I decided to go with Super Warrior because I was really intrigued by the First Strike ability. On the one hand it looks far less utilitarian than something like Super Breeder or Super Hive, but the ability to completely explode an entire fleet of enemy warships before they can even zip up their flies just sounds excellent. So I'm going to go to town and try for a combat-oriented victory on a Gigantic map because apparently I am a masochist and I hate myself.
This AAR will likely be much more story and much less strategy talk on my end, since it's my first time playing with this particular super ability. I was very familiar with the intricate details of Super Diplomat when I started that AAR, but with this one I'm mostly just winging it and making up my own rules as I go along. I guess bear with me if I abruptly end up as a bloody smear on the asphalt of the universe six months into the game and post something like, "um OK Day Three I'm Dead LOL LOL".
The galaxy setup for this game is listed below. I finally managed to find my CD Key and just updated to DA v1.61 (or whatever the most recent version is), so if you give a crap here it is.
- Gigantic Galaxy - Nine Random Opponents - Painful Difficulty - Common Everything - Normal Tech Rate - All Victory Conditions On - Tech Trading On
This is my (hopefully) awesome civ. I figured that since I was going to be basically exterminating and/or subjugating all life in the galaxy it would only be fitting to embrace my inner Warhammer 40K aficionado and use a picture of my head Photoshopped onto the body of Ultramarines Chapter Master Marneus Calgar as my avatar:
I should mention before we go too much further that this is something like my fourth or fifth attempt at writing the Super Warrior AAR. The first couple of times I went balls-out war mongering, taking the War Party and using my civ points to max out Weapons, Hit Points, Repair, Soldiering, and any other skills that involved building ships that would make Imperial Star Destroyers look about as combat-effective as a GPS Satellite orbiting the Moon. Unfortunately, being able to shoot the mustache off a Klingon at four hundred yards doesn't really help you extract taxes from your citizenry, so as a result of my dumbass point choices I did an awesome job of bankrupting my civilization and throwing my entire race into an economic death spiral after about six turns. Since I was seemingly incapable of doing anything other than wasting money and making my citizens hate me, I did what any aspiring Galactic Emperor in my situation would have done: I consulted the GalCiv2 forums.
I read a great post somewhere about an effective way to set up a Super Warrior civilization, so I decided to give it a shot because obviously I'm too stupid to figure it out on my own. The poster (I can't remember who it was, but I'm guessing Wyndstar because that guy might know more about the inner intricacies of this game than Frogboy himself) essentially said that Super Warriors' effectiveness hinges on three attributes - Speed, Attack, and Luck. Speed and Attack are pretty self-explanatory, but apparently Luck not only affects your ability to find cool crap and get mad awesome 1337 bonus tiles, but it also works during combat to increase your minimum damage. Since we're going to be all about the damage here (we want to kill them before they can fire back), this will help us immensely. So as much as I was pumped up about throwing my support behind the War Party, it seems like the +25% Luck we get from the Universalists is going to be much more useful to us. Oh, and I also took the max Economics bonus because as I mentioned before I'm a complete gimp when it comes to managing my economy without relying on tech whoring as my primary source of income. Who knew I was such a ho?
Anyways, blah blah blah who cares about how much of a dumb jerk I am. This is the starting galaxy, and I am going to KICK IT'S ASS:
Ok, I'm mashed up in the top right and I appear to be going up against the Thalan, Torians, Drengin, Drath, Yor, Altarians, and three of the gray races that are all indistinguishable from each other on the galactic map. I'm going to guess Korx, Krynn, and Korath, but who knows.
I jump right in and start spamming out colonizers all over the place, looking to rush between the Thalan and Torian starting locations before they box me in. Since I took the +2 Speed ability I just chucked a colony module on a small-sized engine-less hull and started spraying them indiscriminately across my tiny boxed-in corner of the galaxy. Unfortunately, most of the systems near my homeworld are either completely devoid of habitable planets or they're home to nice fat juicy PQ5-7 planets that can serve little to no purpose in my empire except to sit there and be expensive. I guess I'll take whatever I can get, but it would be nice to have at least a PQ10 for my Manufacturing and/or Research Capital.
