Advanced Save Game Six Empires Huge Map and Minor Races

[UesugiKenshin]

A good mapper builds a backstory for every species on map and has a complete awareness of that species. They're not just some dumb aliens in a sector that are going to be exploited. They might end up being extremely lethal. They may be an underdeveloped indigenous species who never had any conflict and therefore are entirely at peace and so have had a lot of opportunity to build infrastructure or they might be living in thatched huts. And all of that has to be taken into account when considering what kind of fleets would be in that sector.

Just because a minor alien species is underdeveloped, it would be a huge mistake to think it would be easy to conquer them with a ground invasion. The longest war in US history is in Afghanistan. Well the Soviets invested a large amount of money and Technology, it was rejected by religious extremists as well as there being a polarized political situation between the tribal people and the urbanites. So while they don't have the best technology, they are completely committed to guerrilla warfare.

A minor alien species may be underdeveloped but have a mutation that grants them remarkable awareness in some regard, so if they are placed in a situation of extreme technology, they may suddenly and exponentially rise as that mutation synergistically with the technology then facilitates a Quantum Leap. Let's say their memory retention is 5 times better than a human but they don't have organized education. Then suddenly the Terrans give them an organised educational system. If the situation goes awry and they are learning five times faster especially with military technology, then you would have a repeat of Afghanistan where Guerrilla Fighters quickly learned how to use explosive devices especially improvised ones.

[UesugiKenshin]

In history, when a primitive people were giving advanced technology, and then felt they were betrayed, when they thought they could trust their benefactors, they became the absolute nemesis of their benefactors.

That makes for a great game and is a compelling story as it resonates perhaps unconsciously with the player.

Many alien species would have miscommunications and misunderstandings due to ever present mammoth cultural differences.

Like the Andorians and Vulcans. Both are innately hot blooded emotional people given to extreme violence, but one surpresses it and fears its release and even would find it disgusting. Thus show terrible bigotry.

On a psychological and medical level, the aspect which repels us in others, is often something we hate in ourselves or in our own nature. So for the Vulcans, they despise the Andorians who they think are barbaric, because the Vulcans despise their own barbaric nature in themselves.

[UesugiKenshin]

Some sectors are limited and less than 10 billion, so why bother with them?

They can be staging areas on the periphery of an Empire. It can keep your competitor from encroaching on your sphere of influence with an outpost there. But they're quite limited because there's an inadequate population to fully develop the sector.

This means that you're going to have difficulty when you try to put in defensive systems and power them up. You're going to have trouble if you leave them powered up. So you're going to have to turn the power off so that you can do adequate mining. Or you're going to have to send resources to that sector. No doubt that system will have limited resources because it has very few planets that can be terraformed.

I believe the scarcity would not exist in sectors unless there's nothing there at all. There are blank places in space-time, sometimes cryptically so. But in general there are so many stars in a very small area that they cannot even be individually mapped in some places.

For example in the center of spiral galaxies, there's a hub and there's so many stars that it would be impossible to show them as discrete points on a map. Out toward the periphery, there are less. Imagine you're holding a bucket of sand and you're spinning in a circle. So tremendous centrifugal force is making some of the sand spill out and the more centrifugal force, the further out goes the sand in a dispersal pattern. On the edges of the room would be very little sand but in the center of the room there would be quite a lot. That's just one similar example of how a spiral galaxies might disperse stars.

So the distance between stars elongates the further out you go. And realistically speaking, this centrifugal force is not in a plane in two dimensions, but in four dimensions of height and time also, above and below the plane of the galactic hub. There is not just one star per sector, but 80 single stars and several binary and when brown dwarfs as well within 20 light years of the Earth.

Does that seem like a lot? Nope, as the Terran sector is a cosmic rural section of our galaxy. In the hub, it may be thick with very close stars in much more abundance in a 20 light year sector.

[UesugiKenshin]

My plan is to create a series of advanced turn save games and at higher and higher difficulty levels, and also have civil war games and coalition games where one player is controlling three empires at once. I'm trying to make it where players and multiplayer could play BotE on a weekend and wage huge battles. In advanced turns, each turn is supposed to be two weeks of time. So maybe then 26 turns then result in clear winners and clear losers, but at high difficulty levels, then the AI wouldn't have managed their economy, I would have. Thus the players would have two extremely powerful empires CLASHING and it could be very close. It would be all you could do not to lose sectors and have to very intelligently play, finding a gap in the AI's defenses as they redeploy. Scouts doing probes, maybe even frigates who are cloaked, are cautiously trying to avoid long range scanning networks.

Then it's quite fun as the mundane aspects of management have been done for you.

