Space Empires V PBEM game

GuppyShark · Post by **GuppyShark** » 2006-12-13 04:59pm

Tuxedo signed us up to the game. It's cool, I've PMed Stark.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-12-15 06:18pm

Ah hahahaha you Prussian pricks, what makes you think I'll say yes the second time when I said no the first time. You think I wouldn't look at the treaty elements or something hahaha.

Like I said, even if tech trades were allowed, you're not getting my fighters. Better load up on the vodka, you'll need it. And the bear calvary too.

EDIT: I also ask that people please don't send treaties asking for technology or giving technology, not just to me, but to anyone. Because the AI is stupid, and if I hadn't done my turn this turn, the AI might have agreed to the treaty and given away my precious fighters 4. Now that Gerard is gone I could fuck up his empire royally asking for his hull technology in exchange for some useless bullshit, but I'm not going to, and I don't think trying to exploit the AI is fair game. Thanks

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InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2006-12-16 01:34am

Err... the turn didn't execute/run again.

Nephtys · Post by **Nephtys** » 2006-12-16 03:10am

weird. But it gives me time to run my turn!

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-12-16 11:12am

Forcing execution. The B5 game did that, too.

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2006-12-17 04:16am

So uhm... I noticed that the Sethulkra clan has racial abilities (+25% to yard rate, no space ports, etc)

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-12-17 11:36am

What? You don't have racial abilities?

On page one Tuxedo talks about the best and the worst racial abilities. The only racial ability that was banned was ancient race.

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2006-12-17 06:15pm

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:OK, here are the proposed settings:

No mods
3 good homeworlds
Med sized mid-life galaxy
Med tech cost
High starting resources
No starting tech points
No racial points (when you see how broken the point values are, you'll understand)
No AI players
System exploration enabled
No events
No tech trading
"Destroy All Homeworlds" Victory condition (instead of needing to destroy every last colony of every other player, you just need the homeworlds)

Err...?

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-12-17 07:01pm

No racial points refers to 0 point start when you create your race. Not no racial traits. For example, you can have a 2000, 3000 or 5000 point start. He said no racial points because there's the +500 point racial deficiency which he mentioned, and if you started with 3000 or even 2000 it'd give you every single useful racial trait.

Well too bad, the Prussians are vanilla

. I feel like giving you fighters 4 since I feel sorry for you... nah. Not such a big deal anyway, it's just a small edge and with 8 players small edge won't matter shit if you get a good ally.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-12-17 07:10pm

Hey guys I'm not sure if it'll be a problem, but I'm having serious problems with my connection, and I might not be able to upload my turn in the next 6-7 hours.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-12-17 07:23pm

It's not a problem, it'll just automatically execute and the AI runs your turn.

No worries, it just fucked up the first time.

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2006-12-17 10:20pm

brianeyci wrote:No racial points refers to 0 point start when you create your race. Not no racial traits. For example, you can have a 2000, 3000 or 5000 point start. He said no racial points because there's the +500 point racial deficiency which he mentioned, and if you started with 3000 or even 2000 it'd give you every single useful racial trait.

So, you're saying that I could have taken refining ineptness and naturally depressed in order to get hardy industrialists, or the like?

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-12-17 10:51pm

InnocentBystander wrote:
brianeyci wrote:No racial points refers to 0 point start when you create your race. Not no racial traits. For example, you can have a 2000, 3000 or 5000 point start. He said no racial points because there's the +500 point racial deficiency which he mentioned, and if you started with 3000 or even 2000 it'd give you every single useful racial trait.
So, you're saying that I could have taken refining ineptness and naturally depressed in order to get hardy industrialists, or the like?

Yeah... I am pretty sure that's what Tuxedo meant. But I only knew because of SE:IV. Why would Tuxedo talk about banning a specfic trait later, ancient, if he wanted to ban all things?

Don't worry it's not a big deal. +25% is not such a big deal because construction bleeds, and natural merchants just saves 1 facility a whole solar system. If it was 1v1 you'd be in trouble, but with eight the Prussians just need to find a good ally and they're set against whatever mega evil empire shows up. Or who knows, the Prussians could be the mega evil ones

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brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-12-18 01:14am

And in less than five seconds, two gallant fighter pilots of the Naga obliterate a spy frigate from the Antagonist Empire. One fighter sustains heavy damage from the depleted uranium shells, but is still functional. Captain Fzor is quoted as saying, "If this is the best those slug scum can bring, they might as well quit!"

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So my suspicions prove valid... at high levels fighters rape ships, and apparently at low levels as well. Though that frigate wasn't armed with point-defense cannons, and was basically a turn 1 ship, so we'll see.

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2006-12-18 05:22am

I've done a bit of testing, and deploying dedicated point defense ships within a fleet, in addition to outfitting regular cruisers with PD makes it much easier for a fleet to deal with fighter swarms.

By the by, anyone know what % gain you get for every level of shipyard?

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-12-18 01:44pm

How do you do testing? With a maximum technology game, you can't select lower levels of equipment, and in our current game, you can't have my level of fighters and good PD and good ships unless your research really eclipsed mine.

