Cluster Wars (formerly Empyrean Challenge)

[Darth Pedro]

Okay, I finally had a chance to look at the new turn results. And this is going to be a big turn for me -- need to order up some big builds, design a colony and military fleet, plot out my resource needs, etc.

Basically, I think I am emerging from the opening game and moving into a phase of initial expansion. But how bout those results?

As per my norm, I goofed up my orbiter again. I set up a large number of hydroponic farms, but failed to add people and automation to work them. Since farming comes before manufacturing in turn-processing, that means my existing crew ran the farms and had precious little left to run the factories. So there were shut-downs, but nothing critical.

I brought most of my ships together at the home world to consolidate into some better designs -- fewer, bigger multi-purpose scouts with updated equipment and large holds for food, fuel, and con-goods. 3 of the scouts appeared at my neighboring alien system, and now share the outside orbit with an alien scout. Might be some gunplay? The alien homeworld is still there, still "mass 8", still sitting on 10 habitation points.

I accidentally let one of my factory groups start up a new production run of Lab-5, so I basically threw away some minerals there. Dang. I have a large pile of new Factory-4, Life Support-3, Farm-3, and (drum roll) Mine-4. So my basic economy is churning now and it's time to expand.

First order of business is tech advances. I saved some from last turn and have a lot of high-tech labs in play now, so I have 15m research to play with. 11m of that is going to exploit my alien prototypes (captured in the in-system alien outpost). That means Sensor-5 and Automation-10. The Sensor-5 is absolutely critical considering I am planning an invasion. The Automation is probably an extravagance -- a large investment in what will probably be overkill. But I just can't seem to walk away from such a huge prototyping opportunity.

(Prototyping means I can save up to 80% off tech advances if I have higher-tech prototypes to work from -- as long as I make the advance in one jump. And jumping from 3 to 10 is BIG. But 80% off of BIG is even BIGGER, in my mind.)

I will probably put the remaining 4m research into Missiles and Missile Launchers, raising them both to 3. This means a big production setup this turn and a lot of construction 4 turns from now.

And finally, there is one more tiny little item to report. Following Pool Boy's lead, I clicked around some of the buttons I had been ignoring on the game tool, and found that apparently some other player's ship transmitted a message to one of mine last turn! (Very cryptic -- one word -- "Salve!") So I have the ID number of a ship belonging to "Augustus", and am seeing star names start appearing on my probe reports.

As Pool Boy would say, GAH!

Don't put your food. fuel and consumer goods for the crew and ship into a Cargo Hold. You can only LOAD and/or UNLOAD a Cargo Hold from a Colony.
"The Colony is directed to Load the Items-TL listed from its own Storage Inventory to the Cargo Hold of receiving Ship. The Cargo to be Loaded must be Unassembled or Non-Assembly Items or Population Units. The Ship must be Docked to the Colony. The Load Cargo Order requires one-fifth the Transport Capacity of an equivalent Transfer Order. A Load Cargo Order to a Ship belonging to another Player will Fail."