The Phoenix Republic (Human)

[Justus2]

Aside from pirate hunting, I was continuing to explore my corner of the galaxy. I found another luxury resource on my homeworld, Losarn Syrup, and finally at 64% exploration level my homeworld seems to have given up all it’s secrets (a couple other planets in the system are still yellow at 25%). I have also topped 3 Billion in population, and development is now over 100%.



While exploring, I came across an interesting find – an automated research station, that is asking me for the security code!



Unfortunately, I chose unwisely (I won’t say which, don’t want to give away all the spoilers…) and the station attacked my explorer, who was barely able to warp out in time. Looks like I will now need to send my Ghost fleet (with reinforcements) to this system to solve the riddle the old fashioned way!

Sometime after this, I had a hard crash, and realized that my autosave (which is set for 5 minutes) was about an hour and a half old….
So I will have to pick up from here next time.



This is the current state of the galaxy from that save, I have completed research on frigates, and the Gerax Drive, so I am working to refit my fleet and build some new frigates. I also researched assault pods, I designed an alternate frigate with just 3 missiles and an assault pod that I can use for an assault fleet for capture attempts, in addition to my standard patrol frigate. I had to go in and set the design and refit settings to manual, for my warships and explorers/CSTs. I had designed a longer range CST with an extra fuel pod (minus the missile), but auto-refit removed it when it upgraded the warp drives. So I now have my standard CST and Explorer base ships, with Gerax and extra range in exchange for weapons. And I have my escort design, and 2 frigate types. As I get the ships refit, I plan to capture the Research Prime station, and then (with a bunch of the new frigates) take on the Azamol base.

My other goal is to focus on Atuuk diplomacy (I’m researching the first tech in their culture tree) to try to allow colonization.

[GiveWarAchance]

That was a lot of big events. The dollar amount to buy the Ghost Fleet was tremendous but looks like it almost made you a mediocre power as long as you stay away from Azamol planet.

- Are you sure the pirates will treat your 2 captured spies well? Pirates are not good hosts.
- Can we see some ship combat photos and a photo of the Ghost fleet ships?
- How agonizing is losing 1.5 hours of work? I recommend throwing in some manual saves too while playing to avoid a lethargic autosave not keeping up. Or maybe you can change autosave frequency in options to every turn.
- How much more preparation before you can finish the Azamol base and be done with those thugs?

[Justus2]

That was a lot of big events. The dollar amount to buy the Ghost Fleet was tremendous but looks like it almost made you a mediocre power as long as you stay away from Azamol planet.

- Are you sure the pirates will treat your 2 captured spies well? Pirates are not good hosts.
- Can we see some ship combat photos and a photo of the Ghost fleet ships?
- How agonizing is losing 1.5 hours of work? I recommend throwing in some manual saves too while playing to avoid a lethargic autosave not keeping up. Or maybe you can change autosave frequency in options to every turn.
- How much more preparation before you can finish the Azamol base and be done with those thugs?

Thanks for the questions! Yes, the cost for Ghost Fleet was a lot (especially that early) but bought me ships and tech I would not have had access to otherwise, so worth it. As for the spies, they keep offering to ransom them, they want $30k for the first and $50k for the second (so he must have had a hidden trait?), but I can't justify spending that much on one character. I wonder what will happen when/if I capture their base, will that 'free' them?

I will work on getting combat photos, I do have some screenshots of the Ghost fleet ship designs I can post. I am actually going to use my fleet to capture the Research Prime station, and the Ravagers base first (only around 500 strength) to get a better feel for how base combat will work before I throw my fleet against the Azamol base (1200 strength). I haven't had much time to play this week, but hopefully can play some tomorrow.

Losing the 1.5 hours hurt, I also had to take some time to go back and figure out where I was, note what I had done and not done at the time of the last save, before I started back up again. I do use manual saves also, usually at the end of each evening or occasionally after a major event/discovery, so I can go back and get screenshots for the AAR if I notice I'm missing something when writing it up. The weird thing is I had autosave set for every 5 minutes, but looking back the 4 autosave files are at random intervals, and hours apart. I don't know if some of the recent patches fixed that, but I will make a point of manual saves more frequently to be safe.

