Tug of War - Progress Thread

[spoon]

Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
"I'm at a loss to explain it--- what would make a ship remove itself from its own fleet???"

Intel changing its orders.

Nope, no intel Messages rec'd, and I still have counterintel stored up...

[atari_eric]

Originally posted by BBegemott:
Yeah, Spoon has outsmattered us. Still I really enjoyed this game. Thank you guys for a good game atmosphere and special thanks to Gandalph for a brilliant mod idea!

I think spoon had us practically from the get-go. He(she?) made out as if he needed to take over the whole map by himself in order to win. His(her?) strip of planets are more developed than unregulated beachfront property, and has more goods in space than the Star Wars Empire. Spoon knew he'd(?) have to take on everyone else as soon as the tug was nabbed, and would have to fight them all the way back. I'm not saying that the other players weren't doing similar, I just think that Spoon's first priority was subduing the other players, then grabbing the tug.

[Gandalph]

Spoon - check your PM's

[Gandalph]

The Tug left the fleet for a legitimate reason. I have been asked not to reveal the reason until games end. Game will proceed.

[spoon]

Great game, everyone. I was biting my nails til the very end. That Last turn alone left me with 60% of my remaining colonies in complete riot mode, and I don't think I could have Lasted much longer.

The Worm Overlords will have to use that tug to tow our homeworld to a safer galaxy!

Props go to the death-dealing Mokulions (BBegemott), who, thankfully, started on the opposite side of map. And to Gemini Twighlight (ekolis) who snatched the Tug from the center two rounds before my cloaked minelayer got there... causing us much undue stress. And to the Fenolans (Megatrain) who, if you didn't notice, stole the Tug from the Geminis with a Colony ship (Heh! Clever!)

And special props to Gandalph for hosting the game, which was great fun, and ran without a hitch.

-High Wormlord Smmmrrlgor

[Ed Kolis]

Cloaked minelayer, huh? So you went the route of "as long as I can keep the other players from winning, I win by default"! Surprised you went to the trouble of researching cloaking and mines though, those are fairly expensive to get to... I figured there would be more of a race for the tug, so all the early diplomacy and colony building was only something to kill time while I researched ship capture as fast as I could... well, the fact that my first colony I devoted to research centers did help

That colony ship thing really did get me though!

[Katchoo]

Congrats Spoon!

Next time i'll have to take researching Mines more seriously (I must have lost 30 ships to Worm mines).

[Electrum]

By the way, the reason why the Tug seperated from the fleet & didn't go through the warp point was simple. I knew I didn't have enough of a fleet to stop him at the entrance to his home system. So I set the stratagy on my boarding ships to first target ships without any weapons. They went straight to the tug, too it for a short time, and them had it taken back. Since I had it for a short time during combat, it was seperated from the fleet and any orders that were attached.

[spoon]

To address Gandalph's request that he posted to the Game News:

This game seemed to end too soon and I would appreciate any input on how to make it a little tougher. I have thought about making the map larger so it will take longer to get the Tug home, thus enabling the other players more oppurtunity to recapture it.

The game's length seemed right to me, but if you want to increase it, you might want to try the following
- Reduce the tug speed to 2, and/or
- Eliminate Propulsion Expert (or raise its cost to something obscene, like 3000)

Making the map bigger would also work, but we all know what a pain it is to make maps. I also don't think it would be as effective as simply lowering the tug speed.

Note, though, if the game goes on for too long, the tug becomes moot, and the only real way to win is probably to crush everyone else first, then dominate with intel.

-spoon

[BBegemott]

Congratulations Spoon! You played a good game till the very end. (e.g. Mining the way of my 21 ship fleet ech, it was almost out of suply anyway. That fleet couldn't do any harm anyway )

Imo the main reason why the game ended so early was that your neighbours were not strong militarily as you were. And the southern neighbour missed 8 of his 9 Last turns. AI isn't smart in such a specific game.

Speaking about the map- I liked it as it is. I fully support Spoon's opinion about this. In addition I can say, that imho creating larger map could be effective only if new systems were placed between homeworld and the web and connected as a chain. (Without warps to other players chains from these two).
[space]||
H-*-*-web=
[space]||
The point is that two nearest systems could be used mainly for the resource generation without a fear of being destroyed by neighbours (after tug capture).
This also gives the bigger distance from the center and homeworlds, so there is no need of tug spped decreasing.

EDIT- I see some players have uploaded their turns... is there any purpose for playing on?

[ June 12, 2003, 09:12: Message edited by: BBegemott ]