Part 6: Episode I, Part VI (2370-2375)

Episode I, Part VI(2370-2375)

A short hop in terms of in-game years, but there's a lot that happens and even more exposition




Next year. You freaking BASTARDS! I swear they read my mind. Our Colonizer is on on its way ... but they probably are armed by this point.




Only a colony ship ... but it's armed. I know that because it instantly moves towards me. By the way, this is initiative in action; I've been able to move first in the past; they've got something, most likely a basic battle computer, giving them the edge. They have the planet unless they only have missiles and I can outrun their supply and have them all miss. Unlikely. This is one of two videos that I screwed up and deleted before uploading somehow, but basically I tried to figure out what was going on and got the Recon blown up by a laser from their colony ship. Crap on a stick.

Welp, post-mortem time; what could I have done differently? I could have built some destroyers with reserve fuel tanks and some kind of weapon to guard Kronos. The Starfighters wouldn't have done it because they don't have the range, so destroyer-class would be the minimum size for that job. I couldn't afford such an expense back when I built the Starfighters, but during the research kick the last 15 or so years I could have. I didn't even know the Silicoids had already scouted Kronos; I put all my eggs in the Arietis basket. Also worth noting that if I did that, it would have taken longer to get the colony ship going due to the resource diversion and maybe I would have fought off the colony ship, but they could have returned with escorts in that time. So no guarantee at all I could have prevented them taking it. Sometimes there's just nothing you can do about things. I'm not sure if that's the case here.

Beat me by four years. DAMN YOU, MYSTERIOUS SPACE ROCKS!! Ok. Emperor Zygot must compose himself. What to do now? Well, we'll soon get that propulsion tech but we aren't in a hot hurry for it anymore. Might eventually scrap the Colonizer D but not just yet. A lot is going to happen once we get the fuel cells; should put us contact with three races including these ... these ... these maddening purple crystals, these interlopers!!

It was a three-eyed, rock-faced, flying purple Psilon Eater! Three-eyed, rock-faced .... I digress. We need more information and we'll get it, but for now we need to keep working on the factories so that we are in the best possible position to respond. But we are pissed. Oh how pissed we are. If we can justify it, war with the Silicoids is very much on the table. All that work setting up ... destroyed.

At least we only lost a few million citizens from the waste snafu, all on Imra. Could have been worse.




A year later. In plenty of time, in fact ahead of time, for a plan that is no longer relevant. I'd already shifted the tech ratios back to their normal even propulsion/planetology distribution.




Ok, those too. Cool. I'm still pissed, but slightly less now.




Huge upgrade over our starting Retro engines obviously. If conflict is headed our way, getting a move on will be vital.




More range is always good. One parsec further is no match for going 3x as fast though. Sub-light Drives here, no contest.




Lots more choices. The Mass Driver here is definitely worth considering, another particle weapon but packs almost twice the punch of the pellet gun we bypassed.





Another missile upgrade chance; these are almost twice as strong as our Hyper-Vs, along with being faster and more accurate.





Oh yes. Basically triple the damage of the laser, a third-generation weapon of the same type(we didn't get a shot at the second-gen ion cannon).

Honestly the answer here is 'it depends'. Does our military need to be offensive? Defensive? Invade? Hold key positions? Wear down a superior opponent? I tend towards beam weapons all other factors being equal, but I'd rather wait a bit to decide. I think we're about to find out what's what in the galaxy. And I can actually do just that. I choose none of the above and go back to the beginning with Hand Lasers. A boost for our ground troops as we haven't come across a better weapon for them yet, and a quick project as a delay tactic. Win.

Then came the expected first contact wave. This would have been shown with associated musical effects in another short video, which was lost the same way. Not the end of the world; that kind of thing can be shown at a different time. First contact always goes the same way; an initial greeting anywhere from friendly to highly aggressive. The tone of the statements will indicate what type of leadership they have. More on that soon. Now we have a whole bunch more crapola to do. Time to go see that Races screen and deal with foreign policy, the final unseen column in this Master of Orion expose.




The Races display gives an overview of our relations with other empires we are in contact with. That just went from zero to three; we still have not met the Humans or Sakkra. Looking at the Darlok in the upper left, here's the list of things we can discover:

** Treaty Status -- This can be some form of War, No Treaty like now, Non-Aggression Pact, or Alliance. The first two are exactly what they sound like. Non-Aggression Pacts prevent conflict in unowned systems, allowing both races' ships to co-exist peacefully in orbit. Sending a fleet to their colonies will still result in a battle. An Alliance is the most cooperative form of relations. Allied empires will never fight, and can use each others systems for refueling. They are also expected to go to war with each others' enemies.