[Justus2]

Here are the Ghost Fleet ship designs, as well as a design screen of the only military ship I had available to build at that time. Notice that most of the components of my Escort design were the 'Basic' version (Basic Crew Systems, Basic Command Center), i.e. all level 1 tech, whereas most of the Ghost Fleet ships were level 2 (the standard Crew Systems, Command Center, etc). I still had Ion engines, and hadn't discovered shields or armor yet either. The one issue is since I still (15 years later) havent discovered some of those techs yet (like the level 2 fuel cells and command center, or the scanners), I can't upgrade the Ghost Fleet to a design with the newer Gerax drive without 'downgrading' the other components. In fact, at this point I am thinking once I use them to capture these bases, I will start retiring them to get tech boosts and replace them with my 'normal' frigates. I may keep the DD as a flagship for a while, though, both because I can't build DDs yet, and because I want to keep at least one of these around. I think its cool that they still retain the distinctive pirate color scheme!

[LordMM]

Great read so far. Hopefully, we can see a very successful Anti Piracy campaign.

[Justus2]

Returning to the game, I completed my research into Atuuk customs (Basic Diplomacy), and used the opportunity to send them a large gift ($37.5K). This opened the option to negotiate a Limited Trade agreement! Looking at the diplomatic modifiers, the gift had a big impact, but appears it will depreciate quickly (within 2 years, -7.5 per year after a boost of 15). The initial boost from the treaty (+5) will also wear off within a year, but hopefully the ongoing trade will sustain improved relations when the initial effect of the gift wears off. I was surprised hwo much it boosted my success chance for colonizing the Atuuk moon (75% from zero). I assume that will also drop over time (it did), and I still have to complete Colonization tech and build a ship. However, if I can build up my baseline relations, then time another large gift when I am ready to colonize, I can hopefully get to 100% chance in a couple years.

[Justus2]

Great read so far. Hopefully, we can see a very successful Anti Piracy campaign.

Thanks! I am building up toward that goal, the pirates have given me several opportunities to fend them off, and I am almost ready to take the fight to them!

[Justus2]

I had discovered an abandoned freighter in the far northwest, on the other side of the line of nebula, but it has taken me a while to do something about it. The explorer ship that surveyed the system ran out of fuel, so I had to direct a tanker there to refuel, and a construction ship, which recently upgraded with Gerax drives, to go and rebuild the frigate.



Note that I started updating the initials in front of each ship name with a G if they have the Gerax drive, makes it easy to see at a glance if they’ve been upgraded yet, and I can sort the list alphabetically and get all the upgraded ships to sort together.
While investigating, instead of tech, I found nearly $12k in treasure. Not bad. However, looking at the ship, it really is a technical marvel!



Definitely more advanced tech in many areas – engines, fuel cells, armor, shields, and Crystal Sensors. I recognized the Megatron Z4 shields and Crystal Sensors as Zenox special tech, but it appears some of the other techs (TurboThrusters, Mega-Density Fuel) are also special tech from other races. This will be my new flagship, it shows a combat rating of 216 compared to the 130 of my Ghost Fleet DD.

Speaking of the Ghost Fleet, I’m in a bit of a quandary. They are still more advanced than my current ships, however they don’t have the Gerax drive, and until I research all of the comparable tech, I can’t upgrade them to include the Gerax without downgrading some of their higher level techs. And without the Gerax, they are so much slower than my other ships (half the warp speed) that they can’t react to threats.

So my plan is to start retiring them to get the tech boosts, and replacing them with newer ships that have Gerax drives and will eventually have all of the other upgraded techs. I am debating keeping the DD around for a while, as I can’t build any ships of that class yet, and use it to lead a defense fleet that won’t travel as much.

The Ghost Fleet escort was already close to home, and I received several tech boosts after retiring it.



