Yang the Island Hermit

[bvanevery]

Back to Yang.  Is he really the best of the best, at eXtermination?  Is a no-penalty no-bonus Planned Police State the way to go?  Well now we try to find out!  Huge map, average settings, random opponents.

I start inland at the foot of Mt. Planet.  The land around me is really good.  Using one of my colonists, I pop a minerals deposit.  That was 2 squares northwest, so I keep going that way to the coast.  The coastal land isn't that great up there so I come back slightly to found my 2nd city.  The minerals deposit is in range of both cities.  The coastal city starts working on The Command Nexus almost immediately, because it doesn't have much food for producing colonists.  Meanwhile my capitol has piles of food, plus I pop a ridiculous amount of nutrients to the northeast.  3 in a tight group.  1 of them becomes food for a city on the rim of Mt. Planet.  2 feed an inland city to the northeast.

This looks like a large island, and I don't meet anyone.  In time I prove that it is in fact a large island.  It also has The Manifold Nexus in the northeast corner.  So now I'm an honorary Greener.  It takes awhile but I do capture 2 mindworms.

I have tremendous land resources and easy settlement.  So easy that I don't bother making Formers for awhile.  I just put cities where I want them.  I pop Industrial Base from a pod, so I give everyone basic synth protection.  I set my research focus to Explore, Discover because I might need to attack someone, I'd like to get various Secret Projects, and I might need to get off the island.  I don't research Build or Conquer at all, which has consequences later.

In the global competition for various SPs, I manage to complete The Human Genome Project and The Merchant Exchange.  The latter sits atop Mt. Planet.  I tried to get The Virtual World as well, but failed.  It became a city that just toodles along building a Secret Project.  Having developed a cloud of Formers in the meantime, I send them to this city and assign their support there.  The idea is not to finish a Secret Project that's "cooking on the backburner" too quickly.  And it's still cooking even as I write this.

Since the Discover based SPs have come and gone, I switch to Explore only focus.  Maybe I can get The Empath Guild.  In any event I need ships, to fish Artifacts out of the water.  One peculiarity of my otherwise good luck, is I didn't find any Artifacts on my island.  While waiting for coastal cities to do things, my interior cities run out of things to build.  I feel I have enough Formers to do all needed jobs.  In particular, every city already has enough food, it's a matter of growing into what I've already cultivated.  So I just build Probe Teams.  Probe Teams upon Probe Teams upon Probe Teams.  I bet I've got enough Probe Teams to probe every city on Planet right now, if only they could get there.

When I do get transports, at first I send them out loaded with Probe Teams.  That does allow me to pop some pods on surrounding islands, and I do bring back Artifacts from that.  I cash them in... and often get stupid things like Social Psych, or Applied Physics.  Perhaps I should have held onto them, built a bunch of scout ships, met other factions, and traded for the low level techs.  Perhaps I should have disbanded Probe Teams to rush those scout ships.  Perhaps I should have been sending Skimship Probe Teams.  Perhaps perhaps perhaps.  What actually happened, is I waited around for my coastal cities to get stuff done.  And I found myself waiting a looooong time.

Zhakarov lands on my island with a 4-2-1, finally breaking the lack of contact.  I ask him for a Treaty, with the intent of demanding that he remove his threatening unit afterwards.  He declines a Treaty, saying I'm too powerful and he'd feel threatened.  Well, yeah, I am #2 on the graph and just barely behind #1, which is Aki-Zeta.  She just built The Planetary Datalinks, that's how long this shenanigan has been going on.

Anyways I tell Zhakarov to get the hell off my goddamn land!  He's a piss-head and declares war on me.  I really didn't make any offensive units on my island, as I've seen no sign of other factions and only had aliens to contend with.  But that city happened to have a mindworm larva in it, which I never did actually put on a boat, due to finding Artifacts and general lack of coastal production.  So, Zhakarov gets a summarily dead unit.  Boy it sure went down easy, that unit must have been pretty much untrained.

