Space Empires V PBEM game

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-10-22 12:26pm

I've received one empire so far. Hope to have them all by tomorrow.

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2006-10-22 02:28pm

One final suggestion, how about high tech cost, I've always found it forces you to be a little more focused on what techs you take early on. Hopefully we'll see more diversity between players. It wouldn't be cool if everyone built the same kinds of ships, now would it?

Also, should we be password protecting our empires?

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-10-22 03:27pm

High tech cost can certainly be considered. Anyone else in favor or against?

Password protection is good, unless you don't mind others being able to peek in on your turns.

Nephtys · Post by **Nephtys** » 2006-10-22 03:39pm

I dunno. Tech costs are high enough, and in SEV you can refine certain techs to be better. So one player can go beam or missile, and the other toDUC...

It's notably harder to get larger hulls though.

BTW, are we playing with any mods, or just 1.08? I can make an emp file...

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-10-22 04:07pm

Just 1.08.

Nephtys · Post by **Nephtys** » 2006-10-22 04:51pm

Sent in. Beware of the Goa'eld of the Antagonist Empire.. FOOLS!

Trogdor · Post by **Trogdor** » 2006-10-22 08:58pm

I agree with Neph on the tech cost thing. Medium works fine for me, thanks.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-10-23 06:24pm

Send your .emp files in, folks! If I don't have them all when I get home from work tomorrow, I'll start without you.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-10-24 10:04pm

And we're off! Get the game file here. If you didn't get your .emp file in in time, don't despair too much. The chance that I, a player, or the game screwed something up and we have to recreate is pretty high.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-10-24 10:17pm

We'll be running turns roughly every 48 hours. First turn will be executed on Thursday at 10 PM PDT (GMT -07:00), unless everyone gets their turns to be before that. If you don't get your turn in by the specified time and don't make a post explaining that fact, it will be run without you.

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2006-10-24 10:57pm

This is a little painful, having to wait 4 days just so I can build a colony ship. If you get everyone's turn early, can we run things a smidge faster maybe?

Darn · Post by **Darn** » 2006-10-25 05:01am

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:And we're off! Get the game file here. If you didn't get your .emp file in in time, don't despair too much. The chance that I, a player, or the game screwed something up and we have to recreate is pretty high.

Here here! I forgot to set my password in empire setup, and apparently you can't change it in-game....

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2006-10-25 05:07am

Darn wrote:
Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:And we're off! Get the game file here. If you didn't get your .emp file in in time, don't despair too much. The chance that I, a player, or the game screwed something up and we have to recreate is pretty high.
Here here! I forgot to set my password in empire setup, and apparently you can't change it in-game....

If you go and start a new game, choose the empires tab, and then load your empire, if you go to edit it you should be able to see what password you used.

Darn · Post by **Darn** » 2006-10-25 06:56am

InnocentBystander wrote:
Darn wrote:
Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:And we're off! Get the game file here. If you didn't get your .emp file in in time, don't despair too much. The chance that I, a player, or the game screwed something up and we have to recreate is pretty high.
Here here! I forgot to set my password in empire setup, and apparently you can't change it in-game....
If you go and start a new game, choose the empires tab, and then load your empire, if you go to edit it you should be able to see what password you used.

Except that that I didn't set any password at all...

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-10-25 01:47pm

Thanks to Dalton for unbanning me just in time

.

Anyway here are my 2 cents.

Weapons

Ordinance is broken. The patch fixed the fleet supply bug, but made an ordinance bug. When you fleet ships together, they slowly lose a bit of ordinance per turn. Either do not use ordinance requiring weapons, or do not fleet/only fleet when you're about to attack. I am staying away from ordinance completely.

That being said, Tuxedo is right. Meson blasters are the best weapon. You can put in 1.5 Meson blasters for every other kind of weapon at least, and researching energy pulse weapons gives you Point-Defense Blaster, a PD gun that shoots 4x as fast as Point-Defense Cannons and 6x as fast as Flak Cannons. Energy pulse weapons is an obvious no-brainer.