** Trade Agreements -- Trade requires an initial investment on the part of both empires, but can be very profitable eventually. They start at -30% of the pact amount, which can be as high as a set percentage of the smaller economy of the two empries involved, and increase over time to +100%.

Trade Agreements, Non-Aggression Pacts, and Alliances require increasingly high levels of relations to start, and also increase relations over time.

** Relations Bar -- Red bad, Green good basically. The pointer underneath and also the one-word description provide an evaluation of what they think of us. Psilons are a neutral race overall diplomatically, and that's where we start with the Silicoid and Alkari, though the Darloks are set to Unease because nobody with a pair of brain cells to rub together trusts them. These are not just starting states; various actions will improve or degrade these, but they will always tend to drift back towards these levels over time. So for now, we know that we'll have a solid chance at decent relations with the Silicoids and Alkaris, while having a harder time of it with the Darloks, all other things being equal. All other things are never equal of course, but this is the baseline.

** Spying Slider -- If we choose, we can invest on spying now ... and they can do so with us. This costs money which is taken directly out of our production. I think I mentioned this before but it's always proportional: that is, a planet with 200 production will get 4x as much taken out as a planet with 50 production. Spies that HIDE are just gathering information on what tech a race currently has and/or waiting for the right time to strike; ESPIONAGE and SABOTAGE are more likely to get them caught but will also offer opportunities for stealing tech or being directly subversive(specifically, they can incite revolts, blow up factories, or blow up missile bases with the latter option). Hiding doubles the base chance(from 30 to 60%) that a spy will not be discovered -- the nail that doesn't stick up doesn't get hammered and all that.

If you choose ESPIONAGE or SABOTAGE and are caught -- well, the game doesn't go into detail but the spy is always gone when they are caught. It is assumed they are eliminated in a rather 'uncivilized' manner with what one might call an 'intense and unpleasant' final debriefing by their captors before their execution by various grotesque means. There's another type of being caught, and that's when you actually steal something or blow something up and they know who did it. This will generally hurt relations considerably, so you take a risk of pissing them off if you do this. There's also a chance of framing another race, and it can be really unpleasant to have a long-time decent relationship spoiled because you got framed and put in a war because of it. This will happen.

The cost of a spy network is 25 BC + twice the Computers TL of the target empire. That's the first one; it's doubled for each additional spy. Computers are the relevant tech level when it comes to spying; hacking and whatnot. The side with better Computer tech will find it easier to both spy on others and catch enemy spies. And our Darlok friends here to massive bonuses to everything in this part of the game. We can pretty much bet that they are going to steal most of what we have that they don't, blow up shit if we're not on good terms with them, and trying to steal from them is a colossal waste of time.

That's pretty much that for each individual race here. In the lower right we can set additional spending to boost internal security to catch more enemy spies. The manual recommends to set this to the maximum once in a while to catch a bunch of them: I've found this to be ineffective in limited testing but one of the things I'm going to do in this LP is check into that more. The maximum you can spend on internal security is 20% of empire production, which boosts security 40%. How much you should spend really depends: it'll be nothing for the next few years because it would take them some time to set up their networks if they are even going to bother. After that it's sort of a thing that you don't need to worry about until they really start using it. You can also spend up to 10% of empire production on setting up spy networks for each race, so you could ultimately spend almost everything you make if you chose -- but that would be a really, really bad idea in almost any imaginable situation.

From here we can also do three other things: STATUS, REPORT, and AUDIENCE from the lower right. Ok takes you back to the main Control screen.




This is the Report screen, which gives us more detail on a specific race. There's the tech fields covering most of the screen on the right ... but it says just starting tech in all fields. If there were any in white, they would be things they have that we don't. That's valuable information to know -- but that's the stuff it's talking about when it says on the left that this report is "72 years old". In other words, this is what they had when the game started. And we already knew that, because it's exactly what we had in 2300 as well. All that's required to get a fully accurate update here is a single active spy, who can be doing anything, even hiding. One spy giving us a full technological readout of an entire empire on an annual basis is pretty darned efficient if you ask me. It's usually a good idea to invest in spying at some level just to get this information.

