Ok, so the update 1.7.2 is out and installed. I have finished Stalker and feel the strategy deprivation. I will start a new AAR in the near future and have no bloody idea on which race to pick (again). We've seen Morrigi and Hivers so far.

There are Humans, Liir, Zuul and Tarka left.

I am not at home so I can't really tell what ANY brought to them, so only what I can think of the top of my head for now;
Humans... I have no idea.
Zuul... Devourer - a DN ship that chews on leftovers and is capable of DE production IIRC.
Liir... Protectorate ship - a DN fleet-wide shield projector or something
Tarka... Hunter carrier - a DN carrier that carries three hunters; non-FTL manned (lizarded), heavy armed and armoured cruisers.

Any wishes?

I say let loose our reptilian brain, SV - I vote for the Tarka!

::

Besides, maybe I'll get lucky and one of those behemoth vessel designs gets named after me...

Zuul!

Humans!

Ok, Tarka it is. I haven't played them in ages and... they have hugely cool hunter/killers since ANY! Also their ships are good all-around, except PD coverage IIRC.

Although Zuul (not the one FA linked ) are my atmosphere favourite so I'm sure I won't be able to resist them indefinitely. Seriously, Zuul make the game (IMO) most different. No trade, no civvies, slave runs, etc. etc..

This time it is Tarka.

100 star map, 4 players only. This time I added a hard AI, but to only one AI player, the other two were supposed to get an extra colony but I forgot about it. When I remembered it was too late, I couldn't make myself start again, we were 20 turns in and doing good. Probably because we haven't encountered anyone yet.

I chose small clusters map, a 1.7.2 update addition.


In game


And off we go.


Now, THIS is why I love Tarka. Damn eggheads, at least you have the decency to off yourselves!


Small clusters seem like a great map. Clusters are not very big nor are they very far apart, making it more like a sphere but easier to navigate. Still, the initial drives make the distances between clusters somewhat longish so one tries to make do with tankers and extended ranges to get to a cluster with full tanks.

Our first cluster-to-cluster expedition ran into... minor... problem. Well, it would be minor in a few tens of turns. Right now it is deadly... This scout arrived the first.


But there are more inbound, along with a tanker. Tarka have a problem though - we can't communicate in deep space until we research the appropriate technology.

Namely, this one:


8 turns of research, huh? Let's see...


The last one is to arrive in two turns. You can guess the rest. Damn.

State of the empire

Yay for the Tarka empire!!

::

Reptiles with a Samurai honour system.



I just love these little touches.

That's fantastic.

"For frivolously increasing my wages, honoured egg-layer, I cut out my own cloaca."

We find first independents.

Humans, sadly. This tells me that there are humans in the game. I hope not the ones I game hard AI... Humans can be a real pain in the behind, being as fast as lightning. Errrr... many times faster.


Now THAT is what I like, damn lazy bastards finally had some luck.

Space is filled with swarms. I can manage them with lasers (we have green lasers) but we have heavy casualties. A lot more than we harvest from the remains of them bugs.


Ha, Slavers. First Zuul contacts... Does NOT mean we have Zuul in the game, Slavers are always present as a random. Complete CR with slaver disk and all;

Aaaaand with a destroyed mission section.

I managed to destroy its mission section before all my guards were gone so their cruiser was more or less harmless afterwards. The outcome:


Quite a lot of these, too...

I haven't bothered to tackle them yet, I just try to go away with my scout and continue the exploration.

Some pretty bug encounters:
Queen before


and almost after


It also stayed almost, dammit. I had to move my fleet to trigger the swarm battle again.


Our colonizer ships were also dragged into the planet by the colony trap. Not a serious setback any more but still, many lizards dead and a colony less for quite some time.


State of the empire...

Hmmmm... Where IS everybody?!

Where is everybody?!

Are you kidding? The place seems to be absolutely crawling...

Not to mention that slaver ship cost us almost 7 million lives!

::

Me wants payback!! Oh, yes - me surely wantz, my precioussss...

If slave disk got to the surface that would be 50 million + the damage done by the ship, so we got of lightly. Could be better, definitely.
The galaxy is teeming with life, true. But the other empires are my main worry.

I'm at home as Tjaša has a mild bronchitis. So I can actually bring you up to speed before continuing.

We meet the first. That is a human empire, normal AI. They got an asteroid monitor under their command. Luckily neither opened fire.


After meeting a second AI empire, Morrigi, we go for a bit of Xenotechs.

This one is very useful because it makes all Xeno research cheaper.

Ahhhh.. .that is the hard AI.


We MUST start producing some better ships or we may not have the time for it.

DF racks and fire control (MUCH better accuracy) are both available. In an attempt for PD we already researched faster fire rate from which DF benefits, so all we need to do more is upgrade the warheads.

Oh, met a smaller bug

Actually a harder nut to crack than the queen! This one has an emitter up its arse and that stings!

Our first real warships.

A bug with a nasty sting (hmmm... looks like a clay candidate). Don't worry, Tjaša will surely subdue the critter...

::

That ship design has a toxic appearance. I look forward to seeing it in action!

Yes, Tarka designs do look somewhat toxic in nature, he he he! The vivid colours do that. Anyway, I'm not posting complete research queues as most of it is standard empire development (that is available this time). The only real difference so far is going for fire control control, DF racks and some lasers. We'll continue up the beam tree in hope for phaser PD as for now we're completely naked in that department. No PD, no emitters and no beamers, DAMMIT. If even phaser PD fails I'll probably be thinking into lasers and fire control cruisers to try and take at least some missiles down.

My aim is to go for plasma weaponry in the end so we'll probably need that fire control (terribly inaccurate), DF racks are mostly to tide us over. Poor man's projectors. What are those? I hope we'll get there.

