Aki throws rocks at Sparta

[bvanevery]

And she must have Hobbit blood, because she did bring them down!

Huge map, average settings, random opponents.  I start on what looks like a large island.  Good, because I'm sick and tired of starting on small islands that only have room for 3..4 cities on them.  I don't like having to spend all of my early research on just getting off the damn island.  It puts me way behind everyone else, especially if I get something classy like the Pirates interfering with my empire core.  Now I'm just not going to bother with such starts anymore.  Yes I can win those games, but they take a lot longer than they should.  Too many mouseclicks to overcome the initial bad starting conditions, not worth the hours and hours of real wall clock time they inflict.

My large island has the Unity crash site on it to the northwest.  I pick up all the goodies, using my 2nd colony pod to assist with the exploration.  And then, in a perverse state of affairs, I popped a pod on the coast and got trapped by a Spore Launcher.  I couldn't found my city because it would walk in and destroy it.  So I had to sit there taking hits until I could walk up a scout from a long ways away.  If it had been a simple mindworm, it would have attacked and probably not killed me.  I wouldn't have lost any time in that case.

So then guess what?  A Spartan scout rover shows up from the east, right next to my capitol.  I've got only a scout in it, but I do have the Unity Chopper and 2 other scouts nearing the area.  Santiago is not friendly, we go to war immediately.  And then suddenly she's got three scout rovers to bother me with.  I'm really in a lot of trouble, she definitely could have destroyed me capitol.  Fortunately the AI makes some bad moves and I make some good moves, so I prevail.  I did have to save-load a couple of times to learn how to use the Unity Chopper in combat though.  It's not strong enough to take out a full strength scout, but it can pick off an almost dead one.

I found a 3rd city just north of my capitol, in the radius of 2 Monoliths that we popped.  I had popped 1, Santiago had popped the other, and that's how I first got wind that I was not alone.  This placement of my city turns out to be a pretty bad move on my part.  Santiago brings up an impact rover and sits on a Monolith.  Yeah sure I attack it with something and wound it, which ordinarily would trigger a retreat.  But it just heals up on the Monolith.  So, she takes my 3rd city.  I'm not a complete chump though: I've got a Probe Team ready.  I steal tech from her, then infiltrate.  I got Doctrine:Mobility out of that deal, which was sorely needed to put her in her place.

I build a couple of Recon Rovers.  I approach with 2 Laser Scouts I already have, over rocky terrain adjacent to the base.  I have 1 Recon Rover also ready to strike, and 1 more en route.  I didn't anticipate that she'd build an additional scout for defense and summarily cut my Laser Scouts down with her Impact Rover.  If she had just 1 unit, I would have won that engagement right then.  But she had 2 units, and my Recon Rover merely blew the scout away.  Fortunately, the situation was rectified on a 2nd wave, with the assault led by the 2nd Recon Rover.  She didn't manage to build anything further.  Unfortunately, I did not get a tech for toasting the base.  It simply died with her 1 unit.

My support situation is really awful.  I've only got 2 cities, a fair number of military units, and only ordinary levels of minerals.  I send my forces east, hoping to stop Santiago's advance, and determine what the lay of the land is.  Fortunately she doesn't seem to be sending anything anymore.  Maybe she's just as feeble as I am, albeit with better weapons.  I really need to steal Nonlinear Mathematics.

I establish a perimeter in relation to a river coming out of Sparta Command.  Her movement is likely to end at a place where I can summarily kill her.  Indeed, it works like a charm.  The AI is very stupid and never figures it out.  Every X number of years, I just kill whatever she sends down.  I also put a scout in some fungus, at the "blind corner" 2 squares south.  I eventually work a Probe Team up there and steal Nonlinear Mathematics.  It takes many more years before that scout is finally killed trying to attack a 4-1-1 that came to see me.

I expand.  Sparta does not.  She chokes on her own lack of minerals.  Too many military units to support, that she's not doing anything constructive with.  I've now got 8 cities to her 2, and I have real roads, terraforming, etc. around them.  Sparta is toast; I just have too many other priorities to deal with, so I can't get around to finishing her off.  Might be just as well: wiping out a player too early, merely respawns them somewhere else.

I get Doctrine:Flexibility even though I haven't been resarching Explore at all.  I already knew the Caretakers were northwest of me on another land mass.  Flew my Unity Chopper right up to them, but that doesn't establish contact.  Guess air units don't blast loudspeakers at the ground.     I do a bit of fishing for pods, but not too much, as getting cities up to reasonable size is more important.  I'm very conscious that an early war usually puts one waaay behind other factions that didn't have that problem.

