Cluster Wars (formerly Empyrean Challenge)

One of the most "challenging" space empire PBM games of the 80s was Empyrean Challenge. It pushed the standards of the day to the limit in terms of informational awareness, design and customization, text reporting, team-based competition, military planning, and cost. (Mature positions could cost in excess of $10/turn -- in the 80s!)

Now it is back in the form of Cluster Wars. Original creator Vern Holford (interviewed elsewhere in these fora) has assembled a team and is recreating this beast with significant updates in terms of rules and (especially) tools. He ran game #1 of what he is calling a "pre-alpha" release, which seems to have concluded. Now game #2 is starting up, with a full roster of 20 players (I believe).

I will blog about it here in this thread. If anyone here is interested in joining, I encourage them to contact Vern (go to www.clusterwars.com for info). PBM games are usually hit with dropouts, and an early take-over of an abandoned position should find you in good shape for a full experience and an even shot at victory.

CW uses a highly customized MS Access client tool to both display every detail of your empire and provide you with power tools to craft your orders. It is, in my humble opinion, somewhat confusing. But the team has now put together a detailed tutorial to help get players through the first few turns. The first turn tutorial can be found here:

http://www.clusterwars.com/cluster-wars-tutorial

This tutorial, along with the MS Access tool, the CW web site, and the rules, suffers from deficiencies in layout, formatting, clarity, completeness, and accessibility to the uninitiated. But it more than makes up for that with enthusiasm, nuts-and-bolts knowledge-sharing, and a sense of collaboration with the development team. Like the game, it is a diamond in the rough.

The basic premise is that our star cluster is recovering from a dark age in which our old civilization crumbled and humanity shrank to a set of isolated star systems. Now, stardrive-capable civilizations are emerging on these planets simultaneously, and the race is on. Not only is this a race for control of the star cluster -- it is a race for survival. Every homeworld is approaching its population limit and death rates will soon go up. To save our people we must expand.

Unlike the old Empryean Challenge, in which 20-25 people were jammed onto one homeworld and forced to cooperate in order to face the other homeworlds in deep space, Cluster Wars grants each player an entire homeworld with a command economy. It appears we have been given a small bump in certain technologies to start with. Each player needs to set up their production lines, put together a complex interplanetary supply chain, boost technology quickly, and prepare colonizer ships to grab their share of habitable worlds, all in balance with spinning up military and naval defense forces and power-projection capabilities.

Turn 1 is out and orders are due back 6/20. Tomorrow I will post some screen-shots and review the basic approach I am taking (which, as it happens, is more or less in line with the turn 1 tutorial.)

Sounds interesting, but I miss a rulebook or something on your site!?

Ack, another design flaw. The rules are in the form of a wiki, and they are in the "Player Zone" on the site, which appears to require that you have an account in order to access. You should request an account -- I imagine Vern and company will grant you access even if you're not a current player.

I will suggest to Vern that they move a copy of the rules out into the general site, so new players can take a look.

Quick test to see if free image hosting really works.

This is the opening screen in CW's "central command" client tool:

I will post more later tonight, after verifying that this works...

Hopefully the texts are in an external file, so we can translate them into german :-)

Okay, I'm back with more screen-shots from the CenCom tool.

This is a listing of all my "S/Cs" (which stands for ship/colonies). We all start with one "OPC" (open surface colony on our home world), one "OBC" (a stationary orbiting colony above our home world), and 2 small but well-equipped scout ships.

The grid coordinates are relative to your homeworld, so everyone's homeworld will appear at 0,0,0. This will make it entertaining to sync up our navigational efforts when we start meeting each other in deep space...

This shows us the inventory of items in our home colony. We've got a number of farms up and running, a lot of laboratories, etc. There is a basic assortment of military hardware, a bunch of consumer goods (to "pay" your people with), and a pile of "metals", "non-metals", and "fuel" with which to keep your production lines going. This is not nearly enough for the long term, and it is imperative that we get offworld mining colonies set up to boost our supply chain.

Note also we have a large starting population. Among other things, we will want to move a large swath of those "unskilled" workers into "trainee" status, where they will become "professionals" over time. Unskilled workers can be replaced by "AUT" (automation units), but professionals are needed to run just about everything, especially labs. They are probably the ultimate limiting factor in building the economy, so it is wise to boost their numbers asap. (Note also we have a lot of AUT units waiting to be assembled!)

Here is the manufacturing base on our homeworld. We are building an array of important items, with a particular emphasis on consumer good, automation, and factories. We will be assembling new factories asap, and they will most likely focus on building Laboratories or Factories. We'll probably hold off on weapons production for now, because of our dire need for production goods, ship-building goods, and mines.

Speaking of mining, here is our mining display. Home planets get 6 slots for mining -- one set of metals/non-metals/fuel that are high-yield but limited deposits, and another set that are unlimited deposits but lower-yield. I don't know yet if this is the case on other planets. We have a lot of MIN units on each deposit -- I will likely move the low-yield MINs over to the high-yield deposits.

Here is a display of our tech status -- we have AUTomation boosted to level 3, a number of others at level 2, and everything else at 1. Higher tech goods are more capable/efficient. Some, like weapons, increase in power exponentially, so it is critical to boost those tech levels continuously in order to stay competitive. But there are always trade-offs. And every time you set up a production run of, say, Energy-Weapon-12s, you will have to set up a new production run when you boost EWP technology to a higher level. And each production run takes 4 turns to complete!

Finally, here is the built-in order generator. I put in one of my first orders -- "assemble all AUT-3 units in the home colony" (so I can train all those newly-displaced unskilled workers!)

I will probably run through my whole turn tonight. The general outline of my first turn will be along the lines of their recommendations in the tutorial:

- assemble the AUTs
- spend research on production tech
- scan for all start systems within 10 light years
- scan all planets in the home system
- update the mining and factory groups
- build some new ships and perhaps increase the size of the orbiting colony

(Note the OBC is critical -- it's the only place you can build "Light" Structural Units. Without them, ships become extra heavy and require a LOT more drive-power and fuel...)

More tonight -- maybe.

Turn 1 is due tomorrow (6/20). I will complete the turn and do a write-up here tonight.

If any of you on the sidelines are interested in taking over a dropout position, I suggest you contact Vern asap. If past history is any indication, there could be dropouts already. You might be able to convince him to hold up processing for a day or two while you take one of the dropouts and run a basic starting turn.

Captain Jenkins downed his martini with uncharacteristic speed. Tulane, the first ensign aboard the Space Heroes Interstellar Transportation Enterprise flagship, SH Mutha, paused before refilling his glass with what was left in the mixer. She had served with him since the Company first floated this space tub, and knew his moods better than almost anybody.

"I swear, Two Lane, I can almost smell it. I can almost smell the gold on planet 3. I can't for the life of me figure out why we haven't gone out there sooner!" Jenkins squeezed the olive gently, watching the pimento start to ooze out. "Gold, palladium, tons of iron, and more helium-3 than you can shake a swizzle-stick at..."

She watched as he pointedly chomped the olive, pimento and all, before sipping his refilled glass at a more leisurely pace.

"Captain, it's kind of a big deal to commit a space colony. There's a lot of set-up, planning, science -- peoples lives are at stake, sir!" She began mixing another round, hoping she might be able to fill her own glass before his emptied again. "And the money, god think of all the money the Company has spent on this ship. We can't goof this up, sir. It was better to wait."

Jenkins belched loudly. "Yeah yeah, I hear you. I read the memos. Whatever. But it is MY opinion that the Board was wasting time not putting this -- investment -- to quicker use. And as the Company has told us since diaper school -- ".

"Time is money!" Tulane winked. She loved this quiet time with the captain before an important mission.

* * *

Space Heroes Information Nexus: special report-----

The Company Press Service has just released another briefing on today's market report. Company subsidiary stocks have soared to new levels, but there is concern on the horizon. Population Control scientists have determined that our planetary death rates are starting to creep up as a result of widespread overpopulation and environmental degradation on our planet. This, of course, prompted the first annual Space Hero plan in a generation, intended to re-ignite our spacefaring capabilities, secure new sources of raw materials, and most importantly, goose Company stock.

As a result, Company stock prices are climbing, even though we are facing perhaps the most challenging ecological problems of our times.

* * *

Yes, we are back with another GameLog! This is the first turn of CW pre-alpha game 2. I command a planet full of resources and people, and I'm gonna go get what's coming to me. First turn orders have already been laid out in general terms a couple of posts ago. I may throw in a surprise or two just to keep things interesting for the reader. I know that *I* get surprised when playing this game all the time, even though the random element is pretty small. It's the deep deep planning complexity that gets me. I forget stuff and it makes the game -- interesting -- when my foolishness comes and bites me later on. We'll see how it goes!

If there are any other forum readers here who are in this game (and I know of at least one), please feel free to join me in putting up a GameLog thread. Or just chime in on this one now and then. Cheers!

Just sent in my turn 1 orders (on the day of deadline). Further notes/observations:

- my people are burning through their "consumer goods" twice as fast as I am making it, so I am bumping up that production line by 25%/turn for this and the next 3 turns -- in effect doubling the supply every turn.

- one factory group is producing obsolete stuff (tech level 1 factories, and I am boosting that to level 4 this turn), so I am ordering it to build 'nothing'. This is an experiment. Each factory group is currently set to push 1/4 of the production line through each of the 4 work-in-progress stages. I want to see if clearing the orders will free up 1/4 of the factories to help the other 3/4 of the factories move the work-in-progress units faster

- I have lots of farms and mines that are not being used, but I don't have enough people to run them! I also have 2 million laboratories sitting idle, and according to my back-of-the-envelope calculations I can't afford to bring them online without shutting something else down! So I am holding off on adding further production power until I see some results from my huge training program (which promotes 'unskilled' people to 'professional' people), and automation program.

"Uh, sir, we're picking up some highly unusual particle trails on the scatter-scan of Largo Leadball. Way more organics than expected, and some radio isotopes that are off the charts..." Tulane deftly manipulated the probe reports and assembled an array of pivots and charts for the captain's display screen.

Jenkins put down his martini glass and lazily thumbed up the display on the main bridge monitor to make it easier for his slightly-foggy eyes to skim through the data. The rest of the bridge crew ignored this -- it had been another run through of the new probe systems fired off by Corporate. As a courtesy, all resulting data from these probes was copied to all company flagship captains. Well, "both" of them anyway.

"Organics? That's nuthin but a hot airless rock out there. What organics are stable enough to form under that heat?" He looked at his ensign with a rapidly furrowing brow. "Radio isotopes, too? Those don't sound compatible with organics. This whole things is getting me more curious than a Louisiana judge. Two Lane, sound general quarters. We're gonna float out to high orbit and see if we can run a probe from our own ship and corroborate this stuff..."

"Yes captain." She worked with the efficiency of an employee who knew what was going to hit their bonus checks this quarter if the ship met escalated performance metrics.

* * *

"The Chairman is recognized by the Board, but be reminded that this meeting is already over schedule, and our decision is not likely to change."

Chairman Smithers rose from his cushioned throne-like chair and approached the lectern in the secretive meeting chambers of the Corporate board room complex. "Vice Presidents, Senior Executives, and Special Policy Consultants, I feed it is necessary to remind you how very important this time is in our history. We have only enjoyed a consolidated corporate homeworld for a score of quarters. We can't take the risks you have insisted we face. The implications for our planet, our people -- my god, think of the bottom line!"

A shadowed face from the other end of the dark table moved slightly. "Get to the point, Smithers."

Smithers' jowl tensed. "You would have us throw away the considerable surplus we have amassed on some.. some space adventure? This money needs to be paid out as dividends to our equity lords! THEY deserve the fruits of our labor, our capital consolidation, and our market manipulations. We can't throw this all away on a project that's based on phony starmaps..."

The shadow retorted quickly. "NOT phony. These probes have been repeated and re-analyzed for an entire quarter, Smithers. There is no doubt. Green is our main target -- that planet can clearly sustain life. Open farms, breathable cities, even dog-parks. The risk of letting this opportunity go is FAR greater..."

Smithers slammed his fist on the lectern. "Are you mad? How will the equity lords get a return on THAT next quarter? They are going to come down on ME if their next quarterly statements don't meet our marks! We have based our very civilization on these quarterly statements! We have dabbled with longer-scale investments here and there, funded mainly by our slush-funds, but never have we committed what amounts to all our corporate profits AND THEN SOME on ANY project! What will the lords do? How do you expect them to react? What if I get fired???"

The room fell deafeningly silent for a few moments. Smithers knew the board members were conferring, mainly by private text. He used the time to compose himself.

"We are entering a new era, Smithers. The quarterly profit model is not serving us well anymore. We used it to beat our competitors, but we can't beat our planetary ecology. There isn't much room left down here, and if we don't start moving people up soon, all your quarterly numbers are going to add up to jack squat. The equity lords will back the board on this. They will realize, we are confident, that our plan is the only game in town. Anything less will risk a total ultimate collapse in their share price -- a threat to our society that we cannot allow."

The shadow cleared its voice and continued. "As for your job, Smithers, you don't need to worry whether the Lords will fire you. We are going to fire you ourselves. Effective immediately."

* * *

Turn 2 is out, and wow! Three complete shockers, to me anyway. This was surprising, considering that I thought the first dozen turns at least would consist mainly of an orderly development of my imperial supply chain.

First, and most intriguingly, the results of our system probe showed an existing colony already in place on planet 1, named 'alien ruins' and controlled by 'aliens'. I have never come across this in the old EC games. It's a small colony -- somewhere around a million mass-units, as opposed to the five billion of my home colony -- but could be dangerous. I have no idea if it is truly abandoned, or perhaps populated by aliens or their robotic guards. In game terms, though, it promises at the very least to be a source of alien technologies. Every piece of advanced stuff I grab could be used for prototyping to accelerate my own tech program.