Since I was having a lot of trouble with this aspect of the game in my earlier attempts, I'll take a moment here to mention how I managed my economy early on (even though it was probably something like 75% luck and 25% actually knowing what the hell I'm doing). Basically, I just maxed production and dropped my tax rate until my overall approval was at 100%. I bought my first two factories on my homeworld, set my sliders to 1/49/50, and just watched my 5000bc surplus steadily decrease every single turn while keeping my approval up at 100%. I researched Sensors early and sent two additional Survey Ships on anomaly hunts, boldly searching for those life-saving 1000bc jackpots, while colonizing everything I came across and trying desperately to increase my tax base. Once I hit -498bc, I raised my taxes until I was at 51% approval, and dropped my production until I was actually making money for once (what a concept). If I found a good anomaly, I jacked my production up to 100% until the buffer went away. Eventually my citizenry started getting it on like porn stars, my population grew to a good size and I got some markets online so I was able to stabilize and get my industry running at 100% all the time. It was a little dicey there for about a month, but it all worked itself out in the end.
The bad news is that the colony rush didn't turn out so hot for me. Those Thalan bug bastards expanded towards me first, and while I managed to hold off the Torians I couldn't break through as far as I would have liked. The Thalan cut me off at the pass and boxed me into the corner, where I was stuck with my vast and diverse array of crappy worthless low-PQ colonies:
(I'm the hard-to-see dark blue in the bottom right corner)
The rush on hostile worlds comes along, everyone backfills, the economies stabilize, and everyone starts building up their empires. Unfortunately I'm nowhere near where I'd like to be in terms of economy, industry or technology. At this point in a Super Diplomat game I'd be establishing myself as a major galactic power, but unfortunately without the luxury of effective tech trading and diplomacy I'm starting to fall behind the curve like a remedial sixth-grader in an MIT post-graduate Engineering seminar:
Damn my unquenchable desire to smite all infidel aliens with a never-ending torrent of Photon Torpedoes! Now the Thalan, Krynn, Drengin, and Altarians are battling for the top and I'm just some chump also-ran. People are also starting to thug me for cash, which I hate. Did they not see that picture of me wearing a gigantor freaking suit of armor and sitting on a throne of skulls or whatever?! Throne of Skulls = I'm Not Giving You Any Money.
Meanwhile, the Drath are paying people off to fight me because apparently they aren't down with my tendency to pick the "Evil" option when I colonize a new planet, even though all the Good options are stupid and self-destructive. Before I even know what's even going on the freaking Altarians have declared war on me, despite the notable fact that they're located something like twenty parsecs away from me and none of their ships even have engines on them. I'm not worried about it because they're on the other side of the galaxy, but after looking at the lead the Altarians got on this map I was considering going Good and pulling a combined Torian-Drath-Altarian-Imperium Diplomatic-Conquest Victory. The moment Eleys Mue called me up to declare war on me however was the exact moment I decided it was time to bust out the dark helmet and get it on Vader-style. Sorry, Eleys. I don't care that you might be hot for a computer babe, but I'm going to have to crush your pitiful military under my heel and bend your pathetic civilization and all of it's people to my iron will. That's just the way it goes some times. I'll save you a place in my harem if you're interested.
All in due time, however. Right now I don't even have the Range to get out to Altaria Prime, assuming I had the firepower I would need to blast Wisp out of orbit and send it crashing into Altaria. My new decision to turn to the Dark Side did present me with an interesting option in terms of improving my economic situation however, and I was looking forward to pursuing this potentially-lucrative route:
As luck would have it, I just so happened to be positioned next to two Minor Civs (as of the above screenshot I'd already captured the Jessuins' PQ15 homeworld) and an incredibly weak major civ. I started mass-producing some 0/9/0 attack small-hulled fighters, fleeted them together into a sea of 0/45/0 killing machines and proceeded to First Strike the ever-loving bejeezus out of the inept half-asleep Torian pilots. The beauty of the Super Warrior is that you don't have to waste valuable shipboard real estate one stupid crap like "Life Support", "Defenses" or "Ejection Seats" - it's all weapons all the time here, baby. If it doesn't fire some sort of projectile capable of killing another living creature or turning heavily-fortified starship hulls into deli-fresh Swiss cheese, there's no point in putting it on the ship.