Deirdre completes The Empath Guild and calls an election.  Surprisingly, she only beats me 27 votes to 24.  That's saying a lot because I had a war and am a weak growth faction.  Maybe everyone else is in just as bad a shape as Sparta and I are.  I tried to bribe Domai to win the election but his tech price was way too steep.  Cha Dawn is also in the game.  Domai allied with me, for all the good that does.  I managed not to get into a war with either Cha Dawn or Deirdre immediately, and in fact they each wanted help with their war against each other.  I declined; let them weaken each other if they can.  I may be at war with both soon enough, although I could go Police State Green at some point.

A number of Secret Projects have already been built.  Surprisingly however, The Virtual World has not, and I seem to be the only player with that tech.  So I started on it, in a city that didn't have good minerals, but had a lot of food that could eventually offset a lot of forests.  Then Deirdre did something surprising, she traded me Doctrine:Loyalty for some tech that really wasn't worth it.  So I switched to The Command Nexus instead, hoping to bang that out before anyone else bothers.

So that's the story.  A tiny bit of sea exploration with 2 slow transports, since my faster ones got killed by Isles.  Mostly trying to get those SPs completed.  Sparta held at bay.  I've got Plasma armor too now, there's nothing she can do to me.  H'minee is Seething so after Sparta, that's the next logical victim.  The Usurpers are somewhere, I have no idea where.

[PvtHudson]

Thanks for all your AARs, very entertaining. Especially this fight against hopeless odds. A few suggestions: 1) Several screenshots of map layout and mutual disposition of factions during the course of game would be useful addition to textual description of the same stuff. 2) I've noticed you often enough get bored with managing endless conquests and sprawling empire and quit. Maybe try large or even medium map size instead of huge?

[bvanevery]

Thanks for all your AARs, very entertaining. Especially this fight against hopeless odds. A few suggestions: 1) Several screenshots of map layout and mutual disposition of factions during the course of game would be useful addition to textual description of the same stuff. 2)

I'll think about that, but I play a lot of games and I think that amount of extra work might get old.  Maybe if I see something on the map that is actually of exceptional interest.

I've noticed you often enough get bored with managing endless conquests and sprawling empire and quit. Maybe try large or even medium map size instead of huge?

Nah.  History has shown that those games are too simple to be of any interest.  I've been playing this game since, well, forever.  In past writeups I've also proved that you can still get a boring unit crawl out of a normal sized map.

I quit this game.  One of those 3 AM triggers where the mouseclicks definitely don't seem worth it anymore.  My game position was certainly viable, but I was annoyed that the Caretakers and Usurpers were slightly more powerful than me.  A lot of SPs had gone by that I couldn't really do anything about.  That early beating by Sparta really put me behind, and getting stuck trying to settle my 2nd city didn't help either.

I think the final straw was Domai cheating at his research again.  How does he pull things like The Ascetic Virtues out of his ass, when he's got -2 Research, and I am focused on Build?  I've got +2 Research and all the Network Nodes and most of the Biology Labs you could think of.  I had more cities than him, and they were of decent size, centrally located, and I had +2 Efficiency.  Several were at size 7, and I don't think he had had Hab Complexes available all that long, so it's not like he had big population cities.  It's really as though the AI ignores the faction's Research rating somehow.  I'm going to have to revisit this subject in another thread, as this has really bugged me in 2 games I've played recently.

As for Santiago, there came a moment when a landing of Mindworms, seemed to empty out some of her units at Sparta Command.  I think she may have moved a bunch of Scouts out to keep them from being shelled.  Maybe she lost some stronger units not to combat, but to lack of support with the mindworms sitting on her tiles.  Anyways I moved in with modest forces.  In a bit of a rockfight, I used a probe team to sabotage the unit she was going to rush for her defense.  I only had to "stir things up in there" because she had nothing other than a HQ and a unit in production, so of course the latter is trashed.  After taking her capitol she surrendered.  Then under my purview the city starved, from 3 citizens down to 1.  That's how marginal her land was.  As is usually the pattern with her, I don't think she'd done any infrastructure improvement at all.

I was basically turtled up when I quit.  The Caretakers would send a substantial number of incursions as they're basically "across the English Channel".  The Usurpers sent occasional incursions as they were much farther away.  Turtling is fine if you actually get to build some SPs, but really sticks in my craw when I can't manage it.  So enough of that.  Let's see what happens when I get a start where my 2nd and 3rd cities are not seriously interfered with.