Second, another planet in my home system is habitable. These worlds are rare (compared to airless rocks, gas giants, and asteroids), they count toward final victory conditions, and this one in particular will provide an easy pressure release valve to get population off the homeworld. Again, I hadn't seen this in any other game.

Finally, the probe of all star systems within 10 light years showed a huge number of systems -- 44 or so. (Well, huge to me anyway.) Many of them are binary/multiple star systems, which multiplies the number of planetary orbits available. I even saw 2 systems with FIVE stars in them. I do remember my first position as a 'regent' ruler in EC-1 back in the 80s. I was given the governorship of "the quad" for my team -- a 4-star system very close to the homeworld. It had no habitability, but a LOT of mineral riches, and interesting military possibilities. So there are a LOT of stars out there, and some of them may hold a LOT of planets.

I came across one bug. The mining section of my turn results crashes the client tool. I had ordered some consolidation of my mining groups, and apparently this may have caused a fault in the data. I will alert the GMs.

This also revealed a user interface problem. (And it might just be my own confusion with the tool.) I can't seem to find a record of my turn-1 orders. Nor can I see a 'shapshot' of my empire on turn 1. I wanted to compare mineral totals between turns 1 and 2 to see if mining had taken place, but I can't see the turn 1 totals anymore -- just the current turn 2 totals. I will dig into the rules and help docs to see if it's just my mistake.

There were dark times. Times none would want to ever remember, but they will sadly never forget.

Cold. Dark. Pain. Anguish.

In the Halls of Awaiting, The Elder dreamed of a Journey Unknown.....Across the Dark. But what did it mean? At the Gates of Sleep, it was always hard to think, hard to understand. But, he was not one to be Weighed Down with Sorrow any longer. There was a....a...hope, for a New Beginning.

Ruins. Stange objects washed away by rains Where the Last Wave Broke. Was there a Bitter End in The Groves of Death? The was the time that Death Walked the Earth. Men. Women. Old. Young. All wanted to Regain the Fire but did not know how. But they believed. They hoped. They dreamed. In one, The Elder, an Ill-Starred Son, they placed their trust, their dreams and hope.

Time passed. Ages. The Harrowing Years they called them. But in time, there was hope. Into the Woods and Through the Shadows they went in the name of The Elder, and the Daughter of the Moon.

Men became strong. Slowly. Men became many. Men became towns. Men became cities. Men became war. Men fell. Men became hopeless once more. But in The Elder, there was hope. Men listened. Men dreamed. Men grew strong. Men grew....smart. Men became....The Elder.

A proud and fierce people have they become. Always searching, always fighting, always learning, always dreaming, always....remembering. And there was hope. And they were ready.

But were 'they' ready for them? For The Elder?

I think not.

Awesomeness.

There are now TWO confirmed forum users who are in this game. (Another one still lurks.)

FYI, the moderators have issued an updated client tool to fix the problem with displaying mining info. I will download and test tonight. On the agenda for this upcoming turn:

- scout out the alien ruins on planet 1
- expand the orbiting colony to beef up production of 'light structural units' (which can only be built in space)
- design an in-system freighter and a starter colony for that habitable in-system world
- figure out how I let 20m unskilled workers lay around doing nothing
- send the other scout to the nearest star system
- build a new batch of scouts with extended range capabilities (to investigate these 40-odd systems)

Ixnay, I'm loving this info,

Thanks for doing it!

I'll give it some time if you Ned feedback. Let me know.

Hey, looks like this game just got its own sub-thread -- thanks Grim! I hope this will inspire other players to add threads and take their positions public on this forum, at least in some small way.

I have spoken with my brother, who has confirmed the existence of a 2nd habitable world in HIS home system, so I imagine it's standard to all home systems for this game.

In prepping for this turn, I read up on a new item/technology available in this game for the first time -- beamers. They are big, expensive devices you can install only in an orbiting colony. There, they can beam/teleport items directly to any other colony in the same system (but not to ships). The purpose is ostensibly to simplify and ease in-system economies -- instead of shuttling freighters back and forth to circulate supplies and raw materials, you can beam them over for about the same capital investment.

You'll still need planet-side transport capacity and an orbiter at each mining colony to make this work. But I find it opens up other possibilities, beyond mere logistics. If your system is under attack, you should be able to reinforce any colony quickly, for instance, from a single well-equipped orbiting fortress. And as with other technologies, the gear is heavy and clunky unless you invest a lot of research into it, thus creating another potentially lucrative distraction from core manufacturing/military research.

The next turn is due 7/7 and I hope to draft my orders up maybe 7/4 or 7/5, along with another post here.

"Sir, we've locked on to orbit one. Can we begin the Impulse Drive countdown now?" Tulane seemed on edge, particularly after the friendly scolding she received from Captain Jenkins for neglecting to include the customary two olives in his martini.

Jenkins sipped and paused, relishing in her suppressed frustration. "Now just hold on there, Two Lane. We've got a long flight ahead of us, and there's no reason to blast off before we've had a chance to grok things out a bit up here."

"Bob! I mean Captain! We have not one but TWO other Company Ships en route to planet one already! We might not arrive in time to be part of first contact with the alien relics we've detected on the surface! We might be needed in case there are hostilities! We might even (gulp) miss out on the bounty!" Tulane was visibly and uncharacteristically distressed.

Jenkins paused and considered whether other Company captains had set things up such that junior officers were required to serve drinks to senior officers. In the general absence of a strong military tradition, Company culture gave ship captains wide latitude in how they ran things on board their own ships.

"Two Lane, relax. There is no hurry. We already knew we'd have at least one other ship coming with us. Sure, the Company built a new fleet, and one of them new birds is flying high guard over this little operation. But all them others have been dispatched off to other orbits. And these other two captains we're competing with are cupcakes. They ain't likely to jump our claim. And if they do, good for them -- and us. Remember, the early bird might get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese..." Jenkins speared an olive before catching Tulane's eye and winking.

* * *

I submitted my orders yesterday, just under the wire. Thank goodness for those tutorials! I followed their basic gist in that I built the 10 new scout ships (cloned from the 2 existing ones in my fleet), and dispatched one to each orbit in my home system to begin planetary survey duty. However, I sent both my original scouts directly to the "alien ruins" world (along with one of the new ships) just to triple up for safety. The ruins might harbor hostiles, and these scouts carry a fairly moderate marine contingent -- 1k "assault craft" and accompanying soldiers, along with some energy weapons and shields for direct combat. My hope is that the "ruins" are uninhabited repositories of ancient high-tech items, which I will gleefully use as research prototypes. (If you can get your hands on items of a higher tech than you have -- be they a gift from an ally, loot from a conquest, or otherwise -- you can get up to 80% knocked off your research costs to attain that level.)

I figured out how the "space navigator" tool works, and found that of the 40-some systems within 10 light years of home, only one is within single jump distance. So I am sending one scout thataway. At some point I will have to boost my Hyper Engine tech, but my first priority is fleshing out the home system and securing a basic supply chain.

The tutorial alerted me that food supplies have disappeared. This was a surprise to me -- I had done some rough calculations on turn one and thought I was generating slightly more food per turn than my people eat. Clearly I miscalculated! So I almost doubled the number of farms in operation. I also broke with the tutorial in that I kept all 3m Mine units in operation. I believe I have enough professional labor to run everything, but it is just as possible I forgot something and will get a warning of a "pro shortage" in my turn results.

(This is another UI issue I would like to see addressed -- tell me how many professionals, unskilleds, etc, I am currently using, and how many I'd be using with my draft orders in place.)

I also did the doubling-in-size of the orbiting colony described in the tutorial. It's not strictly necessary according to my plans -- the orbiter mainly produces Light Structure, which I have stockpiled in sufficient abundance for the moment. But I'd like to stay relatively close to the tutorial blueprint, in case something in turn 3, 4, or 7 depends on this doubled orbiter thing.

As for tech -- my laboratories produced the basic 2m research points. I could have bumped two technologies up from level 1 to 2, or one from level 2 to 3, but I am stockpiling instead. I want to put an early focus on boosting laboratory and factory tech, to improve the efficiency of my limited population of pros. Next turn I'll have 4m research, which should be enough to bump Factories or Labs up to level 5.

No major changes to my production lines -- just added another 600k factories to the Consumer Goods line. Hopefully I have enough people to run all this...

I am surprised at how cautious you are about the alien ruins. You usually play things loosey goosey. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

[quote='Pool Boy' pid='2228' dateline='1373310197']
I am surprised at how cautious you are about the alien ruins. You usually play things loosey goosey. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
[/quote]

Indeed. I actually did go a little too loosey goosey this turn, as we shall see when I get around to drafting an update.

Turn 3 came out today -- multiple new shockers! Watch this space for further developments...

I cannot download my turn. GAH!

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...

[quote='ixnay' pid='2238' dateline='1373429759']
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.[/quote]

Address the shortage of food that is occurring, ( your population is eating 1/4 of 1 food per Pop per turn)—look up food requirements—and you should be out of food this turn.
Assemble 1,250,000 Farm-1’s.

Source: http://www.clusterwars.com/cluster-wars-tutorial

[quote='GrimFinger' pid='2239' dateline='1373469394']
[quote='ixnay' pid='2238' dateline='1373429759']
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.[/quote]

Address the shortage of food that is occurring, ( your population is eating 1/4 of 1 food per Pop per turn)—look up food requirements—and you should be out of food this turn.
Assemble 1,250,000 Farm-1’s.

Source: http://www.clusterwars.com/cluster-wars-tutorial
[/quote]

That was in the turn-2 tutorial, which in its original emailed form did not include the warning about sending ships out with no food. I accept full blame for not remembering to address the food question before building those ships. But turn-2 was a little late to warn of this issue. If my theory about population hoarding food until its stockpile is complete is correct, even doubling my farms on turn 1 wouldn't have resolved the crisis fast enough to get ships outfitted so fast.

Also, one of the moderators sent a separate email about the food crisis -- and admitted that he had put it into the test configuration so long ago he hadn't remembered it himself. In that email he advised those of us who were tripped up by it to take it as a lesson learned cheaply, and that we can still get some scouting done if those starving ships move quickly.

I do not forget that this is a test game. I imagine in a real commercial game this food crisis will not be baked in. I also imagine that the rules will more clearly state how food-stockpiling works, to help players plan accordingly.

You will find that you get no warning about any issues until you have them. :)

I suggest you read this page in entirety.

http://empyreanchallenge.com/ECWxManual/?page_id=304

I read that page fully before commenting here. It says the population attempts to build their stockpile to 4 turns worth. It doesn't say that they will grab food prior to your add-on or transfer orders. So basically you need your pop to have 4 turns worth of food before you can send any ships out. That's a major point that new players should be made aware of.

Looks like they are re-running the turn today. I'll post an update here as soon as I get my hands on the rerun. I doubt it will change anything on my turn, but it might change Pool Boy's and Darth Pedro's results a bit.

Did another turn run?

Were does it even say when the next turn is due?

When you get an e-mail from Vern announcing that the new Turn (or re-run Turn) is available for download, he will usually include the due data in that message UNLESS he forgets. :P

You can send ships out without food, they will eventually starve though. I suspect the rerun is to trap some of the errors evident in the current turn. This is NOT unusual with this "TEST" game process. If you have an issue, it is good to discuss it here but everyone really needs to file a Help Desk Ticket.

I am the editor for the manual and I have to file tickets quite often just to get clarifications of some questions I have when attempting to correctly update the document. Being a technical writer by profession, I think I am doing a good job. I also realize that the people with a long history in the game have tunnel vision and sometimes can't keep track of what is a new rule or function and what worked in a game years ago. It is complicated.

Yes, the interface software (Central Command) needs to be completely revamped and I have made suggestions along those lines as I see some of them repeated in the commentary from the newer players. I understand that Vern is involved in a long process to get that done too. It's not like he's a full time dedicated to this task. What I am doing is just for fun and because I can.

You and Vern are doing great! Keep it up! Adding this sub-forum as an official communication channel for the game is a good step in development maturity. We can kibbitz and crank about the game (that we love, in spite of its problems), and hopefully keep your creative fires lit.

[quote='ixnay' pid='2257' dateline='1373649099']
Looks like they are re-running the turn today. I'll post an update here as soon as I get my hands on the rerun. I doubt it will change anything on my turn, but it might change Pool Boy's and Darth Pedro's results a bit.
[/quote]
they ran the turn again partially because some ships that should have moved did not. On the rerun - they're where they should be

Also some changes in Farms and Food production. Let's see if it all works correctly...mine will need to wait until Saturday morning.

I just downloaded my turn. I still have no food. :(

Man shall not live by bread alone.

Pool Boy -- your population needs to build up a 4-turn stockpile, which at normal ration rates means 1-food per pop. You have some 200M pop, and they can't possibly have built up that much in their stockpile yet.

Somehow I got the math wrong on this myself, when we were looking over your turn.

Even with doubled farms, it will take at least another 3-4 turns of full production before the stockpile is full.

[quote='ixnay' pid='2314' dateline='1374247340']
Pool Boy -- your population needs to build up a 4-turn stockpile, which at normal ration rates means 1-food per pop. You have some 200M pop, and they can't possibly have built up that much in their stockpile yet.

Somehow I got the math wrong on this myself, when we were looking over your turn.

