Worst "oops" moments in PBW?

Krsqk · #1 April 1st, 2003, 01:18 AM

Oh, how about just plain forgetting the rules of the game? Like in The Hunt, where you're dead if you lose your homeworld, and I forget to build any defenses on it? Or put ships over it? Or build any satellites? Here you go, partner, have a free rest of the empire!

Of course, I saw it coming, but I still forgot the rules and decided to retrofit my fleet "so I could thrash his homeworld after he got mine." I was somewhat disappointed with the results.

I felt every bit the doofus I was.

[ March 31, 2003, 23:23: Message edited by: Krsqk ]

Slynky · #2 April 1st, 2003, 02:31 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by minipol:
Putting a sundestroyer on the sun to toast an incoming fleet? WOW, what a move. This is something i would have never thought about. Brilliant!

Doesn't always work, it seems. Late in the game, when everyone has those destroyers and speedy ships, detonating one when a fleet is at the warphole won't do the trick...they have to be at least one sector inside (from the wormhole). I know...I detonated one and the fleet fled back out.

PvK · #3 April 2nd, 2003, 05:03 AM

In the one game I've lost so far in the Universe Cup PBW tournament, I had just researched level 2 minesweepers and cruisers and had just deployed my first offensive fleet equipped with a fair number of them - enough to sweep a large but not the largest minefield, and decided to risk an attack on an enemy planet with my main fleet...

BOOM

Nothing left. I thought there may have been a bug in the mine calculation, and went so far as to ask my opponent if he thought my fleet should've been vaporized by the mines.

Well, guess what? My new class of minesweepers which I had been mass-producing were in fact high-tech jam-packed mineLAYERS, which thought they were minesweepers! ARGH!

That wasn't why I lost, though.

PvK

Chronon · #4 April 2nd, 2003, 06:42 AM

I did the same thing PvK. I had a ship design called Minesweeper IIIa, and had duly retrofitted all of my earlier Version minesweepers to that model. Unfortunately the components were actually minelayers, not minesweepers. When war finally broke out, I had a grand total of zero actual minesweepers. And my opponent had mined just about everything he touched, including the warp points in my own home system...

[ April 02, 2003, 04:43: Message edited by: Chronon ]

rextorres · #5 April 2nd, 2003, 07:28 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Ed Kolis:
Well, it turns out the devious Concordium player, bless his heart, had a sun destroyer sitting on the sun with sentry orders just waiting for us! KABOOOM!!! All 500 ships, destroyed... all that remained was a nebula, and my 60 ships that had apparently entered the system just AFTER the explosion.

That was one of my favorite all time PBW moments.

[ April 02, 2003, 05:29: Message edited by: rextorres ]

Slick · #6 April 2nd, 2003, 09:28 AM

I love this thread! I have either made the same mistakes outright or can see myself easily doing so. It is fun to laugh at these!

Anyway, here is another one which is not as bad as my other one. It had been many turns before I finally got the Last colonization tech and I really needed to colonize those gas giants in my 12ish systems. I quickly "copied" my rock colonizer, changed the design type to Gas Colonizer, but forgot to change the colonization component from rock to gas. Then I splurged added my new gas colonizer to all available construction queues. Didn't notice the problem either when the ships got built - they had the right name, right? All on the same turn I got a bunch of "Cannot Colonize" errors, but by this turn the 2nd batch of wrong colonizers was produced, so I had to retrofit (at great cost in resources and time) 20 to 30 Gas Colonizers to remove the rock colonizer component and add the Gas colonizer component. This bothered me so much, I didn't even check my resources that turn and (you guessed it) the mass retrofit took me into the red. I don't think any ships got auto-scrapped, but I did lose production at several planets that turn. Grrr!

Slick.

Ruatha · #7 April 2nd, 2003, 10:22 AM

I haven't played that many PBW games so my big ones are still waiting to happen!

But in my first game I built most of my ships with solar panels and no resupply depots as I didn't need them.
I sent my entire fleet(almost) against the enemy and it got wiped out.
He then sent in a minor weak fleat through a black hole system (Is that allowed???) towards my virtually undefended home system.
But good enough I had a fighter carrier filled with fighters two system away that had been on the way to the front, so I turned that around.
Then it ran out of supplies! The one ship without solar panels!
What to do?
I sent it to the closest planet with a shipyard and built a resupply ship that was filled with solar panels, planning to fleet them and gain supplies and then unfleet the supply ship and send the carrier on it's way.
Therefore it didn't need any engines as they would take valuable space away from another couple of solar panels!
When it was finished it produced lots of supplies but had a supply storage capacity of Zero!
Starting to refit and repair took two more valuable turns and he got into a killing spree going from planet to planet in my home system!

I think this was what tipped the balance and after that it was all downhill, riots, mineral shortage, ships abandoned and eventually genocide.

I learned some valuable lessons!

[ April 02, 2003, 08:23: Message edited by: Ruatha ]