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Thank you all for an exciting game. A shame it is not ranked, though :-)

A big Hat tip to FireAge, he used every trick in the book and a few more. I learned quite a lot of things (sometimes boldness did pay off. Often, however, it did not...)

Thank you all for an exciting game. A shame it is not ranked, though :-)

A big Hat tip to FireAge, he used every trick in the book and a few more. I learned quite a lot of things (sometimes boldness did pay off. Often, however, it did not...)

Thank you, too for a nice game. The game wasn't too exciting for me in my comfortable corner, but I too learned a lot - about this server :)

--Stefan

Thank you all for an exciting game. A shame it is not ranked, though :-)

I was just looking through the ranking code when I found that this game was... umm... partially ranked. The server did hand out skill points. What it didn't hand out (as planned) were turn reliability points. However, some players (deffli, snouka, The wanderer) used their reliability points from Just a Second to advance a rank. Congratulations.

Everyone else could use reliability points from future games to turn their skill points into a rank. I heard there are some games offered here. (No, this was not planned as an advertisement campaign. Really.)

--Stefan, currently trying to program a rank table

Thank you all for an exciting game. A shame it is not ranked, though :-)

A big Hat tip to FireAge, he used every trick in the book and a few more. I learned quite a lot of things (sometimes boldness did pay off. Often, however, it did not...)

Gratz to the victors and thanks for a nice game. Though I must say, I have never been destroyed so thoroughly in 10 turns :)

Game summary:

I started out in the north part of the cluster.

And discoverd the location of the homeworld of the bird and the borg in 3 turns... Which even though I messed up my selection of ships and arms, ended up poorly for the bird. Him flying off to the north-east with a single ship of clans in hope of better days.

By turn 20 I still had not managed to destroy the Borg:

And I was getting a little distressed. The longer you wait, the more worlds are ruined. So I threw some ships on his homeworld and managed to destroy it, but due to bad counting of torps and fighters, lost a Godzilla and a T-Rex in the process. And of course, the borg by then had many new homeworlds, so not the best move ever.

By turn 40 I was pushing back the borg, though slowly, as he had managed to capture a buccaneer and was dragging a cube from planet to planet, making it hard for me to defend against until I got enough minefields up.

I continued to push on, and encountered the Fed, who was working with the Borg to keep me at bay. So I started pushing on his worlds as well, though lots of them contained an unhealty amount of citizens, likely from Borg assimilation.

By turn 60 I managed to push the borg back by quite a lot (seems he was opposed by other people as well in other places), and was encroaching on the Fed territory.

So the Fed decided to strike back.

Unfortunately for him, he made a bad choice to land, even though he had the element of Firecloud surprise (eh I mean bridgekeeper :/). As I had just build 6 Godzilla in that region. The fed split up his fleet to attack several planets at once, and I wiped our his whole fleet while only loosing 2 Godzilla in the progress.

Not long after that the borg and fed stopped submitting turns. In the meanwhile I was playing around with the Orion in the west. With a few small ships. Grabbing a base here and there by clan drop, and being a pain in the ass with minefields. A lot of buccy's lost their valiant lives while playing kamikaze on empty loki (eh constitution) and big minefields, so I saw no need to commit more to that region. Until he managed to drag a Rebel Assault carrier over there and started destroying my precious, badly defended bases.

So I send a bunch of Godzilla that way with all the fuel I could find (it was getting quite scarse) and some of my constitution. But by the time I got there, I was greeted by a little surprise.

What what?

As my entire fleet was scattered around the echo cluster hunting down borg/bird/fed in the east and Orion in the west, and as I was completely out of fuel almost everywhere, I just applied lubricant and prepared for impact...

12 turns later, my empire was in shambles, with my core region being either overtaken by Draklor Imperial troops or Death Star madness.

So nice job on the Empire, Orion, Cylon combo. Knocking me so far down, even the Crystal managed to get above me :)

See you again some time in the echo cluster.

Gratz to the victors and thanks for a nice game. Though I must say, I have never been destroyed so thoroughly in 10 turns :)

Game summary: ...

Thank you for sharing your game summary with us. It was nice to read. And it was interesting that there actually were two respectable Firecloud (i.e. Bridekeeper) invasion fleets you had to repell.

And congratulations on that you finally managed to destroy one Death Star (it was under privateer control for a maximum Rob Fuel effect - rob up to 2597 fuel with one ship :D). According to Klemens, it was his bad that he did not realize you had a T-Rex as well in addition to your Godzilla.

Well, according to your second screenshot, snouka (the Bird) never had a chance. It's great to see that he managed to recover somewhat.