Even with doubled farms, it will take at least another 3-4 turns of full production before the stockpile is full.
[/quote]

Check out the Ration Order:
http://empyreanchallenge.com/ECWxManual/?page_id=195

The stockpile maxes out at 5 turns worth but remember that the people EAT out of the stockpile, not the inventory. Therefore 5 Turns stockpile ends up with a 4 Turn surplus at the end of the turn. Max ration is 0.25 FOOD per Population Unit. 250,000,000 Population will consume 62,500,000 FOOD per Turn at 100% Ration rate.

Will this increase the death rate though?

[quote='Pool Boy' pid='2340' dateline='1374338313']
Will this increase the death rate though?
[/quote]

Less than 100% Ration rate is "less good". 100% Ration rate is 1/4 Food per Turn per Population.

[quote='ixnay' pid='2314' dateline='1374247340']
Pool Boy -- your population needs to build up a 4-turn stockpile, which at normal ration rates means 1-food per pop. You have some 200M pop, and they can't possibly have built up that much in their stockpile yet.

Somehow I got the math wrong on this myself, when we were looking over your turn.

Even with doubled farms, it will take at least another 3-4 turns of full production before the stockpile is full.
[/quote]

Rationing will reduce the amount of food your people get. They are partly paid in food. They will not eat more than 1/4 of the food they have stocked, unless that would cause starvation. Your Population can eat as little as 1/16 of a food unit and still live (will cause some malcontents). If there is less than 1/16 food per pop some will starve. Starvation causes lots of malcontents. Rationing is not nearly as bad. Rebels are generated from malcontents. Some rationing should fix the inventory situation. The amount of food paid is listed in the activities tab each turn. Hope that helps.

[quote='ixnay' pid='2197' dateline='1372081696']
This also revealed a user interface problem. (And it might just be my own confusion with the tool.) I can't seem to find a record of my turn-1 orders. Nor can I see a 'shapshot' of my empire on turn 1. I wanted to compare mineral totals between turns 1 and 2 to see if mining had taken place, but I can't see the turn 1 totals anymore -- just the current turn 2 totals. I will dig into the rules and help docs to see if it's just my mistake.
[/quote]

On the Imperial Directory page near the upper right is a pull down that will let you select the turn number. It needs to be labeled.

I just submitted turn 3 orders (with 10 minutes to spare...) I would ordinarily add to my colorful narratives, but I'm on vacation at the beach and would rather sleep after the exhaustive exercise my kids are putting me through. So here's a quick recap of what I did:

First, I noticed that my "doubled" orbiting colony was short of unskilled labor to run the light-structure factories, or rather it was short of automation. This is because on turn 1 I noticed I had 360,000 Automation-1 units lying around so I assembled them, but they were really intended to be used as part of the tutorial on a later turn (to help double said orbiting colony.) My "doubling" went through except the automation units weren't there. I haven't checked, but I suspect my turn 2 results will show that my "add-on" orders didn't find enough automation.

So I corrected that this turn by adding an equivalent amount in hi-tech automation-3 units (each of which is as good as 9 of the old units!) I also added considerable space to the orbiter, but did not double the factory base. This is because my food situation will soon affect that orbiter as well as my ships. It has a stockpile, but I can't add to it until my home-planet farms catch up on topping off the home-planet stockpiles. So I don't want to add more population to an underfed orbiter.

And what about those ships? I could have committed them to conducting surveys without food, and have 25% of their people die. But I decided it was wholly out of character for me. Besides, they were just surveying my home system planets, which will doubtlessly be surveyed soon enough. I also pulled back the one scout I sent to the one other system within range. Didn't want to kamikaze him on the large alien base out there.

I AM kamikaze-ing the one unfed scout in orbit 1, along with my 2 original well-fed scouts, in that all 3 ships are invading the alien outpost. I have no idea how this will turn out, but I'm excited to see the next turn's results.

I continued with my program of greatly expanding consumer-good production, which had been ignored by the tutorials until now. So I think I'm drifting farther and farther away from the tutorial track to the point that they are serving merely as an example for me. Still enormously helpful. I am leaving all other production the same. I doubled my mines, finally -- I believe I have enough professional labor to run them now.

And I am spending my accumulated research on Laboratory-5 tech. This means that the factory group producing labs will be able to retool and upgrade to lab-5 when the current lab-4 production run is complete in 2 turns. At that point, I will assembled the lab-4 and start making close to 4.5m research points a turn, on top of the 2m my old labs are currently spitting out. I don't know what I'll spend all that on first, though Mines and Farms are pretty high priority.

If all goes well, I'll have another post in a day or two reviewing my results.

[quote='ixnay' pid='2408' dateline='1375157407']
I just submitted turn 3 orders (with 10 minutes to spare...) I would ordinarily add to my colorful narratives, but I'm on vacation at the beach and would rather sleep after the exhaustive exercise my kids are putting me through. So here's a quick recap of what I did:

First, I noticed that my "doubled" orbiting colony was short of unskilled labor to run the light-structure factories, or rather it was short of automation. This is because on turn 1 I noticed I had 360,000 Automation-1 units lying around so I assembled them, but they were really intended to be used as part of the tutorial on a later turn (to help double said orbiting colony.) My "doubling" went through except the automation units weren't there. I haven't checked, but I suspect my turn 2 results will show that my "add-on" orders didn't find enough automation.

So I corrected that this turn by adding an equivalent amount in hi-tech automation-3 units (each of which is as good as 9 of the old units!) I also added considerable space to the orbiter, but did not double the factory base. This is because my food situation will soon affect that orbiter as well as my ships. It has a stockpile, but I can't add to it until my home-planet farms catch up on topping off the home-planet stockpiles. So I don't want to add more population to an underfed orbiter.

And what about those ships? I could have committed them to conducting surveys without food, and have 25% of their people die. But I decided it was wholly out of character for me. Besides, they were just surveying my home system planets, which will doubtlessly be surveyed soon enough. I also pulled back the one scout I sent to the one other system within range. Didn't want to kamikaze him on the large alien base out there.

I AM kamikaze-ing the one unfed scout in orbit 1, along with my 2 original well-fed scouts, in that all 3 ships are invading the alien outpost. I have no idea how this will turn out, but I'm excited to see the next turn's results.

I continued with my program of greatly expanding consumer-good production, which had been ignored by the tutorials until now. So I think I'm drifting farther and farther away from the tutorial track to the point that they are serving merely as an example for me. Still enormously helpful. I am leaving all other production the same. I doubled my mines, finally -- I believe I have enough professional labor to run them now.

And I am spending my accumulated research on Laboratory-5 tech. This means that the factory group producing labs will be able to retool and upgrade to lab-5 when the current lab-4 production run is complete in 2 turns. At that point, I will assembled the lab-4 and start making close to 4.5m research points a turn, on top of the 2m my old labs are currently spitting out. I don't know what I'll spend all that on first, though Mines and Farms are pretty high priority.

If all goes well, I'll have another post in a day or two reviewing my results.
[/quote]

IXNAY,

It sounds like you are getting the HANG of it. Too bad the tutorials were not timely. I had nothing to do with this game setup, other providing an algorithm to generate a more "globular" cluster design. It seems that the initial setup was indeed engineered such that there is only ONE PATH to success in the initial turns. I made a few boo-boo's myself so don't feel bad. Relax and have fun while you can.

Space Heroes Information Nexus: Special Report

All Corporate Space Hero "Focus"-class Scout Ships Recalled

Another outcome from the calamitous Corporate Food Collapse that came to light last quarter was that all of the newly commissioned Focus-class scout ships were dispatched with minimal quantities of food aboard. The new Chairman issued an executive order to recall all ships immediately to save as many of their respective crews as possible. None of them had yet conducted their assigned survey duties.

The rogue trader in question has been Fired. Since the Company is the only entity still in existence that has the legal capacity to Hire anyone, this is tantamount to a life sentence in debtors prison, with "life" likely to be agonizingly short.

* * *

Tulane smiled at the boarding officer after he concluded his report to the command ship, and switched off the conn. "Congratulations, Captain Jenkins! You are now a real live Space Hero!"

Jenkins shuffled off this praise, but the glint in his eyes betrayed his pride. For the first time since final the final Corporate merger, there had been official non-counter-insurgency combat operations. He had led the 3-ship invasion. He planned out the attack with the full leadership chamber from his military attachment. And he took the risk to withhold all ship battery fire in an effort to preserve what treasures the outpost might hold.

His planning and forbearance had paid off in spades.

This colony had an armed contingent of renegade soldiers present, but in the face of overwhelming odds they immediately surrendered. SURRENDERED! The outpost had been captured intact! Not only did they have a few thousand potential new employees ready to assign, but they had some very advanced technological artifacts to reverse-engineer. These technologies hadn't seen widespread use since before the civil war! Today's action would save Corporate research billions in leveraged investments.

"Two Lane, you are too kind. Thank you for the sentiment, but I am only hoping to do my part for the Company. And since it looks like today was Good for the Company, I am a happy cappie." He sipped from the day's fifth martini. "Don't think I'll forget you come bonus time, either. Daddy's gonna have a little bag of somethin' somethin' to hand out next payday..."

Tulane took the rare step of pouring herself a celebratory martini upon hearing that.

* * *

More Big News this turn! Our invasion of the alien outpost went flawlessly -- we had a very high superiority in combat factors, so the enemy caved in. We have a batch of high-tech items ready to prototype, as outlined in the tutorials, and will likely start with Farm-2 and Transport-5. Then Sensors and Automation can wait, though they are still welcomed.

We're going to retool our Lab production line to Laboratory-5 this turn, so our initial batch of Lab-4s will be assembled and a new 4-turn run of Lab-5s will follow suit. I am basically thinking of splitting research between "Labs" and "everything else", so I'll probably accumulate enough research to bump labs from 5 to 7 (which will cost 11m research), over the next 4 turns, and apply the rest to mines, robot probes, and prototyping these alien goodies.

My orbital factories are back in full production. My earthly farms are fully-engaged. My consumer-good doubling is proceeding on schedule. I will likely end the Automation factory group since sometime soon I'll be leapfrogging to Automation-10 thanks to prototyping.

My space fleets will remain land-locked until my food supplies can catch up. I will start building Farm-2 asap now that I have prototypes -- this turn, probably. But that will take 5 turns to reach fruition, at which point my Farm-1s will have caught up. Still, I am planning a large production run of Farm-2 for my orbiter. I shall Never go Hungry Again.

Not much else to report. I am taking a risky option, here, by not cutting food rations and holding back space expansion. But I am thinking that whatever I will lose in home-planet overpopulation will balance out with the gains from not-starving my ship crews and colonists. I'll take the next few turns to build out a big fat in-system freighter to start shuttling people out to my other hab world -- I just won't begin the shuttling until 3-4 turns from now.

If anyone advises this to be a Dumb Idea, please let me know!

[quote='ixnay' pid='2418' dateline='1375732355']

If anyone advises this to be a Dumb Idea, please let me know!
[/quote]

I think you are making the correct decision. Those who strive to get "out there" too soon will be strapped and stretched beyond some limit or other. Build up your infrastructure and Professionals. When you build newer Labs, put them on the OBC and junk the old ones to get the materials. You can extend your resources by cutting back on mining the "unlimited" deposits while living on the higher yield ones until they run out. That saves you 3,000,000 Pro's which can be used to TRAIN more Pro's AND/OR run another 1,000,000 Labs. Labs in orbit and then get Farms-6 as they are the best buy in the long run. Don't forget to increase your Factory TL AND Mine TL should be done less often but in larger leaps so you only need to produce 3,000,000 of them to mine the unlimited deposits, etc. Once you have that cycle flowing, use the spare change in Research to nibble away at items you really need to improve. When you finally do start exploring go out with one large ship and 10 parasites to survey a whole system quickly. Follow on with Colonizers.

Don't get too caught up in EXPANDING your economy until you have a big enough base to support it from the home system. Remember, ultimately you will be limited by your UNLIMITED resource deposits and Mines-TL.

Turn 4 orders submitted -- LATE! I went for a run last night and upon my exhausted return I forgot to submit the turn. The moderator was very kind and accepted my turn at noon today. Thanks Roy Bean!

It was basically a building turn. I docked all my food-less scouts to my orbiting colony, where I can share what little uncommitted food I have with them. The 3 scouts who had conquered the alien outpost have remained docked there, where there is a small excess of food as well as a batch of hydroponic farms.

(As an aside -- I consider the "alien" worlds to be loyalist remnants of the previous cluster-wide empire. They'd never willingly join ranks with us new pretenders to the throne, so they remain hostile -- until we conquer them. I don't consider them to be truly alien species. Other players may envision it differently. The game makes no differentiation between "races".)

I prototyped some of the alien tech to use in my research program -- those aforementioned hydroponic farms and the highly-advanced transports. Both will be very helpful in the near future. I left the advanced sensor and automation tech for another day.

I began an orderly-shutdown of those factory groups producing automation and transports, since I will be upgrading them soon. I upgraded my new laboratory-production group to make Lab-5s. And I completed my 4-turn doubling of the consumer-good line. Next turn I should get the first Factory-4 and Lab-4 units off the line, which will enable huge increases in my production capacity. I will probably need to prioritize Mining technology soon, if I'm going to keep these factories fed.

System and cluster exploration has been put on ice until there's more food...

Quick update:

The only semi-urgent news is that my new surface colony in orbit 1 (the alien outpost I siezed) is in some state of rebellion. There doesn't appear to be a definite flag or status reading saying that as such, but there were items in the action listings for that colony saying that my forces "repelled the invaders", and that my security people had found a few rebel leaders. The latter was understandable, the former confusing, and both could be presented more clearly. I also found in the rules that upon becoming occupied, 65% of a colony's loyal inhabitants go rebel, and 65% of the rebels go loyal. So it was expected that this colony would be in trouble.