For that to happen, the AI needs the following as presets.
1. Organized diverse proper fleets under the command of a flagship.
2. A sound economy.
3. Well orchestrated research.
4. Customized starships.
5. Veteran troops in transports ready to go...with escorts in a fleet.

I think it's all doable especially with hex editing as each game would take about 3-6 months to play each turn, so unrealistic if I have to build them that way.

[UesugiKenshin]

I want many starship classes but have generational upgrades, so a Saijin level 1, level 2, and so forth. But then also have a few fleet killer custom designed starships for the AI.

Humans can always create some specially designed ultimate dream starship, but the AI would have issues trying to do that. But if it has a few, maybe it wisely utilizes them as it can't make more.

But you can...but they would be hugely expensive. Rushing them would screw up your economy. So they would be slow to make versus standard starships.

[UesugiKenshin]

In between everything else I am doing, I play a few turns as I'd like to get the advanced save game to turn #400 where so much more is built up. I'm at turn# 328. With nearly unlimited money, literally the only limitation is due to deritium as otherwise I could complete Omega Battleships and Vi Dreadnoughts every single turn.

It's important to realize that fleets are more powerful based on diversity of units, not a fleet of all dreadnoughts.

When the power is so lopsided, to wage war would be like professional soccer team playing those in kindergarten. So there is no reason to wage war, but to maximize about 200 colonial sectors and build up defenses, infrastructure, starships, transports, and units. Then I will build up a probably 20-30 colony ships to do terraforming of conquered systems. I'm ensuring the starships are very diverse so if I load this at turn 400, players can try making making different kinds of fleets.

I could customize ships soon as now there are so many options. Even the Yimandar became cooperative as they realize they cannot withstand the Omega as 200 turns ago, my fleet had a 99% change of winning, so now it's pointless to resist the inevitable.

[UesugiKenshin]

There is a turn #400 with the Omega versus the Terrans, Heyoun, Khaoran, and that has all the minor alien races turned on too. That is a far easier game as there's little chance of sabotage.
There is a chance of sabotage in this game, however the Cartare botched their growth and the Rotharians appear to have a small empire as well. And it's impossible for either species to overcome 2.7 million internal security points. That is honestly what the Omega can do in turn# 328 have and they could sabotage all of them if they wanted to. The idea of sabotage totally bores me. The idea of conquering very weak species who are quasi-peers bores me. My goal was to prove it's possible to play using the existing rules and succeed without making any modification. It doesn't work for every species.

Even with their small Empires they would cause a mess with the Khaorans so they would be forced to conquer them to protect themselves which would alarm the Terrans and of course the Omega.

The AI is always malevolent when it plays; it does not understand playing to entertain beginners. It plays to win. That seems rather limited to me. Birth of the Empires is not chess, and reducing it down to galactic chess is too simplistic. It can be so much more. With storytelling and genuine dialogue between the minor and major races, this game would be the best space game available on Android tablets.

[UesugiKenshin]

A young beginner could play that other smaller version, and a bright clever beginner could play this version. It would save either about 196 hours of play to play a turn#300 game doing all the mundane boring part of building an economy instead of waging war.

To get an advanced game to turn 400 takes me about about 420 hours and that is very focused playing with goals all along the way.

By comparison, a good game of Medieval 2 Total War might have the player attack a weak village in the first 8 hours. This gap of 8 hours versus 196 hours is rather significant. BotE is made for turtlers which is why I suggest the next version include advanced saved games.

[UesugiKenshin]

There are chess tutor programs and they are an excellent way to properly teach a young student of chess so they learn how to properly defend and wage war. Similarly, with my advanced saved games, a beginner could could pay attention to the manner in which I play, and would rapidly advance because they would understand key concepts...largely economic ones. Then they would be able to rapidly gain technology and many kinds of Starships. So this is the best way to learn and saving 400 hours plus. And the point really is that it took much longer than 400 hours to figure this stuff out. It took months. I'm trying to save beginners months of time so they can enjoy Birth of the Empire's much faster and have a much deeper level of entertainment. Then of course they can start in turn #1 and see if they can improve upon my techniques. I'm sure they can. Every time I play, it's far easier to rapidly accumulate a large treasury.

[UesugiKenshin]

Turn#340
The Omega are bribing members of the Terrans and the Heyoun that are within their sphere of influence. They have halfway finished level 12 technology and have a rather large ground invasion force of level 6 troops plus a considerable diverse number of units for fleets.

I'm going to begin ship designing in turn#350 and that will largely increase starship costs. Then I could use up existing antiquated vessels to any initial attacks and easily win, and then the new second generation ships gain experience at the combat training center.

