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Cluster Wars (formerly Empyrean Challenge)
#20
Another turn, another set of shocking revelations...

First and foremost, I have a gigantic food crisis. The tutorials cleverly neglected to warn of this, ostensibly to teach us all a lesson early in the game while there's still time to recover. Ugh.

On turn 1 I saw that "food produced" exceeded "food consumed" and thought I was fine. On turn 2 I saw that my stockpile of 23m food units had vanished. I had intended to alert the moderators, thinking this might be a bug, but forgot about it. "food produced" still exceeded "food consumed". This turn, I nearly doubled my farms and am producing far more food than I consume, yet food is still absent from my inventory. Upon reading the rules, it looks like my population is attempting to stockpile a 4-turn supply, and is thus grabbing up every morsel my farms produce. Even with doubled farms, it will take several more turns for their stockpile to reach this target.

Which would be fine, except that now all ten of my new scouts have not one box of corn flakes in their holds. And they have departed my home planet -- one even departed my home system. While I will take this as a lesson learned, I do think that we benevolent despots ought to be able to secure some portion of the harvest before our countless minions get their grubby paws on it. I will fly my scouts back immediately and attempt to rescue their crews from creeping starvation, but it would seem that I will be unable to send anyone back out into deep space until I have sated my gluttons.

(I will try to get clarity from the rules and/or moderators on this in the next few days -- I imagine I'm not the only one in this predicament.)

Second on the list of shockers: those "alien ruins" on planet 1 are populated! My "intensive probe" results show a population somewhere around 5k. I have 3 scouts with a total of about 4.5k soldiers armed with 3k assault craft and some transports (which can bring soldiers to battle, though they are unarmed.) I suspect this colony is at least half civilian, so I feel daring enough to attempt an invasion, perhaps with a round of bombardment from 300 shipboard blasters to soften them up. It should be enough to carry the day UNLESS they have some tech advantage.

Third shocker -- the one scout I sent off to the nearest star system reports another alien colony. This one is far larger, at a logarithmic mass count of 8.4. (Probe reports generally show the mass of ship/colonies as a logarithm, to preserve some vagueness. So a mass-4 colony would have 10^4 or 10k mass units, while a mass-5 one would have 10^5 or 100k mass units. A probe report of 8.4 means this thing is less than 10% the size of my home colony (a hefty 9.7), but still about 10x the size of my orbiting colony. It's somewhere around 300m mass units.)

This is the only star system within a single hyper jump from my home. This alien world is habitable -- fresh air and victory points. I need to conquer it, but it will take far more than my measly 12 scout ships can muster (even if they all had food). I have a million each "assault craft" and "assault weapons" (think howitzers) at home, along with some 6m soldiers, but nowhere NEAR the ship capacity to haul them all out, a pittance in ship-based weapons/shields, and no advanced weapons tech.

There is clearly much to consider in plotting these next orders. I will post again before the next due date -- probably once I get clarity on the food crisis...
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RE: Cluster Wars (formerly Empyrean Challenge) - by ixnay - 07-10-2013, 04:15 AM

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