I left my 3 scouts (with all attendant soldiers) docked to that colony, so that probably helped. I have no immediate plans to move them again, so they'll just hold down the fort. One interesting thing to note is that while all the inhabitants of the colony started out with a different "race" number (indicating they were aliens), all new population growth in that colony appears with MY race number. This pretty much confirms that all people in this game are "human" -- just different ethnicities or nationalities. If my rebel problems persist, I may eventually shuttle all my "aliens" to my home world where their insidious influence will be swamped by my superior culture.

This is a big turn for manufacturing -- any factory groups that were set up on turn 1 have now completed their first production run! If one followed the tutorial closely, one would have a big batch of Factory-5 ready to assemble now. In my case, I went with Factory-4 and Lab-4, so I have a smaller (but still big) batch of both. I should start producing about 6M research a turn now and still have a great big boost to my production capacity.

The new research will likely go into Mine or Farm for the next 2 turns, and then go back into Labs for a 2-level bump over 2 turns.

The new factories? There are many things to build, but one item is screaming pretty loudly at the moment -- food! I will probably make at least a million Farm-2 which will push out 10M food/turn. Food is absolutely my top scarcity right now. I don't have my turn in front of me right now, but I may have miscalculated. It might take far longer than 2-3 turns to overcome my food shortages at present farming rates. It's worth boosting Farms to at least level 6 in the long run -- that's when you can run them on ships, thus you can make every ship and colony self-feeding if you have the space, fuel, and desire.

So Ixnay is Player 5?

Mwahahahahaaaaaaaaa :)

Re: CW - the turn is due tonight. I may be a little late and beg forgiveness.

Re: my player number - I'm not sure what my player number is, but my race number isn't 5.

Anyway, I am playing this as an "open game". I am game-logging the whole thing, for the benefit of everyone. I realize that I am giving away a lot of sensitive data about myself, and once we get to a point where players are meeting each other I may start censoring what I post here. But my goal is to help the game, boost enjoyment, and make a lasting memory of the whole experience.

I had thought about logging it privately, and just posting the complete log when the game is done, but decided this way was more fun.

Looking at the images in earlier posts; you're home colonies are #'s 5 & 6. The inventory display shows populations of race 3... so you must be race 3 in the game.

Also, I am curious what race you find inhabiting NPC locations? The one location I have captured (alien ruins) has some race 63 population. If there is only one NPC race to be found, then I suspect there may be the vestiges of a larger political NPC entity pervading the cluster???
:)

[quote='Darth Pedro' pid='2464' dateline='1377954386']
Also, I am curious what race you find inhabiting NPC locations? The one location I have captured (alien ruins) has some race 63 population. If there is only one NPC race to be found, then I suspect there may be the vestiges of a larger political NPC entity pervading the cluster???
:)
[/quote]

Doesn't the alien race # match the number of the colony you just captured?

[quote='jwsosus' pid='2466' dateline='1377997649']
[quote='Darth Pedro' pid='2464' dateline='1377954386']
Also, I am curious what race you find inhabiting NPC locations? The one location I have captured (alien ruins) has some race 63 population. If there is only one NPC race to be found, then I suspect there may be the vestiges of a larger political NPC entity pervading the cluster???
:)
[/quote]

Doesn't the alien race # match the number of the colony you just captured?
[/quote]

I don't think so, but we'll see....

Well, this was a mild "building" turn. I was very late in submitting, so I only did the most urgent stuff, but everything else was easily put off for a future turn.

Most Urgent Stuff:
- assembled all my new Lab-4 units
- disassembled about 1.5m of the old Lab-1 units (to free up some labor)
- researched up to Farm-3
- set up a production run of 2m Farm-3 (enough to grow 30m food/turn)
- set up another production run of Lab-5
- new production run of Life Support-2 (enough to support 20m people!)

These new production runs are all using my new Factory-4s.

Non-urgent stuff that I will try to do this next turn:
- calculate my actual usage of professionals. I can't run all my stuff because I'm running short on these, and I need to come up with a good balance of work for their full employment.
- calculate my actual unskilled numbers -- Each turn I've been adding enough automation to take 9m of these laborers off the market and into training for professional status. I need to tighten this up a little.
- calculate how many turns out until my food crisis is resolved -- my back-of-the-envelope analysis suggests 10 turns or so, which is horrible. I may need to double the Farm-3 production line.
- take my unfed scouts to the alien outpost in orbit 1, where there is a small food surplus - maybe enough to get a couple of scouts properly outfitted
- start a production run of robot probes
- design a colonizer/freighter to begin the build-out of the in-system hab world. I can't send it until I have more food ready, but I need to design it and see how far behind I might be on ship supplies -- particularly light-structural units and space drives.

Turn 6 orders just uploaded. I didn't super-optimize like I had planned (didn't remember the deadline until the moderator's kindly reminder.) But I did get a few things done:

- Food appeared in my inventory! Inexplicably, since my population's hidden stockpile isn't up to the 4 turn goal yet. But I jumped at the opportunity to load up all my scouts with food.
- I noticed the 3 scouts that had invaded the alien outpost in orbit 1 were starving, even though there is ample food inside the outpost! Food distributed poste haste.
- Spent 6M research to bump Mine technology from 1 to 4
- Set up a new production run of high-tech factories to produce the new high-tech mines. My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that in 4 turns I will have more than enough to upgrade all 6M mines on my home world with the new stuff. This will hopefully address my immediate mineral requirements.

If it is really true that my food shortage is resolved, then next turn will open up all possibilities again. First and foremost, my scouts will get back to surveying every planet in my home system and jumping out to the neighboring star to scan the alien base out there. Second, I can put together the biggest in-system freighter I can find and max out a starting colony for my other in-system habitable world. This freighter will be working hard throughout the game, and will probably be expanded upgraded repeatedly.

Also, with upgraded Mine tech, I will have fleshed out my emergency tech updates for basic economic growth. I will probably take a turn or two to upgrade robot probes and maybe some weapon techs before turning back to laboratories.

Well, looks like I went from having 6M food at my home colony to having 10M. Still not sure how that works, since my population still hasn't stockpiled their requisite 4 turns worth yet. I will take advantage, to be sure, but I will need to check the rules to find out what I'm missing here.

All 12 of my scouts are now stocked with food. I will send them out this turn on their original missions.

My mining tech is now 4, and I have a big factory group producing them -- 5.5M of them. This is only slightly short of the 6M I need to fully upgrade my home mines. Cool.

So my balanced approach of economic development is starting to pay off. Instead of spending all of my initial research on Factory-5 (as the tutorials suggested) or Laboratory-5 (as another player suggested), I went with level 4 each. I am producing 6M research a turn on that bump AND I have a large number of Lab-5 under construction AND an almost full upgrade of Mines underway. I have my Consumer Good pipeline under control, and apparently food is no longer an emergency.

My weak spots:
- very little scouting done
- not nearly enough ship-building materials in stock
- no investment in sensors or probes
- no real military development (which will be necessary to take over the alien colony in the next system)

I will try to take Vern's advice and craft a good set of orders EARLY this turn, instead of a last-minute rush. I have over 20M unskilled workers sitting idle who should be in training classes right now, thanks to shoddy planning.

If you look at the turn sequence you will see that Farm production is before Food consumption. If you look at the Population page:

STOCKPILES

The Population of each Colony maintains a Stockpile of Food and of Consumer Goods separate from the Player's Storage Inventory. The Population will try to accumulate 1 Year's (4 Turns) supply of each. The full rationed amount of Food and the total paid amount of Consumer Goods are added to these Stockpiles. The Population will consume up to 25% of the Consumer Goods and Food each Turn. Food consumption will be more than 25% of the stockpile if needed to prevent Starvation; also no more than 0.25 x Food per Turn will be consumed per Population.

So...the people actually consume from the stockpile AFTER the new production is added to it at the ration rate. Since the population grows AFTER the consumption of the Food, you will appear to have less than three turns worth of food in the stockpile assuming the population is growing.

Now to test this logic with reality...

My home OPC on Turn 7 shows a total population of 243,490,521 which is rationed at 100%. This should yield a consumption of 60,872,630.25 Food. My current Food Consumption stat is 53,946,386 which multiplied x 4 comes to 215,785,544 Population at the 100% rate of 1/4 Food per Population. Something just doesn't add up here does it? My population did grow by about 2,000,000 but that doesn't account for the under-consumption does it?

My Food Produced stat is 62,500,000 which equates to my 2,500,000 Farms-1 production.

Conclusion: it appears that the 100% Ration Rate (supposedly 1/4 Food per Pop) is actually 1 food per 4.48 population or about .2232 Food per Pop instead of the anticipated .25 Food per Pop. Sound like ticket time.

Ticket Filed: 9R46BDDZT4

[quote='Darth Pedro' pid='2554' dateline='1380574959']
If you look at the turn sequence you will see that Farm production is before Food consumption. If you look at the Population page:

STOCKPILES

The Population of each Colony maintains a Stockpile of Food and of Consumer Goods separate from the Player's Storage Inventory. The Population will try to accumulate 1 Year's (4 Turns) supply of each. The full rationed amount of Food and the total paid amount of Consumer Goods are added to these Stockpiles. The Population will consume up to 25% of the Consumer Goods and Food each Turn. Food consumption will be more than 25% of the stockpile if needed to prevent Starvation; also no more than 0.25 x Food per Turn will be consumed per Population.

So...the people actually consume from the stockpile AFTER the new production is added to it at the ration rate. Since the population grows AFTER the consumption of the Food, you will appear to have less than three turns worth of food in the stockpile assuming the population is growing.

Now to test this logic with reality...

My home OPC on Turn 7 shows a total population of 243,490,521 which is rationed at 100%. This should yield a consumption of 60,872,630.25 Food. My current Food Consumption stat is 53,946,386 which multiplied x 4 comes to 215,785,544 Population at the 100% rate of 1/4 Food per Population. Something just doesn't add up here does it? My population did grow by about 2,000,000 but that doesn't account for the under-consumption does it?

My Food Produced stat is 62,500,000 which equates to my 2,500,000 Farms-1 production.

Conclusion: it appears that the 100% Ration Rate (supposedly 1/4 Food per Pop) is actually 1 food per 4.48 population or about .2232 Food per Pop instead of the anticipated .25 Food per Pop. Sound like ticket time.

Ticket Filed: 9R46BDDZT4
[/quote]

Response to my ticket:

Our staff has just replied to your ticket "Food Consumption Algorithm"

The food algorithm is complex. If the people's stockpile of food plus the food paid that turn divided by four is less than the total population divided by 4 then they will consume 1/4 of the food stock pile. They never consume more than 0.25 per pop unit or less the 0.0625 per pop unit. Unless the total stockpile is less than 0.0625 per pop unit. In that case they will consume it all.

Your case I would guess that the total food was 215,785,544 before consumtion.

So when we set the food ration rates, we are really setting the food PAY rates. The people actually EAT 1/4 of their stockpile (with .25 and .0625 as ceiling and floor). This raises questions:

- My people must be consuming less food, right? If I have 200m people and they have 100m food in the stockpile, than even if I "pay" them a full ration (which would add up to 50m food), they will only actually EAT (100m + 50m) / 4 = 37.5m food? Since that is below full normal rations, are they building rebels now?

- What happens if I "pay" them food when their stockpile is already full? Or does that never happen because they only take .25 food per turn max? Can I pay them more than .25 food per turn, in order to pad their stockpile?

I have to suggest, at this point, that maybe the concept of a "food stockpile" and "consumer good stockpile" ought to go away like the "market" did. It's a shadow economy, those items are now "off the radar" so they don't take up space on a ship or anything, though perhaps they should. I remember one of the main problems with the market function was that players were selling inventory items to the market in order to protect them from bombardment, since the computer no longer considered those items part of a ship/colony. As such it was an exploit.

This food/consumer good thing isn't an exploit, but it is perhaps an unnecessary complication. Since we are managing our own production supply chains, we players could just as easily handle food/consumer good supply chains without this abstraction. If you have a ship with no food, everybody dies, period. If you have no consumer goods, your rebel numbers shoot up accordingly. If you ration stuff, fine, accept the consequences. This would remove the problem where your food production goes into the stockpiles BEFORE you can allocate it elsewhere.

In light of the ticket response and explanation, I see that all of your questions are valid. Questions like yours and my own are what got me started in the editing of the manual. I actually started writing my own copy from the C&P'd html of an older website version. It sure does seem like a lot of mundane complexity for whatever game flavor it adds to the mix?

I won't even begin to attempt to embed this information into the manual without some serious back and forth with Vern in order to boil it down to the essential, which I thought I had already done...

[quote='ixnay' pid='2556' dateline='1380647232']
I have to suggest, at this point, that maybe the concept of a "food stockpile" and "consumer good stockpile" ought to go away like the "market" did...
This food/consumer good thing isn't an exploit, but it is perhaps an unnecessary complication. Since we are managing our own production supply chains, we players could just as easily handle food/consumer good supply chains without this abstraction. If you have a ship with no food, everybody dies, period. If you have no consumer goods, your rebel numbers shoot up accordingly. If you ration stuff, fine, accept the consequences. This would remove the problem where your food production goes into the stockpiles BEFORE you can allocate it elsewhere.
[/quote]

Agreed. See my previous post #21 in the suggestion box.

Thanks for passing on your experiences! I am also playing CWT2. I had some of the same problems, particularly food. I sent out a bunch of scout ships without food; in fact, it was just a couple of turns back I finally got the food situation under control. I noticed however it doesn't seem to be such a disaster to send out your scout ships without food. I kept sending them farther out with not a crumb to eat, and the death rate is only about 2% per turn (maybe they eat the poor souls who starve?). The malcontents are increasing as well, now I know why I have police and agents on scout ships (I too followed the tutorial). I have the impression now that I am probably behind on development, but I have done a fair amount of exploring (knowledge is power?) and have even stumbled into another player's HW system. But I guess it's time to recall some of those first scouts, not because of food, but because they are running out of fuel!