Here is my view of the universe. My Homeworld was p#472. The next Homeworld (Rebel) was 409 LY away. As you can see, starting conditions were really different. I believe "HomeworldsRadius" ist one of the most important AMaster configuration values. I usually prefer a value of 300 and more to ensure a fairer initial race deployment. FirstSteps had a value of 100. No Go.

Ironically, you conquered p#411 in turn 85 with some sneakers. This planet was the source of the invasion chunnel.

The Empire built 16 Bistro/Multitraf Death Stars, one of them was crapped (privateer pilot :P). I.e., when I had to fight more than one capital ship (Godzilla, Mon Calamari, Eraser Cube) I usually had a Super Star Destroyer at hand to prepare the dirty work. Or, in some cases, the enemy capital ships did not have enough torps or fighters on board.

I was confirmed in my strategy to always max out Death Stars if you can afford it (both in regard to ressources and time). It's not cheap, but it's a blessing. With 650 Fighters, you can blow up 7 Rebel Assault Carriers without more than a scratch and finally consume one of those Mon Calamari Cruisers, as well. (That's a calculation example, I never had these numbers, of course.)

And finally: Double thumbs up for using VPA! ;)

It's a shame you can only run it in a DOSBox in recent operating systems. Up to Windows XP (which I even used yet until around turn 60), the mixed mode version could be used.

And congratulations on that you finally managed to destroy one Death Star (it was under privateer control for a maximum Rob Fuel effect - rob up to 2597 fuel with one ship :D). According to Klemens, it was his bad that he did not realize you had a T-Rex as well in addition to your Godzilla.

yay! Yes, I put all my ships to beamup 1 fuel and enemy privateer. I expected him to tow away my Godzilla to be destroyed, but was pleasantly surprised to find him directly attacking those ships :)

Well, according to your second screenshot, snouka (the Bird) never had a chance. It's great to see that he managed to recover somewhat.

Yes, he was screwed from the start :) His departing ship was named: "Lizard Homeworld at Mao 5" or something like that. So I guess he did not like the start of the game much. He got some new homeworlds from the Cyborg later on, so he was able to recover a bit.

The Empire built 16 Bistro/Multitraf Death Stars, one of them was crapped (privateer pilot :P). I.e., when I had to fight more than one capital ship (Godzilla, Mon Calamari, Eraser Cube) I usually had a Super Star Destroyer at hand to prepare the dirty work. Or, in some cases, the enemy capital ships did not have enough torps or fighters on board.

Those things are a pain in the ass.. I build at least tripple the amount of Godzilla, but lost so many of them. And my poor bases barely manage to get the shields down of those Death stars.

And finally: Double thumbs up for using VPA! ;)

It's a shame you can only run it in a DOSBox in recent operating systems. Up to Windows XP (which I even used yet until around turn 60), the mixed mode version could be used.

Yup, I use VPA and PCC2. VPA just still is the fastest way for me to control my empire. PCC2 is nice, but it takes me more time (also lack of practise probably). It's super for simulating though.

Thanks for sharing your results, nice to see the other half of the universe :)

As you can see, starting conditions were really different. I believe "HomeworldsRadius" ist one of the most important AMaster configuration values. I usually prefer a value of 300 and more to ensure a fairer initial race deployment. FirstSteps had a value of 100. No Go.

This was probably the biggest mistake this game uncovered. I actually assumed AMaster to be smart enough to use the "homeworlds in a circle" method for non-wrapped maps. Turns out it doesn't.

The next program I'll integrate into this server will be PMaster, which does "homeworlds in a circle".

My game summary is probably pretty dull:

My homeworld is #373, Geo Sigma. I started expanding in all directions (what else?).

In turn 10, Klingons capture a planet of mine in the North. This means war: you want it, you get it. We exchange some violence, and the rest is history.

The Bots in the West proposed a non-aggression pact pretty early in the game, so I expand to the East and South pretty undisturbed.

After being done with the Klingons in the North, I met a few Borg, Lizards, and quite some Feds. By the time it got interesting, the Feds had called this test game a test game and left, so my final turns consisted of expanding North, assimilating petrified Feds.

--Stefan

This was probably the biggest mistake this game uncovered. I actually assumed AMaster to be smart enough to use the "homeworlds in a circle" method for non-wrapped maps. Turns out it doesn't.

The next program I'll integrate into this server will be PMaster, which does "homeworlds in a circle".

When talking of a non-wrapped map, "homeworlds in a circle" certainly is the best solution. IMO, when playing in a wrapped universe, placing the homeworlds in a circle makes it too easy to guess your neighbors homeworld. I'd stay with AMasters algorithm in that case, using a "HomeworldsRadius" of 300.