It would be more interesting if certain military academies conferred different modifiers for combat like ones that limited fleet size, so with training the admiral of the flagship could control larger fleets. Or could do complex manuevers. Or cloak an entire fleet in a more plausible manner.

I might be able to complete level 14 research by turn #450. Then by scrapping all research, and focusing on mining, commodity training, and starships and units, they would have impregnable colonial sectors and have godlike power over the galaxy.

[UesugiKenshin]

A humorous tactic would be to take all minor alien races away from your opponents...one by one. What could they possibly do? Not much. Then just have fun designing generations of ultimate starships.

Oh and the Yimandar became members too. That is why I'm going to start designing starships.

There are 4 or 5 space faring minor races very close by, so I may make first contact by sending very lethal fleets and trying hailing them. Then try to gain them as members too.

The Omega have become the Borg.

[UesugiKenshin]

If I wanted to be in their face about it, I would steal their members in their spheres of influence and make them staging areas by sending major invasion forces to that military base sector. Then whoever plays this advanced save game could attack anywhere at any time of their choosing.

I could create a path into each empire so there are logistical lanes to route starships and troops all the time, even if no treaty exists.

[UesugiKenshin]

The claim is made that the US is an empire when that is nonsense as we have not significantly gained a square inch of territory since 1898. Even with Alaska and Hawaii, these were already territories though statehood happened far later.

However, the USA has 800 military bases in 70 countries. See the Omega could replicate this as a strategy for your enjoyment.

[UesugiKenshin]

Turn #343

The Omega just completed level 12 technology.

If I had time, now I would sit down with a spreadsheet and create generations of starships for each class such that in a rising stairstep fashion, the weaponry and armor and shielding would increment up. I do not have that time, however there is way too many ships now, so are so numerous that it's not necessary, but it is sloppy from a ship design engineering standpoint.

So I just gave them all the maximums and by turn #350 will deploy fleets to likely hotspots like assigning starships to patrol regions. That way the AI won't get any stupid ideas about trying to seize borderland territory.

Likewise send fleets to every undeclared space faring minor races. They will be my explorer diplomats much like Enterprise does but with at least 7 starships. It would be a shocking fearsome sight. Imagine you have no visitors and then 7 magnificent warships arriving in a coordinated fashion. This is the identical idea with the US Navy's Carrier Strike Force group assigned in a fleets.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_strike_group

When designing fleets, you do not necessarily equip every starship with the most damaging torpedoes as some do different kinds of damage like disabling vessels. BotE is remarkable this way as there is a lot of depth to how things can be configured.

Ideally there would more predesigned starships and or generations of classes as there are cases where you would utilize different speeds or range or weaponry or stealth/cloaking within these.

Obviously, as colony ships are scrapped when colonizing, it makes no sense to make expensive ones. However the Heracletes can make a weak defending colony ship. I don't see the point versus a scout or a transport. I have so many starships, I could have explored the entire galaxy 50 turns ago and choose not to. I let them gain safe experience instead, and now will dispatch very protected fleets to make first contact in an overwhelming show of force.

One tree issue occurs when powering up new colonial sectors with less than 10 billion as the way I play, I so rapidly increase infrastructure far faster than energy levels of power cells. So inadequate power can exist were they are level 4 energy cells (so less efficient) and you can make level 7 but lack sufficient raw materials just yet. So you play catch up later.

Right now I could routinely maintain 1.5 million in the treasury by rushing everything like all starships and level 6 troops, but lack the deritium and some raw materials, so there is no point as then citizens would just doing nothing some turns instead of slowly finishing some tasks.

So obviously while I can complete say a Vi or Omega or Samech 2 in the same number of tunns, now that the armament is so lethal and every ship is using a double iridium hull with level 10 shields, then the raw materials to make such starships at considerably MORE.

You have to be wise on not selling down every colonial sector's mined raw materials so you can make these behemoths. You judiciously build. So I am letting it accumulate in calculating ways, but still making enormous profits.

So instead, every colonial sectors is maximizing defenses and building up 10 level 6 troops for initial protection, but genuinely for massive future ground invasions.

[UesugiKenshin]

Tricobalt torpedo 900 Penetrating Omega Alliance
Ultritium torpedo 800 CanCollapseShields Storgor

The best two torpedoes are these two and the Storgor became members.

http://birth-of-the-empires.de/wiki/ind ... e=Torpedos

You could spend hours designing starships based on how you want your fleets will utilize torpedo technology. BotE is not a button masher game. It is a military tacticianian and strategist's game.