I just submitted my next set of orders, just under the wire (deadline was in 1 hour!)

This was a comprehensive building and survey turn.

First, I sent out my re-provisioned scouts to all local planetary orbits to conduct Surveys. (This assesses potential mining deposits.) I have one scout stationed in orbit-11 -- the "outer ring" around every system in which incoming ships always appear first. He might be needed here in case aliens get nosy. And I send 2 scouts out into the alien system nearby. I figured they might try to survey the uninhabited planets there and maybe avoid getting shot by aliens. Finally, I remembered to do one thing that I've forgotten for at least 3 turns -- doing a system-wide probe of my home system. Chirpsithtra has already discovered another player system, and for all I know it could me mine!

Next, I ordered a large expansion of the orbiting colony around my home planet. I am basically quintupling the population there, adding a huge increase of factories and automation, and otherwise buffing it up. I was way behind in getting this done, and I'm glad I took the time to analyze what I could do up there. I more than doubled production of light-structural units, and added a range of ship-building goods, including a batch of the new robot-probes. Should be fun to test out.

I shut down a couple of old factory groups on my homeworld -- they were producing outdated goods, they were low-tech factories, and I had finished emptying out their build-queues. While I spent a lot of time calculating my personnel needs in the orbiter, I didn't for the home world. Between the factory shut-downs and the automation-adds, I think I've still got enough to run everything even after sending more than a million professionals up to orbit.

Finally, I upgraded my Lab tech to level 6. I debated building PowerPlant tech up to level 4 and starting a batch of those, but I still have time. Power plants are like hydro and solar stations on open colonies. They create power to run almost everything, so you save fuel for what you really need it for -- moving ships and firing blasters. I was surprised to discover that my home colony has only 1m of these set up, but there is room for 2.5m. Saving 1m fuel or 2.5m fuel a turn didn't seem to matter much, though, when I'm burning more than 20m. But Power Plant tech goes up exponentially -- a Power Plant-4 unit saves you 16 fuel a turn! So a full planet-wide batch of 2.5m PowerPlant-4 would completely meet all my fuel needs. But I still have a billion fuel in storage, and thought I could coast another couple turns if need be. And I have a suspicion that I'm going to need to keep advancing Lab tech as aggressively as I dare at least through mid-game.

Look at ultimately having 30,000,000 LAB-TL# of the highest TL you can manufacture. Disassemble and scrap enough lower TL Labs as you add higher TL Labs in order to maintain 30,000,000 working LABS. Yes, it takes 90,000,000 PRO's and some AUT to keep them running and in the OBC=NO FUEL COST (Solar Power).

As I have advocated, upgrade your LAB TL every 4 turns or so and keep a large Factory Group building LABS=200 so they will always be making the top notch stuff.

You don't need to disassemble lower TL factory Groups. Simply disassemble the factories and the same turn Assemble higher TL Factories (in a smaller quantity if desired) to keep the stream flowing. Remember to set all Factory Groups to TL-200 of whatever they are manufacturing.

Ultimately you want EVERYTHING to be manufactured in your OBC to save FUEL costs. It will also be the main orbital defense platform and shipyard.

30m labs??? wow... Might need to start shanghai-ing some aliens!

I am wary of putting so many people up on the orbiter -- it's birth-rate is far lower than my home planet. I understand wanting to save fuel, but you're paying with people! My god, man! ;-)

OKAY, this turn had some self-inflicted misfortune...

First, I accidentally shut down my Energy Shield production line. It was small, and I was only keeping it open to have a few on hand in case of emergency. But still embarassing.

Second, after all my careful calculations on building out my orbiter, I made one teensy tiny error. I planned out how many Professionals I needed to run all the new factories, and I added that same amount of automation capacity. But of course, factories require triple that, so most of them sat idle. That will be fixed next turn. I did manage to notice and remedy a big consumer-goods gap in the orbiter, so that's good.

I sent scouts throughout the system to conduct surveys. Alas, "survey" happens before "movement" I guess, so they just parked in their respective orbits. I need to check -- they might need to move within one distance-unit of the planet to conduct a survey. The one survey I DID complete was for that alien outpost I captured. And that answered a big question I had -- "do all worlds have "infinite yield" deposits?" The answer is no. Planet one has 6 mining deposits, but they are all of limited yield. Personally I find that unrealistic. I suggest that every planet have unlimited yield deposits, but that their extraction percentages be low. Perhaps vanishingly low.

I now have "Laboratory 6" technology. I have a turn or two to finish my current production run of Lab-5, and will start Lab-6 when those are done. OR I might expend to Lab-7 this turn and do a 2-level jump. I haven't made up my mind -- putting such a focus on labs seems risky, but I have balanced out most other elements of my economy. The only big question mark is when I'm going to start needing weapons. I don't want to be caught with tech-level-1 armaments when things heat up, and that's a 5-turn lag at least (4 to build, 1 to assemble).

I made a boo boo myself. I forgot the importance of the TURN SEQUENCE and had changed my Standing Orders to increase the quantity FILL TO for NMTS and METS from my OPC up to the OBC in the same turn I Assembled a huge wad of SLSU in the OBC. Thus my Space Available did not increase until AFTER the Transfers and so I filled up on one item and fell short on the other thus stopping three of my OBC Factory Groups for Consumer Goods, Life Supports and Labs. Dang It!!! The SLSU group kept on pluggin' though so I am set with a WIP stream of SLSU-3's from now on.

It's no big deal though since I can now beef up the Factory Group producing Labs and make up for it. I now have breathing room in the OBC and can let the OPC population continue to grow as I siphon off PRO's for the OBC.

In 2 turns I'll have 3,000,000+ LFS-3 complete from my OPC and will add them onto the OBC to add another 27,000,000 LFS CAPACITY there. In two turns my OPC will be maxed out at 250,000,000 population so the timing will be JUST IN TIME.

I'll probably spend a LOT of research on upgrading the LAB's as soon as I start pumping it out of the LAB-4's. Ten turns from now I will be ready to embark upon AGGRESSIVE exploration meaning going out and conquering whatever I run into and beefing it up with large scale colonization, etc.

Note: During the last game I didn't even get into the game until turn 26 and inherited a VERY large but wrecked empire which took me almost 15 turns just to recover from the downward spiral already started by what appeared to be three previous players based upon the historical NAME orders I detected in the historical Turns In files Vern gave me. This game will be MUCH better.

I Screwed up on positioning and turn sequencing last turn for trying to bring some gear to the alien ESC in my system. No big deal though.

LArgely last turn was more maintenance, anyway.

Another turn submitted just under the wire. (Over the wire, really, it was due last night. If Vern hasn't run the turn yet, then I'm ok.)

All my scouts are surveying, except 3 that are charging back into the neighboring alien system for another look.

I wanted to correct my shortage of automation up on the orbiter, but lo and behold I had shut down my automation production lines in anticipation of using that alien tech to jump-start my automation levels. So either I disassemble some of my home-world automatons to send up, or I send up an army of unskilled labor. I opted for the latter, and threw in a big hunk of steel, life support, consumer goods, and raw materials. (ARGH! Just realized I forgot about FOOD!) That should get my orbiting production lines back on track, and take a little heat off my home planet population limits.

I also set up a production run for Farm-1 -- the classic dirt farms that only run on habitable worlds. I had a bunch sitting around left over from the start of the game, so I am adding just enough new ones to fully farm-up the other habitable world in my home system. So in 4 turns when they're done, I'd better have a freighter ready to ferry them over along with several million people.

Further on that track, I boosted my Life Support tech to 4, and added some production capacity building those. That should be enough to hold me through to mid-game.

That leaves me enough research-points left over to fully exploit the Automation-10 units found on the alien outpost. It might be frivolous to burn so much research on something I could handle with existing AUT-3 tech, but the power of prototyping is too great a lure for me to resist, and I need automation. Each one of these new AUT-10 will replace a HUNDRED unskilled labor. (Incidentally, they burn no fuel, and I think they should. That's a lot of power moving around in those factories and farms -- it ought to consume power. Add that to my belief that hydroponic farms ought to consume life support, I guess...)

Finally, in a fit of indecision on what to do with excess production capacity on the home world, I am building a big batch of military robots. They're low tech, but this ought to be enough to free up my entire existing soldier force. Or I can dedicate them to an invasion of the alien colony -- IF I can get enough supporting military hardware in place for that. I'll need to get a scout report first!

If the turn gets run today (and assuming my turn was accepted a few hours late), I'll have another update posted tonight with the results...

I forgot to mention I started a FRM-1 line several turns ago. Already retooled that line to something else, but I have plenty to send out to my first colony when I am ready. I really think that that is my next big project - colonizing the HAB 10 world in my starting system.

Good news and bad news this turn!

The good news:
- My upgrades to the orbiter went almost flawlessly. Only one of my factory groups is short of labor, and only by 2%.
- My scouts completed their surveys of every planet in the home system.
- Most other orders seem to have run without problems.

The bad news:
- I think I miscalculated the research needed to exploit those Automation-10 units captured on the alien outpost -- by maybe 20k research! Argh! It will be another turn before I can start that Aut-10 production line!!
- I forgot to add food with all the new people in the orbiter, so there is a starvation/rebel problem now. (At least this is easy to fix.)
- I am out of consumer goods at the alien outpost, and I may not have fueled/fooded my scouts as much as I really needed.

There aren't too many random elements in this game. My biggest problem is forgetting about one detail or another in each of these little ventures I embark on. I would probably do better by (ahem) not waiting until the last minute to do my turn. I am happy to report that the significant number of bugs/errors/etc from the old days of Empyrean Challenge are pretty much gone! The errors I am dealing with are all self-inflicted. I imagine this can largely be attributed to the order-entry client tool, but perhaps also to Vern's comprehensive rewrite of the code.

I started a batch of 500k military robots (level 1) to effectively replace 1m soldiers (or add to them). My Farm-1s will finish out the 1m I'll need for planet 2. And a batch of Farm-3 (hydroponics) is in production now, to disperse among my empire as needed. I will never go hungry again. Add to that a batch of robot probes and enough Mines to complete my home-world upgrade. Incidentally, the long-awaited survey reports brought delightful news -- each planet has a different array of mineral deposits. They don't all have 6 deposits, they aren't all predictable arrays of limited-vs-unlimited deposits, and the yields vary wildly, so mining has become a bit of a discovery process that will make stellar geography fun!

I boosted my Life Support tech to level 4, and added a bunch of factories to build them. When this batch is complete, I should have more than enough to shuttle tens of millions of colonists AND invade the alien base in the next system. I might just leave the production line going through another cycle and have enough Life Support to last through the rest of the game. I expect the same will be true once I get my Automation-10s going. One big production run of them will have me automated out into the forseeable future.

I am doubling down on my gambit of inward development, here, by focusing on economic techs and staying in-system. But I am at last making a nod toward expansion by having the tools ready for settling planet 2, and by scouting the next system. I am feeling some heat on this, because I checked a report this turn that tells you have many Habitable-world-points the "winning" players have settled, and the top 3 are all at 35. This means at least 3 other players have successfully colonized their in-system hab worlds, and I am behind.

Okay, just submitted my turn.

First, I have something like 8m Lab-5 that just came off the production lines. So I am shutting down all the old Lab-1 and starting up all the Lab-5. I am reworking some other production priorities, so I should have enough PRO labor to run all these labs. (I have the capacity to build Lab-6, but want to jump to Lab-7 before starting another production run.)

Second, I finished 2m advanced hydrophonic farms, and am asssembling half of them up on the orbiting colony. They should make food without burning fuel. 1m should make 15m food/turn, which will go to feeding ships and orbiters from here on out. The rest of these farms will be ready to ship out to other colonies as I build them.

Third, I put in a sizable initial investment in Power Plants. We start with 1m Power Plant-1s but our home planets can support 2.5m of them. So by jumping tech up to Power-Plant-4 this turn (and cranking up a production run), I will be able to run 2.5m that produce 4 fuel-equivalents per turn. That's 10m free fuel that I can devote to energy weapons/shields in the future (or, uh, "moving ships around.")

I guess my mind has been shifting to military preparedness, because I also laid down a tech-improvement marker on missiles and missile launchers. I am still probably going to colonize my in-system world first, but I am thinking now that conquering that alien colony in the next system will be my best leap-frog option. It could add tens of millions of new citizens to my holdings -- much faster than the normal birth rate. So I want to start building a basic space superiority fleet to at least control their out-system orbit.

I also noticed this turn that one of the systems I can see has been "named" by another player. So I have neighbors, even as I conduct my turtle strategy for the early game. This might also be what prompted me to start beefing up some military.

Next turn I will have enough tech to leverage those AUT-10 prototypes finally, and start a final production run of Automation that should last me through the game. I will also combine some scouts and build out 2 new ships -- one "in system freighter" and one "space superiority" destroyer-class thing. Oh, and the bulk of my new Mine-4 units will be finished, so I will have a big upgrade of mineral production...

I am apparently way, way, way behind you. WTH.

The tutorials advised going with FCT-5 to start with, which is what you and probably most people did. At least one other person when with LAB-5 instead. I went with LAB-4 and FCT-4 at the start, which gave me most of the technology boost and most of the production boost, which meant I could push out a big pile of LAB-4 with my newly assembled FCT-4 as soon as turn 5 rolled around.

