What's going on in your empire/planet/battlefield?

[Panopticon]

I like moon 5 there, those are some damn fine accessibility minerals.

[ollobrains]

any nearby aliens to take out ?

[xeryon]

Completely unpopulated system two jumps from Sol.  I'm quite pleased.  Sol is about depleted on minerals and I am already running into a Duranium ceiling.   I did a lot of exploring "north" of my system and have several new colonies and smaller mining operations.  Mineral accessibilities were reasonable but quantities were very poor and not worth relocating major industry.  I'm probably going to to have to SM in a Duranium geology team "find" to continue this game.

Anyone else have this problem with extreme mineral shortages relatively early in-game?  My first couple starts I either focused on exploration or military (just feeling out the game) with only a half-hearted focus on minerals and ended up depleting Earth long before a viable alternative was established.  In this start pretty much all I have done is focus on mining and mining related technologies.  I built almost nothing for a navy and as such I only built a couple of geo and grav ships and 20+ years into this game have only just completed exploration of systems two jumps from Sol.  My next start even with a mining focus I am going to have to SM Mars as a fully functional colony with a full mineral dispersment right from the start.  Is it just me and my style/ignorance or is this a common issue?

[Thiosk]

Well, theres a lot of crapshoot at the game start.  The big questions for me are always
"is there enough duranium and corundium around to feed expansion of mining capacity."

I've never needed to SM in minerals to get over a hump, but I have had to shut down industry for: lack of duranium, lack of corundium, and lack of wealth.  I've never had utter shortages of anything else (except for humans), but thats because I put a huge emphasis on construction factories and duranium/corundium at game start.

Find the duranium, you can play the game.  Find corundium as well, and you can build 50 million ton orbital habitats and the tugs to tug them.

[ollobrains]

yeah scout geo ship and a geo team and not much else until u find the treasure chest try a non sol start to

[xeryon]

I'm struggling with team management as well.  Discussing it is more of an Academy topic so I'm not really looking for help ATM, just noting my frustrations.

Diplomacy teams level up quickly and easily by "practicing" on their homeworlds.  Espionage teams appear to be entirely irrelevant in single race starts.  Xeno teams just hang around picking their noses most of the time.  And Geo teams irritate the hell out of me.  I make the best team I can, send it out into the universe and they take ages to make a discovery and get a minor improvement to their skill, while my geo and grav ships captains are leveling up like mad.  Just seems to me the geo teams should be gaining skill at a similar rate to the ship captains as failure is just as much of a learning experience as success.  I don't expect them to succeed at discovery more, but am frustrated at the extra micromanagement of needing to cycle team members on and off of ships as training facilities.  And additionally frustrated by the "completed" tag on bodies.  If a crap time doesn't find stuff it is only logical that a superior team could be able to find more.

In other news.  I scored my first military victory ever in a missile vs gauss precursor battle.  It only took me three tries before I finally configured my fleet correctly to get missile combat to function correctly.  RIP to my first 10 FAC's that valiantly tried to defend themselves with their good looks.  It was unfortunate that the commander became overconfident in his new-found ability that he pressed on toward the suspected base-world only to encounter a missile armed combatant that out ranged and out ran me and was able to exhaust his entire magazine without my ability to close and return fire.  There goes another 2 ships, unfortunately not FAC's this time, but 9000 ton cruisers.  Ouch.  At least the last one got away with the survivors and commanders from the lifepods when the enemy had to go home for a reload.

I'm getting the hang of it.  My multiple failures have been a lot of fun as I learn this the hard way.

[xeryon]

I suppose I should post a SS when I have a chance.  I just completed survey of three systems back to back which consist of 12 Colony Cost 2 range worlds between them.  Is this distribution frequent or just a peculiar roll of the die?  If I include worlds up through the Cost 5 range there are over 25 planets that are longer term colonizable.

Such a peculiar starting arrangement in this non-sol start.  I chose a small Binary system with a 0 cost starting body in the inner system and a 2.5 cost body in the outer system.  There were three other 5's and an 8 in the system as well but, as it turns out, very resource poor.  System had 4 jumps points.  Doors #1 and #2 went to body-less, jump-less dead ends, door #3 went to a small singular system with a 2 cost world but little other real estate and an unexciting quantity of minerals and also a dead end JP-wise.  That leaves door #4 as my only salvation without SM mode assistance.  Voila! a nice Quadrinary system.  Inner pair of stars has nice 2 and 4 cost bodies in them and the JP is pretty close to the system core, the outer star pair is not easily accessible until next generation engine techs and possibly hyperdrive become available but has two cost 2 bodies.  With an absence of LP transit options the travel time is 150 days at 1500km/s.  In the process of surveying the system I encountered not one, not two but THREE separate populations of everyone's favorite advance alien opponent.

