The Darlok Empire

[Bingeling]

The 3rd (?) Horecani War

Yeah, I know that headline was used at the end of last post as well.



A selection of the galaxy map. They have one colony in the SE too. Notice lower right corner, where the system is contested by my crappy Atuuk colony.

The circle in the east is the most annoying outlier that may be picked, but probably not.
I wish to focus on the west. The nicest system is Ackdar, the upper of the 3 close ones in the smaller system. It may be too well defended, though. I ponder going for this, and maybe some of the weak ones.

I send a raider fleet to examine the ackdar system, others to kill mining bases, and move the invasion fleet out west.

The spice planet rebels, lets hope the lone defender can hold off. That is the right of the two close ones in the west.

Let me see, Ackdar system. Minor colony Decroy. No planetary stuff, 12 defenders. Ackdar itself, large space port and 3 defensive bases. Ouch. Maybe a different plan It also has many troops. A LSP is also present in the system to the north, nearest my own.

Home fleet munches mining bases in home cluster and the 4 new cruisers are completed. A raider fleets also gets fat on mining bases here.

The sluken are also mauling the Horecani, including bombarding a planet in our home cluster. The left of the tight 3 in one of the west circles is now independent.

And we got a deep cover spy in the Quameno Techocracy. How useful.

We conquer the 2 western systems in the big northern cicle in the west, and wait for home fleet to bust a medium space port in the right one. One of the conquered give a empire wide 20% diplomacy bonus. Battle 1 with 8 cruisers is searching for fuel for the last 4 in the home system.

Raider 3 limps for repairs 1 ship short after killing quite a few strike force members in our home cluster... It will eventually get a new 4th ship.

Battle 1 had no issues killing a medium space port in the soon to be our system central home cluster (see end map)...

Home fleet moves west to kill a medium space port in the rightmost colony in the top circle. 3 ships low on fuel temporarily leave the fleet.

Somehow we have lost Ester, the colony at our capital's doorstep. We must pay more attention

All 3 enemy systems in the big circle west have been conquered, although the big one rebelled (should be contained). The spice planet rebelled, became independent, and is again ours after a small detour by a troop ship...

We end the war after some nice conquests. One of them has rebelled, and I hope it won't defect back until reinforcements are landed (it won't).

Peace is needed to control pirates and gather our ground forces again.

An attempt at peaceful life



This is the map post war. Changes are circled. The two top left are fresh colonies, the second circle in the west is decent. 94%, an just over 1000M with mostly humans.

I lost the one at the doorstep, top among the east. Too many defenders were left after conquest for me to bother taking it, so I took something else instead. The one near this is a half decent colony, a prospect that I wanted to colonize at the start.

I grabbed one central, there is also an mortalen independent here, and lost the contested one in lower right.

All in all a nice war, I never saw a major fleet, but molested some 8-10 ship ones. Also nice to see the 8 cruiser Battle fleet easily kill a medium space port. And I made a corner of the world (west) more red.

Those large space ports with 3 defensive bases in the west is a problem for the future, though.

Silly Horecani invaded the independent in our new system central home. It is an inferior mortalen planet.

So, lots of pirate bases, kill, kill.

The sluken are not fond of us, and start a blockade. They are the nice purple ones that has greedy arms coming from the south in the image above. The blockade ends without incidents.
Etreadop, the contested mortalen planet in the central home cluster has revolutionized itself into our empire.

The Sluken are busy blockading us, we order Battle 2 of 8 cruisers and say bye bye to positive cashflow for a while (already 20-30k negative before this).

And just after this they declare war...

This will require some thought, they destroyers have 1 more firepower than my cruisers, and their cruisers have 3 times as much... I notice peace at start is a modest 400k. I sense a quick war after some grabs. My invasion fleet is easty, so the two there (seen on the first image) could maybe fall. Unless that blockade fleet with 3 300 point cruisers (and some destroyers) really makes a mess out of us.

Stay tuned for the next episode

[Bingeling]

Dear Master Data.

How do you view using the following options that I have stayed clear of so far (almost...).

Trading tech in non abusive way (not planting contested bases just to trade them).
Invading independent without AI suggestion.
Switching government from feudal (way of the ancients seems to powerful, though).

I think I found a Data Surprise (tm) in the form of a tech boosted Sluken. They are not giants, but huge, and maybe started quite small. If I had paid more attention I may have noticed their tech prowess before.

The good thing (if any) is that my cruisers are 12xx vs 7xx in defense, while they are 3xx vs 113 in attack. Better defense helps.

The rampant troop recruitment of the AI makes cashflow management hard. Of course, without AI controlled colonization there would be no need to worry about the somewhat broken cashflow.

And it is so freaking annoying that conquered planets keeps their tax level. This usually gives instant rebellion if they are your enemy's race.

[Data]

About the three options: agreed, granted and WotA is indeed overpowered so if feasible consider changing it to anything else that's available, at your discretion.
Spot on on the sluken trip mine [:)]
We should indeed make more granular rules for broken features such as taxes on conquered colonies, we can agree on the fly to change those manually.

Edit: overall you're doing much to well, next time no mercy [:D]

[Bingeling]

What could save me now is the ability to make peace easily. I have 2M cash, and peace is valued at 400k. And I could probably lower the value by busting a mining base or taking a colony. Never mind their 4 other wars.

