Help! Try this MoO game.

[vmxa1]

I can not say that I have, but that does not mean much as I do not pay mch attention to it in Moo, some in Moo2 and more in Civ3. Like I said, I am not going to have any ongoing deals, only one time tech trades.
2458 Meks finally declare war, but send nothing for a long time. Bad move on their part as they had two infernos with no defense right near me. I dropped troops on them and got one tech from 1 and 5 form another, thank you very much.
I am sitting on 23 planets now, only 2 with out class X shields and one is Rich and it is making them now. The other is that lame ultra poor and it is getting close to finishing the 600 factories (2-3 turns). It is way out of the way and probably will never be attacked anyway.
Have a lot of battles with Humans and they paid 2K for peace. A couple of more rounds of trade on tech with Klacs and even one with the now peaceful Humans.
I have been pumping over 5% into Meks, but only got one steal.
They have sent 5 or 6 fleets, one quite large, but no damage as their torps are not able to defeat the shields.
Soon I will have HEF and will start the fleet build up. I am not sure how strong the Meks over all fleet is, but so long as they do not get a shield busting tech real soon, I am go to go.
They now only have 9 techs that I do not have, I may have that many that they do not have or more.
They do have adv soil, I only have soil. I am about to get atmospheric, so the Rich and UR I have will be monsters, just in time to build that fleet of HEF ships.
It is the save for that point.

[AIL]

Originally posted by grinningman
BTW, has anyone ever noticed opponents changing personalities during a game? It says this can happen in the manual, but I've never noticed it.

It only happens when they are down to one planet and someone incites a revolt. The likelyness of this increases if Darloks are in the game.
I remember 2 games where I lost my last planet to a revolt.

Of course you can also trigger this via the alt+p cheat, but I guess you were not talking about this.

[Zed-F]

Originally posted by AIL

It only happens when they are down to one planet and someone incites a revolt. The likelyness of this increases if Darloks are in the game.
I remember 2 games where I lost my last planet to a revolt.

Of course you can also trigger this via the alt+p cheat, but I guess you were not talking about this.

It will also happen if you get an "assasinate the emperor" event.

[Zed-F]

Originally posted by grinningman
Zed-F: Does the amount that you trade with a race affect the rate at which your relations improve with that race? i.e. does maintaining trade with someone always improve relations, regardless of the amount traded? I've always assumed that the amount matters, but I don't have any evidence to show this is true.

I don't know for sure, but I believe it does.

Nevertheless, a good reason for using a small deal is that the AI is more likely to accept a small deal than a large one if relations are less than neutral to start with. Also, if the small deal does last a while and you think it would be worthwhile to go to a larger one, the large deal will become profitable more quickly as a result.

[vmxa1]

Well that game was a great reminder of why I do not play huge maps. It took so long to finally finish. I had to resort to scortched earth to get it over. I left a fleet over all the planets that I knocked out (wish I could destroy them ala Moo2) to stop recolonization.
I ran into 2 stacks with the negative numbers and were 32K or more of large ships. I was concerned, but I was able to make a stack of large ships with disrupters and the Meks would flee, losing ships in each battle. I finally got some huge ships with Black Hole Gens to wipe them out. I took losses, but had many planets to replace them.
I went to Orion after all tech was learned and got the Black Hole, I normally do not use it, but it turned out to be a good thing. I only wanted the death ray to be sure that I could but shields on any planet.
Oh, funny thing, the very first turn after posting about them having advanced soil, I stole it.
I had to switch styles in the very late game to crank out 15 or so ships each turn.
The 2 issues for huge games to me is the length of time it takes and that the largest AI will get so many planets that they are a handeful. Even though I got ahead in planets and pop, they have that research handicap and since it was Meks, lots of factories.
So Grinningman, did you go back to take another run at it?
I would not blame you if you gave it a pass as it was a chore.

[grinningman]

Originally posted by vmxa1
So Grinningman, did you go back to take another run at it?
I would not blame you if you gave it a pass as it was a chore.

Yes, I played it again. This time I was a lot more careful at the beginning, trying to be as efficient as possible. My expansion was a lot more successful, I colonized all the planets I had the first time plus about six more planets in the south east corner (including Spica and the ultra rich one). This was similar to what Zed-F said he(?) colonized. I never ran into any insurmountable problems after this.

The late game was boring Too many planets to manage.