Everything else on the left side is 'public knowledge'. This includes details on the empire's Emperor, Alliances, and Wars. There are no secret campaigns in Master of Orion. If you are going to ally with somebody or fight them, others will find out about it. The Darloks have no alliances or wars, so that's useful to know. Also quite important is the emperor description at the top, "Xenophobic Ecologist". This will always be two words; a personality followed by an objective. Xenophobic tells us that the Darloks will react twice as strongly to negative diplomatic actions and half as much to positive ones. In other words, not only do we start on subpar terms with them but it'll take a lot more work to change that. Ecologists means they want large worlds and will focus on construction and planetology in their research. Ecologists can tend to be less warmongering in general, so that could be a positive thing.

Awesome. To save what would be relatively pointless shots at the moment, neither the Silicoid or Alkaris have any active Alliances or Wars either. This is very rare at this point in the game. The Silicoids are Aggressive Expansionists: they want as much territory as possible and will attack whenever they have the advantage. Alkaris are Xenophobic Expansionists, so they are pretty much going to be pissed off at the galaxy given how they started. Not that we really care because they are going to be pretty irrelevant it would seem. All of these Personality/Objective combos have a racial preference that they gravitate toward, but they can be different from game to game. Alkaris are usually Militarists for example, which means they like to maintain a large fleet and focus on weapons tech. But not in this game. It's a weighted distribution; the further away a personality or objective is from a race's default, the less likely you are to see it. From a replayability and predictability standpoint, I really like the way this was designed as well.

Next up, we'll go back and look at the STATUS screen.




This is the best one-stop-shopping, how-are-we-doing display. It's also the only place in the game that you can always go to see what year it is, which I think is a definite oversight. Our empire will always be here and always listed on top; the others will be filled in as we gain or lose contact with them. Before this year it was a pretty boring screen. Now we have a lot more info.

Fleet Strength is based on the cost of all your ships. You can build a bunch of colony ships or whatever and it'll add to the value here, even if they have no weapons to fire whatsoever. As you can see, we're not looking real hot here. We're competitive in technology(total number of advances IIRC) and production, though behind the Darloks and just behind the Silicoids in both. By the way, the current status of those is great with a capital G for an Impossible game 70 years or so in. It means we've almost equalized for the bonuses the get, which usually takes a lot longer to do. It's always better to be ahead, but things could be and often will be a lot worse at this stage of the game. We've got a solid Population lead, and are equal for that in Planets. Running a competitive third in Total Power, which is just an amalgamation of the other five.

This is mostly encouraging; we're doing pretty well economically but definitely aren't ready for a war. That's the takeaway here. Before we do any talking, let's look at the map because there is more info there as well.




Now we can see for sure what these three empires have instead of guessing at it. The Darloks haven't expanded as far as I'd feared; the Silicoids are basically where I thought they'd be though I was wrong about that white star, which they'd probably have grabbed if it was habitable. They've got 5-parsec range or they wouldn't have been able to reach Kronos from where their other planets were(if they had 6 like us, they'd have made contact when they got the planet, not a year later when we got the range tech). As far as the Humans and Sakkra, they're in the uppper corners for sure; no other yellow stars to even be possible. Since we saw that one Human scout, it would seem Sol has to be in the upper right and based on the map I don't see how they'll ever even leave it. The Sakkra are probably stuck in the corner too but they might have managed to reach one of those green stars by now. Probably not. That quartet of stars in the upper left though(2 green, 1 blue, 1 white) is the only real frontier of the galaxy though.

It's hard to avoid the what-ifs surrounding Kronos here. If we'd managed to snag it and hold it, the Silicoids would be stuck at 3 and wouldn't be able to expand much. We'd have 5 and would basically be in a good position to overtake the Darloks as the top dogs. Still can't get over the fact that in the first game the Darloks are the #1 power in the galaxy. That's just all kinds of bizarre. As it is, it's a three-way competition and right now we're trailing the pack. It will get better for us as we have a good shot at taking the production lead or at least equalizing once we get our current run of factories finished. That should be enough to let us gradually take the lead on technology with our skill there. We will need to mobilize now, and whether we can do that in time to form a competitive fleet is up for debate.

