Law&Faith - TTT

[Kirov]

And sometimes I try to coordinate, e.g. send my turn and immediately go shopping, so that I can come back for the next turn.

I didn't start the war with the Drones, although perhaps I will end it. He actually had demanded 'protection' money beforing going to war. Can you believe it? Some people have the nerve...

Feel free to save the game when you want, there is no reload message. It's perfect when you need to go out suddenly. Every now and then I also save at the end of the turn if I want to take a look at it. Comes useful especially after combat, when you want to think what's next.

[Misotu]

Good to know on the saves, thanks.

Poor Domai. Great with hammers and other heavy objects, bit of a muppet when it comes to deep thought. Your bases seem to be popping up *everywhere*   

Morgan kicked off an SP.

[Kirov]

You've sent me your turn, probably you saved and didn't hit 'end'.

[Misotu]

I think I just sent the wrong one - hopefully this will work! Sorry.

[Kirov]

Poor Domai. Great with hammers and other heavy objects, bit of a muppet when it comes to deep thought. Your bases seem to be popping up *everywhere*   

Well, your HQ alone seems to pump out almost as many lab points as my entire faction. That's one impressive SSC, I must say.

[Misotu]

Yes ... you know dear Brother, when people make remarks like that it somehow makes me nervous. And my Pointy Stick General is having a blue fit, but I can't quite make out what he is shouting about. Something about Planet being in a fluster? Makes no sense at all to me.

But I must say, dear Friend, that your Principled Stand regarding nerve gas and Other Atrocities is an example to us all. The Word of God is great indeed! There will be many converts to your cause. I'm first in the queue, I can tell you.

Still no MMI. Amazing. Not that choppers are much help now really - this is the big, empty tech gap for a builder and blind research is a killer.

We are sad   

[Kirov]

My Beloved Sister, Sunshine of our Planet, She Who Prances in Fungus, Omnipotent Energy Being To Be,

I have to inform you, and with a great sorrow, that a most dreadful thing happened – as one of your bases got within the range of my Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile, we are now teetering on the brink of a nuclear war.

Dear Sister, I really hope you understand my desperate predicament – you are currently on the runaway trajectory to the Transcendence and there is nothing I could do to keep up with you. And much as you would make my second favourite Supreme Ruler of the World, I’m afraid I’m applying for this position myself. Besides, you’re just too good for these wretched humans. They deserve someone more despicable.

Believe my word that I would just hate to put any damage on your wise and beautiful faction, which is why I hope this nuclear ultimatum will suffice. I would expect that you concede my military domination, the effects of which can be discussed (I don’t need to win now, I just want to prevent you from doing so while I still have time). Should you refuse, an all-out nuclear confrontation will ensue.

Now, I just want to stress two things: First of all, as you probably know, it is not one who has more nukes but who can deliver them which has the advantage. And I already have one delivery chain system in place (obviously) and I’m nearing the completion of two more. Between the PTS, HSA, MCC and Xeno Dome, I can fairly easily deploy numerous throw-away bases and airbases aimed to operate as warhead transfer points. When placed outside your bomber range but inside my missile range, there is not much you can do about them. And I only need 9 of them, not counting the one already humming in its silo.

Secondly, I assure you that I don’t hesitate to accept any nasty drawbacks of such a war, from casting out of the Council to eco-damage. In fact, I’m looking forward to the latter, as brutal raping of the Planet seems to be one of the most effective ways to make money, courtesy of the Almighty. And with my fleet of formers, I can easily bring down the Deluge on this world and stay dry myself.

So what say you, Sister Misotu of the Peacekeepers, Governor of this Pale Pink Dot of ours? The future of the Planet is in our hands.

PS. And believe me, God is completely fine with all of this. His actual words were, “Aaahh, just like in the old times”.

[Kirov]

And so it is, my Sister. I see no other thing than  that can prevent you from Transcending before me. I'm genuinely sorry, although we could kinda see this coming, Believers vs. Peacekeepers. You're just too good of a player. And you're surely aware of the 'snowball effect' which means that after some point I can only dream about catching up. You'd smash me probably somewhere around Hab Domes, seeing your nut output.