That one decision has put me in a good place, compensating for the horrifying food crisis, mismanagement of scouts, ignoring the orbiter for a long time, etc. You are probably way ahead of me in terms of production capacity, orbiting colony, etc. I now have LAB-6, FCT-4, LFS-3, FRM-3, MIN-4, and now Power Plant 4 and some missile tech. Oh, and the prototypes from the alien outpost. But you'll catch up with your high volume of productive output. Especially if you follow up with a big military push and conquer your nearby alien colony sooner than I do...

Well that is an impressive list of tech. The 3+ TL I have are FCT-5, LAB-5, LFS-3, MIN-3 LTSU-3 and TPT-5. Everything else is TL-2 or less. I expended for MINs and Power Plants this turn. I still have not expanded to AUT-10 or even SEN-5 yet with the alien artifacts. That said, it looks like I am not as bad as I thought.

The one thing I am realizing is how uneven my manufacturing is becoming. I have to correct that. One thing I am investing in heavily on production is BEAMERS. I need to read up on how they work, but I imagine it will save me a lot of ferrying things around.

By the way.....I want my next turn to pore over!

My understanding is that beamers are big expensive pieces of hardware that burn a lot of fuel, which is supposed to make it a wash vs. using ships to lug stuff around. But the flexibility and speed has got to be a factor, since it takes 2 turns to get from one planet to another (including docking). (Unless I have that wrong?)

So you have higher tech factories and Light Structure. Good for you. I am thinking I am balanced enough at the moment that I can afford a couple turns focus on military tech. I might double down on missiles to start with -- they carry an advantage over energy weapons at long distances, which makes them good for bombardment. I had forgotten about the high tech sensors at the alien outpost -- thanks for reminding me! Sensors are actually super important for ship combat!

They are? Ship combat?! GAH! I like the idea of missiles.

I actually think I am going to crank a bunch of research this turn - maybe 10M. That will be fun to figure out what to do with it all.

I am frankly scared shitless that I am not making enough LTSU. Next turn more FCT-1s go offline and I will be dramatically expanding the OBC. From our conversation, we are probably even on the OBC front, more or less, now that you upgraded. I'll need LTSU for everything - ships, OPC, OBC, ESC on all of these planets. GAH!

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!

[quote='ixnay' pid='2651' dateline='1384490353']
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!
[/quote]

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."

Just putting a marker down that the next CW turn is due TOMORROW. Since I have an ambitious agenda this turn, I am going to see if I can knock it out tonight. I will try to write up a decent presentation of the ship/colony design process.

I am saving up for a proper colony/freighter ship for next turn. Don't get me wrong, I need and want them this turn, but I am short of CNW to pull it off. I have too much to do and I am frankly more terrified of running out of raw materials.

I'm really missing the Ixnay turn commentary.... :)

Whoa, thanks! I am woefully behind. My immediate priority is to get my Legends turn out. Running a week behind on that -- pity my poor teammates.

A quick update is in order, though. I didn't have time to do a full set of orders for this turn, so I got in the BARE minimum. I updated 5m of my 6m mines to Mine-4, which means I am digging stuff out 4x as fast with the same work force. I'll have the last 1m upgraded in a turn or two. I got Automation-10 from the alien prototypes (which was a big expense), and now have a big batch of Aut-10 in production -- probably enough to last throughout the game. (Each Aut-10 replaces 100 unskilled workers!) I also put some more research into military stuff and have a couple of big production lines going on that, in anticipation of a military invasion of the alien colony nextdoor.

I need to do a real turn this next go-around, but Legends must come first...

Okay, I battled away the forces of real life long enough to get a halfway decent set of orders submitted. Not fully decent, but halfway decent. If any of you are following my Legends game log, that turn is coming tonight (guaranteed).

First, I had a lot of research to spend. My most urgent priority was to finally burn those high-tech sensor prototypes I captured in the alien outpost. 18 Sensor-5 means I get to deduct 72% off the cost of upgrading from level 2 to level 5! And sensors are critical for all space-based battle stuff. I have a big batch of military hardware in the production queue now, so I'm going to need a few good Sensor-5 to aim with.

I also bumped my Laboratory tech from 6 to 8 -- an enormous investment in research. I don't want to diddle with single-level upgrades to labs. I am currently working Lab-5s, and hadn't built any Lab-6 yet. This will kick it all up a notch, so I am starting up a production run of these Lab-8 now. We'll see how it goes.

Finally, I had 2m research left over so I upgraded Hyper Engines to level 3.

I uploaded a new batch of raw materials to the orbiter and pulled down a large hunk of newly built Light Structure. That will go to ship building next turn. I also noticed a small but growing group of unemployables up there -- all new population growth in a colony goes into the unemployable group first (families, etc). I want them down on the home colony where birth rates are better.

I loaded up most of my scout ships with food and consumer goods. Their crews don't actually consume those con-goods, but they will bring them out to the alien outpost in orbit 1. Out there I might swap personnel so that the alien population gets moved to my homeworld and the outpost gets a new staff of loyalists with no rebel issues.

There are 3 other scouts sitting in the adjacent star system -- the one with the large alien colony. They are in orbit 11 (the outer ring), along with a single alien scout. I ordered them to attack the scout with energy weapons and then move in to the orbit with the colony. They can attack that next turn. They will likely get fried, but I hope to get a good probe of the alien colony defenses in the process. Kamikaze. Typing this, it occurs to me that the alien scout in orbit 11 might not be one of THESE aliens -- it might belong to another player. Oops. I guess I will find out -- are ALL ships/colonies that don't belong to me flagged as "alien"?

The rest of my turn was minor production tweaks. I have a lot of stuff in the pipeline. I also happen to be out of Factory-4 so next turn I will probably want to bump up Factory and Mine technologies and set up a new production run of both. We'll see how much research I have to play with.

The big thing I left OUT this turn was using the ship designer tools to build a large freighter. This will involve me finally learning the rules about cargo bays and the neato design sheets. I was late and ran out of time to fully document all that stuff. It will be done for next turn.

I cannot believe how much more technologically advanced you are than I am. UGH.

That said, this turn was done in a mad, uncareful dash to get it in under the wire. We'll see how many mistakes I make.

Also, I want my next turn already.....NOW.

Hint:

Use your standing orders to do such things as...

OPC, Pickup, ALL, UEM, OBC
OPC, Draft, ALL, USK, PRO

etc.

Of course you don't want to do the 2nd order UNTIL you have over abundance of AUT and are utilizing NO USK.

You should also have several million CNW in the OPC and maybe 2,000,000 CNW in the OBC, increasing those levels as capacity is required with growth.

[quote='ixnay' pid='2743' dateline='1387045490']

There are 3 other scouts sitting in the adjacent star system -- the one with the large alien colony. They are in orbit 11 (the outer ring), along with a single alien scout.
Typing this, it occurs to me that the alien scout in orbit 11 might not be one of THESE aliens -- it might belong to another player. Oops. I guess I will find out -- are ALL ships/colonies that don't belong to me flagged as "alien"?

[/quote]

Any S/C that belongs to a player who has not designated you a Friend or Ally will show as belonging to aliens. Take a look at the diplomacy tool to see who has designated you a Friend etc.

I believe that all alien SHIPs belong to other players. But then I am also a relative newbie so I can't be absolutely sure.

[quote='Chirpsithtra' pid='2760' dateline='1387626696']
I believe that all alien SHIPs belong to other players. But then I am also a relative newbie so I can't be absolutely sure.
[/quote]
We always used to believe that in real life, too!

Things have been very quiet around here... TOO quiet. Kind of creepy if you ask me. :dodgy:

And no Ixnay report for a few turns now. It must be that those alien scout ships took him out...

LOL

Let's see... Losing your position to a mass 5 scout ship. That would be the definition of Epic Fail!

Getting back up to speed here, folks. I had a torrent of Real Life stuff that sharply curtailed my free time for the past few months. I was just able to squeak out a series of maintenance turns for this game, and finish editing an article for S&D that I had partially drafted earlier.

I will catch things up by writing a post for each turn. A lot has been going on, and there is much to review, even if my order-sets have been short. So here is my next turn in the series. There will be a few more to follow...

* * *

My orders were not fully complete this turn, but getting there. The big news is that I finally set up a large freighter-colonizer to haul people and materiel. I did it the old-school way of running basic calculations on a piece of paper to make sure it had basic integrity. First, I put in all the accumulated Light Structure 2 I had on-hand -- a few hundred million. Each one provides 4 volume-equivalents, but ships require 10 of these to enclose each volume. (Orbiters need 8, enclosed surface colonies need 5, and open colonies just 1.) So each of these structural units would enclose about .4 actual ship volume units.

To this I added basically all the hyper engines (for inter-orbital and interstellar moves), space drives (for tactical moves), and advanced life support I had. I threw in a large batch of Farm-1s and Min-1s, unassembled, for use on my in-system hab world. I loaded up about 15m population and a bunch of fuel. And just for good measure I added all the energy weapons and shields I had accumulated in small production runs these many turns.

Mistakes? You bet. First, I didn't read up on "cargo holds", which designate a portion of ship volume for efficient storage. I didn't use the ship designer tool. I added enough food, but only JUST enough fuel to keep the life support running. (Ships need lots of fuel!) I have a new batch of Mine-4 coming off the line next turn, which will make my Mine-1s look shabby. And I forgot to include constructors, and to carefully calculate the amount of transport units to include. Obviously I'll need enough capacity to set up the whole colony in one turn. So I'm probably going to hang around in home orbit one more turn and get that all straightened out.

I am building a bunch of Lab-8, but not nearly enough to occupy all my professionals. Clearly I am running low on production capacity, so I pumped Factory tech from 4 to 7. Sadly, I have only a bunch of Factory-1 units available to build them, so this was all bad planning. I am retooling production lines where I can to boost production of both Lab-8 and Factory-7, but it's going to be a few turns at least before I'm back in balance.

I stocked my old alien outpost in orbit-1 with loyalists and am bringing the alien people home where I can reeducate them. I'm still just producing food out there, nothing else. Maybe my colonizer needs to make a stop with some mines...

In military news, I launched a test invasion of the alien colony in the next system. You'll recall that last turn I fired wildly at a scout ship in orbit-11 that I believe belongs to a friendly player. (Didn't even penetrate his shields, though!) This taught me some combat fundamentals, so I thought I would probe the alien colony defenses. First, he's got no energy weapons, shields, or missiles -- at least nothing set to auto-fire. Nice. Second, my invaders (a few thousand soldiers armed with assault craft) were overwhelmed by his ground forces -- amounting to about a million combat factors. I can deal with this. My missile-3 production lines are nearly done, which will help me soften them up from space. I built a half-million military robots, each of which is worth 2 CF. And I have a good million actual soldiers ready to go. I think two rounds of missile bombardment (there are 2 per turn) aimed at his military defenses will bring his CF down enough that my invaders will have a solid chance.

The timing is not perfect. I will need a turn or two to get my colony set up, then return home to pick up the troops. But this invasion is probably my best chance at catching up on the old race for habitation.

That last post was turn 12. This is for turn 13. Just getting caught up here -- the game is currently up to turn 16.

First, my invasion of the alien colony failed utterly, as expected. But I got some useful info. I managed to actually hit it with some pre- and post-maneuver bombardment -- this time my energy weapons were able to hit, and with no energy shields to stop them they actually did a little damage. The aliens didn't fire on my 3 scouts at all, but they did resist my "invasion" with about a million ground combat factors -- easily swamping my few thousand soldiers and assault craft. So, we learned that the aliens don't have shields, they have a relatively moderate amount of ground defense, and they either don't have space weapons or they chose not to fire. I am sending the 3 scouts back home.

Back on the homeworld, my factories finished up a large batch of farms, life supports, and power plants. Just basic colonizing stuff. I am assembling up to the planetary cap of power plants, which at this tech level will save me 10m fuel per turn. I'm retooling a bunch of factories to produce Lab-8 and Factory-7, since I am in short supply of both.

I brought my other scouts back from the in-system former alien outpost, and am completing the assimilation of their small population into my home colony. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, I always say.

My big new colonizer ship setup went well -- it's sitting in dock, loaded with people and stuff. I am adding a bunch more fuel and a LOT of structural units, both assembled (to expand the hull) and unassembled (to use in building a colony on planet 2.)

And finally, I put a big boost of tech into Robot Probe Vehicles, which are new in this iteration of Empyrean Challenge. Not only can you fire them out into nearby star systems for remote probing, but you can harpoon alien ships with them and get reports on their movements!

And now for turn 14...

Argh. I must have fat-fingered the orders where I enlarged my new colonizer ship and stocked it with light structural units (to be used in constructing my new colony.) Instead of LTSU-2 I apparently ordered LTSU-4, which I don't have. So now my colonizer is sitting in orbit 2, burning fuel, with 15m people on it, and it has to come BACK HOME.

This gets to what is my one big gripe with this game. I should have an alert or warning when I enter a bad order. The interface does help tremendously (compared to when we used to do all this on paper), by guiding us through the order writing process. But I should have had a red flag go up when I tried to add materials to a ship that I didn't have. I would think that in real life, I would have noticed that my structural units were tech-2, not tech-4, and I certainly wouldn't have sent 15m colonists on their merry way without their supplies.

On the other hand, this player-fallibility does have an air of realism about it. Snafus happen all the time in the real world. The handful of other players in this game who have posted here seem to have hit similar snags. And one Legends player (another high-complexity PBM beast) said that even as a veteran, he generally strived for limiting himself to just one bad error per turn. And as a programmer, I can tell you that error-proofing data input can be very difficult and time-consuming.

Back to the first hand, though -- this error-prone order writing thing is potentially one of the big barriers to entry on this game. The dedicated fans will deal with it enthusiastically, but newbies will become frustrated.