Shield tech is ok, we're about to boost it again and get better armor, but we haven't advanced our engines or battle computers and only have very basic improvements in ECM and weaponry with the Hyper-V missiles. We'd love to take back Kronos; in a ground war of attrition we've got the population to stomp the slow-growing Silicoids. We can't compete with their fleet though. It's got to be more defensive, at least for now. Stopping them here is an absolute must though, we can't afford to lose more ground. That makes Arietis the key. Still have those 50 Starfighters there, but they are either obsolete or will be before long. That's in range of the Silicoid's colony ships, and if they take it then Imra and Tyr will be.

It won't be long before the Darloks and Silicoids develop the range to reach at least Tyr anyway. We need to prepare to defend ourselves, including getting missile bases up there as it's our point planet in both directions. The bottom line here is we appear to have a decent chance at becoming the supreme power in the galaxy, but we're definitely in a fight and we must choose our direction wisely. Mistakes are very easy to make at this stage of the game and will prove costly if we make them.

So, how to handle our various possiblities on the Races screen?

** Security -- No investment at least for now.
** Spying -- A minimal amount for the Alkari, a hair more for the Silicoid and Darlok. That adds up to 2% of income spent here. I think it's worthwhile to see what they have. Looking at their tech will give us an idea how to best design ships to counter it, how effective our missile bases might be, whether we want to try to trade for something they have, etc. You can't effective counteract something if you don't know what it is. Knowledge is Power.
** Trade -- Despite the initial hit, it's pretty much always a good idea to trade with anyone you expect to be able to maintain peace with. They'll get the same hit as well, so it tends to equalize things. You can offer tribute(BC or tech), esp. if relations get too low for a trade deal, but as long as we're on reasonably good terms it both offers the promise of long-term profit and the best way to improve relations. Right now we don't want to be in a war anytime soon, so all signs point that way. Here's how the negotiations went ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C1nSzadhVY


That first one was basically to show off some of the submenus like threatening and tribute etc., but also makes another point; don't even poke around in something you don't plan on using. It annoys rival empires(slightly) to propose something and then change your mind. At the end where they said 'We go now' -- that's their way of saying 'we're sick of talking to you; come back when you're serious'. Note that I couldn't even get a trade agreement here. On reloading, here's how it turned out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ha5e5Uh03Kk


A couple points of interest: I gave the Silicoids ECM Jammer I because it's a very basic technology and I wanted to butter them up for the Non-Aggression Pact. I didn't expect them to take me up on it, and they didn't, but it was a fairly small price to pay in order to try. They shouldn't either by the way; they are acting intelligently in their own self-interest. The diplomatic AI is usually quite good at doing that, though some weird things do happen. Also, I took the minimal trade agreement with the Alkari because I don't care as much whether they like us. We can up the amount with them later. Note that their high limit was 125 BC while both of the other empires gave us 225 BC; that's because of how much wimpier the Alkari are -- their economy can't support a larger deal.




Did a couple of other things before this, scrapping our scout which we have covered by one of the Recons now(the second one was blown up by the Guardian), and also getting rid of the Colonizer D. Kronos is the only planet we could reach with it and that won't be happening anytime soon, so it's basically so much space scrap. No point in continuing to maintain it. Throwing good money after bad is never a good plan.

So now we've got some minimal expenses in ship maintenance and spying, a small amount in the reserve from the scrapped ships, and look at that trade number. Do the math and over 15%, almost a sixth, of our production is going to set up trade routes. That's steep ... but quite possibly necessary. We'll want to re-up over time but we'll definitely wait until that balance improves, which it gradually will.

Made a few adjustments to the planets in spending; Tyr will not be doing any research for now, focusing soley on factories and then I'll want to get a few missile bases up there just in case. The others are doing mostly factories as well with a token research effort; growing the economy with the new factory controls will be the foundation of everything that comes afterwards.

If you look closely, you'll see a bit of bad news as we hit the 2375 mark ...




Maybe the Silicoids got new robotic controls or something, but they've increased their production and fleet strength, taking the overall lead from the Darloks and putting us further behind. Over these three years, our trade balance improved from -141 to -122. So it still sucks, but it's going in the right direction. Slowly. As I said, long-term investment. Relations are already up to Neutral across the board, and 'high Neutral' for the rocks. So the trade is helping there.

So what's up next for the Psilon Empire? Can they halt the Silicoid Surge at Kronos, or will the Purple Psilon Eaters prevail? Will we ever see another Human ship, or any evidence of the Sakkra? Who will take those stars in the frontier on the opposite side of the galaxy? And what in the world does a shape-shifting ecologist really know about galactic domination anyway? These and other equally irrelevant questions abound as these misadventures continue.