Re: newest beta patch?
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Originally posted by geoschmo:
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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OMG, you keep all the old turn files! Exactly how big is your archive? Obviously, having looked, you'll know more about that battle then I do. But in general I have clear memories of the early battles being against ships without combat sensors. Of course, that includes the battles with the Meklar, Niridians, and SMR-10 as well as you, and you know, all aliens tend to look the same from in front of a fire-control console...
I think at the time of the battle you mentioned, I also had built the Ship and Fleet Training facilities. So I probably had a Veteran fleet to counter yours, though it's very unlikely that many of my ships were Veteran.
Obviously the Talisman is a huge edge, and I wouldn't want to deny that. But my experience of our more recent battles, and from the other game where I'm playing a Religious, is that while the Talisman lets me win battles against equal or bigger fleets, they are no longer the one-sided blowouts we were seeing initially.
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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.
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You blew that fleet up (or most of it), with a large number of organic armour rammers, and I'd had to redirect my resources to deal with Tesco's latest 100-ship armada. I did desperately want to come back and glass the rest of your planets  but having lost that fleet, I didn't have another to do the job with. Fighting four races on three seperate fronts leaves you with little chance to build up reserves for the next Big Push. My fleets spent a large part of their time dashing from system to system trying to deal with the next threat, and no Kif sailor gets shoreleave unless he's wearing a coffin.
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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.
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One of the most interesting and difficult challenges of this sort of game is to get some idea of the other players' current state of minds. From your point of view, I may have been the unstoppable religious monster who was winning every battle he fought. From my point of view I was fighting four opponents, with pretty much the minimum of resources needed to avoid a complete collapse. The attrition rates were pretty favourable, but not favourable enough for me to actually build up any reserves, and the occassional defeat, mistake or bad guess would leave a gaping hole in my defenses. So I was desperate for a chance to rest and rebuild.
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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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Part of the problem was that I didn't (or don't) understand what Self-destruct devices do (Dim X 2.0 is my second PBW game). I was too scared to put them on my ships, seeing a scenario where one of your frigates with Boarding Parties could force one of my Battlecruisers to blow itself up. I've read very recently that boarding ships refuse to even attempt an attack when the enemy has SDDs, but it's a bit late now... Actually, even I had known, I would have a great deal of difficulty finding time to refit my exising fleet. It didn't tend to stand still (except on a warp point) for that length of time.
Actually the repulser beam trick seems less effective in practise then it sounds in theory. It won't push a ship through or past another ship, and it doesn't seem to work on any ship bigger then the firer (as far as I can tell - too lazy to test properly). So often, especially when facing an enemy in a large clump, the repulsers harldly do anything at all.
Another reason why your rammers/boarders did so well. I'd hoped the repulsers would keep them at arms length, but it didn't quite work...
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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
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Agree on that, as well. It's been fun, incredibly tense, and a real mental challenge. A couple of the other PBW games I've played in have had some quite long dull patches, as each player sat still doing the research and buildup thing. Almost none of that in Dim X 2.0
Mark
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