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Originally posted by Mark the Merciful:
Geo, you accurately describe the first stage of the fighting between you, me and Tesco, but you're wrong in just attributing it to the Talisman. Half your problem was not just that my DUCs were hitting, but that your PPBs weren't. The Research I'd saved by not going straight to PPBs went into ECM, whereas none of your or his early ships seemed to have Combat Sensors. Had you had DUCs with Combat Sensors instead of PPBs without, I think the early fighting would have gone as the current battles do now that you're actually hitting (or in your case ramming) - that is, the Talisman giving me an edge, but not a completely decisive one.
I say this not as criticism of your play (because I know I've grossly simplified the research choices available to all of us), but to illustrate the general point that properly planning your counter to the Talisman makes a huge difference. You know the Religious player is going to emphasise his strengths by building hard-to-hit ships and staying out at long range. So if you see him as the early game threat, make sure you can *hit* his ships before you start researching all the cool weapons.
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Ah, but what you could not know is that while you were spending points researching the ECM, I was spending points researching military science.
We had a decisive battle at around turn 30. I went back and looked at the old game files cause I wanted to be sure. I had a fleet of 60-70 ships, over 40 of which were LC's. You had a fleet of 30-35 ships, all destoyers, except for about 8-10 LC's. Almost every ship in my fleet was veteren, trained to 20%, and the fleet was as well. SO that alone would have countered your ECM 2. So without the tailsman there would have been a slight advatage in your fleet having the smaller ships, but I had twice as many ships, and they were larger. Probably 4 or five times as many weapons total for the fleet. Your DUC's were a bit stronger than what I had at the time. but my ships had organic armor, so they could take a lot more punishment that your standard armor ships.
The result without the Tailsman would have been at worst significant losses on both sides, with me being ultimatly victorious. Instead you destroyed everyone of my ships and lost 5 or 6 of your own. THe Tailsman was clearly the pivital factor in that battle.
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I'm genuinely curious, by-the-way, about what you think my strategic mistakes were. Or is it too early to be revealing that sort of information?
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Your first mistake was in not finishing me off when you had the chance. Your fleet wiped out several of my homewolrds, and then inexplicably, from my perspective left. Now to be fair I do not know what other pressing issues you had to deal with at the moment. You could have been facing a threat from another quarter, or perhaps your fleet was running low on fuel. I don't know. But you did not return immediaetly to finish me off.
Second, you allowed Tesco to negotiate that temporary cease fire. I was stunned that you would accept such an obvious ploy in the middle of a shooting war. But it allowed me to prepare for taking advantage of your third ciritcal error.
Which was not putting SDD's on your top of the line warhips. Retrofitting nearly my entire fleet to heavily armored organic boarding/ramming ships was a total desperation tactic on my part. It was the most cost effective thing I could think of at the moment to deal with the tailsman's. If you had employed SDD's, my ships would have had to be given orders to ram exclusivly. And while they would have been somewhat effective, the combination of your speed advantage and repulser beams would have limited their effectivness considerably. (That was a brilliant combination by the way in addition to the tailsman. Well done. 
) But not having SDD'd on your part meant that I could manage to capture a couple of your ships early in the battle, which caused a cascade effect. Because now the ships I just captured became the strongest ships in my fleet, so the rest of your ships concentrated their fire on them, leaving the rest of my boarding/rammers unmolested. You destroyed most of the ships I captured before the battles in which they were captured were over, but they greatly reduced the overall caualties of my fleet in total.
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Definitely true. As it was, I only got the Talisman a turn or two before fighting first broke out, and had to carry out a frantic refitting program in order to have ships ready to fight. Normally, developing towards the Talisman would have to be a much longer term goal. You couldn't afford to commit to spending the hundreds of thousands of point necessary until you'd got several other key technologies first.
Mark
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Yes, and I attempted to take you out before you developed the Tailsman, and might have been succesful too had I not made a critical mistake of my own and miscalculated the amount of minesweepers in my initial foray into yoru homesystem. Losing that fleet set me back long enough for you to retrofit your fleet and resulted in that disasterous battle (for me) around turn 30.
This has been one of the most mental games I have ever been involved in. Win or lose it's been a pleasure.
Geoschmo