Re: Are you tough enough to be the "King of the Hill"?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Well who was it between and who was the victor?
Don't keep us in suspence http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I believe it was Lord Chane and Deccan (Deccan being the victor).

Re: Are you tough enough to be the "King of the Hill"?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Well who was it between and who was the victor?
Don't keep us in suspence http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I believe it was Lord Chane and Deccan (Deccan being the victor). </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Thanks. I should have looked it up on the Koth site, but just didn't think of it.

Re: Are you tough enough to be the "King of the Hill"?
 

Phoenix-D vs Rambie, turn 2402.8.

Rambie has surrendered after I burned down his homeworld the previous turn. This was a weird game; the two warps leading out of my home system lead to useless nebula systems, and the rest of the game wasnt't much better. One warp past one of those was his homeworld.

To top if off I made an error with my empire file that result in 0% reproduction. If you had any doubts about Enviromental Resistance affect reproduction, I think this killed that. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif

I found him before he found me, and the rest of the game I sent ship after ship at him. One colony was planted in his home system but soon lost.

Not sure what happened on his end, but eventually I martialled a 10 ship fleet, sortied in and blew his homeworld. With only three other colonies, he didn't have much left to do after that but surrender.

Re: Are you tough enough to be the "King of the Hill"?
 

Well, I'm getting bored of SEIV, but I thought that being longest KOTH game ever, I owed it to the SEIV community to give some sort of battle report.

As noted, we ran a Proportions game in a small spiral quadrant. Chane discovered me first, and it turned out that we had near identical empire setups. After I used a destroyer to, um, destroy that pesky initial unarmed scout, we had no real contact for at least 100 turns or so. I did continually send throwaway ships to "ping" his minefields to see the extent of his build-up.

I started the game with one major disadvantage. Three systems to the north of my homesystem was a massive black hole which completely blocked off access. Due to the slow speeds at which colony ships travel in Proportions, this meant that my expansion was limited in mostly one direction only. This is an especially bad thing in Proportions because you have to continually build population transports to carry colonists to new worlds and it meant that my transports had to travel that much further from the homeworld.

So, I moved aggressively in the other direction and mined two strategic warp-points that led into Chane's space. Early on, Chane tried to use a small fleet to break out of the cordon, but underestimated the size of the minefield I'd used and ended up losing that fleet.

Things only started to get interesting around turn 160 or so. It turned out that both of us went on the offensive at around that time. I tried to attack towards the southwest, beyond my own minefields, while Chane attacked across that massive black hole.

I had brought along troop ships with my attack fleet, and managed to actually capture one of Chane's planets with 11 m population, quite a treasure in Proportions. However, when my attack fleet tried to venture deeper beyond that system, it was totally wiped out by Chane's defenses, mostly lots and lots of fighters.

Luckily, I had brought minelayers along with my attack fleet as well, so I placed new minefields on my side of the warp point. Chane apparently didn't expect that, so he lost his counter-attacking fleet. He also did not have minesweepers in that area, because the minefields gave me the time I needed to secure that system.

Meanwhile, Chane's attack across the black hole system was going on. I did not expect him to attack through there and so did not prepare any real defenses. However, after passing through that black hole system, he picked one warp point that led into an empty trinary system and stopped to resupply his ships.

This gave me the time to emergency build boarding ships on escort hulls in my homesystem designed specifically to capture his carriers. They worked as expected as captured most of his carriers more or less intact and the fighters on those carriers destroyed his other ships. If he had chosen to go through the other warp point in the other system, he would have been able to destroy several important planets, though not my homeworld.

So things stayed that way for a long while while we both rebuilt. At around turn 240 or so, Chane sent another attack fleet, consisting exclusively of carriers, to take back that planet I'd taken from him. He entered through a warp point into a nebula system. I'd built bases to defend that warp point, but didn't count on the nebula's cloak that prvented combat, so he had a clear run, and despite my efforts to raise a defence using fighters and several loose carriers, he retook that system from me. However, I managed to send a ship to put a spy satellite in that nebula system, so that when he next tried to send some minesweepers through that same warp point (which he probably thought was undefended), his entire fleet was destroyed.

At around turn 260, I sent a new attack fleet at that same system, consisting of some cruisers designed specifically to kill fighters, PD beams, sensors, armor plating, lots of armor, no shields, fully trained, accompanied by lots of carriers. This fleet succeeded in piercing his defence and that was when he surrendered, confessing that those were about all of his combat-worthy forces.

So that was the longest game in KOTH history and probably remain so. After playing this, both Chane and I agree that Proportions is a great mod for multiplayer, if time consuming. It gives the player time to build and implement strategies to counter specific enemy strategies seen in the field. I find that in stock SEIV the pace of gameplay is so fast that you generally try to build versatile, all-round ships rather than gambling on specialist strategies. Congrats to PvK again for making this mod.

I must say however that I had an advantage in this as I'd played Proportions before and Chane hasn't. I'd like to do this again sometime, but not for a long while.

Re: Are you tough enough to be the "King of the Hill"?
 

Whoa, I just realized that I'm no longer officially the worst player in the game! Cool. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

Re: Are you tough enough to be the "King of the Hill"?
 

That sounds like an interesting game - i would have pursued warp point opening and closing technology.

We need alternatives into the game mods ie new black holes that suck any ships into it - seal off such systems. - I like to cover defenses from all angles and find drones are useful to offset mine fields. You can use them in conjuction with small escorts to explore and probe defenses.

Any tactics you would have used in resprospect now in reference to that game.

Re: Are you tough enough to be the "King of the Hill"?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Nah, this is Proportions remember. I had like 60k research per turn at turn 264, Chane had like 22k. Not much chance of high levels of Stellar Manipulation with that kind of rp count.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Well, I seriously underestimated how much intel you need to break through an opponent's defences, so that was a big waste.

Also, I think I should have made the transition to dedicated anti-fighter ships much earlier and much more heavily instead of trying to match Chane fighter-for-fighter, given my tech advantage, say using armor plating and emissive armor and lots of training and combat sensors, instead of researching things like maxed rippers that never got used. The problem with trying to match an opponent fighter-for-fighter is that it gives the defender a massive advantage since he can just switch production on all his planets to fighters and swamp you, while the attacker replenishes his fighter squadrons much more slowly. Anti-fighter ships on the other hand can be repaired after battle, and if they're fully armored, it can be damn difficult for fighters to kill them, unless you have fighters dedicated to killing ships (torpedoes or rockets).

Of course, if Chane had predicted that coming, he would have cleaned those ships out using conventional warships, but as I expected, he gave up producing conventional warships after he saw the first fighter vs. ship battles.

Re: Are you tough enough to be the "King of the Hill"?
 

Oh yeah, nearly forgot: this game would have been a lot more interesting if we had AIC style anti-fighter fighters. It would have vastly increased the strategic choices available.

Re: Are you tough enough to be the "King of the Hill"?
 

A zig when I should of zagged and a novel defense and a king abdicates.

Re: Are you tough enough to be the "King of the Hill"?
 

RexTorres (Rex Enclave) vs BBegemott (Vengeful dreamers)
Turn 2410.4
10 starting planets + Tesco Map + default

The war finally ended! Vengeful dreamers are celebrating the victory! More than 40 billions of people have died in this bloody skirmish.

I was the first to rebuild my military and start operations in enemy teritory, expanding economically at the same time. At the end of the game I have 207 colonies and that number tends to increase. Though RexTorres still has got decent number of colonies- 67, I am sure I have rolled over him. Slowly, but safely.

It was a great game, RexTorres. Thanks.