Currently my fighters are medium sized, and cost 83 minerals to maintain. A warship costs around 1.5k minerals, at least a light carrier does. So every warship would be outnumbered between ten to fifteen to one. In just two seconds of firing with equivalent levels of PD and armor, three fighters strip the ship of armor. I was overestimating with the 5 seconds necessary to kill the frigate... it's more like 2 seconds, because of the second it took the colony ship to pop out of the warp point and the second it took for the fighters to close. Have you tested against ten to one odds, with equivalent levels of fighter technology to ship technology?

Anyway I'd like to echo earlier sentiments about the ship design mentioned in the SE:V patch thread. It's cool dragging and dropping, but after awhile it just becomes a nusiance. I can make an SE:IV ship in under ten seconds, but with SE:V it takes ten minutes, at least with a laptop niblet. If they're going to use predetermined slots for equipment, at least make an "expert mode" where you can click a component and have it automatically appear somewhere in the design, either in inner or outer hull as you specify. It's cool making your ship look cool, but after awhile I don't really care how it looks, just that the components get in the right spots.

A less clunky ship creation interface would be preferable. Insead have several large icons at the top of the screen labeled "ship control" "weapons" and so on to allow you to filter components immediately without going through an intermediary dialogue box. The components appear in a row at the bottom of the screen, because a row is far more intuitive than a column, and just mousing over the edge of one end or the other of the row moves the component list left and right. There could be an expert mode, where you click a component and it automatically appears on inner or outer hull, depending again on large icons set to the left or right of the screen if you turned on expert mode. Dragging and dropping still possible if you turn off the expert mode. Mouse-over should bring up the details of the component in a basic way, such as cost and size, while right clicking could bring up detailed information in a window. Basically, it should try and minimize intermediary windows as much as possible, and I'm finding the middle-top-bottom decks and filter options and drag and drop just adds unnecessary steps to ship creation that are at first cool then time consuming for no reason.

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2006-12-18 02:14pm

I started up a new game, put techs up to a reasonable level for the turn that it was (I'll admit, it was a little while ago) and did some testing. I found that as the numbers of ships went up (I think my biggest tests were with more 60 fighters) the better the frigates would do. A mix of gun ships and PD ships, using the proper formations meant that the frigates armed mostly with regular weapons took the first casualties, but allowed the point defense ships to really chew through the fighters.

I also found that carriers, even with mounts, were dramatically inferior to an equal build of frigates(2 CV vs 3 FF, for instance).

I think I found that upkeep was generally similar to build time, though I suspect that differing tech paths could skew this (lower tech engines, armor, and guns specifically).

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-12-18 02:24pm

Well sixty fighters are equivalent to around six ships, and I'd bet on the sixty fighters anyday

. You won't be facing single digits or even double digits or triple digits when I come, you'll be facing thousands. My computer sucks so I can't watch anything more than a hundred, but oh well.

No surprise, carriers being inferior to ships. 50% of their space is wasted on fighter bays rather than weapons or shields. Set up 100 carriers, maintainence equivalent to y frigates, and see what happens. I usually set the carriers to point blank, and have six massive mounted meson blasters, along with armor and a shield and max moves.

Upkeep's a lot better for fighters.

Does acceleration go up with better levels of engines? What's the point of getting better engines, just bonus move and better upkeep?

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2006-12-19 02:18am

I'm pretty sure its just max speed and supply storage.

In addition - I don't have an email from PBW and PBW appears to not be working. Who wants to bet turns didn't execute when it comes back online?

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-12-19 02:22am

It won't execute because there's some lamer trying to join. Tuxedo's got to mark Gerard's old empire as "dead" or else whenever random people try and join it'll always keep failing

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Stark was trying to upload all day but it didn't work for him. Everybody should figure out how to submit turns by e-mail, PBW's likely to be down a lot and with the holidays I'm guessing whoever runs it won't have time to fix it often.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-12-19 06:07pm

New patch is out, v 1.20. Did someone let their Steam version automatically update? Because that would explain why auto execution is failing. I marked the Sethulkra clan as dead.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-12-19 06:37pm

Turn won't process manually, either. Did someone update?

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-12-19 06:38pm

Not me.

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2006-12-19 06:40pm

Mine still claims to be 1.17

Of course the versions are compatible; I don't get why it would fail, I'm 100% positive you've done mixed executions before.

Arthur, do you need someone to help 'push' the turns through if they continue to be difficult? I'm one of them lazy college kids who will have way too much time on his hands for the next couple weeks and would be glad to tell our game to execute its turn in the early hours of the morning

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-12-19 06:52pm

Mine's still 1.17.

Maybe try removing .plr files one by one until you find the troublemaker. Though I'm sure you tried that already since you've done it before for B5. I'm sure a lot of people don't check this thread now that PBW's up so if we wait for someone to say they went to 1.20 it might be a week.

Shouldn't really matter, next turn everybody should use 1.20.s