After their entire Torian Navy was summarily crushed in the span of about two months by a never-ending horde of Imperial SA-25 "Witch Hunter" Starfighters, my Tir-Quan trained martial arts kung fu ninja cyborg commando soldiers parachuted in from orbit and managed to wipe out armies ten times the size of their own. Attack Group Alpha snagged a couple of very nice PQ10+ planets the Torians had colonized inside my territory before snatching a PQ15 colony out of the Carinoids' cold dead hands, while Attack Group Beta took Toria and Toria IV in a matter of weeks. The only front on which I didn't make a whole lot of rapid progress was with Attack Group Gamma, and then really only because "Attack Group Gamma" was actually like a single SA-25 Witch Hunter flying all over the place trying to take out all of their crappy 2/0/0 Defenders. It might as well have been called "Imperial Attack Group Lieutenant Mark Johnson" or something.
Just as sweet delicious munchy-crunchy victory was about to be mine, however, I made an interesting discovery:
Apparently I'm at war with the Krynn or something, because all of a sudden they just completely freaking came out of nowhere with a gigantic armada of ships and started laying waste to my colonies. My first contact with the second-largest military in the Galaxy came when they sent a huge fleet of ships to blow up the single 1/0/0 Defender I had stationed at the planet on the top left of this screenshot and then followed it up with 4-5 transports packed pull of bloodthirsty Krynn warriors who decided they were going to spend their evenings slaughtering my citizenry and being dicks to everyone. This was quickly followed up by wave after wave of Krynn Fighters and Escorts swooping in from some random location off to the right of the map. I mean, I can't emphasize enough that there were a LOT of them, and they were flippin' EVERYWHERE.
This was really my first opportunity to put Super Warrior to the test, and let me tell you right now that I am a believer. I must have gone up against the full might of the massive Krynn military (I would estimate probably between thirty and forty separate fleets perhaps) with only something like six fleets and managed to make a Strategic Combat Simulator look like a well-played game of Gradius or Ikaruga or something. I didn't lose a single engagement, and the only time I lost a ship was when one of my fleets went up against a random Krynn Battleship (!!) that came in out of nowhere... I took him out, but lost one of my ships in the process. One small hull for one large hull is a trade-off I'm willing to make though.
The main advantage to Super Warrior doesn't appear to be the ability to crush a large fleet with an inferior force, but rather that you can take one powerful fleet and use it to repeatedly kick the asses of many smaller, crappier fleets without having to worry about being beaten down by attrition. Think of it this way - at one point I had a 0/45/0 fleet consisting of five 0/9/0 small-hull (8hp) ships and was face-to-face with a wall of four separate 16/0/0 fleets with four 4/0/0 small-hull ships in each (they may have been Tiny, I don't remember). With Super Warrior, I was able to destroy all four fleets in a single turn without so much as even losing a hit point, whereas without the ability I might have lost one or two ships during the course of the turn and reduced my fleet's combat effectiveness by 20-40%. Not bad at all, especially considering that I didn't see this surprise attack coming and reinforcements weren't going to be able to get to the front for several weeks.
Despite this distraction I manage to completely conquer the Torians and the Carinoids before turning the full weight of the Imperial Navy on the Krynn invaders. I'm basically kicking their asses up and down the galaxy, but they just keep on coming. It's maddening. Unfortunately, just when I realize that I'm going to have to suck it up and launch a major offensive into their territory the Thalan and Altarians hold a secret meeting, decide they're going to jump in on the "let's force Ben to blow up all of our ships" bandwagon and expand the war. That's fine with me, chumps. You bring the asses and I'll supply the kicking.
