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« Last post by Kurt on May 20, 2023, 11:14:44 AM »
Some thoughts on the Cold War Campaign
First off, the start conditions: In this campaign I limited growth to every five turns, and made tech research take longer, with the intent of slowing down the growth rate of the races involved. It worked fairly well, ensuring that the campaign was still viable much longer than either of my other major Starfire campaigns.
At the start of the campaign there were four ‘races’. One of the starting races was the D’Bringi, and there were two human governments, the USSR and the Western Coalition. More about the fourth race in a bit. My intent was to focus on the conflict between the D’Bringi and the human governments, and the rivalry between the two human governments, and their internal disputes and pressures, well into mid-game. This largely worked as anticipated, although I did not know exactly how this would work out at the start of the campaign. Essentially, my original idea was that whomever won the initial human-D’Bringi war would then face internal dissent that would likely lead to a civil war. I wasn’t sure who that was going to be when the campaign started. As it turned out, neither side won, but I decided based on the way things went that the humans would be the one that faced the internal problem, leading to the devastation of Earth. This was largely because of the random fact that the D’Bringi had met an ally, the Rehorish, and an enemy, the Mintek, neither of whom I anticipated at the start of the campaign.
The Human nations both started on Earth, of course, and each had a medium population and were almost at HT-1 tech level. This put each individually behind the D’Bringi, both in terms of income, technology, and population, but combined they had a much better income than the D’Bringi. This was by intent, as I wanted each government to have a problem dealing with the D’Bringi alone, but if they teamed up, they would hopefully have at least parity with them.
When I originally generated the D’Bringi, SA indicated that they were a “wild-card” race, which meant that they had one or more tech items from above their actual tech level. I liked that, as it made them special, and gave them a bit of an advantage against the humans, whom they otherwise might have trouble facing in a straight up fight. As the campaign went on, I decided to keep giving them an occasional wild-card tech from the next higher tech level, to keep things spicy, or if I felt they needed a little help. This eventually evolved into the “Benefactors”, whom I then had to flesh out.
Now, about that fourth race. To provide a late-middle to late game threat, I also started a hive mind race at the start of the game. I was ambivalent about this at the time. Hive minds had been the “big” bad guys in both of my major Starfire campaigns before this, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to do them again. I was worried, though, that the late game might need some spicing up, so I decided to start them and then decide later if I wanted them to become a factor or not. By around turn 150, though, as the campaign was entering mid-game, I had realized something about my hive mind race. In a normal Starfire campaign, hive minds are like a metastasizing cancer that just grows and grows. They get a better growth rate than normal races, and income bonuses for larger populations, as well as reduced colonization costs, all of which means that after a while they become a spreading threat with an incredible economy. Their weakness is that they are slower to research tech than other races, and don’t use fighters. In my previous games this meant that they were an incredible threat to mid-tech races, but as time went on their economic advantage began to lose out to their tech and fighter disadvantages. When the ‘player’ races began advancing to HT-9 and 10, even if the bugs were at HT-9 themselves, they began having problems dealing with opposing fleets. Higher tech levels introduce more fighter defenses, but the problem is that the bugs take longer to get to those levels than the other races, meaning that they are a substantial and increasing disadvantage going forward, unless they are at a higher tech level than their opponents to begin with. That makes bugs hard to balance, even in a normal campaign. They tend to have larger economies than everyone else, but once fighter tech become prevalent amongst their enemies, they have significant difficulties militarily. If you give them superior tech so they can deal with the fighters they tend to roll over their opponents due to their economic superiority, and if you don’t they become a steadily diminishing threat as they fall further behind. The major race in the Phoenix Campaign, the Allied Sentient Races, had just become focused on a major campaign against the bugs, and it was looking touch and go. Knowing what I knew about both sides, though, I was becoming concerned that the bugs were a house of cards that was going to crumble faster than I had originally anticipated. Unfortunately, I was unable to resolve that campaign due to its size and complexity.