I assume there’s some random element determining which techs get boosted, and how much. You can see here there was a big boost in Space Construction, also a boost to Enhanced Missiles (both now in the queue), and a small boost to Deep Space Damage Control (and a slight tick on Monitoring Stations, for some reason). There were small ticks on a couple others. After my next operation to capture bases, I will send the Ghost Frigates to be retired, and maybe one of the Azamol escorts as well, since they have some different techs.

[Justus2]

Another pirate raid in the south, the Liberated send a ship to ‘liberate’ some Hexodorium and other resources from one of my mining stations.



On the same day, I spotted my first Vordikar! 666 strength, that’s stronger than the Gravilex (which was around 400). The Gyndeni system is the same system as the Atuuk planet, my colonization target, so I will have to deal with this at some point.



The reason I wasn’t able to react to either of these threats, is that after getting my fleet refitted, I sent them to the Tefnyl system, home of the Fire Ravagers pirate clan. When I had an explorer here a few years ago, it was a ~400 strength base with no ships. I thought this would be a good first target to see how a base assault would go. However, as my fleets arrive, I find that the base has been upgraded and is now 879 strength, and has 5 ships (Frigates and Escorts) nearby.



This causes me to re-evaluate my plan. I might still be able to take them on. I have the Assault Force (4 FF with Assault pods), and my First Fleet (the 3 remaining Ghost Fleet ships, and a mix of FF and ES), totaling about 1100 combat strength. However, I would have to lure his ships away and fight them first, which would be more difficult as I don’t have any of my own bases in this system, so once I break my treaties he might send them to raid elsewhere, and I’d be playing chase. Also, this is the one pirate clan that I have decent relations with. We have a non-aggression pact, so no protection money, and I don’t know what the diplomatic hit would be for breaking that. And they have been a decent source of selling me random system info.

So I am going to pass on attacking them for now, I have enough active enemies. However, there is the matter of the aggressive research station a couple systems to the south….

[Justus2]

I deploy both fleets (First and Assault) to the Tanaab system, and the Prime Research Station is still there. Combat strength is only 453, but it had some high tech defenses, so I’m confident but not convinced. I had also researched Zero-G Combat in preparation, a 50% boost to Boarding Assault should be helpful.



I start the battle with my First Fleet moving in to attack, but I manually moved my Ghost fleet ships back, and kept the Assault Fleet ships at a distance, as I didn’t want my limited boarding ships getting damaged or destroyed too early.



Once the shields were down, and reactor offline, it was time to commit - the Ghost Fleet ships and Assault Fleet moved in with orders to capture.



Boarding Strength was solidly in my favor (although it was confusing, I wasn’t sure if I was the green bar or red initially).



The marines moved swiftly, and the research station was secured. I also rescued an admiral who had been stationed aboard. I may have to reassign him to my new high-tech Frigate!

[Justus2]

Speaking of my new Frigate, the advanced crystal scanners made a discovery while travelling south to link up with the fleet. I discovered a Black Hole system, and identified something at Traitor’s End, with a threat level of 1,546. Based on the name I’m assuming that there’s a pirate base there, but since I didn’t actually explore the system yet I don’t know for sure. The Crucible’s scanners must have just detected trace signals as it passed by? Or maybe it jumped from Urtu to the black hole, then to Tiyr (I’ve noticed that ships will break up long jumps into segments with systems along the way). That definitely will require more investigation.

Meanwhile, I want to focus on finding (and destroying) the Liberated clan. Their attacks have bounced back and forth between Thyfirra and Gyndeni systems so far, so I think they are more likely coming from the south than from Traitor’s End (which I assume would be trying to raid Urd Radamar).

I noticed a system south of Tanaab, called Trillar Yaigan. I haven’t explored there yet, so I don’t know why I even see the name, and it looks like a vortex of some sort from the zoomed out view, but when I zoom in it appears to have two orbits. That would seem to be a logical location, and will also be a priority for exploration.

Meanwhile I will shift my fleet to Gyndeni, try to catch the raider, and clear the Vordikar, while I build my first colony ship!

[Justus2]

As I mentioned, I still don’t have a lot of the common ship techs to be able to upgrade my captured ships. So my focus for the next couple years is catching up on these, most of which got at least some boost from retiring the Ghost Fleet escort and one of the Azamols.



