Subject:  Game 31 Retrospection |
Author:
Bob
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Date Posted: 09:06:56 28/06/08
Still waiting for Don's promised story, but here is Game 31 from my point of view. I'm hoping for reactions and other stories!
Immediately after the reading of turn 1 it was clear Peter created a game that would differ from other games. All the planets I discovered had a population and industry level that was far beneath the normal standard. No planet had enough population or industry to build mines and ore levels were low. Progress would be very slow. This promised to become a game of small scale logistics; quite a difference from the last games. At least the players still showed humor with their player names: The laughing Nerds, Cheap Sunglasses, Belly Button Fluff....
In turn 2 Peters intentions for game 31 became even more obvious: a build limit on the total number of new ships per decord. That was really hurting for shipbuilding specialists as me, although I didn't understand the formula (mostly because of the not matching example).
It became worse the next couple of turns. DLS ships were everywhere end even the much hated Mine layers were in the game again. Some other players seemed to be extremely lucky, though. Already in turn 3 two players had a Ring of Darkness, in turn 5 Player 18 even found another..... - never understand how that could be possible. Imperial Scholars? Some unknown Special Ability?
I made the best of my ships and planets, shifted population, scraped the ore from my planets, build ships and mines as many as possible.
In turn 4 I received the Factory SA, so I was able to boost some of my planets. The Ashecta home world at 67 distance to my origin became the first deliverer of officers and a discovered Shadow Station with defence fleet promised some good points and a planet with industry in the future.
Turn 6 and 7 passed and the Special ships for level 4 SA still didn't appear. I asked Peter about it, and he send some diplomatic answer that the SA's were generated by the AI. Another setback, as I became a specialist in training officers through the years.
[As we now know, this 'normal' SA didn't appear in this game. At the end I had officers for 1 Auxiliary Ship, 3 Libraries, 4+ Workshops, 4 Illusions, 4+ Assemblers, 2 Ministries, 4 Institutes and 4+ Transporters, weep].
There were some more setbacks. First good old ally Olaf Bak didn't pass the second turn in this game, and in turn 10 Michel Peeters did the same. He never liked this 'beggars game' and (like Olaf before) he had constantly problems with the Bigpond server, which has a special dislike of dutch providers. When Peter didn't receive his turn for the second time, Michel threw the towel and even became incommunicado for several weeks.
Luckily good old Brian was still there, but this game he had an accumulation of bad luck and lost more ships to mines then ever (take a look at the ship numbers in the last Spy Report and you see how badly he was hit). So I looked out for new allies or at the least informers in Game 31. Mike Ranta and I already made an agreement at the start of the game that we wouldn't repeat the war of Game 30, so I opened a communication line to Mike and his bunch. When we discovered that both our 'teams' had no planet leader in his ranks, the cooperation sincerely improved. We successfully scanned Sauran and and were for a big part responsible for the killing of the last DLS Battle Stations. Especially Gary was better then ever before and was far ahead of us all in points and abilities.
Things looked well around turn 16. There were still DLS Battlestations alive, but we new where they were and should be able to destroy them soon with our combined war ships. I was very lucky in finding homeworlds and had a steady stream of Ashecta, Devlon, Inatan and Lexmons officers to boost my ships and planets. And the ship building limit didn't seem to work. Not sure about the formula I entered all build orders I was able of (important ones first) and had no problems in building them. At first I thought Peter had disabled the SA because of the impact, but it turned out to be a bug ;-)
The only bad thing was this planet leader that was some 40 planets ahead of the best of us, whose growth only increased while I was desperately searching for unowned or NPC planets. Who could it be? Mr Nice Guy Astral Cowboy? Mr Fluff with his Flagship fleet? This annoying Guluu x2 who specialised in sending Probes into my empire again and again?
A few turns later Gary received the Spy Report and we knew who we had to chase. But although all his progress I/we underestimated Don and decided to wrap up the big DLS fleet that defended the last Battle Station. When we made the agreement to a coordinated scan + attack Don was already so far ahead that our slow reaction came too late to stop him. It didn't even hamper his ever increasing growth, as the last jump showed us (although I suspect that the sudden decrease of Fluff planets made a contribution to it).
So it was over without a big fight and we had to look at Don with a mixture of embarrassment, disappointment and admiration.
Good luck, Don. Hope to face you soon in a coming game!
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