In the Cold War campaign, however, the lower growth rate really hurt the bugs. Their income advantage only applies to large and very large populations, if I remember correctly, and with the growth rates reduced it takes forever to grow a population to that point, even with the bug’s increased growth rate. And, worse, the bugs in this case had some initial bad luck exploring, which slowed their growth as well. Those two things combined to limit their growth in a way I hadn’t expected, meaning that by turn 150 the bugs wouldn’t really be a threat to either major race, if and when they met. So, I gave the bugs a big boost in population, bringing their economy more in line with the major races. However, by then I was focused on the Mintek, who were having their own problems.
The Mintek are a Federal Theocracy type race, like the Thebans in the canon Starfire universe. Federal Theocracies are built around a central religious belief that they feel an overwhelming urge to proselytize to the rest of the universe. A Federal Theocracy will readily make trade or trade and military treaties, but only as a means to spread their faith. Once the relationship is made, they will convert all population growth from the receiving race within three jumps of their border to their religion and ‘steal’ the population. This will continue until the other race stops it. They are also able to convert conquered races to their religion, reducing the time needed to amalgamate conquered pops into their empire. They are the only government/race in the game that have this ability, and there is no real explanation for this ability given. They just do it. By this point I had created the D’Bringi Benefactors, and I realized that a benefactor type situation would be a good explanation for the Mintek conversion ability. In addition, it could be a linking concept in the campaign. Therefore, I decided that the Mintek would also have their version of a benefactor, which would explain their ability to convert other races.
The Mintek were discovered by the D’Bringi and thus started long after the other main races. This put them in a disadvantageous situation from nearly the start. The only thing that saved them was that the D’Bringi had concentrated nearly their entire fleet on the front lines with the humans, far from the Mintek home system. Still, even so, the D’Bringi were able to handily stop the initial Mintek thrust into D’Bringi space, and they then launched an assault into the Mintek home system that was only stopped by the Mintek home system defenses. The Mintek were a happy accident, not intentional. But accidental though they were, they fit into the campaign very well as a ‘bad-guy’ race and foil for the rapidly growing D’Bringi Alliance, something I was becoming increasingly convinced the bugs would not do well. However, they were never strong enough to pose an actual threat to the Alliance, unfortunately. They did have a brief tech advantage, when they developed HT-9 well ahead of the Alliance, and that actually gave them a chance against their bigger adversary. They developed a plan to overwhelm the D’Bringi defenses at their initial contact point in the Phyriseq system, using SBM pods, which at that time were unknown to the Alliance, and from there they intended to move from Phyriseq to the Chruqua warp nexus and seize it, fragmenting the D’Bringi empire. They hoped by that by chopping the Alliance up into numerous smaller pieces they could take those pieces one by one while resisting the uncoordinated counter attacks that came from the fragments. It was a pretty good plan, and it might have worked. The D’Bringi at that time knew that the Chruqua nexus was a critical link to much of their empire, but had not realized that it was a vulnerability as well.
Unfortunately for them, Mintek resources fell short of being able to provide the fleet strength they estimated they would need to make the plan work. And in trying to build up that fleet they almost destroyed their economy and dug themselves a hole that only the conquest of multiple NPR’s allowed them to climb out of. Unfortunately, by the time they were able consolidate their hold on their conquests and rehabilitate their economy, they had fallen behind the Alliance in terms of technology and had discovered too many other threat/opportunities to focus their military back on the Alliance.
Thus, the Mintek had become little more than a nuisance and would have inevitably been put down by the Alliance at some point, particularly after an Alliance associate member (the Zir) found a closed warp point into the Mintek home system. Enter the Shiba Ascendancy. I originally introduced the Shiba to provide an additional threat to the other races, as none of my other threats were working out. I decided to do something a little different with the Shiba, giving them implants which assured loyalty to their government, and would allow them to convert other races after contact, if they were given time. And then, by random chance, the first race they discovered when they went exploring was the Mintek. And by that point I realized that the Shiba ability to convert other races was analogous to the Mintek-Theban ability, and was perhaps a better explanation for what the Mintek were doing. At that point a merger became inevitable, as both sides tried to convert the other. This merger revitalized and enlarged the Mintek Empire, and made them a credible threat again.