I also decided to go back to researching 2 at a time for a while, in particular with Crew and Storage, I don’t want all my AI private ships running back to refit basic components every few months. If they complete close to the same time, its only one refit.

However, I also noticed how far short of our max potential research we are falling, so it’s time to review our budget. This is good timing, as I have been reading the thread THREAD on the extent that planets become less profitable once they reach half of their max size. Sounds like there are a lot of variables, so it’s not clear-cut. While I have a good development rating due to luxuries, I don’t have access to any planetary structures yet, so no ability to reduce corruption. And I’m almost at the 50% mark compared to the planetary max. So this seems like a good time to prioritize research spending, and back off on growth for a while.



Even shifting research to 90% only gets me to 3.3k, still well short of the 5.5k ‘optimal’ level, but almost double the 1.8k I was at previously. And when I went back to the research screen, my Actual Research Output went from 203 to 240, so nearly a 20% increase. As I type this up, I also started thinking about my happiness, which at 18 is pretty good. I can probably even go in and raise taxes (currently 20%), bumping it up to 22-24% shouldn’t hurt happiness too much and could boost research pretty close to max.

Of course, there are other ways to boost my research progress. After losing my first two spies to the Azamol pirates, I was gunshy about risking my third, so he’s been sitting at home doing counter-intel. But after watching some more videos of players really get a lot of research from spying on pirates, I decided to take the ‘somewhat risky’ approach, and send my untested Yan Obarria to the Liberated of the Stars.



It seems strange that stealing their territory map was still extremely risky (27% success), when presumably they only have one base. And now that I think about it, I’m not sure how he can steal their tech if he doesn’t know where they are? Anyway, when I look at the choices I realize they have a ton of techs, I am so far behind. Rail Guns is one that I want to research soon anyway, to get a 2nd tier direct-fire weapon, and 88% is risky but reasonable.

And finally, I get another major research boost, as my capture of the Prime Research Station pays off in a big way.



I assumed there must be some research bonus tied to the planet, but 10% to All Research is huge. Not only is it a big bonus, but the 25% boost to all research unlocked a couple techs (including Long-Range Scanners) that required a minimum 20% boost to research.

[Justus2]

As I mentioned, I still don’t have a lot of the common ship techs to be able to upgrade my captured ships. So my focus for the next couple years is catching up on these, most of which got at least some boost from retiring the Ghost Fleet escort and one of the Azamols.



I also decided to go back to researching 2 at a time for a while, in particular with Crew and Storage, I don’t want all my AI private ships running back to refit basic components every few months. If they complete close to the same time, its only one refit.

However, I also noticed how far short of our max potential research we are falling, so it’s time to review our budget. This is good timing, as I have been reading the thread THREAD on the extent that planets become less profitable once they reach half of their max size. Sounds like there are a lot of variables, so it’s not clear-cut. While I have a good development rating due to luxuries, I don’t have access to any planetary structures yet, so no ability to reduce corruption. And I’m almost at the 50% mark compared to the planetary max. So this seems like a good time to prioritize research spending, and back off on growth for a while.



Even shifting research to 90% only gets me to 3.3k, still well short of the 5.5k ‘optimal’ level, but almost double the 1.8k I was at previously. And when I went back to the research screen, my Actual Research Output went from 203 to 240, so nearly a 20% increase. As I type this up, I also started thinking about my happiness, which at 18 is pretty good. I can probably even go in and raise taxes (currently 20%), bumping it up to 22-24% shouldn’t hurt happiness too much and could boost research pretty close to max.

Of course, there are other ways to boost my research progress. After losing my first two spies to the Azamol pirates, I was gunshy about risking my third, so he’s been sitting at home doing counter-intel. But after watching some more videos of players really get a lot of research from spying on pirates, I decided to take the ‘somewhat risky’ approach, and send my untested Yan Obarria to the Liberated of the Stars.



