My current game; playing Yor (why???), on Masochistic, Gigantic map, all-abundant, loose clusters, rare events.
This is my first Masochistic game, so I was pleased to read recently that it's a big step up from Painful. Wonderful. I've been playing immense maps, but it's just too much, too long, and the mopping up takes forever. And it's been ages since I played Yor. I'm using Tolmekian's tech-tree mod.
I started out on a decent homeworld, with a 200% production square, in the central-west portion of the map, with the Thalan menace to the north, the obnoxious Kynn to my immediate south and the cute-but-menacing Torians stuck in the southwest corner behind the Krynn. The poison-sucking Korath in the southeast, the pathelic loser Korx in the north-center, and the cute-but-evil Drengin in the northeast completed the roll of AI opponents. This being my first Maso game and with me suffering from what appears to be a constitutional aversion to extreme development strategies, I'm playing dirty, with full on tech-sex-worker-tactics and corruption of the enemy's governmental procurement committees and everything.
So, I thought it was going pretty well; I got off the mark, colonizing my local space, researching my little head off, selecting the 'evil' option each time one came up 'cause, hey, evil robots, right? 'What is this 'mercy' of which you speak, protoplasmic contaminant? Eat hot photons and die -- and, ha-ha, I don't. Die, I mean. Oh, forget it ~~zap~~'
I've also got the megalomaniac evil-robot-talking-too-much disorder.
Boy, the AIs sure do colonize like lightning now. Well, except for the Dreng and Korx. I could've sworn I changed all those AI assignments.
But, by ripping their latest warships off; 'Yes, Krynn-senator Robertson, the Thalans really are depraved infant-molesting alien commies; we don't call 'em the Pink menace for nothing on Iconia, let me tell you. Twenty Heavy Fighters? Yes, that'd help us keep the Pink Menace from your border-worlds." "High Tech-Lord Thalron, I think you should know that the Krynn missionaries have infiltrated our cybernetworks, and our baby nanochips are just eating up the doctrine that we were all created twenty-five years ago by the Disney Co. from animatronic parts and that anyone who says otherwise, especially if they claim to be from the future, is evil and should be 'purified'. We think that purification probably involves nuclear fusion, but we're not sure yet, we haven't gotten to that chapter in the book. A trillion credits and twenty Thalan Defenders? Well, we can't guarantee anything, but we'll try."; I've managed to maintain my space, and I managed to grab colony nucleus worlds from the Korx and Korath, and some careful under-the-table payments delivered in some of the seedier fighting-pits has transferred substantial numbers of their warships to me too.
The shipyards are just waiting to take all that metal and circuitry and convert it into colony ships and new citizens to man 'em. If only I could just get anough money to pay the rapacious grasping damned cyborg construction companies, who, suspiciously, have allied with other galactic entities and are charging me, not an arm and a leg -- hey, they're replaceable -- but hard credits, which are a lot harder to come by. When I rule the galaxy they're the first ones into the quantum converter. For some inexplicable reason, the opposing powers, even the pathetic bootheel chewing-gum-spot minors, won't talk to me more than once every two months so I can rip off their money. Can't imagine why, I've got diplomatic translators so I'm charming as anything.
So right now the game's a bit iffy. For some strange reason (innocent whistling) the Krynn and Torians are in a death-struggle; the Torians have invasion techs, the Krynn don't, and they come whining to me once a month, but it hasn't stopped them expanding into the central cluster that's clearly future Yor space. I don't want the fecund damn bunnies on my doorstep, so I occasionally toss the Krynn a defensive 'tech. Good thing I've got surrenders turned off. The Korath, oddly enough, declared war on the Thalans, not that it's done much good, I doubt their ships can even reach that far, and the Pink Menace is expanding like, well, a menace. I couldn't con the Dreng and Korx into attacking anyone, and nobody wants to attack them; probably because they're so pathetic it'd be embarassing.
I had to turn my production rate down to 75%, but I'm running a slight surplus at that; and the next diplomatic turn I'm going to have enough money to convert a dozen more colony ships, plus it's treaty-time, and the minors had better cough up or else. I've got more advanced trade centers and efficiency matrices coming online too.
Then I think I'm going to blow up the happiness-mining starbase the perfidious Paulos stole -- stole -- right from under my constructors' nose -- and let 'em come at me with half the Korath fleet sitting right there. Eat robot death, squashies.
Does anyone know how many Super Dominators, and doesn't that sound like something you'd find in one of their seedier sex-clubs, the Dreng get when you declare on them? They've got a lovely green mining starbase just a parsec away from the Paulos one, and the fleet's going to be right there, and it's an enormous temptation, which my evil cyber-brain doesn't handle well at all. I figure by the time they could even get there to take it back, I can get 'em to declare peace again. Mining starbases are Yor territory, I say. It just makes sense.
To be continued, possibly.