My first foray into the system completely wiped out my first battle fleet but there was a glimmer of hope and it did show that I could out-range the enemy combatants, I just needed more launchers to finish a kill before they could close range on me.  This little problem set me back a full four years or more in exploration.  Since my resources were poor I was already hitting shortages and having to resort to mining random comets and asteroids for anything I could find.  When I eventually punched through and won over the system a scan of it revealed three more JP's all leading to body-less systems (wth?) with one jump point each leading to trinary and quadrinary systems overflowing with bodies and minerals.  One system has 5 cost 2 worlds and over 10 2-8 worlds.  So far I have found 11 systems, 5 of which are void, one is normal and the remaining 5 systems account for 16 stars, approximately 14 cost 2 bodies and well over 50 2-8 cost bodies.  Such a feast or famine arrangement...

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Haha what.  All those worlds and no NPRs...? xD   

**

Oh my stars.

Noman
Duranium 228,488  Acc: 0.9
Tritanium 6,100,900  Acc: 0.6
Mercassium 67,600  Acc: 0.9
Vendarite 6,492,304  Acc: 0.4
Sorium 219,024  Acc: 0.9
Uridium 195,364  Acc: 1
Corundium 1,430,416  Acc: 0.1
Gallicite 5,234,944  Acc: 0.5

And it has ruins! And it's x2.00 col cost!  And it's in the crossroads system for three different NPRs! And it's in the same asteroid as:

Transvaal-A Asteroid #11
Duranium 1,185,800  Acc: 0.9
Tritanium 324,900  Acc: 1
Mercassium 129,600  Acc: 0.8
Uridium 302,500  Acc: 0.7

Ahrg!   Mining is a force which gives war meaning.

[xeryon]

Correct, no NPRs.  Just the three outposts with a pair of defenders each in that first system.  This is probably the 10th universe I have generated and has by far the most unusual distribution of systems and bodies I have seem.

[Thiosk]

I think i'm going to bump the NPR generation rate for a couple years.  My galaxy is devoid of life.  I havn't even seen a precursor in 25 years.  I find earth-clone after earth clone and nothing to do but put humies on them.

[Garfunkel]

I just waged a proper slugfest against everyone's favourite advanced aliens. I had ten frigattes, 1x Command/Sensor ship, 1x Jump ship, 4x Missile ships and 4x Beam ships, who also double as PD-platforms with their railgun and laser turret. Two enemy ships - 6,700 tons - closed in on me and started lobbing missiles beyond my engagement range.

Turns out I had seriously underestimated the number of AMMs required. Even with 1 AMM per vampire, I ran out of them perhaps 2/3rds through the first wave. Hit-ratio was probably somewhere between 25% and 33%. Beam frigates took up the slack but since there were only four of them (plus the laser of the command ship and the railgun on the jump ship), some leaked through. Armour cratered, no biggie. I pushed in-system after the buggers.

Who managed to restock on a moon and then came back for the second wave. Since I was out of AMMs, their fresh salvoes started getting through easily enough (2x4 missiles) and eventually caused serious damage. My only piece of luck was that their WH-5 required several hits to punch through my armour. In the end, it came down to two of my FFG's lobbing their few remaining ASM missiles (only 3 working launchers at that point) against the enemies and then using my last FF that had an operational FC and a laser turret to close-in and whack them. Two ships lost and the other eight will spend a long time being repaired.

On the other hand, it did prove that my frigate flotillas are capable of independent action - as long as I add a dedicated PD-corvette to the mix.

[Moonshadow101]

Four ships with eight plasma carronades each, designed for Jump Point defense were jumped by spacebugs.  Three hundred of them.  Three ships destroyed while trying to get out of their range.  The final ship is backpedaling while desperately firing backwards. 

By "is," I mean "Has been for the past two hours of real time. " The carronades have a 20-second refire, and each salvo has about a 50/50 chance of killing a bug.  I've ground through 200 of them so far.  THIS SHIP WILL SURVIVE.

Makes me wish crews gained exp from dealing damage instead of just from taking it.  These guys would be pros by now. 

"Tapajo 211 has been destroyed"

Only 89 to go!

[xeryon]

How did they close on you undetected?  Since you obviously can out range them and have the weapons and FC to fire from outside their range I would have thought you would have plenty of advance notice of their arrival.

[Moonshadow101]

800 Ton bugs with a tiny thermal sig.  Plasma ships have 100-Resolution (5000 ton) sensors.  The tiny buggers don't show up on thermals until about 1 mil out, and active about 800km out.  That still would have been *decent* notice, but a bug (other kind of bug) stopped them from showing up on the system map when I zoomed in.  Thinking the path was clear, I pulled a 5-day increment, which was enough to put them well in firing range.  (A measly 80k km, information gleaned while the first three ships were dying. )

I killed the last of the pursuers a few minutes ago.  Currently moving back to the starting position, wiping up all of the cripples that separated from the pack left behind. 

[MehMuffin]

The Combine Directorate has just begun to build up its navy, and is in the process of several shipyard expansions to allow the construction of many more corvettes and a research push to design effective weaponry.