[Slynky]

Originally posted by Nodachi:
Slynky, who won the rematch, you or Parabolize?

I'm afraid I did...luckily, I think. I think Parabolize may disagree but I was sure happy to see the surrender!

I can see he is a good empire manager. Better than I am, for sure. I was in 2nd place most of the game. I had a bit of an advantage in combat (racial) but he could outbuild me like crazy! I had 33 colonys and he had nearly 100. I had (at game end) about 45 ships (about 20 of those were SY ships, sat-layers, small carriers to shuttle fighters, mining stations, or desparate destroyers...kamakazi guys). I had mineral problems the whole game and only had about 100k in storage and about 20+ going into turns. Every turn, I was converting orgs/rads (about 50k per turn) and both of those reserves were around 50k each. I had a planet builder and converted every asteroid in one of those asteroid systems and didn't get a SINGLE one to come out to my atmosphere type . (I still say something is wrong with that...as in another game, I converted about 40 and never got a NONE atmosphere!).

We had a few battles before he surrendered and my fleet got cut from 24 ships to 8. But that fleet of 8 killed around 20 battleships by itself in the Last battle. I think this is what did it for me. Most every ship in that fleet finished up over 30% in experience/training. It would have been hard to kill it but only 7 ships were combat ships. And it was in his territory. But it seemed to me he could have waited for it at a warp point and gotten first shot at point blank and done some damage. Otherwise, that was the only invading fleet I had. Everything else (about 20 ships) was guarding my empire and couldn't leave because a 19-ship fleet of his was lurking around. BTW, my chief design made us of Meson BLasters and Repulser beams (hows that for a surprise?). One other note...both our wave-motion guns seemed to fail miserably...I thought they had a 30% bonus to hit?

His resources were amazing! AND, he had a lot of atmosphere converters in place in case the game went for a while...GOOD long-term thinking! When those things started completing their job (2 years), his production would have buried me!

All in all, it was an interesting game and I had to find ways to keep my empire producing while wondering where he was going to hit me...the map was so that it was hard to find places to defend my empire...I settled on 5 places but that locked me into a small resource area.