This is the case...

The hard AI is human, which is worrying. They are expanding FAST, which is worrying. Together this is VERY worrying. Right now I have ceasefires with everybody but ceasefire only means that if we happen to meet at nobody's colony we don't shoot.

What we MUST do in order to win this game is cut the crap and start the war or the AI with its 150% economy and 150% research will eat us alive. Considering that lizards are traditional cuisine in many parts of Earth, it may be taken literally.

So we go for it!

Our first use of DF laden cruisers! BTW, at the end of this report these are fusion powered.

AAAAhhhhhh, my kind of people.


We take every opportunity to cover our back.


Heh, during our exploration an interesting thing happens.


Our scouts are destroyed BUT we get a glimpse of our enemy's cruisers.

Heavy combat lasers. Not a shocker really.

An intermediate empire report, our latest intel.


We go for their real colonies!


.
.
.
.
.

And don't like what we see...


Erm, that is 5 DREADNOUGHTS!!! Damn, DAMN that 150% research!!! Ok, ok, breathe easy, breathe easy... I did want to show you a harder struggle this time, I guess I had it coming!

:panic attack:

Ok, don't worry, we have an ans...

:panic attack:

We can man...

:panic attack:

GET A GRIP, DAMMIT!

:panic attack:

:panic attack:

:panic attack:

:reboot:



Yep, those are DNs all right. They are not something really special as far as DNs go, really, but they are DNs. The main problem is that they can take a lot of pounding. If we don't succeed to take at least one down all the sacrifice is for nothing. It will be repaired while our ships will be gone.


It will be repaired.

In the next turn we try to make as much damage as we can.

Looked great but none of those shuttles actually made it to the surface. Planetary missiles took them all down, the last was just about to enter the atmosphere. But didn't.

Sooooooo... what are we gonna do?

Frankly, we'll go ugly. Unfair. Cheapo. Bastardly. But not bio. So, research will go into jammers for decoy fleets, slightly later into DNs to hold our ground, our factories will start producing masses but our first action is to augment our fleets with something to slow the enemy down. Preferably to a halt.


I hope we get better versions, too, but Kača "Snake" DEs are going to go into production immediately as we get this tech.

IMO we have seen the grunt of Human fleet as they had warning of our arrival but should they decide to just throw this fleet at us we better have something ready or we're doomed. We were pretty stingy on ships production until now to have as little upkeep as possible but right now we can't afford to save money, however weird this seems. Yet we don't have enough to just build and build. And we need to invest into our economy (trade), too.

Expect some serious action next time.

Ranking

Well, DAMN, can't they even get a ONE TURN RESEARCH RIGHT?!?!?!?

Sometimes I think it would be good if those Human DNs came and did some order among the eggheads. Order, as in carnage.

So, a turn late we get these.


Yet we speed the research forward as disruptors have their limitations.



We build a lot of them and go for another try!

Aaaaaaand we flee, tail between our legs. Funny, we can actually do that, he he he!

Disruptors have a lot of limitations. Especially vs. DNs.

And we NEED armada CnC tech, this lack in numbers on the battlefield is a huge limitation to our capabilities.


Erm, I guess they haven't seen our last two battles... Whatever, I can really use a friend right now.

DIE DIE DIE!!!

And I'm not posting half of these.

DIE!

Than again, kill a janitor instead, I'm afraid I'm gonna loose all my scientists.

The plan; Armada CnC, than BOARDING! I said bastardly, didn't I?!

I suspect it's probably a fetish; they like staying at the tail-end of things too much...

::

Unique racial feature: 'Harakiri-happy' aides...

I think I'm going to have to go find me a short-hand dicontary. I'm still missin ghalf the words you use. XD

Which ones?

Today Okim posted a possible issue with EMP weapons at Kerberos' forum.

I'll test this today at home as we just invested heavily into this weapons branch (up to pulsar torpedoes) and are counting on them to save our behinds a lot.

This could explain why we were defeated so heavily at Tasia, twice. I may just be reaching out and looking for excuses though as the issue is not confirmed yet. And they did have DNs there...

Anyway, if this turns out to be true I will have to consider reloading from oldest save. I keep two saves, the current one because autosaving will not save your game when you exit so one needs to save the game if you did anything during the turn, and the other one for save file corruption probability. Never needed it though but it is usually like ten turns old. So I may be able to recycle some investment into research and EMP ships.

But if this is a text-file issue I'll just edit and go on.

I'm not sure whether there is a problem with EMP or not but there was some effect on enemy ships. Arguably smaller than what I was used to so they may have been just toned down a bit - and I forgot to check if the enemy has hardened electronic tech researched. I do admit that usually when a player started using high-end EMP weaponry the AI was pretty unable to counter fast.

Anyway, no loading, we go on. Que sera, sera.

Taking a closer view of an enemy scout, just to see if they have antimatter already.

Nope, that's a relief.

We abandoned a baby colony so that it was not destroyed by the enemy and delayed research of DNs to get jammers. Now we go for deception, A LOT of decoys. And decoys only as we don't have warfleets of much worth. Than again, we could send some shuttles to their colonies. Will think about it. The main player, a DE Nizek udarec (Cheap shot):


Before we are able to start the jammer spam, we try to keep their fleet occupied at their worlds instead of ours.

Not that I thought we can win, I just want them to defend instead of attacking.

We need to go for plasma weaponry as was planned from the beggining;

DF racks are just bouncing off their ships, they have good armour.


A quick slideshow of our decoy launches. Starting with two most distant colonies.








Now we go straight for DNs and Armada CnC, we need those numbers in the field.