It seems strange that stealing their territory map was still extremely risky (27% success), when presumably they only have one base. And now that I think about it, I’m not sure how he can steal their tech if he doesn’t know where they are? Anyway, when I look at the choices I realize they have a ton of techs, I am so far behind. Rail Guns is one that I want to research soon anyway, to get a 2nd tier direct-fire weapon, and 88% is risky but reasonable.

And finally, I get another major research boost, as my capture of the Prime Research Station pays off in a big way.



I assumed there must be some research bonus tied to the planet, but 10% to All Research is huge. Not only is it a big bonus, but since I now have a 25% boost to all research, I've unlocked a couple techs (including Long-Range Scanners) that required a minimum 20% boost to research.

[Justus2]

I posted a few days ago about some of the threatening monsters around, but Tuydarea wasn’t even marked. I had spotted a Gravillex there when exploring, but I was only using the system for a refueling stop so wasn’t too worried about it. Until now…



My formerly-abandoned, newly-restored, high-tech frigate Crucible had orders to go to Tuydarea and refuel, then I planned to send her to join up with the First Fleet. However, the crew must have gotten bored after refueling, and decided to go pick a fight with the Gravillex in the central star. Unfortunately, it turns out there were two Gravillex there (second one is behind the star in this picture), and there’s no way I want to risk the pride of my fleet against that.

The First Fleet, meanwhile, had arrived in Gyndeni system, and apparently chased the raiding pirate off. He must have jumped when my ships started entering the system, he was gone when I got to the base. However, this system also had a Vordikar, and since I am planning to colonize here soon, I thought I might as well use the fleet to clear the monster out of the asteroid belt. I thought 822 vs 666 would be sufficient…



I didn’t know there would be more than one! And even bigger than the one I saw originally? Now I’m worried, how many are there? Regardless, I am in no position to take them on. I quickly jump away from the asteroid belt, and mark the area hazardous. I probably won’t be coming back until I get Destroyers at least.

I love this game so far! I feel like I’m making progress in several areas, but the game keeps reminding me it’s a big, dangerous galaxy out there, and I have a lot to learn!

[Justus2]

Sorry for the delay in updates, but I have been impacted by the crash to desktop bug repeatedly for the last couple days. Last night I posted the updates I had been working on from earlier this week, but for the last couple days (under both 1.0.2.4 and 1.0.2.6) I get a crash every 20 minutes or so. Not sure why, usually while paused and in the ship design screen or while adjusting budget settings, not while the clock is running.

I have filed a couple bug reports, hopefully once this is resolved I can start going again. The patch notes for 1.0.2.6 recommended deleting all previous save files, but I don't really want to start this game (and AAR) over. So I may try to move the save files out and just start a fresh game under 1.0.2.6 and see if it makes a difference. If some of the issues get resolved, I can hopefully come back and pick this one back up where I am.

[USSAmerica]

I love this game so far! I feel like I’m making progress in several areas, but the game keeps reminding me it’s a big, dangerous galaxy out there, and I have a lot to learn!

I'm enjoying your AAR and I hope the crash issues don't cause you to have to abandon this game. I've only played a little myself after the release to see what things are like as I have a War in the Pacific AE PBEM game that is my top game time priority. I loved DW1 and so far love DW2 even more. I'm sure all the stability issues that some folks are encountering will soon be resolved.

I also wanted to mention that the line I quoted is exactly why I love the game so much!

[LordMM]

Great read, I hope the crash bug gets fixed. Having a lot of fun reading this.

[Justus2]

Thanks for those of you still checking in! As of last week (1.0.2.9) the crashes were still constant, I havent been able to test the newest version today (I wont be home again until Wednesday). Hopefully one of these will solve the problems.

I also ordered a new computer that should arrive next week, with an RTX 3060 which should be a big improvement (my home desktop has a GTX 950).

So far, I have been testing each beta with new games, in case there are problems with the old saves. But once I find a build that is stable for me, I will try to go back to the old saves for this game (I have them backed up).

[llillyhjk]

congrats for the new computer, But I have heard that 3060 and 3050 will be discontinue and in like 1 or 2 year they will also don't get updates and all this happening because 4080