Yang the Alien Lover

[bvanevery]

I'm visiting other family now and quite a bit busier than I have been.  I did manage to play a little bit more last night.  Don't really have time for it tonight, only for a writeup of what happened last night.

Domai took back the city with The Ascetic Virtues.  Given the amount of force he had to bring to bear, and my complete lack of willingness to manually push units all the way across the ocean, I'd say this was strategically inevitable.  There's really no point in trying to conquer a strong foe without a rail.  I could have used those expensive Marines for something else, or probably should never have made them at all.  The only tangible I got out of that, is I raised my city size cap to 16 for a short periord of time.  So I have some cities that are size 16 as a result.  Otherwise, a complete waste of time.

Fortunately I do almost have a rail to Domai now.  Then it'll be a direct competition of his industry vs. mine, and I'm betting I have better.  Last I checked he's Democratic Free Market Power, which should give him +0 Industry.  I'm Police State Planned Wealth, which gives me +2 Industry.  He has Support +0, I have Support +4, which means I support units up to the size of my base for free.  He'd have +2 Morale.  I'd arguably have +0 Morale in practice, because I have The Cyborg Factory.  He could build Bioenhancement Centers everywhere and gain further advantage, but I doubt he did.  My armor is superior to his: I've got 6, I think he's got 4.  My weapons are slightly superior, 13 to 10.  I think I also have more cities than he does.  So that sounds like a win.  Especially against an AI, who can't be expected to fight all that well.  The AIs do lots of stupid things that get their units killed.

I did take University Base.  Next turn I'll have a rail to it to reinforce it.  Contrary to what I thought, it only has The Empath Guild in it.  I do not quite have enough votes to win an election against all the other factions that hate me.  But once I take a bite out of Domai, I will.  I don't even have to conquer him, I just have to push the votes a little more in my favor.  Or just grow some more turns with The Cloning Vats.  The Governorship will be mine "soon".

Marr's grounded nuke got away.  He's probably about to produce a 2nd.  I've thought of bringing over a pile of Conventional Missiles to pound the crap out of wherever those nukes are.  But I'm feeling a bit lazy about pushing them across the board, so I probably won't bother.  He hasn't used the nuke he's got, so....

[bvanevery]

I'm still kinda busy, and this is still a slow war.  It takes a long time to get even 1 turn done.

I became Governor.  Taking a few of Domai's cities was enough.  I raised some of those captured sea bases to make them into land bases, to solidify my claim and also to make my bridge, in a way that I could control access over the bridge.  I'm not directly connected to Domai's core.  I'm sort of snaking up on an isthmus, as though I took over Panama, and going up to Mexico to get to the USA.

Domai's peripheral cities were easy to take, but his main cities are heavily stocked with defenders.  I don't think I've quite mustered the forces to blow them away.  I stopped 2 squares short of one of his cities, using a bunker that he conveniently built for me.  I shelled his city with a lot of really weak artillery units, barely scratching him.  But hey they were gifts from my wondrous ally H'minee.  Can't believe I loaned her money.  The sex must be good.  Or the offspring are delicious when dropped into the tanks.

The stack of weak units in the bunker, provoked a sizeable open ground counterattack.  Which worked out better for me, because then I killed his big stack next turn.  His dead units are worth far more than my dead units, mine are mostly just crap that H'minee gave me.  So if he continues with this drill, he's gonna lose badly and quickly.  Well, unless his spam rate is so high that he can keep it up forever.  I doubt it though.  As noted in an earlier post, my industry is actually spammier than his industry.

I've redeployed all my Formers to the conquered cities near Domai.  They have needed a lot of land improvement, which is nearly done.  Domai shoots some of them with planes.  I'm not going to go through heroics bringing Tacticals over, as it's a loooong ways away from my other cities.  Eventually my cities will have enough productivity to cough up their own Tacticals.  In the meantime I'll probably conquer the cities the planes are coming from, long before I would be making defensive planes.

H'minee might be fighting Domai with her air force some, and thereby diverting some of his planes.  I'm really not sure.  I've got my video settings to move everything as fast as possible, which is still slow watching H'minee poke along my rail lines.  Maybe fights are happening and being resolved that I'm not even sure of.

Absence of Formers on the front with Marr, means I'm not really advancing against him.  I am destroying his units as they come inboud to University Base.  Quite a ways before: my perimeter around the base is quite large.  I am slowly X bombing any nearby cities into oblivion.  An Artifact gave me Wave technology, so now I've got bombers coming that ignore any AAA unit defenses and so forth.  I think that same tech also gives me a reasonable amount of food from fungus squares, and probably also allows me to build on them, so I don't have to clear them anymore.  Not that there's much fungus around to deal with.  The ground we're fighting over, has been worked for a long time.

Marr mistakenly left one of his nukes in a city that I could bomb out.  I don't know if he was intending to hit me with it next turn or not.  Maybe it was sitting there all the time, and I just missed it in the soup of cities I needed to deal with yet.  At any rate, it is destroyed now.  He has only 1 nuke remaining, sitting in the city with The Virtual World, quite a ways away from me.  He doesn't have any other nukes in production.  Once I get to The Virtual World, the nuclear threat from Marr is over.