The Meklar were still the main bad guys. I took a few planets from the Alkaris and Humans, and tried to be nice to the Klackons and Silicoids to win the vote. Then the Meklar attacked. They had amassed a huge fleet of ships with plasma torpedoes that I wasn't ready for, and bombarded 4 or 5 of my planets out of existence over 6 or 8 turns. So I built my own huge fleet of medium ships with sub space teleporters, bio-terminators, neutronium bombs and pulse phasors, and bombed every Meklar planet down to pop 10. I then did the same for the Silicoids and Klackons, while rebuilding the planets I lost. A felt a little bit guilty about this mass genocide, but it did greatly increase my proportion of the galactic population, so I won the next vote . This was the first time I've used sub space teleporters. They are very powerful. Up there with HEF in terms of effectiveness vs the AI.

I also saw a negative numbers bug - the Meklar offered me something like -32500 BCs to make peace. I refused, but later thought I should have accepted to see what happened. The Meklar didn't make huge stacks of small or medium ships in my game, they just seemed to stick to large and huge ships.

It looks like I wasn't careful enough in the early turns the first time around. Thanks to everyone's advice, I'll know for next time.

[vmxa1]

Originally posted by grinningman
"The Meklar were still the main bad guys. I took a few planets from the Alkaris and Humans, and tried to be nice to the Klackons and Silicoids to win the vote. Then the Meklar attacked. They had amassed a huge fleet of ships with plasma torpedoes that I wasn't ready for, and bombarded 4 or 5 of my planets out of existence over 6 or 8 turns. So I built my own huge fleet of medium ships with sub space teleporters, bio-terminators, neutronium bombs and pulse phasors, and bombed every Meklar planet down to pop 10. I then did the same for the Silicoids and Klackons, while rebuilding the planets I lost. A felt a little bit guilty about this mass genocide, but it did greatly increase my proportion of the galactic population, so I won the next vote . This was the first time I've used sub space teleporters. They are very powerful. Up there with HEF in terms of effectiveness vs the AI. "

I flattened the planets as I could not see the point in trying to hold them, unless they were rich or UR. I do not use the vote, I killed everyone.
N-bombs, maulers, plasma torps and death rays are sure fire planet defenses busters. I prefer maulers, but I did not get them, so I used death rays. Just 3 on each huge ship, but stacked up they were killing colonies unless I was very careful.
Teleporters are required if you want to get much use out of Black Hole Gens. I think I was the only one with Interdictors, so they could not stop me from porting on top of the planet, unless they had teleporting ships there.

With the huge maps, when you get to torp phase, you will have look for their largest fleet and start to pare it down. If you do not they will be able to jump on planets and bust them. This did not happen to me, because I had class XX shileds with N-armor. This meant that when they came to my planets they could shot all they wanted, but no harm was done, except to their ships.
They started using hellfire torps, but they can not do the job. I had busted their fleet up before they got plasma torps, if they even did, can't recall.
At one point they managed to nearly wipe out my fleet with two stacks 32K large ships with torps. I felt it was worth it as I eleiminated one stack and cut the oher down to 10K. I got that one later. Since they could do nothing to my planets, I had time to rebuilt the fleet and they did not.

"I also saw a negative numbers bug - the Meklar offered me something like -32500 BCs to make peace. I refused, but later thought I should have accepted to see what happened. The Meklar didn't make huge stacks of small or medium ships in my game, they just seemed to stick to large and huge ships."

At that stage in the game I refuse peace and see if they counter with money or tech and if they do I accept it. This is because they will go to war in no time. I have seen them do it the next turn. So I got something for nothing.
If you intend to attack, do it anyway, I don't care at that point.

"It looks like I wasn't careful enough in the early turns the first time around. Thanks to everyone's advice, I'll know for next time."

Larger maps at higher levels require you to get a flying start on planets. They will have so many planets and the research edge, you will really fall behind. When you look at the first run, they had only 14 to your 10 planets (IIRC) at one point, but you were down close to 30 techs. That makes life very rough. Even with my having more planets they were very far out in front on tech, but I had more resources to get back in the game, namely trading tech and steal. Later getting techs from capturing their planets. It was a big job to kill all of those planets.

[Zed-F]

Heh, if the game gets that late, I often just send combat-transporter equipped troops everywhere. By that time I have a big enough pop base, can regrow pop very quickly, have advanced scanners and superior ground combat tech... who needs warships?

vxma, I was fairly sure that was a large, not huge map. Not that it really matters, I don't often play maps that big either. Almost always stick with small.

[vmxa1]

Yeah, I do not know if it was large or huge, it just was too big for me. I had well over 30 planets and there was plenty left.

[vmxa1]

Ok I genned up a large and a huge and it looks like the game had around 66 or so planets and that makes it a Large. Dang, Huge would have really been work.
I like small as you can finish in the same day, even going for all planets.