Fighters

Fighters are extremely powerful, mostly because their armor gives them incredible resistance to the lower levels of PD, and also because their maintainence costs are so low. Also, fighters are essential to chasing down retreating enemy ships. Fighter acceleration and turning rate makes them the only kind of ship that can reliably dance in and out of range or retarget. Fighters are so powerful that if you let them target "Only unarmed ships" or "Only carriers" or "Only planet" and so on, they'll get there before the defenders can react and blow it up, unless of course the defenders have their own fighters. Eventually fighters get so powerful PD guns are useless against them.

The only problem is, fighters are bugged, or balanced if you want to call it that, because every time you launch a fighter it sucks up supplies. If a fighter has 900 worth of supply storage, it sucks up 900 supplies from the carrier and your carriers are quickly empty. You need a lot of supply ships to use fighters. Maybe even 1 supply ship for every fighter. But seeing how powerful fighters are, it might be worth it.

Supply

Once your ships run out of supplies, they're toast. SE:V generates 1k supplies per supply depot, and your starting ships begin with 6k supplies and gradually by the end game your gigantic ships have upwards of 20k supplies. So if you've got a 10 ship fleet, or a 100 ship fleet, there's no way you're going to sit in orbit for 50 turns waiting for the supply depot to generate enough supplies for you. Building a lot of supply depots doesn't work either since they only make 1k/turn.

Bottom line is, treat your ships as highly expendable. Once your supplies are gone, the ship is as good as dead. Better to scrap it and make a new one.

A partial workaround is to make huge supply only ships. Make a supply only ship with supply components and the bare essential bridge/life support/crew quarters, and whenever you want to resupply your fleet you build one, transfer the supplies over and scrap it. But resupply depots are worthless. I read if you start out in a system with three stars you can use solar collectors too so your ships run on "fumes", but if you start out in two or single star systems, even high levels of solar collectors won't work.

Movement

Since ships have acceleration and turning rate, that means dancing in and out of range is no longer a good tactic. You could compensate and use smaller faster ships, but they'll just be weak and won't survive against larger more powerful ships. And larger ships cost only a little more than smaller ships... the difference in maintainence between a dreadnaught and a frigate is only a few thousand minerals.

Bigger is even better in SE:V, unless you go with fighters.

Strategy

I wanted to try a strategy I used a lot in SE:IV. That is ignore ship hulls completely and do my light carrier rush.

In SE:V, construction costs 60k, and fighters cost only 10k instead of 100k research. So it's even easier in SE:V. The idea is to get heavy mount, and use a cheaply researched weapon. I chose meson blasters in SE:V, because of the weight efficiency and researching energy pulse gives you access to point defense blasters.

I can pull off such a ship by turn 10. The meson blasters do 105 damage, and the ship's fully armored on upper/middle/lower decks with everything else in the picture. Actually with a 100k resource start, I can start building an 850 kT ship with heavy mount level 1 by turn 3, though that's not a good idea unless they start out right beside you. The idea isn't so much as to load the carriers up with fighters, but to build 20-30 of them and use them as disposable battleships. A few of the carriers will have fighters of course.

It's probably a good strategy to beat 1v1, but with more in the long run hulls should win, at least in SE:IV. I have no idea in SE:V, because fighters seem so powerful and by endgame they're unstoppable. The fighter supply "bug" balances it a little. We'll have to see.

The strategy might be weak to missiles, given the ships have no point defense, or it might be weak to fighters that target the carriers first. A wing of ten fighters can bring down one such fully armored carrier in ten seconds. But since you're going in with a few fully loaded carriers only anyway, even if a lot of carriers die you should have more than enough room to recover them all and continue your invasion.