So here's the situation at the moment in the galaxy. I've increased my economy, research and manufacturing substantially, but am still third in the galaxy in terms of population and colonies controlled. It's time to start whomping asses, trashing enemy ships and establishing myself as an intergalactic badass by torching everything in sight with the Holy Fire of ship-to-ship missile weapons.
I'd like to think that I'm hitting a turning point in the game. I've fully embraced the true power of the Dark Side - the MCC and Artificial Slave Center are both online to help further increase my economy and manufacturing potential, and my first Medium-Hulled Psyonic Missile Frigates are just beginning to roll off the assembly line. They outclass anything I've seen in the galaxy at this point, and I have the Logistics to fleet them up into unstoppable First Strike machines. I'm also working up to Psyonic Beam just in case the Krynn or the Thalan decide they're going to try and counter me, and from there I'm going to go for Hyperwarp III, Expert Miniaturization and probably the Black Hole Eruptor, in that order.
My plan of attack is now to get off the defensive and start pushing the attack. The new Valkyrie-Class Frigates have engines on them so they'll be much more adept at striking deep into enemy territory, and their weaponry is still badass enough to vaporize anything this side of the Death Star. Here's my current strategy:
We'll have to see what happens. I have to admit that this is a very different style of play for me, and it really involves a lot more micromanagement and ship-level strategy than I'm used to. I'm having a blast right now even though the game is a little more slow-moving than I'm used to, but after seeing a couple of those Krynn Battleships I really worry that I might run into something I can't handle. I may find myself really having to put the Super Warrior ability to the test, especially once the Thalan and the Altarians get their forces mobilized and go on the defensive. However, if my boys can pull out some key victories, I stand to be able to conquer sizable chunks of the three largest and most populous civilizations in the galaxy.
I'll update this post in a few days, after I've made some progress in the war. In the mean time, I'm open to strategy suggestions if you've got 'em.
Iztok, I wish that I had read your post before playing, because it makes a lot of sense and would have helped me out a great deal. Basically everything you said I needed to look out for happened, and unfortunately a lot of it caught me off guard. The Krynn and Altarians keep circumventing my military and sweeping in at my core worlds, forcing me to pull forces back from the front to deal with them. Fighting a war against three civs simultaneously also hasn't helped me out a whole lot, as I'm going up against tougher and tougher opponents and am starting to take more losses than I'd like. I haven't lost any worlds yet, and have managed to capture all the enemy planets inside my territory (I also struck out and took the Krynn and Thalan Technological Capitals), but fighting a three-way war on two fronts is damn near impossible, even with Super Warrior, and my expansion is moving much more slowly than I would have liked.
I feel very confident that Super Warrior is the only thing that has kept me alive thus far, since even though my ships are still more-or-less the class of the galaxy, my low-PQ core worlds can't produce them fast enough for me to build a sizable standing military. I'm able to win 99% of the engagements I initiate with my First Strike, but it's very difficult to avoid the inevitable AI counter-attack when you're facing a situation like this:
My fleets of small and medium hulls were able to destroy all of these Krynn battleship fleets, but not before losing some of their numbers. Unfortunately those are losses that the Krynn can absorb, but I can't. I can spam out the small-hull fighters pretty easily, but the mediums are pretty time-consuming to produce and when I've got enemy fleets all over the place I want every ship completed immediately if not sooner.
To make it worse, the Drath and the Yor have both surrendered to the Krynn. They're now far and away the leader in terms of planets, and the Altarians aren't far behind. The Altarians, Krynn, and Thalan are all locked in mortal combat against me, and while I've so far been able to hold them off and wipe out their militaries they are starting to beat me down with sheer weight of numbers. I've never seen so many ships packed together so tightly. I'm also at war with the Drengin, but I've never even seen one of their ships, so that's not too bad. The scary thing is that their military ranking eclipses that of the Krynn by a ridiculously wide margin, so I can't even begin to imagine what their fleet looks like. I'm guessing it's like the Imperial Fleet at the end of Return of the Jedi, but who knows. As if all of this wasn't bad enough, the Altarians have now paid the Korath off to fight me as well, which is especially scary considering that I don't have enough ships to try and garrison all of my planets. At least the Korx are cool with me. That would be useful if they controlled more than eight planets smashed up into the bottom of the map and the same military ranking as a terrarium full of hamsters.
