[deccan]

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.