It was as this was going on, around turn 200+, that I realized I had yet another problem in the way the campaign had developed. Essentially, humanity as an independent race, was screwed. The slower population growth rate of the game had found yet another unexpected way to express itself.
By this point, the way colonization was happening across my races, was as follows:
1. New System Colonization: Newly discovered systems would be colonized with enough population units to create a small population (150). By turn 200, these systems were typically 8-12 jumps from the core worlds. Which meant that they were 2-3 months travel from the worlds with large or very large populations, which were best able to handle new colonization. Because the Imperial transportation network moves at a speed of four per turn, that means that a colonization effort sent to a colony site ten jumps from the origin will take three turns to complete. This is problematic, as that means the capacity tied up in the effort won’t be available for use on anything else for three turns. It is also very expensive. If you are depending on colonization alone to create large populations capable of sustaining both in-system and out-system colonization, though, you are going to have to wait a long time.
2. In-system colonization: This was colonization of moons, barren planets, and asteroids within a system, using the in-system colonization ability. Essentially, each system had a certain amount of “free” colonization ability, that didn’t count against the race’s colonization capacity, and is cheaper than regular colonization. This is an important and cheap way to expand a system’s population, but the system has a limited per-turn capacity based on the productivity of the system, and thus it can take many turns to completely colonize the entire system. There is another important limitation. A world with a small population, or a settlement, outpost, or colony, can still use in-system colonization, but if it does so it will quickly deplete its central population. A world with a population of medium or higher can typically support both in-system and out-system colonization, although it may need to have its population boosted occasionally or it will fall to the small population level.
3. Boosting population: This one was new to me, and is largely based on the slow population growth in this campaign. Under the original rules, populations quickly grew to medium sized, and thus were able to support both in-system and out-system colonization fairly rapidly. Slower population growth, however, subverted this. It took over 200 turns for the earliest colonies to reach medium size, and by this point the expanding edge of the empire had moved far beyond them. So, I realized that the best way to promote in-system colonization, and to shorten colonization times to the frontier, was to boost the population of suitable colonies on the periphery (meaning the most productive or most strategically located), with additional colonists. These boosting efforts were expensive, as it took over six times as many colonists to create a medium population as it did to create a small population. But, by the mid-game, the Alliance and other more-or-less mature races were well capable of undertaking this effort. However, the important limitation was that a large or very large population was needed to support these population boost efforts. A medium population would be quickly drained by such an effort.
By boosting the population of suitable systems, I created a situation where both in-system colonization, which is very profitable, and limited out-system colonization, became possible. The out-system colonization was important, because it reduced travel times to new colonies on the periphery, and thus costs as well.
It was at the turn 200+ level that I began realizing that the Colonial Union had a problem. They had only one world with a large population, and that world was on the bottom end of the scale. Thus, they had no worlds capable of boosting a planetary population to medium level without seriously compromising their own populations. They were able to handle #1 above, albeit with increasing difficulty as the periphery moved farther and farther from their systems with medium populations, but boosting over the long term was beyond their capabilities. I considered a careful plan of boosting using the excess population from every system that had over the minimum medium population level, and that would have sustained the Union’s colonization effort for some time, but it was a short to medium term solution at best. In fact, the excess population available to the Union using that method wasn’t enough to boost the suitable candidates the Union already had, much less new opportunities discovered by ongoing exploration. And it would have left the Union with a bunch of planets barely capable of supporting any out-system colonization at that point.
All of this was an outgrowth of two factors. #1, the humans in this campaign nuked their home world. This removed the only very-large population the humans had. #2, the humans refused to incorporate any alien races, unlike both the Alliance, the CSR, and the Mintek. Thus, the humans had no way of obtaining a very large population within the likely time frame of the game. This also seriously hurt the human’s ability to expand their economy and military through absorbing other races, which was the primary strategy of both the Alliance and the CSR.
Thus, I realized I faced a future in this campaign where humanity would be increasingly sidelined and marginalized, without any hope of remedying the situation without merging with another race, which would have meant that they wouldn’t really be a human nation any more.
I did have plans to move forward. They will be detailed in the next post, which will cover the future of the Cold War Campaign, had I continued it.
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