I've never even played past the nuke stage, all my games were resolved either at D:AP/MMI or Fusion at the latest. I literally had to look up what the Living Refinery does as I had no idea.

So, it's your call now - either a total war, a handshake or we can just as good play some more (although I will never give up the nuclear advantage).

I really respect your skills and love bouncing turns with you. But you know, "if you want peace, you must prepare for war".

[Kirov]

PS. I'm going out soon so take your time, I won't do my turn tonight anyway.

[Misotu]

The Noble Peacekeepers are devastated to find that our Perfect Trust and Cordial - nay Friendly - Relations have come to this, dearest Brother.

And are you *sure* it's a nuclear weapon? Last time we looked it was called "supply crawler". We have been sadly misled    I have to say though that our Pointy Stick General kept pointing out, in exasperated tones, that it was the wrong shape for a supply crawler. We just didn't believe him, nasty suspicious man.

Well I always said that I was a rotten militarist    But it was very, very dumb of me to miss that airbase until too late.  It might have bought me a few more turns taking it out - but there's absolutely no defence to busters without orbital defence and blind research is terrible at this stage - actually even with guided research it's a long, long stretch to get there. But it wasn't many turns away ... esp. with the Theory of Everything coming in in 2   

You are right, at this stage and without busters I was going to be doing 3 techs every 2 turns in a couple of turns - I'm doing a tech a turn now pretty much - so even with Morgan helping your research if you don't blow me to kingdom come I will cruise transcendence.

To be honest, I didn't expect to last this long    And I was interested to see if you would try a conventional attack first, just for the fun of it    I think I would have held that off with luck, but again tachyons weren't coming up.

I enjoyed the game Bro    and a worthy victory. It's not easy to play the Believers against the PKs without early war and given that this was my first MP game in 15 years or so I don't feel bad. But you can see why I like team games! Nerve gas is hard for builders - and busters are a nightmare ...

[Misotu]

Which all adds up to "I concede" 

It's no fun watching your bases go up in smoke. Although .... the last time my SSC HQ was busted I *still* transcended 

But I don't think you'd let me get away with that ...

[Misotu]

We are going out tonight too, but now the game is over I definitely have some questions to ask (tomorrow). Some will be dumb, but there were things I just couldn't remember and some new things that I think might be Yitzi.

Congratulations Brother!

[Kirov]

I'm looking forward to discuss this game with you, you have several strategies quite different than mine (e.g. terraforming sea instead of just raising it, crawling energy instead of mins, etc.).

I didn't want to go early ballistics because I really, really didn't want to fight you. From the moment you mentioned you're a 'hopeless builder', and then roleplaying the PK in such a sweet way, I knew that sneaky nerve gassing your HQ just won't bring me the rush it usually does. But you know this will have to change if we're to play together, right?

Yeah, you may have already noticed that I like this kind of action, little tricks like renaming units, finding weak points etc. I'm heavy on scouting, navy, map control, power projection, looking for sweet spots. It sure costs a lot comparing to builder growth, but it's worth every penny. Basically it's all the difference between MP and SP.

Re: airbase: fret not, it was timed so that the airbase was built in the very same turn the 'supply crawler' was ready to move in. There is no airbase in 2230, as you can see.

Re: regular attack: I'm pacted with Zak and Morgan and would have probably just transferred gas jets through them, reaching half of your faction. That would be my first idea, but for example bombing the heaven out of your sea and coastal improvements with hordes of 2-2-4 would be another.

That's it for tonight, I'm looking forward to talk with you and find another game! It can't be anything less than thrilling (my heart was literally pounding the recent turns).

Thank you for the congrats and above all, thank you for a great game, see you around, Sis!   

