--There are other races out there ? Ones with new and potentially interesting flavours ?

We must prepare...

This is my first 'full' game of GCII and so i thought i would offer it and some thoughts as a way to pass my working day. 13.b2 Suicidal, Gigantic, abundant in general, scattered and very fast. Because who i am is required to interpret what i post, i'll allow myself to ramble, but will change my ramble as the game goes on, occasionally a point may be made. I've spent about a month following the boards and practiced my first 20 turns as Yor, Torian and Drath several times over occasional evenings and different versions. For now i am Yor as a consistent failing of mine is that i fail to be an agressor, rather focusing on building and the Yor will help overcome this by having more obvious early game military oppertunities, based on evil and miniturization. Once i understand the game more, i will probably play as Torian. I have played one other game past the first battle and that was my last game, but i found that i was heading for an influence victory too quickly (i had left it on to give the AI something to aim for) and so had to restart with conquest being the only option. I will turn influence victory back on for most game in future (which will be non metaverse i imagine, but i will use metaverse to compare 'good game' scores) as i anticipate it will reduce end game tedium. Also, that game had an incredibly good universe, which made it very hard for me to accept alternatives. I believe 4 out of my first 5 planets had had 300% or more in manufacturing bonus, 1-2 of those had started within the initial sensor radius and so had been easy to get to, resulting in an incredibly impressive startup, to good infact, a top 5% result, which being 'unreasonable to expect' is not something i want to play often.


--We quickly examine the stars around us, within a week we have intercepted, decrypted and analyzed the transmissions coming from what appear to be at least 8 presently independant planets. After much arguing in council, we take a low risk choice and land our colony ship on a local, but poor quality world. We aggressively redesign our first attempt at a colonization ship, it's design brief was to chain asteroids into a contiguous community for long distance comfort and travel, not for establishing brave new worlds. It simply doesn't have the engines for anything other than an interstallar crawl. Never the less we Yor are overjoyed at our technical success with landing on an uninhabitabed planet and we quickly find ways to be able to build at least a couple of industrial zone and also house some dangerous special projects that we wouldn't want to build on homeworld. With it's lower gravity this planet will be easy to launch from and although it's output will be low, it can quickly and easily concentrate on further colony production, we know this and have stacked the ship with enough materials that it can make a quick start. And our survey ship, there must be more inhabitable planets out there for so many to have unknown life on them, we too send it our on what we decide is the best tactical course. We decide that we've been fools in our arrogance and are far from where we need to be. In simple terms there are people out there that are dieing from old age and unable to find anyone to make sure they are eaten alive. We terminate half the young of our research slaves in order to give their creators extra motivation, i mean, how could they have mised all of it, the crackpots had been right all along! This takes time and limits our short term research as it goes on, meaning it will be over a month before we can think about prototyping new inter stellar engines.

--We examine ourselves and what we may guess the others are about. Our planet is green, but really is only built for it's own needs. We decide that we need a galaxy based infrastructure and that as with all such things, before you can use it, it must be built. Our engineering division is immensly stretched, they not only busily dismantling the young research slaves (these meat bag slaves are clearly inferior as once dismantled they cannot be stored for later use), but execute the plan to bring starship production up to a reasonable speed and produce a followup protoype colonization ship - in only a little over a month. We realise somewhat late that colonization ships can't see what they are doing in nebulae and so spend the next 2 months perparing our population with all the news we have for them and making very fast scouts. Our ships are notably faster than the opposition due to our nature. 12' tall people might be a multi-yor portion meal, but they need more space on a ship and can't manufacture smaller designs. We're not fleshy, we are better, our engines and systems are smaller. This means more engines per unit and so our ships are faster. Looking around the galaxy have no immediate neigbhours that matter and plenty of space to expand in, later we will find our two nearest neighbours are best described as minor.

It should be noted i live in Amsterdam. This means, for better or worse, i am often stoned when i play. I had a plan for turn 1, and i've stuck to that, restarted enough to get a top 25% world (and restarted enough measuring what was top 25% etc first). I'm pleased enough with my start planet (my condition was 300% manufacturing bonus as well as whimsys) and am pleased enough with the proximity of a secondary secondary system that i decide to play. In future games i will ignore start position, but will probably require that my start world, or that a world near it, has some manufacturing bonus for a few more games to come. My intention medium term is to have 'no restart, but if it's a really bad position, you can reload from turn 1' games. As you can tell by my rambling, i'm somewhat stoned now. This means i go off topic and forget things. I mention this specifically because this is about the last point where i have a determined plan. Impulse based (i use cargo hull) scouts can get out there and will find good planets, ion/impulse based colony ships will get there first, assuming they are anywhere near, then half of the scouts can turn auto-survey and keep my economy alive whilst i try and grab at least any PQ15+ and backfill as much as i can. In reality my plans are altered by how stoned i am and what i believe are immediate priorities. I build under 6 scouts for now and round it out to about 10 by the end of anomolies, usually things are set to auto survey as soon as they've unveiled their designated star systems, keeping back 2-3 for manual discovery. Experience tells me that through combinations of my relative ability at this, the relative lack of practice i've put in getting it right and how wobbly my mind is at that time, that come the end of the exploration phase i will get the exploration ending timed wrong to some extent and that the AI is very likely to grab lots of my lesser and average worlds forcing me to share systems massively. On the whole sharing systems is a negative, but not the worst thing in the world, especially when i'm planning to do a whole lot more of it later on. Anyway, from this point although i have objectives, i don't have an exact plan as i don't know enough about actual gameplay, in addition to this i am somewhat impaired and much less able to reflect my decisions in actual gameplay. This is advantageous in that i am not able to change my mind every few turns (which i might otherwise do to easily) and disadvantageous in that it usually takes me 2-10 turns to implement a decision as i will forget to do things, regardless of importance. I'm happy with this. Perfection requires a boring level of micromanagment, good enough to win should be playable without that.

--Finally, Colony Ion I arrives at it's distance destination. Problems are noted with the overall systems and some minor corrections made to future designs, but never the less we declare a national holiday for it's projected arrival. 4 seconds late, transmission kicks in and every Yor watches as we claim a new home. A Bright home... a home that will built with one purpose in mind - helping more worlds to become our home too. It follows the same schedule as our home world and immediately puts all available resources into constructing an industrial zone. We have a little more information about the galaxy around us... we realise that although not every system is habitable, most are than not and we will never afford the materials to make each a fully fledged industrial megaland and so settle for no more than one initial factory per world, and then only for worlds with potential, even this one, our third, which we recognise the richness of by declaring it will be our manufacturing capital. We are joyous. Not only at our brave new world, but the promise of the galaxy beyond it - with new and exciting oppertunities it will bring, for us and with our arrival, for the others.


tbc when next i can get out of work.