Anyway, couple more things to note about this turn:

- Got pinged by another player via his scout. I haven't been probing my home system each turn, which is dumb. I need to set that up as a recurring order.

- All my aliens from the outpost have been safely assimilated into my home planet.

- My orbiter is now growing excess food in the hydroponic farms, which I need to shuttle down to the planet now and then to keep it from overflowing. Good.

- My consumer goods pipeline is falling short. After I doubled its size in the first 4 turns of the game, I thought I was good for a while, but now I see my stockpiles are running low. I am retooling some factories to CNGD production now.

- I boosted missile tech higher. Missiles are less versatile than energy weapons -- you need to pair missile launchers with the exact same tech level of missiles, the missiles are expended upon use, and there are 2 techs that can shoot down incoming missiles -- anti-missiles and energy weapons. I imagine that most players would focus on energy weapons for simplicity, versatility, etc. So I went the other way. Why? Because the damage energy weapons deliver drops over distance, while each missile that hits delivers the full punch. And you'll always hit within a certain range that goes up as missile and sensor tech advances. So I am testing a risky strategy -- use more expensive weapons that require more research, to use with ships that now need to enter battle "high" (ie: at greater distance) to maximize that edge, and hope that my feeble energy shields will hold their lasers off.

- Finally, retooled more factories into building these new missiles and more production goods.

[quote='ixnay' pid='2949' dateline='1394262328']
And now for turn 14...

Argh. I must have fat-fingered the orders where I enlarged my new colonizer ship and stocked it with light structural units (to be used in constructing my new colony.) Instead of LTSU-2 I apparently ordered LTSU-4, which I don't have. So now my colonizer is sitting in orbit 2, burning fuel, with 15m people on it, and it has to come BACK HOME.

This gets to what is my one big gripe with this game. I should have an alert or warning when I enter a bad order. The interface does help tremendously (compared to when we used to do all this on paper), by guiding us through the order writing process. But I should have had a red flag go up when I tried to add materials to a ship that I didn't have. I would think that in real life, I would have noticed that my structural units were tech-2, not tech-4, and I certainly wouldn't have sent 15m colonists on their merry way without their supplies.

On the other hand, this player-fallibility does have an air of realism about it. Snafus happen all the time in the real world. The handful of other players in this game who have posted here seem to have hit similar snags. And one Legends player (another high-complexity PBM beast) said that even as a veteran, he generally strived for limiting himself to just one bad error per turn. And as a programmer, I can tell you that error-proofing data input can be very difficult and time-consuming.[/quote]

I'm not in this game, but I am going to chime in, anyway.

In Hyborian War, which is still played via the postal service, veteran players still make mistakes. Is it frustrating? Yes, but it hasn't destroyed the game. In fact, reading about errors that players make in games such as these is often a notable point of amusement. The human (player) errors, themselves, while regrettable, also become part of the overall entertainment value that a game provides. Some even rise to become lore within player communities.

That is not to say that errors are good, per se. They can be frustrating. Yet, at the same time, many games playable online have order checkers, even as they don't achieve the same degree of popularity as numerous older PBM games achieved, by comparison.

Eliminating all potential for human error can be a commendable goal, as far as processing player orders goes. Yet, human error is part and parcel of the human element in games. The more of the human element that gets eliminated, it impacts the game, somehow, I'm certain.

Recently, I began experimenting with a game that features the game, itself, offering suggested orders. Some games offer battle simulators, so that you can be certain of the outcome of pending match-ups against opponents in battle. It would be possible to have two electronic chess games that would offer suggested moves, and two players could then compete against one another utilizing those electronic chess games.

At what point, though, does the pursuit of elimination of human error negatively impact a given game? It might vary by game. But, I do think that it is something worth considering.

I am inclined to agree. Interesting that you should mention playing chess via electronic chess. Back in high school I was on the Chess Team (geek! GEEK!) and played many games with our "first board" (ie: the best player). I almost always lost, but it was always fun and instructive, and slowly my game got better. Once we were talking on the phone and I was sitting in front of my atari game console with the Chess cartridge sitting nearby, so I offered to play him a game by phone (which we did from time to time.) I set the chess program to start playing, and entered his moves, responding to him with the program's moves. Inexorably I beat him, but I had no sense of victory or fun. I admitted it to him immediately upon finishing, and he laughed.

But the OTHER game we played that I specifically remember, I somehow managed to flank his defenses and surprise him with a checkmate. Both of us were surprised. And for me, the taste of that victory was worth all the defeats that came before.

Back to CW. Turn 15. I brought my colonizer back to the home world. I will finally add the missing structural units and send it off. While I am at it, I am also setting up another big ship -- this one will be intended as a missile cruiser to send to the alien colony. I have a whole pile of Missile-3s ready to shoot. I had thought of using the colonizer to ferry military stuff over there after my colony is set up, but I think I'm going to keep that ship in-system. I will need a ferry service. So the number of capital ships under my command is about to double.

I finished building a batch of Lab-8, though not nearly enough to replace all my older Labs. I also have a big batch of Mines and Farms ready to go on the colonizer -- better stuff.

On another note, last turn I finished a large batch of Automation-10 -- the highest tech item I have! (Thanks to those captured alien prototypes.) So I assembled enough to fully automate my home world and orbiter. ALL my unskilled labor is now entering training for professional status. The star-trek economy? I should have enough automation to last through the rest of the game.

I noticed that my raw material stockpiles are starting to run low. My full palette of Mine-4s are being overwhelmed by the demands of a full set of Factory-4s. So this turn I am bumping up to Mine-7 and setting up a production run. I am also junking my old scout ships -- I am in turtle mode at the moment, and by the time I get around to extending my reach beyond the alien colony, I will have tech far beyond what is on those old scouts.

Thanks, as a relative novice player, this has been a very valuable thread! A few comments and questions. First of all, I don't understand the bringing of the alien population back to your HW and "re-educating" them. I left all the alien pop there and added some of my own, and they seem to get along fine, no rebel activity, etc. Am I missing something here? I have made many of these same blunders and others. One thing I have learned is, be flexible. I forgot to take unassembled structure to my colony-to-be, so I disassembled some of my ship structure to use, as I was lucky enough to have some excess space. Worked brilliantly. BTW I have ignored Power Plants up to now. There seems to be plenty of fuel available for the time being, it is METS and NONS of which I am running out. But I may pay the price for ignoring Power Plants later. Finally the alien ruins in the next system: believe me, it is tougher to take than you think. I have made two attempts and not yet managed to take it. You think that by the combat results that you need just a LITTLE bit more to accomplish the successful attack, but in reality the "up to half" population drafted for militia means that if you send too little in, it will defend with only what it needs to, so then when you send more in, it will defend with more. An experienced player told me that you will need 10 million combat factors to take that (smaller) alien colony. It may be less now that they are running out food and the pop is dying off at 30%/turn.

I didn't have evidence of rebellion in the alien outpost, but I suspected there might be some issue there in the future, so I just replaced everyone with my own "race". Probably not necessary, but also harmless.

I think the concept of a "race" could be done away with. Everyone is "human". You could deal with takeovers by having rebel numbers go up upon takeover of a colony. It's not clear to me what the benefit is of having population split out into races. Maybe Vern has something he can share on this?

Your jury-rigged colony construction fix was brilliant. Wish I had thought of that!

Power plants save fuel. It's not that fuel is in short supply right now, it's that ships and energy weapons and shields GUZZLE fuel once wars start happening. Maybe power plants are a good investment, or maybe it's more efficient to focus on mining tech and just extract more out of your unlimited home world fuel deposit. I haven't done the math. Might be interesting to figure that out.

As for taking on that alien colony -- I should alert readers of this thread that Vern posted some info about that via email. At the start of the game, some players had their scouts probe the defenses of these alien colonies early, and were met with full resistance because the auto-return-fire flags were set on those colonies. Apparently in later turns those flags were changed, which explains why my 3 scouts didn't provoke return fire.

So Vern, sensing that some players might get an edge by having successfully probed the defenses before the flags were changed, has now informed everyone that each alien colony has 100k energy weapons at tech level 10. That is a big deal.

I am hoping my missile focus can help, here. I have calculated the distance at which my missiles will all hit (minus whatever he shoots out of the sky), which appears to be a distance that would divide his energy weapon damage by 6. I need to confirm this, and to calculate how many of my missiles I can expect he'll shoot down, to determine how many will hit. 100k EWP-10 -- I'm probably gonna need a bigger boat.

Which brings me to the next turn (ie: the current turn). My setup for the new missile cruiser failed due to lack of transport capacity. Rats! Luckily, Vern had to rerun the turn and I managed to convince him to delete the setup order. I also think I botched my colonizer YET AGAIN by failing to include construction workers. But taking a hint from you, Chirp, I will draft some CNW from my scads of pros and unskilleds. Hopefully my colony will finally go up this turn.

I will also re-try building a missile cruiser. Note that Vern has discontinued the old SETUP order, so I will try out the new way of using a temporary ship ID and doing ADD-ONs to that. I am not at my home machine right now, so I forgot what tech I invested in this turn. I am hoping I put it into Beamers (and started a production run), since it's looking like that could dramatically simplify my in-system development.

If I get my mining (and other production) balanced out, I'm going to have to decide on military tech. I kind of hate the idea of buying into energy-shields, just because I wanted to specialize and not do this blanket-tech-advance thing. But if I'm going to be facing 100k EWP-10, I might need to bite the bullet. I suppose I could also invest in space drives -- higher speed ships are harder to hit -- but it might not make enough of a difference against such superior firepower.

I may have confused which turn I was looking back on. Seems like my last investment in tech was pumping Mines up to 7. So as I formulate my orders for this turn, I am considering the following:

- shutting down some old factory groups to cut down on raw material consumption
- researching Beamers, Energy Shields, or production goods
- building a missile cruiser (or set of cruisers) to test the alien colony with
- setting up my in-system hab world colony (finally)
- shifting more production over to consumer goods

First -- sorry for the long post, but there is a lot to cover!

I am looking at my options this turn, with an eye to taking over that alien colony, and it's not looking good.

It has 100k Energy Weapon-10s. Energy Weapons damage capacity scales up by tech-level-squared, so each one delivers 10 (base) x 10 (tech level) squared = 1000 damage units. If I spend my entire research budget this turn I can boost my energy shields up to tech level 7. Each one of those deflects 10 (base) x 7 (tech level) squared = 490 damage units, which is about half. So to deflect a full broadside, I will need about 200k EWP-7.

The damage delivered is further modified by distance, ship speed, and sensor tech. If I am building a big missile cruiser, I won't have enough space drive capacity to have high speed -- space drive tech is still low. The main thing would be to come in at around 30 distance units, where my missiles will all hit and his damage will be reduced a lot. So I probably won't need the full 200k Energy Shield-7s. This is good because lighting up a full set of shields would cost me 10 x 7 (tech level) = 70 fuel units. 200k of them adds up to 14 million fuel -- EACH TIME. There are 2 attack phases each turn (pre- and post-maneuver), so I'd have to budget 28 million fuel just for the shields, for one turn of combat.

That's not completely awful, because I've stockpiled about a billion fuel at the homeworld. But all that fuel is going to add a lot of mass to the ship, slowing it down and costing even more fuel to move it. I have a bit over 6 missiles stockpiled for each launcher, so that's 2 turns worth of combat. My energy shield fuel budget is now 56 million (plus hauling).

THIS is why I like Power Plants. At current tech I am saving 10m fuel per turn at the home world (which is currently burning over 70m fuel/turn to keep everything running!)

Anyway, what will I get for this large investment? I have a stockpile of missile-3, which do 900 damage each. I have about a million launchers, so each salvo can deliver a max 900 million damage. Woo hoo! But first, the alien colony gets a FREE round of energy weapon fire to shoot them down. (Not sure if this burns their fuel, but I would complain if it didn't.) The formula for shoot-downs is based on relative tech, so I can expect their 100k EWP-10 to shoot down 66k missiles.

Furthermore, damage against ships/colonies is divided by a factor, depending on the type. Vulnerable ships take full damage, but dispersed open colonies (like this alien one) divide incoming damage by TEN. I might also want to target their military systems instead of just causing general damage, which drops another 20% off. So now my 900m of damage per salvo is more like 67m. With two salvos per turn, that means I'm targeting their military sector with 130m damage.

I do have another batch of missiles and launchers tech 5 coming off the line in 2 turns. With around 600k tech-5 launchers, each salvo would deliver 600k tech-5 missiles each hitting for 2500 damage units = total potential hitting power of 1.5 BILLION units. They would be slightly harder to shoot down as well, so only 40k would get taken out, so with two salvos I can expect to hit them with roughly 220m in targeted damage that first turn, fired from a higher distance.

Immediate options:

- build missile cruiser now, hit them with 2m missile-3/turn for 67m targeted damage, diminished by their laser fire and with my ships unshielded
- build missile cruiser in 2 turns, hit them with the missile-3 AND missile-5 for up to 300m targeted damage, ships unshielded
- research energy shield 7 and build them now, to go into a missile cruiser 5 turns from now, with perhaps another batch of missile-5 and fully shielded.

And this is only the initial bombardment! Word on the forum is that those 1m ground combat factors they have will be supplemented by an emergency draft of all able-bodied citizens, to the point that we'd have to deliver a solid 10m ground combat factors to overwhelm them!

I could build a batch of assault weapons and military robots to shoulder the brunt of this, but that will mean keeping my factories pumping at a time when raw materials are running low.

I could count on heavy bombardments taking them down first, but then I'm destroying the very population and materiel I hope to capture!