First turn

It seems the winning research strategy is, whether or not you are going light carrier rush, physics and construction. Physics gives you shields and energy pulse weapons and construction gives you fighters and mines. I'm sorry IB, but it looks like there's only one competitive way to play SE:V, at least until the ordinance bug is fixed. And even then, energy pulse weapons give a weapon that's 1.5 times more efficient and a 4x faster firing PD, so there is no other good weapon except for possibly electric discharge/tk projectors. Electric discharge takes 100k to research organic technology though, and doesn't give you the faster firing PD.

Overall Strategy

It looks like the "land rush" is even more powerful now. In the Adamant game Nova Andromeda was particularly good at that and sent colony ships deep into enemy territory filling them with graviton hellbore fighters.

Build many colonizers, as many as possible, and try and get them in your opponent's territory. If you see an opponent's ship, colonize and immediately start building mines or fighters. Since fighters are so powerful even ten or so could take out a destroyer. It's more powerful because you don't see the entire system when you jump in and it's easier to sneak a colony ship by.

This is a little painful, having to wait 4 days just so I can build a colony ship. If you get everyone's turn early, can we run things a smidge faster maybe

Use emergency build, colony ship out in one

. There's no reason not to, because on turn five you can have a colony ship colonize a nearby tiny planet, and build a space yard that'll be ready by turn 11. Land rush is even more important now that there's no orbital space yards and you need a shipyard on every single planet. By turn 10 you should have 30 colonizers, and by turn 15 maybe 25-30 planets, with 20 yards ready to make your fleet of doom, with a few "outposts" in enemy territory. If you properly defend your planets with fighters and mines, and plug your warp points, any rush between turn 0-15 should fail, though I don't know whether a fleet of 20 turn 10 destroyers could take out mines + fighters. I don't think so. By turn 20 you could have 20 "light carriers" and a few minesweeping ships ready to invade, along with 100+ fighters.

Brian

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-10-25 06:22pm

Didn't I say we would have to restart at least once? Get the new game file here. Due date moved to Friday at the same time.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-10-25 06:33pm

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:Didn't I say we would have to restart at least once? Get the new game file here. Due date moved to Friday at the same time.

You give him a new password Tux?

Maybe we should wait for everybody to weigh in, I don't want to play the first turn three times. The "hands-on" feel to making a ship in SE:V is fun, but it takes a lot longer to make a ship now at least with my notebook's touchpad.

Everything in SE:V takes longer to do, but I suppose it's a good tradeoff for better graphics and improved combat mechanics. And it's still possible to speed through turns if you know the shortcuts and there's always autocomplete (which has to be improved).

Brian

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-10-25 06:59pm

Yes, if there's some sort of problem and we need to restart again, now is the time to speak up.

Anyway, I don't find any significant difference in time it takes to do things now that I'm used to SE V's interface and shortcuts. I was a lot slower in SE IV when it first came out, too.

Trogdor · Post by **Trogdor** » 2006-10-25 09:27pm

I appear not to be in this game. Tux, was there something wrong with my .emp file or did you not get it?

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-10-25 09:43pm

I thought I included all the .emp's that were sent. Should be the same empires as last time. What's the name on yours?

Trogdor · Post by **Trogdor** » 2006-10-26 12:09am

Mine wasn't included the first time, either. I was the vishur alliance. I sent it into you, realized I'd taken the ancient race trait, picked a different one, and then sent you the new one (veshur ii.emp).

Thing is, I sent the it from my PC to laptop and I can't get it to work, so I just assumed something was wrong with the copy you got, too. You never got it?

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-10-26 01:26am

Nope. Try sending again.

EDIT: I always reply with "Received" when someone sends me something.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-10-26 07:59pm

My inbox is still empty. You must be getting spam filtered for some reason. PM me your e-mail addy and I'll send you a message so you can respond to it with the .emp file.

Trogdor · Post by **Trogdor** » 2006-10-26 08:18pm

Done.

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2006-10-26 08:28pm

Lets sort this out eah, I'd like to get through a single turn