I mentioned in the earlier post that I was researching the Psyonic Beam, which is a kickass weapon at this point in the game. Unfortunately, as soon as I rolled that out, the Krynn and the Altarians invaded my space with battleships that looked something like 0/4/0 attack and 16/0/0 defense, basically negating the advantage the Psyonic Beam would give me over the Psyonic Missile.
I have caught one break however - The Plague. The Black Death hit the Galaxy like a ton of bricks, and even though I was able to research the cure in about three weeks I sure as hell wasn't going to share it with any of those other jerks. The Altarians and Drengin managed to recover, but as of the time I quit last night, the Krynn and Thalan were still suffering the effects of the disease. Fine by me. Bastards.
So here's the situation at the moment:
All the planets in my space have been taken, as well as a couple of worlds outside my previous sphere of influence. I'm facing stiffer competition at this point, so I'm considering running out all-attack large hulls on the two or three planets that can support their production, as opposed to just making new and improved small hulls. Unfortunately the small hulls are all that can be produced efficiently on some of my planets, so I'll more likely end up running a mix of the two.
I've worked out a preliminary plan for tonight's bloodshed, but I'm obviously open to suggestions. First, I'm going to try and make peace with the Drengin and the Korath. I haven't seen either of them yet, but the Drengin are carving up the Thalan worlds I haven't been able to get to yet and it's only a matter of time before they start heading into my space. I'm also going to try to make peace with the Krynn (and maybe the Altarians, but I don't know that they'll be receptive to it) so that I can concentrate my attacks in Thalan space. If I can convince the Drengin to fight the Krynn or Altarians, that's even better. I'm going to rush-buy the Orbital Terraformer and try to increase my PQs a little to help get my production capacity up, finish building the Hyperion Shrinker, then start flying up the missile tech tree. Meanwhile, I'm going to strike out against the Thalan worlds near my territory and try to grab as many as I can before the Drengin swoop in and finish them off. Once the Drengin and I have met in the middle of what is now Thalan territory, I'll turn my attention towards Altarian and Krynn space. My main goal at the moment is to stay on the Drengin's good side, because they are going to be WAY more than I can handle right now. I'll try to set up trade and such with them and hope they'll take pity on me until such time that I can get my Navy built up to the point that I can defeat them.
It's been tough going so far, and I'm worried that I'm already falling too far behind the rest of the galaxy to be a viable contender. I suppose we'll see what happens.
No dice. The bastards are all content to crush my civilization under their heel and no amount of money or free car washes for life is going to deter them from their mission to wipe all traces of the Galactic Imperium off the face of the galaxy, enslave all of our women and children, and parade my decapitated corpse through the streets of downtown Drengi. I certainly don't blame them - there's no sense in letting up on your enemies when you have them defeated - but if by some miracle of God I'm able to turn this game around, I won't forget this. Not for a second.
Remember how I said last time I posted that I hadn't actually come across any Drengin fleets yet? Well they finally showed up, and now I fully understand why the Krynn and Altarians were putting so many points in Beam Defense. It turns out that my Valkyrie Frigates aren't nearly as badass as I thought they were, since the Drengin fleets were sporting numbers somewhere in the 100-150 Beam Attack range and had sufficient Point Defense to completely negate nearly all of my missile damage. As if that wasn't bad enough, the Krynn and Altarian fleets had switched their configurations over to include some Point Defense as well, and all of a sudden my 45 Missile Attack fleets were about as powerful as a face-kick from a poltergeist.
My fleets and planetary defenses were crushed in a manner of weeks. Enemy ships poured into my space, and the transports surely weren't far behind. My attempts at peace are rebuffed like a drunk guy hitting on a nun. I had become too power-hungry, and now the combined military might of every civilized nation in the galaxy was holding me in a death grip the likes of which make the Figure Four Leg Lock look like a sensual back massage. I'm so screwed that I'm starting to calculate my odds at scoring a Tech Victory before being completely conquered and mutilated by a bunch of really angry aliens.