And simply moving that amount of hardware and people is going to cost a fortune. (We're gonna need a bigger boat.)

THIS is why I love this game. Each one of these game mechanics is very simple, but taken together, it presents a big challenge to mount an invasion. And this is against a single small-ish foe, for which I have solid intelligence. I shudder to think what it's going to be like in conducting a war against human opponents, about whom I know little, with far more moving parts, and all of whom doubtless are handling THEIR empires far better than I!

* * *

Okay, I had drafted these notes days ago. Just now, however, I realized I don't even have the Hyper Engine lift capacity to carry all the missile equipment, let alone the fuel, invasion troops, supplies, etc. Space drive capacity is about the same. So to move this amount of material, I will need to build a big pile of engines, along with the energy shields. So looks like option 3.

I am pumping energy shields up to 6 (not 7), leaving enough tech to pump space drives up to 5.

I just finished a big pile of Factory-7, so I am disassembling some large Factory-1 groups and setting up production runs for Energy Shields and engine power.

Assembling about 1m Lab-8.

Shifting all production in the orbiter to Light Structure.

Setting up in-system habitable world colony FINALLY, by drafting a batch of constructors out of my pool of professional and unskilled labor. This includes Farms and Mines, and should start producing immediately. This is my first time using the new "temp ship/colony ID" method -- the old "setup" method is now obsolete. I figure I have a 50/50 chance of this actually working.

I have a LOT of factory-7 not yet dedicated. I am holding off to see what my raw material consumption is looking like for the next few turns.

Well, another turn, another couple of disasters!

First, my new in-system colonization attempt failed AGAIN. The error messages suggest that the add-on failed because the distance was too far. My impression was that tactical movements come first, so I moved the ship to the 0,0,0 coordinates of that planet. Then my add-on orders would happen. Then I could execute a "Move" order to move it back to the home colony orbit. THEN, in the post-turn email from Vern, he said that we are still supposed to use the "Setup" order for setting up new colonies, not the "Addon" order like we now have to use for ships.

So, either I got the order format wrong, or I got the turn processing sequence wrong. Either way, my colonizer is back in the home orbit again, with 12m colonists burning away fuel to run life-supports. AAAAARRRGGHGHG!! (This is why I figured I had a 50/50 chance of having it work. "Learning Game")

Second, the hydroponic farms in my orbiting colony have been so productive, their produce has squeezed everything else out! All factory production has stopped due to lack of space! Time to put in a standing order to pump excess food down to the planet...

Third, I am out of consumer goods! My early-game doubling of the consumer goods production line had served me well, but relentlessly training my population for professional work has raised their salaries! I had already swung some factory groups over to help out, and that has mitigated the shortage somewhat, but basically every box of product I make is hungrily devoured on the home world instantly, leaving nothing for me to send to the orbiter, which is now starting to sprout rebels.

There is one more looming problem, though not yet a crisis. The high-yield mineral deposits on my home planet will run dry this turn. That means not only am I restricted to using the lower yield "unlimited" deposits, but I lose the use of 3m mining slots! This is not a disaster yet, because I have a fair stockpile of raw materials, but I can't ignore it for long. Not only do I need to keep making stuff, but I have tons of high tech factories now, which will burn through raw materials that much faster.

Someone posted somewhere that the home-planet "unlimited" deposits form the basis of the economy for a long time, so I could pump up mining tech. 3m mine-7s won't meet my needs, but 3m mine-12s probably would, for a time, anyway. So basically I'd have to keep mine-technology a couple of steps ahead of factory technology.

OR, I could plant mines through all the other planets in the home world -- draining THEIR high-yield deposits. So either I build (and successfully manage) a few more in-system freighters, or I develop Beamers FAST. I'm thinking the latter.

On a positive note, I have another million Lab-8s to assemble, and I started up fat production lines for my swanky new Energy Shield-6, Space Drive-5, and Hyper Engine-3 tech. In a few turns, I will have the means to launch a fully-shielded missile cruiser capable of dominating that alien colony.

I still don't have 10 million ground combat factors to throw against it. Maybe I can do a production run of 5m military robots, which are worth 2 points each at tech-1. I could probably have those running one turn behind, if my raw materials hold out. Brute Force FTW!

Again, one novice to another. The tactical maneuver comes first, so that is not the problem. BTW a fairly new feature in Central Command is the filling of the orders tab, which is megauseful. It shows the orders you have entered for that s/c in the order they will be processed! I am pretty sure your problem is too few Space Drives. Your colony ship will be heavy so you need lots of space drives to move it in close spaces. I have also been caught with too few space drives. Your maneuverability is shown in the stats iab under "max speed". If should be at least about 12 or 15 if you jumped close, much more if you didn't. Your Space Drive-5s will have more than 10 times the lift of the SPD-2s. I still have 2s but am researching SPDs this turn. Too bad you moved the colony ship back to your HW - if you have too few SPDs it will just move as far as it can, and then on the next turn you can finish the move (that's what I did, as I had luckily left the ship there to see if there was something I could transport back).

You need to use a setup to create a new colony. In fact I don't know how you could do it with addons, as addons need a target, and since the colony hasn't been set up, there is no colony number yet to use as a target (you find that out the turn after you build it).

That your high yield mineral deposits are running dry are an indication of success! While I still have plenty left in my high yield deposits, I am running out of raw materials and have had to reduce production and scrap things until higher tech mines come out in two turns. It is important to get your colony up and running so that you can supplement your HW minerals with those from the colonies.

Agreed, mine tech needs to be in advance of FAC tech (someone also warned me about that). My MIN-3 and FAC-5 are the source of my resource problem.

I recommend building beamers now to transfer home resources from in-system colonies. Very useful!

Tech is the key! Get those LABs up and running ASAP. If you have been busily recruiting maximum Trainees as the Introduction mails suggested you should be good!

I checked my max speed, and it was 10 something. My understanding had been that if you do a "move" to an orbit with "close" checked, then you'll be within 10 units.

I suspect the reason for the order failure was that I used the new Add On order, by setting up a temporary ID first, and applying the add-ons to that. That is how it is supposed to work with ships. I didn't know that colonies must be set up using "Set up", and I wonder why it is necessary to handle them differently. Maybe Vern can comment?

I am already resigned to this being a "learning game", so I didn't insist that Vern re-run the turn or manually edit my stuff. It's likely in fact that there is a rule somewhere that I didn't read. What got me, in this case, was Vern's high profile alerts in his emails telling us not to use "Set Up" orders anymore.

I think I will make this the turn in which I finally research and build a big batch of Beamers. Then all I need to do is plant a starter base on each planet in the home system, beam over colony materials, and drop professional labor off. They can mine those deposits and beam it all back home.

On research, I was HORRIFIED to find that one other player is generating on the order of 30m research a turn. This drew my attention to the fact that I tended to leave a buffer of unemployed professionals in place, just in case I miscalculated something. My buffer had grown to something like 10m highly paid pros, and there were unassembled Labs sitting in my inventory! So now I am generating a sustained 25 or 26m research per turn, and I think I can bump that to 28m this round.

Submitting orders again...

Moving ALL food from the orbiter to the home world, to make room. The people are fully stocked, and their farms are making more than they need, so no worries.

Finally researching Beamers up to tech-5. This gets me competitive, an also leaves me enough research to boost Assault Weapons up to tech-6. These will be needed to deliver the estimated 10m combat factors on the alien colony.

Each ASW-6 is worth 72 combat factors, so I will need about 140k of them. It so happens that I have a batch of shiny new Factory-7s ready to go, of which it will take a measly 12k to build all 140k assault weapons in 4 turns. This will be my SMALLEST factory group by far, which is encouraging. I have 5.5 MILLION new Factory-7s.

Last turn I started a production line to build all the newly-researched Energy Shields I will need to fully protect my missile cruiser. This turn the same with ground forces. Looks like my military production capabilities are good. Up to now I have focused my production power on the economy. Assuming I can keep my raw materials pumping, I have the capacity to produce military quantities that can absolutely crush these pesky aliens.

Other PLAYERS, however, will be another story...

I also have 4.3m Lab-8s to assemble. I don't have enough professionals to run them all unless I shut down the 3m old Lab-1s. The net boost to my research is 7.2m, bumping me up to around 33m research per turn. NOW we're cooking with gas. It looks like I have the capacity to run around 22m labs. If I built a new batch of Lab-8 -- enough to replace around 12m Lab-4/5, then I'd be up to 44m research/turn. This might be the way to go, since I am not ready to put more research into better Labs yet.

13m Lab-8s will take 3.2m Factory-7 to build. Good thing I have them! But it means shutting down the older factory groups. With another 3m Factory-7 coming off the line next turn, I am shutting down all Factory-1 and Factory-4 groups (letting them complete work-in-progress).

Were I to pump all the rest of my new Factory-7s into making Beamer-5s, I would have enough Beamers to teleport the equivalent of my entire home colony each turn. This is probably excessive, so I will go with half. The other half will build military robots, transports, and just for giggles a batch of heavy Structure-1. Most people put research into Light Structure and build copious quantities in their orbiters. But the old-fashioned ground-built Structure-1s can absorb more of the combat damage my ships will take.

As for my colonizer, I am adding lots of fuel and food. I have no Consumer Goods to add, because my home population is sucking it all out of my factories! Same problem I had with Food some turns back. So I'm sending them off without any -- I'll get rebels, but I don't want to delay colonization any further. In 4 turns I'll have a big batch of Beamers and a bigger batch of Consumer Goods to beam out there.

Missile cruiser and other ships will wait as I build more ship-making stuff.

[quote='ixnay' pid='3004' dateline='1396545721']Finally researching Beamers up to tech-5. This gets me competitive[/quote]

I seem to recall you feeling competitive, when we played in Far Horizons, together. How did that work out for you? Feeling competitive in-game, again, already?

Long time since my last post. Sorry!

This game -- my favorite of all -- is going down the crapper.

First, I seem to have major calamities occur pretty much every turn because of some interdependency I forgot to check. This turn, I told my construction workers to scrap all my old laboratories, because I had a large pile of higher tech labs ready to assemble. While I was at it, I thought I would scrap some of the other ancient hardware I have lying around -- factories and mines at tech level 1, which are now more valuable as recycling. Lo and behold, I ran out of construction worker capacity midway through all these jobs. Now a big chunk of my labs are disassembled, but none of my new ones went up, resulting in a loss of well over half the research I was expecting this turn.

Last turn I started building a new ship, and apparently miscalculated the space requirements. In the available space went my hyper engines and space drives and life support -- but no crew. So the ship was instantly declared "alien" (in that I no longer controlled it.) To get it back, I had to launch an invasion. I figured "okay -- I want to put troops on there anyway", but somehow my assault craft weren't included in the invasion order. My soldiers had no transportation units to bring them into battle. All of which strikes me as odd, considering that this is an utterly empty ship, that is (presumably) DOCKED to my homeworld.

This is all compounded by shortages of food and consumer goods. I had set up some new farms on the home world, but apparently ran out of space THERE, so there wasn't room to assemble them. Not enough food. Towards the beginning of the game I was so proud for doubling my consumer good production lines, and had it in my mind that I was good for a while. But the large-scale shift of population into high-paying professional jobs meant that my need for consumer goods went WAY up.

Apparently there are a number of ships flitting about my home system now -- some of the friendly, some unknown. There are 3 other players I am now entering into some form of alliance with. This is mainly for tech-trading. But through them I have learned the state of development of some of the other players, and I am just WAY behind. Economically, navigationally, and in terms of military tech and readiness. This would all be fine if I were merely turtling, testing out the game, and just having fun tweaking things. But some of the other player groups are now switching emphasis from early-game economics to mid-game military expansion.

After all my earlier talk of military tactics, the importance of information, and ship design options, I am dead vulnerable to massed assault by big fat ships with Energy-Weapon-10s.

I may catch up in the tech race by joining these other 3, and will likely strive to be a viceroy in one of their growing empires. Which will still be fun. But I am disappointed. It probably didn't help that I missed 2 turns in a row. (I had figured that my factories were still producing, my labs were still researching, and I wouldn't fall TOO far behind. Not sure if that was true.)

I will continue as best I can, but if stuff were up to me I would want two things:

1. A new game. A reset. Call this one a learning experience for us all. This is highly unlikely. Every player has already sunk many hours into their positions, and the well-organized players most of all. It might be remotely possible to ask Vern to start up a second game while keeping this one going, but who's going to play it? The most-vested players have their hands full in this one. There may not be enough interest to get 20-30 people assembled for another round. Also, I don't know how much work it takes to run this on Vern's end. Vern?

2. Major improvements on the user-interface, to warn players of gaps and impending errors. This has been discussed before, and I am not talking about perfection. But it would have been nice to see a counter tick up the number of construction workers my orders needed and have it turn red when I exceeded my supply. I am of half a mind to hand my position over to a teammate and focus my efforts on helping Vern with user-interface coding...

Do not despair! It is a learning game - for me after all. If I had been more comfortable with the game back on turn 2 when I took this position over (or was it 3?), I would have done far more, far sooner.

Well, my goal is to do as best I can, even if it means being a bit player, or an annoying gnat. We'll see!

The same thing with too few construction workers happened to me a few turns ago. But it was with mines instead of labs. I was upgrading to a new mine level and disassembled all of my mines and then ran out of constructors before I could assemble the new ones, with the result of massive met/non shortfall.

And I also once somehow failed to get crew on to a new ship and I ended with massive amounts of hardware (it was a big ship) which went "alien" because there was no crew on it. Vern says that if the ship is docked you can simply add population to it and you should gain control again.

It is important to get some ships out early in the game and meet other players that you can trade tech with.

Good Luck!

Is this game still active?