FreeOrion

EricF wrote:Yea, way worse than the one I had.
Curious to see if you manage to beat this one.

There's a system that's not visible until Active Radar is available that is reasonably close to Sualocin. Researched Gravitonics for Starlane Bore, then drilled my way out there.

Here's the first one i've had in a while (i think since the first game i ever played) where i got to a point where i felt like i was losing. This was largely due to my getting greedy, but it's a fairly challenging setup, i think.:

@alleryn which version of the game?

Ophiuchus wrote:@alleryn which version of the game?

I was using a pretty recent build v0.4.7+ [build 2017-12-18.8ab050f] MSVC 2015

Turn 169 of alleryn's prYPEf6J's game with FO version 2017-12-04.25bd9a9. Start was slow due to no colonisable planets until I killed first sentry (with mass and lasser). Then all went easy. I rushed exobots, growth and plasma, expanded like crazy while finishing plasma and begin pumping robotic hulls with 4 plasmas and robotic interface. I absorbed Cray (purple) prety easy with my first stack of roboplasmas while plasma was at 2. Plasma 4 finished on time to stop the doomstack of the Trith (blue). Right after that I got the ancient ruins at Poi alfa for Kilandow and Neutronium Syntetyzer (nice, I have only researched the very first armor tech). Its turn 169, Cray is pretty much dead and Trith has less than half my population, PPs, army strength and colonies, and RPs have been better than his the whole game. So I call it a day.
Was interesting how crowded of monsters it was. Fast scouting (and three derelic ships with information) to quickly realise that building outpost ships was utterly useless helped a lot.

Oberlus wrote:Turn 169 of alleryn's prYPEf6J's game with FO version 2017-12-04.25bd9a9. Start was slow due to no colonisable planets until I killed first sentry (with mass and lasser). Then all went easy. I rushed exobots, growth and plasma, expanded like crazy while finishing plasma and begin pumping robotic hulls with 4 plasmas and robotic interface. I absorbed Cray (purple) prety easy with my first stack of roboplasmas while plasma was at 2. Plasma 4 finished on time to stop the doomstack of the Trith (blue). Right after that I got the ancient ruins at Poi alfa for Kilandow and Neutronium Syntetyzer (nice, I have only researched the very first armor tech). Its turn 169, Cray is pretty much dead and Trith has less than half my population, PPs, army strength and colonies, and RPs have been better than his the whole game. So I call it a day.
Was interesting how crowded of monsters it was. Fast scouting (and three derelic ships with information) to quickly realise that building outpost ships was utterly useless helped a lot.

I tried to colonize the tundra planet near the trith homeworld and pump out roboshield ships to secure it and take out their homeworld quickly, but trith too OP :p. It backfired and they took back Galifrey, leaving me way behind. I managed to retake it, but by then the third empire was already encroaching, wreaking havoc on my supply lines.

If i hadn't been so greedy i would've taken out the maintenance ships that were protecting some of the less dangerous colonisable worlds instead. Live and learn, i guess.

I've realised I've played a different map: I didn't set galaxy shape to random, doh!

Edit: now I've played the right one. Layout was different but the overal situation was the same: plenty of specials and monsters, no options to colonise at startup until some monsters are wiped out. Did the same strategy: Robotic, Laser, Growth, Exobots, robo hulls with robo interface. Trith was the first one to pay me a visit. Got some loses but he was way worse. After reinforcing I took the lead on the invasion race. Turn 180 I have 2xRP, 3xPP, 5xPopulation, 4xArmy, got DR, and my stack of robos with lasser (25 HP, 52 dmg, 10 shields in a stack of 18 ships) is an unstoppable doomstack.

I'm having some hard time in the early stages of this game: As seen in the image, there are like 5 systems per player (from which 3 will be empty), 20 players. I've rushed to colonise a closeby terran planet but that's next to a Gysache capital and two hops away from mine, that receives constant noisy visits. I'm not used to this pressure, but I'm neither used to play this kind of crazy maps.

Oberlus wrote:I'm not used to this pressure, but I'm neither used to play this kind of crazy maps.

My approach was completely misguided, this map is really easy.
I restarted and built first two troopers (one after the other) instead of the 2xScout + Automated History Analiser that I use to do on setups with few colonising opportunities.
So I got one Scylor colony and one Gysache colony (so those empires got definitively crippled for the rest of game, got their capitals in less than 50 turns massively increasing my population and general output. By turn 100 I'm de undisputed superpower of this galaxy. Three more AIs clearly stand out among the rest, but I could beat their joined armies in a single turn with half my doomstack. By turn 150 I'm conquering three empires simultaneously, each strike force is getting a new whole system every 3-4 turns. Snowball got out of control.

It has been my experience that the more AI players there are
the easier the game is to beat. The 15 AI's 64 system map
was a little tricky in the very beginning, but eventually in the
end an easy victory. The 40 AI 120 map was a cake walk.
Hence the 3 AI 300 system I posted earlier. Not a cakewalk.

Yeah, obviously the AI normally improves over time, then we add a new feature that messes them up and that needs work, etc.

But normally a massive advantage is had capturing a homeworld, so if you're capapble of getting a decent start and swamping a specific AI very early you can then get the next one relatively easily and then it's close to a cakewalk.

On the other hand, a very sparse map means that the AI can't do this either, generally I've found that the only time an AI is a challenge in the late game is if it's also captured a couple homeworlds in the early to mid as well, so if there aren't really any to grab generally a human player will do better than an AI.

That's why I mostly play, and try to balance, for the recommended settings, although I personally prefer a more sparse setting and do that for fun every so often: at which the AI has, generally, gotten a lot better over the last few years, but the new(ish) supply system does mess them up more than is ideal.

Finding the balance between making it challenging for the player and not too challenging for the AI isn't easy.

Or, similarly, a player of either stripe gets some beneficial natives close by.

MatGB wrote:I've found that the only time an AI is a challenge in the late game is if it's also captured a couple homeworlds in the early to mid as well, so if there aren't really any to grab generally a human player will do better than an AI.

That's my experience too. In 50+ systems per player setups it is rather hard that any AI does better than you.

I've encontered another hard game. I've lost the first try! I first tried conquering most of the AI empire that will grow southwest of my homeworld, but eventually one of my other two nearest neighbours (that was initially fenced behind some monsters) grew up exponentially (yay!), and at some point (turn 150 or so) it has 5x my army and twice my PPs and I couldn't stop the onslaught. Really funny! One of the problems was, maybe, that I tried asteroid hull line instead of my regular robos.
In my second time I'm sticking to robos and I am not losing, but still a very interesting game. I'm being forced constantly to move back and forth between my north and south borders to defend from considerably tough stacks, which is slowing me down. I recommend this map!

I tried Oberlus' settings from the post above and turned out that these settings consistently create rough starts (and usually at least one of the 13 AIs get a good start) so I've been toying with them. Last one was me trying to try playing science-oriented Laenfa and this is what happened. Try it out, this is almost as if somebody tried to make the worst start possible (my first colony was started around turn 50 for reasons you will probably see). On a positive note, once you stabilise out of your early game problems there are some interesting goodies nearby so it will be a fun game afterwards.

You can try it with different races too, no matter what the race it won't be too easy (Gysache might be the worst. Laenfa or Chato are also bad, amazing for Trith, but any start is amazing for Trith). For extra difficulty, don't use ruins (I got multispectral shielding there which was really really good).