I intend to take Domai's core of cities that have Secret Projects in them, then go after Marr's Virtual World.

I have Neutronium armor now.  Domai and Marr have Shard weapons same as I do, but are still back on Silksteel armor.

I'm soon to complete The Universal Translator.

[bvanevery]

I have taken Domai's core of cities.  This gives me The Planetary Energy Grid, The Ascetic Virtues, The Xenoempathy Dome, and The Planetary Datalinks.  I'm not going to bother to advance further on Domai, unless he starts throwing Conventional Missiles at me.  I think the Caretakers will probably try to hassle Domai, so I hope that keeps him busy.  He's no longer a threat and doesn't have anything important to take.  With my population as high as it is now, I could easily vote myself Supreme Leader, if only there were no Aliens in the game.

I am still only skirmishing with Marr, but now I'm starting to advance a rail northwards towards his city that contains The Virtual World.  Otherwise I will X him out.  I recently got Hovertank technology, so I'm making X Wave Shard Hovertanks which will blow his cities to bits.  I also got Robotic Assembly Plant technology, but I'm only bothering to make those in my capitol, University Base, and the 1 city south of it.  Those 2 will crank out more planes so I don't have to push them across the map anymore.  Otherwise I have enough cities that can produce things for me.  I really don't need massively more productivity to wipe out Marr.  If I did build those plants, he'll probably be all but dead by the time they're done.

If I don't backstab H'minee, then I'll have to conquer Cha Dawn, Lal, and Domai.  Or else build even more Orbital Power Transmitters than I have.  I don't think I'm anywhere near cornering the energy market.  I guess that's a problem with Efficiency 0.

My social choices are Police State Planned Wealth Thought Control.  I don't suffer any penalties from Thought Control because I have The Cloning Vats.  With The Ascetic Virtues, I have +5 Police, which offers no benefit over +3 Police.  I could go Free Market and have +0 Police.  Strangely I would not make much more money, and I'd have to build stuff to compensate for the loss of police.  At present I am disinclined.  Eventually I suppose I'll get a better advanced society to choose from, like Cybernetic if I can actually get any efficiency from that.  Pretty sucky if I can't.  Anyways that or Eudaimonic will put me back to +3 Police, which gives double police power.

[bvanevery]

Well I'm still at this.  I'm doubting I would continue, if I wasn't doing this writeup about it.  Hope this read is useful to someone sometime!

I have taken The Virtual World.  My X Wave Shard Hovertanks have obliterated most of Marr rather quickly.  What weapons!  I also have my 1 aircraft carrier circling his continent counterclockwise to the east.  It uses planes and copters to obliterate his sea bases.  Marr's main stuff won't last more than 3 turns, and that's only because he has some sea bases that need wiping out.  I think he has only 1 city left on land now.  Marr has a few more sea bases scattered to the far east, interspersed with Domai's territory.  Once those are gone, Marr will be eliminated.

I decided to build Robotic Assembly Plants everywhere, since they can be used to produce Orbital Power Transmitters more quickly.  I could probably wipe out Domai with my existing offensive units.  I would need garrison units to hold the ground though.  I'm at the point where I have to decide whether to backstab the Caretakers or not.  They've been allies since the beginning of the game and at this late a time, I don't think I have the heart to put them to the gas.  I have a feeling I'm not going to make enough money to corner the market, so it's looking like a Conquest victory is needed.

I didn't change to Free Market as I was worried about keeping everyone under control with police.  I've got double police power right now.  Selling all my Hologram Theaters has made some people unhappy, as not every base has a Network Node.  That's something more to do.  To compensate I changed my budget to 30-30-40.  I still make about 200 credits a year.

[bvanevery]

Marr sunk my carrier.  He just had some ships patrolling and I wasn't bothering to look for enemy ships at all.  2 choppers got badly wounded in the incident.  Next turn I was able to destroy the attacking ship and some other things before they ran out of fuel.  This has put a cramp in the maritime destruction of Marr.  I guess I'll need to build some other kind of carrier and take the time to send it waaaaaay out there again.  Alternate possibility is maybe I'll sufficiently invade Domai to get an air strike from the land.  Kind of a pain.  I don't care to push a serious navy to those targets.  I quit the previous game I played due to boredom from that.  Pushing navies is slooooow.  Pushing 1 carrier might be acceptable, but what if it gets killed again?

I've built 38 Orbital Power Transmitters and have belatedly realized they're not doing me much good.  Yes I've got The Cloudbase Academy, but the Help entry says the max bonus is the size of the base.  That's currently 16 as I haven't discovered Habitation Domes yet.  Even if I did have Domes, I've probably built as many OPTs as would ever be needed.  So I need to find something else to do.  My income is merely 240 credits/turn and going Free Market would merely add +40 credits.  Not exciting, not going to make me win economically.  Still waiting to discover Cybernetic society and see if I can actually get efficiency from that.