But then it hits me. All of my enemies were now utilizing Point Defense on their warships, making my Psyonic Missiles a little less deadly than Nerf Arrows, but I had a backup. I went to the garage and dusted off the schematics for the Psyonic Beam, a ridiculously overpowered 12 Attack starship gun I'd researched several months ago but never really decided to implement. It was expensive, sure, but you know what they say about desperate times.
I scanned my techs and took stock of my civilization. For my last-ditch effort to save my people to be successful, I was going to need more Logistics than I could currently muster. I put my scientists to work on Advanced Logistics and told them to get it together at all costs. I shut down all production in my Empire, switching the sliders to 100% research. Three weeks later, we had the technology. Now it was time to put it to use.
The fringes of my civilization were littered with the charred remnants of dozens of my starships, almost all of which had been thrown at the invading fleets in a fit of desperation, costing many brave warriors their lives in an increasingly-futile attempt at delaying the seemingly inevitable. Alien jerkoffs prank-called my house, taunting me as their fleets dropped bombs on my colonists and their endless waves of soldiers laid waste to my empire.
Well all of that was about to end. It was time to prove to the universe that I was worthy of a ten foot tall throne made from alien skulls. It was time for these jerks to say hello to the Zealot Heavy Cruiser.
One thing I've learned so far about Super Warrior is that it's unreasonable to expect to destroy the entire enemy fleet in one shot. You have to use the First Strike as a means of tilting the playing field in your favor and not rely on it as the sole means of your survival. It doesn't matter how tough you are, you can't always kill everything on your first try, so you need to load up on Defense as well as attack. Maybe not at a 2:3 ratio or anything as extreme as that, but you have to put some shielding on your ship if you want it to emerge from the conflict relatively unscathed. So for my new ship design that's exactly what I did.
First off I decommissioned every ship in my fleet, since at this point in the game they were basically only really good at exploding and I could do a lot more with the bc's than I could with a bunch of dead pilots. I designed a Large hull ship with Psyonic Beams and Beam Defense, switched my sliders over to 80% Military, 5% Social, and 15% Research, and started pumping these suckers out on every planet with a Starport, even if the build time was in the 20+ week range. Once the first ships started rolling off the production lines, I threw them together in fleets of three and sent them out to wreak havoc on our enemies. With my two fully-mined Military Resources, the fleets boasted 207 Beam Attack and 153 Beam Defense while still managing to zip along at 14 parsecs per turn. The Zealots slammed into the enemy lines, taking the alien dirtbags completely by surprise and showing the rest of the universe that there was still some fight left in the Galactic Effing Imperium. I started to see a lot of GNN reports that looked like this:
The overconfident alien jerkwads were completely dismantled by my forces, and before long it was MY troops who were dishing out the ass beatings like Juan Valdez on a drunken rampage. Thalan, Krynn and Altarian worlds fell to me as I recaptured former Imperial colonies and struck out to take full advantage of my newfound military supremacy. I stabbed deep into the heart of the Thalan Empire, crushing its forces and taking their homeworld.
I'm currently in the process of completing the destruction of the now-crippled Thalan, securing my border with the Drengin, and pushing out towards Altarian and Krynn space. I've found and secured two Economic Resources and one Morale Resource, which is incredibly helpful. When a new world has been conquered, I decommission all the buildings except for one or two Manufacturing Centers and replace them with Stock Markets to help fund my ever-expanding military while keeping my economy afloat. The ever-growing number of Zealot Battle Groups are using their First Strike to cripple enemy fleets before they can even think about retaliation, and are laying waste to my enemies at such an incredible rate that my core worlds can't seem to churn out troop transports fast enough to keep up with my expansion. From the jaws of defeat, I appear to have snatched victory. For now.
I'll post again in the next day or so, but for now it looks like it should be smooth sailing from here on out, at least until such time as my incredible Tech disadvantage comes back to bite me in the backside.
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