So in principle, I've got an invasion target.  In practice, I have no idea where he came from.  He landed on my northeast coast but that means little.  I was already making a prototype 1-3rt-4 ship anyways, hoping to capture an Isle of the Deep.  Also some 1-3rt-3 transports to fish pods out of the water.  I'll make 4-3rt-4 ships afterwards and go looking for Zhakarov.

My city that's slowly cooking a copy of The Virtual World, is very near to the points necessary to complete a project of that size.  I sure could use something to complete!  It hasn't been for lack of trying to get the tech.  This is a strange game.  It just goes to show that you can think you're going to eXterminate all you want, but the Huge map may have other plans for you.

I have good Growth, +3.  I still have cities that haven't grown all that fast, for the amount of time that's passed.  Even with the huge inland food repositories, I don't have a size 7 city yet.  Getting bigger is expensive.  On the other hand, spreading out pushes the Bureaucracy limit, which I already hit.  I've got some marginal coast land I could have settled, but I decided I wanted sea bases there instead.  And my coastal cities have had a lot of burdens placed upon them.  I even found The Ruins on an island to the northwest, and I've yet to settle it.  Looks nice but I guess it's not as useful as it looks, compared to running a highly centralized empire.

[bvanevery]

While sailing past a Cultist sea base, Cha Dawn declared war on me.  I dumped the probe team on the island it was next to and popped pods.  I brought up a 4-3tr-4 foil and almost took the base, but my transport popped a pod and produced an Isle of the Deep.  It attacked my foil and Cha Dawn also reinforced his base.  I was 50% wounded and didn't think I could take the base, as he'd probably reinforce again, so I slinked away.

My sea bases are just making lots of 0-3tr-4 transports.  I put 2 Probe Teams on 'em and send 'em off.  Some are getting within range of Deirdre.  She's in a Truce with me, but if she's as ornery as Cha Dawn it won't last the minute I land.  And then I'll have a field day raiding her.

Otherwise, I pop pods on islands.  This is a mostly water world and I can see why nobody contacted me for a long time.  Everyone started on an island, and I did a better job of it than most others.  I had a better land start than some, but perhaps not all.  Portions of the map, I still don't have yet, but I've got a good strategic profile of where everyone is from buying someone's map.  I'm not sure how large Cha Dawn's homeland really is.  It's north of me, and Zhakarov is even beyond that.  At 3 movement speed, it's taking a long time to get anywhere.  This map is made for The Maritime Control Center, so I will keep my Explore focus.

I'm allied with Domai.  He traded me Ethical Calculus and Gene Splicing, both of which help with growth.  My new policy is that when my interior cities reach size 7, I produce a colony pod.  Then I send it to the coast to add to the population of my coastal cities.  If a coastal city finally gets to size 7, I'll make a sea colony pod, to put off the coast of my island but accessing the land.  I've got 3 places I'd like to have such cities.

Svensgaard is not much of a big deal for this being a water world.  Wonder what's up with that.

I brought an Artifact home and got Adaptive Economics from it.  Or was that Optical Computers?  Maybe I researched AE, despite my Explore focus.  Anyways now I have finally completed that Secret Project from the beginning of the game.  And I'm rich!  I had built Energy Banks everywhere and now I've sold them off.  I'm rushing Research Hospitals in my core interior cities.

So far this game is not about eXterminating.  It's about eXploiting and eXploring.

[bvanevery]

I did fine, doing more of the same.  Deirdre did indeed declare war, the next time I met her at sea.  So I sunk her transport.

I decided that the number of probe teams I made, and cashing the Artifacts to get Level 1 techs, was egregiously wasteful and beyond ridiculous.  Yes I was a dominant player, but how much better could I have been, if I hadn't made these mistakes?  I decided not to waste further time on this game.  Pushing Probe Teams to explore islands, wasn't accomplishing anything that pushing scouts and recon rovers couldn't do better.  In the future I could either make lots of colony pods in the interior cities, to feed the coasts, or more Formers, or cash units to rush production as I upgrade stuff, or....  Just could certainly do better.