Time to make a lot of Gas Wave Shard Hovertanks I suppose.  Just hurry up wiping out other factions.

[bvanevery]

Well I'm finally quitting.  It's very obvious that I shall win and there's nothing anyone can do about it.  Nobody's been able to do anything about me for a very long time.  But why actually quit?  Well, Domai somehow has become convinced that I committed an atrocity against him.  I've spent the entire game explicitly not doing that, so when did he get this in his head?  There's a possibility than when redeploying a unit to Domai's front, I might have accidentally used chemical weapons against one of his probe teams.  If I'm right, well frankly I'm not even willing to replay one turn to rectify this.  Turns are taking that long and are that much of a drag.  And if I'm wrong, well then it would be hunting and pecking through several previous turns to figure out when I did it.  No way am I going to chase that down, or replay multiple turns.

So the moral of the story is if you don't disband your X units, sooner or later you're going to slip up and use them against someone you didn't mean to.  Corollary: wipe out Aliens first.

Some things were dissatisfying this game and I'll try not to make the same mistakes next time.  The main one is that building piles of Orbital Power Transmitters is very nearly worthless.  I really didn't expect that.  I don't yet know if it's my 0 Efficiency -1 Economy that causes that to be true, or if they really wouldn't be any great shakes until one got Hab Domes anyways.  But I've been playing this game a long time, as the leading research faction, just towering over other players on the graph, and I still haven't managed to research Hab Domes.  So that means in the real world of wall clock time, you can go on nearly forever without getting them.  If I had known this in advance, I would have not built all those OPTs.  I would have put the production into something else that would enable me to win the game faster, I hope.

Not having my capitol at a radially symmetric center of mass, also turned out to be a problem over the long haul, I think.  Yang is pretty sensitive to cities not producing much in the way of money, research, or happiness for him, when they are too far away from the capitol.  I had a lot of dead ocean water south of my capitol, that was never going to do anything for me.  It would have required a lot of terraforming heroics to make into productive cities.  I've done that in other games and it's a drag that takes forever.  I quit a game not long after finally completing that task.  It would be far better to put the capitol somewhere that's going to have financially productive cities in an even circle around it, for a fair ways stretching out in every direction.  But commitment to a base-specific Secret Project like The Merchant Exchange has the effect of freezing one's capitol wherever one did that.  The inefficiency of governing at a distance, makes it quite a bit less desirable to have those SPs anywhere other than in one's capitol.  I recall that I got The Merchant Exchange by a fluke, I just fished the tech out of the water and completed the project becasue I could.  This turned out to have long term structural consequences for the shape of my empire.  I will try to be more far sighted next time.

Similarly, being kind to the Caretakers was completely worthless from a Gamist standpoint.  They never conquered anything.  I'm not even sure they ever put any kind of pressure on anyone.  There's a chance that earlier in the game, their air power might have distracted some other hostile forces, but I really never saw any combat that convinced me that was happening.  Maybe my "quick movement" settings kept me from seeing it, but I just don't think the Caretakers mattered at all.  Maybe they were actually useful for tech at some point in the beginning, I forget and would have to look over this pile of posts to know for sure.  But clearly, there came a point at which the Caretakers were no use whatsoever.  They were worthless in the fight against Marr, for instance.

Because of my love tryst with the Caretakers  half of my conquests ended up being very, very far away from my capitol.  They produced 0 energy and 0 research no matter what facilities I put in them.  They were all serious candidates for Punishment Spheres and I will think more seriously about that in the future, if I'm conquering that far away from home again.  They took heroics of mag tubes to reach, and that's a lot of mouseclicks spent on winning the game.  It ultimately becomes very boring and makes me quit games.

On the balance, I really should have just wiped out the Caretakers when they were no longer of use to me.  If I had done that, and then wiped out the Usurpers, I would have won the game easily by votes and it would be over.  Instead I got put in the position where I've all but wiped out the Usurpers, but I still can't enact Diplomatic Victory because the Caretakers are my best buddies.  And if I killed them at that point, it isn't that much less work than conquering all the human factions anyways.  There isn't that much of a military shortcut, as the Aliens were both allowed to get pretty big.  But boy, they sure can be taken down fast with X Wave Shard Hovertanks.

At the rate I was going, I would have never won this game by Transcending.  My financially productive cities had every research improvement you could think of, and even the financial improvements to back that up.  My research focus was Discover for the final half of the game, when I'm kicking everyone else's butt without even a challenge.  And still I didn't discover the Quantum drive, the Quantum lab, etc.  I guess the Wealth choice really won't do it, at least with Yang.  Yang can use help with Wealth though, because he starts with Economy -2.  Sure he can choose Knowledge but he doesn't get any Efficiency improvement for it, so it's not so attractive.

Ok, so, next game my empire needs to be a "circle" where I progressively wipe everybody out and don't show any kindness.  Need to seriously consider Punishment Spheres for cities that are beyond the radius of financial productivity.  Can't count on getting Cybernetic society ever.  I still don't even know if it would have helped, if I would have ever gotten an Efficiency improvement from it.