Btw, taxes are manual... The problem is remembering to go into the colony to reset on the instant of conquest. This is a game issue on the border of bug.

Let me see. You granted a bit of tech trading (I have of course abused this massively in the early game), and I can invade independents.

[Bingeling]

The 1st Sluken War.



This is the lower left corner of the galaxy, and the Sluken seem to be spreading from the lower left cluster.



This is the diplomacy map with Sluken Selected. They are not very popular...

They have more military and tax, the rest of our stats are quite even, which explains the somewhat even diplomacy bars. The main challenge is that they are more advanced, and have a much higher firepower on their ship (one ship class higher).

I have only minor raider fleets in the west, so my bet is to foxus on the Central cluster of my home. I used to have a deep cover, but he was caught [:(]



The circles. The two colonies I want to grab to get them out of this cluster. Both are quite nice, top is human, lower is Ugnari. And lower got a space port. Invasion fleet head to the northern colony with no space port. Battle 1 moves to the south in the hope of killing the space port (I don't know status of these colonies).

Top circle is a strike fleet that was blockading my mining base. A soon to be dead mining base, I guess. Home fleet is the one on the western colony, and moves to try kill that fleet.

A raider tries to kill the mine circled somewhat westish. And those are the military ships present in my home cluster.

Their strike force is seen heading west by the long range scanners of my capital. I don't have much in that direction that is not in the other cluster. The fleet moves slow, maybe out of fuel?

Duh, their other system got a medium space port, but did only have trade line to the closest system. Some 10-15 defenders. The other got a medium space port and 7 defenders. Easy kill on space port by 8 cruisers of Battle 1. They may not have huge fire power but they outrange medium space ports for the most parts and the kill is a breeze.

Two raiders in the west head for their resort base in our system.
Battle 2 cruisers are reported completed one by one.

I wonder why Battle 1 does not mop the mining bases after killing Umwat 1 medium space port. I realize it is because they are Horcanti, but not until after sending a single cruiser to kill one manually, and forgetting all about it once I realize they are not Sluken. Now the Horecani don't like us much (again).

Tailfagelu 3 is ours (south one).

They shoot up the small space port at Sistuueni5, a valuable west colony, and kill the two raider fleets that busted their resort base in this system.

We conquer the other sluken Colony in home cluster after what felt like a long siege, probably mostly because I so badly wanted it to finish.

And we make peace.

Battle 2 moves to make western sector its home, and two new raider fleets are ordered to be the new Raider 4 and 5.

Technology swaps are done with 3 friendly empires, 3-4 techs to each.

Status from the system image is: The fleet disappeared west, and the 3 circled targets were destroyed/conquered.

Diplomacy:



Glaxy map:



The giant green triangle is not the Ikkuro but some other guys. The Ikurro has not had much obvious progress since our war.



Ships and bases.



Economy. Too darn many troops, but the horde on Sistuueni5 was a nice saftenet after they killed that space port (no landings though).



Colonies sorted by revenue. You can see that spice distribution is poor, only Sistuueni5 got some, I checked Rpipinird, and they had requested some, but none present (nice ruin, I guess).



And the agents, pretty useless lately.

[Bingeling]

A typical war trend for me. They are quite short, and with some simple objectives. I was in a particular hurry to end this one, as their fleets were very dangerous...

[Data]

They should see your creeping to the top strategy and obliterate you. If I could only claim one of those incompetent Sluken commanders I'd hurl the fleets at you...and remain without gas half-way.

[Bingeling]

I have crashes on auto save, not so fun.

First it was after quite long sessions in the weekend, but now it crashed, then crashed again on the second auto save.

Not fun [:o]

I am trying a full disk check to see if that one is the guilty part.

[Data]

Crashing on auto save? That is not me.
If the disk is the problem than why did it not occur on previous ones? Sounds like something incremented until it got to this point. How many saves do you have in that location so far? If the game checks that and somehow overflows due to high number or space occupied than moving the previous saves out of that location could clear this.

[Bingeling]

Good suggestion on moving saves, though I doubt it should matter. And autosaves are a fixed number anyways, even if I add extra saves now and then.

I am getting pretty good at ending that last war if I have to do the ending once more.

On another note. I hate the troop recruiter, and now the dork recruits robo troops of inferior quality. So who knows whether 5 troops on a transport is strength 60 or 20 at a glance? It kind of matters

[Data]

You know via auto-saves and reloading [:D]

[Bingeling]

Bah.

Tried loading the broken save (newest), then tried loading the next one - out of memory. Bad cleanup...

Then restarted, and loaded, played the end of war again, saved manually a few times. And it exited to main menu on auto save (again).

Maybe deleting the oldest auto save helps, I deleted a bunch of others. If this file is undeletable for the game it could cause the issues.

So hard to get the AAR out for that war, it never survives until the post war screenshots. But at least I got a save after peace now, but ordering new stuff after war damage is so boring to do multiple times.

[Data]

J's using a thing called game booster, I've toyed with it for a while. Maybe you should give it a shoot.

http://www.iobit.com/gamebooster.html

[J HG T]

Sorry for busting in, but the gamebooster seems to work best with 3D accelerated games. I put it to test with Painkiller black edition that I bought from GOG some time ago. Noticeably better performance with GB.
It helps with DW and other similar "2D" games, but the effects may be smaller.

[Data]

Thx for that info J. And you can "bust in" any time, it's an AAR not a private party [:)]