[Misotu]

On the nerve-gassing the HQ thing, to be honest that's what I expected you to do - and as early as you could - so it was a big surprise to me when I realised that you were actually holding off doing that! It made the game more exciting, that's for sure

Mart's map was good - thank you Mart! - because it did rule out the early rush, gave me more of a chance and made for a more extended and more interesting game. But of course with your pact mates in that middle region, there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop you late game other than take both Zak and Morgan out. A different player would have done that - but that comes with its own consequences and means playing a completely different game which I wasn't cut out for this time round. I could barely remember how to pop boom in FM when I kicked off   

I have to say that I never expected to win this game, and it's definitely the case that pure builder will almost never prevail in MP against a competent hybrid or militarist, but I *like* it as a strategy, for many reasons, and it can pay off in spades in a team game, given the right team. I hoped this would be a good game (and it was, really good, and very exciting at times). I was hoping to get a serious refresher course in the way MP works - which I did - and get back into the swing of how those games play - which I did - and in particular I wanted to find out how long a tight, highly-developed empire could hold out defensively, and what worked and what didn't (I didn't find that out!).

The Believers' weakness is research rate of course, and I'm usually strong on that. So the idea was to try to research the counter-measures before you got the offensive measures. It's not a strong strategy, but it was really the only one available given the way I play and given how much I don't remember! Blind research doesn't lend itself to that strategy *at all*, but then it's also hard for militarists to get the techs they need early enough. I didn't count on Morgan researching as well as he did (dammit!)  I bought techs or traded tech you already had whenever I could and I resisted pacting with him for a long time, but in the end it wasn't stalling his rate so I gave up, took the pact and got the commerce rates increased through the Council on the basis that I would benefit from that way more than you, given an energy empire. Still didn't help 

My experience is the same, MP games rarely get to nukes - I have had it happen in the past because 'Poly used to set up builder-specific games - but usually it's all over by MMI. But in fact nukes are the most unbalanced aspect of the game in many ways - a serious design flaw for MP making the defensive tech soooo  far away from such a devastating offensive tech. Once you got to busters I knew it was over - you had so many potential routes for delivery that it wasn't funny and there was absolutely no way of closing them down. I needed to get a tech lead of 12+ to have a chance of reaching orbital defence but I didn't manage that - had the artifact thing panned out better I might have had a few to cash late game and pray!

I was relying on a serious energy strategy plus artifacts from pods to boost my tech - I had four transports out looking and popped a lot of pods (even though you were much quicker off the mark and got the vast majority) but I got *one* artifact from the sea. Ironically, it was from the pod that you kindly left for me!    The only one all game - I got two others from land pods but I'd hoped for 5-6 from the sea which wouldn't be unusual. I've often had more than that. Didn't happen.

So I did try to prepare for war - I had the capacity to build elite and commando shard interceptors at a very serious rate if I'd seen conventional unit movement towards me from your side, plus elite photon AAA/ECM defenders (soon to be upgraded again and again) and although you would no doubt have prevailed in the end it would have been a hell of a slug fest and my research rate would only have been increasing meanwhile. An energy empire is very hard to dismantle - people have made the mistake in the past of thinking a single HQ planet buster will do it. But not so, definitely not. It's surprisingly resilient. When you spoke of needing 9 busters I realised you weren't going to fall for the seemingly pathetic Noble Peacekeeper leader coughing and spluttering in the smoking ruins of her HQ and bewailing her now-hopeless empire 

At one point you were running away so fast that I actually thought you might beat me to Transcendence. As the Believers! Not to be borne        How sad would that have been? I would never have dared shown my face here again ... the embarrassment would have been too great. But I'd forgotten what a slow burner the energy strategy is, the early look of things is very misleading.

We do play very differently and it was interesting to see. Actually, I would really like your password now the game is over? It would be fascinating to take a look at some of the early turns and see how we differ ...

[Mart]

I have impression, PK had greater chance to win by transcendence, based on 2231 turn.
And a hypothetical question: if that game had this special rule, that we have in Garland's Legacy, that PK and Believers are bound by a secret pact, and cannot have open vendetta, how Believers would need to proceed in order to win before PK would do it? Believers would need to transcend before PK, in what way?
- probing?
- using AI factions to defeat PK in vendettas, that would be by stealth operations, like framing?
- conquering AI and building more bases than PK?