. Given it's location I'll use any extra production not needed for factories, once there is some, to slowly boost up our starfighter flotilla at Arietis. I'd like to get it to 50 I think. The others are progressing and it's time to give them a boost.
On the homeworld, we're going to back off research except for a minimal maintenance amount and throw the bulk of production into industry, for the purpose of getting some surplus into the reserve. It is wasteful in a sense, but it's also the only way of further accelerating the growth of Imra and Denubius. That's better for us in the long-run and there's nothing in the research pipeline that can help us right away here. You can also see how much less Eco spending is required now that we've advanced our waste-related technology. That's a big boon to the economy.
With that, we've now made it halfway through the 24th century. Disbursements from the Planetary Reserve will lead off our next step of the journey. There are many other questions to answer. Will the Psilons win the race to Kronos? Will the Humans, Silicoid, or Darloks make a serious play for Arietis, and will our empire be able to repel them if they do? Will the Immortal Emperor Zygot lead the Psilons to glory and domination, or will he trip over his own shoelaces into a vat of Infinitely Epic Fail? All these and more questions will be answered when next our adventure resumes.