Remembering PRESTAGS

Tuesday, 17 June 2014

Space Empires 4X - First Contact

Following Paul's coaxing with earlier posts, I had a go at a solitaire scenario in Space Empires 4X. I had to be Terran because I recognise more planets in their set (although I was sorely tempted by the set with Kronos). It started well with my explorers finding useful resources near the home work, but my colony ships had no where to go until Rigel came along.

I colonised that and kept looking. When the first economic turn came around, I grabbed and pencil and began to populate a score sheet. Then it occured to me that someone had made an Excel for this - and searched and found. Much easier, particularly while learning. Exploring further, I found a barren world. This posed a dilemma to my economic strategy. To cost to populate a barren world is 8 + 25 (colony ship plus terra forming technology). The return is nothing in the first turn, 1 in the next, then 3 and finally 5 thereafter. That is a 7+ turn playoff period, so I demurred.

More exploring found resources all around Rigel, so my miner got busy. (The snap is a bit blurry, but that's him on the top (hubward end?) of the map.

I now made an ecomonic faux-pas. I began building a large merchant navy. These act as roads in this game, improving movement and income, but in retrospect I did not need them this early. Their return of investment is a bit worse than terra forming - perhaps 12 turns for full pay back, but more on them later.

Next turn I discovered Eden, Vulcan and Odessey and colonisation became a primary goal. However, cash was do good, I began to seriously invest in technology. I brought my ship size level to 3 so I could build cruisers and purchased attack and defense technologies. I was feeling invincible:

A cocky explorer headed off to deep space and as repayed by discovering a hostile race, the Sarvaasi, whose only strategy is to build military and attack. Peace overtures were ignored and the explorer died.

The economist part of me thought "well that reduces my maintenance costs". (I could get a job in Canberra with that thinking, reducing our education expenditure!) But otherwise, life was good in the empire. Production had grown from 20 to 58 in 5 turns with lots of bonuses from the miners. Colonies were all linked with trade routes and I had money on my hands. I weakened, and colonised the barren world.

(Apologies for to blurry photograpy. I stopped using my flash.)

At the seventh Economic Phase, disaster. An evil race, known only by the acronym NRA, decided to wipe out my empire. Their motto: "War ships don't kill sentients: sentients kill sentients, but Doomsday Machines are much more efficient!" They launched a level 2 Doomsday machine at me, just two sectors away from Vulcan. Fortunately, my empire was connected with merchant routes, so I easily consolidated my entire fleet at Vulcan under the able command of Admiral Brendan Mahoney.

I had hoped that the DM would head towards the Alien world next to it, but according to the rules, there is only one kind of sentient the NRA is committed to exterminating.

So with my entire force facing the DM off Vulcan, Adm B Mahoney picked up the die. You can guess the rest. The space station did get two hits on the DM in the battle, and a cruiser got a third. But in the first round, the DM destroyed all four destroyers (4 x 6 or less on a 10 sided dice). Next round it destroyed one cruiser and damaged another (3 x 5 or less and 1 false throw). Final turn, it destroyed the space station and the last cruiser (3 x 4 or less and 1 x 5 or less). Emphatic. To add injury to insult, it demolished and consumed Vulcan to recover two hits. The Vulcans were "surprised". It then consumed Eden and recovered all its strength and headed towards Terra.

Emergency building on Terran meant we had 4 cruisers and a battle station a Rigel when the DM arrived. Without Adm Mahoney, we knocked it out with the loss of just one cruiser. However, next turn another DM appeared from the NRA. They were taking no chances and wanted only body count! However, it was bed time so I called it a night.

I only then noticed that I had missed a posioned package from ThygoCanberra in the email, so I'll attend to that this evening.