Yep was a fun but frustrating game to play. Watch the replay and see me, BetaAlpha, swear and shout at my allies!

Incidentally the game lagged and froze towards the end followed by a client crash for me . This was even more frustrating as the enemies' fleets were depleted and as Ron suggests there may have been a small come back.

BetaAlpha

Yeah I noted your progress. What really sucked was that blue also lost most of his fleet and just as I typed in a fit of surprise "Bloody hell I've nearly taken out his fleet", the game froze then crashed Sods law!

I've given this a lot of thought, and I still think there needs to be some limit to how much culture spread can stack. It was impossible for me to beat it. If I moved forward, you would've just recolonized, if I kept leaving bits behind, you would've been able to pick them off with your small forces. There was no way I could've "rushed" you efficiently, everything was covered in broadcast centers and my forward base was a dead 'roid that I couldn't do anything with.

I don't know, I think that's a bit much. The only thing I could do was wait for Kinz to finish with the pretty much dead-in-the-water players and attack you from two sides, but even that would be very very slow.

It's one thing to have culture as a valuable and viable addition to your empire, but it's another when it completely stalls the entire game. The only thing I really could've done was scrap all my labs and built up tons of media labs myself, but that should not be necessary to deal with culture.

Maybe it the presence of capital ships not only slowed culture spread in friendly territories, but actually helped your culture along in neutral territories it would be more balanced. I still would've had to stay at the Volcanic for a pretty long time to finally make it colonizable, but at least I *could* have done it.

Still, it was a good game and everyone fought well.. even if you were cursing me Ron for not allowing the majority of your capitals to escape

The game had a good deal of Vasari vs TEC action, and I was pretty pleased with Vasari performance overall!

dang love this replay

45-55min
annatar were able to kill almost 3 caps

1hour 12min
annatar were almost able to make an asteroid survive with 0 pop and just 2 in infrastructure haha

1hour 20min
i start to see the power of the phase gate... BIG

1hour 33min
there seem to be something wrong the shield restorer target priority of the Dunov, as it heals annatars ships it heals the ships thate already close to max. Would be smarter for it to heal those in 45 RED

2hours 34min
Annatars ships seems to be traveling from Calliope to Hamina at normal speed, where they actually should have gone into phase space

all in all this was a VERY learning experiance for me it helped me understand the Vasari much much more. Just the phasegate there ultimate weapon

It was also quite funny to see that 3 players who owned over half the map lost to 2 players hehe.

very GG all

It seems to me since we are destroying all life on a planet, it would pretty much destroy the culture once the population is gone.

Yeah Ron, but there should be a way to deal with it without having to do the exact same thing. Ultimately, no matter how you slice it, the random planets gave you a huge advantage. You had at least 2 terran and 2 asteroids able to feed culture to the volcanic within 2 jumps. I had 1 desert within 2 jumps, the other was a dead 'roid. Considering the culture fall-off per jump, I could not have pushed your culture away even if you had 3 centers feeding the volcanic directly from 1 jump away.

Culture becomes a huge huge issue for a longer-range attacker, especially in the positioning we were in. I had a thin strip of phase gates leading to your territories, and you had a mess of intertwined planets all supporting each other.

You beat me to it, I just thought of this on the way to work

Having said that:




While this makes common sense, in terms of gameplay mechanics that would make culture a lot less useful and appealing than it is now. I don't think culture itself should be bonked with a nerf bat, but only some means be put in to allow you to deal with culture-stacking strategies

it was from the volcano planet close to kilt to a planet of red's, which had a normal phase lane .




yeah thats what i think too

Ohhh I know what you're talking about now. I think they started chasing some trade ships and did that. I didn't show them to go anywhere, when I noticed they were ways off already, I showed them to go back to the volcanic, then they did it again and I set them to hold position.

Re: Antorak gate.

I did some testing on this in my game. The gate is two ways--that is, ships can jump to the Antorak, and ships can jump away from it. However, the Antorak itself can't use its own gate to jump away--if it moves, the ability turns off.

Yea,I would love a rematch with the same teams.The game was alot of fun.