Deconstruction (versus 1.08)

Shall we play a session of 1.08?

I’ve set this one to impossible emperor/and left the default construction/research rates alone. This means the Ai, on top of their more advanced state, will enjoy immense cheats throughout the game. Seems like a recipe for losing doesn’t it?

Not so fast me hearties, ole Gaius has something up his sleeve, (insert evil/maniacal laugh here).

Having carefully studied 1.08, I’ve decided to try and beat this setting by exploiting its weaknesses. I’ve created a different custom race, and added a rich home world to my start, as well as a 25% bonus to both ship offense and ship defense. I did this by taking reduced pop growth, (hope it’s not a mistake), and creating a repulsive race. I know I can’t produce or research faster than the AI at these settings, but by keeping some technology close, I hope to win this on the battlefield.

The start positions are below… oh by the way, I skipped the free colony ship this time around, the extra speed is a huge operational advantage that will be critical in making sure I can fight well even if I am strategically outnumbered.

Care to see how this goes?

 

I ran into the Moltar almost instantly, two repulsive peas in a pod. I also settled a huge swamp world at Drirs without fully investigating the system. One of the planets in that system had ruins which netted me the “Condor”. Mighty handy that this early in the game, I’ll take it as it’s the only defense I have at the moment. Sierra was hired as soon as she showed up and given Terra to govern. While I've increased my production significantly since the start of the game, it is obvious that the Moltar are far more powerful.



Mickey came along at some point, was hired and sent to Drirs. I explored the nearby systems once I got my free survey ship and found more ruins at Tilt, but there was nothing of value there. Then on turn 68 I received the news that the Nova had been defeated. (By the way, it should be “The Nova Vida have been vanquished” or “On turn 68 the Nova Vida were vanquished” not the “The Nova Vida was vanquished”)

This was actually unwelcome news, I need everyone in the game for as long as possible, (divide and conquer and all that). A faction getting knocked out this early means someone is going to get very powerful, very quick. And it won’t be me.

 

The humans made their appearance on turn 81, they too were well developed for this early in the game. As for myself, I had settled Hades within my home system and a newly constructed colony ship was on the way Tilt. I even managed to increase my fleet slightly, knowing that the AI had to be watched with these settings. The ships I had built were pretty useless of course, but they would be upgraded shortly into something effective, the point was to that it was better to have something instead of nothing at all.

 

Lord Matjosh came wandering along and I hired him. I put him in charge of my exploration fleet and he leveled up quickly, gaining the expert explorer trait in the process. This allowed me to explore the nearby ruins a second time and I received an excellent Cruiser as a result, (along with some useless information in nearby ruins… which weren’t nearby).

The Colony at Tilt had been established along with a few outposts which not only gave me some strategic resources, but also aided my research efforts. My drive systems had been upgraded to Fusion drive, which combined with my early cultural pick, meant I had a strategic speed of 5, the minimum for a good defense.

I continued to ignore my neighbors, letting them make the first move as I wanted to expand some more. In pursuit of that goal, another colony ship was nearing construction which I intended to use to settle a Terran world at Vluis. So far so good, though I think taking a 50% penalty to population growth was a serious mistake. Oh well, I’m going to ride with it, so much the better if I can beat the AIs at these settings with a less than perfect race or strategy.

 

I continued my peaceful expansion, (cause I’m just a peace loving kind of guy), while also scouring every system I could in the hopes of exploring additional ruins. My initial decision to go with a reduced population growth rate was really biting now, and I compounded the problem by trying to increase the ecology level on some of my colonies, thereby dropping population growth to zero.

I could have scrapped the game and started another now that I had learned this lesson, but I decided not to. Live and learn.

Of course, I also knew the time would come when peace would be a thing of the past, and I slowly started to build up my forces for the inevitable.

 

The stage is set and all the players have made their entrance. We now see what happened to The Nova, the Lizards ate them for breakfast.

Looking at the AI factions, I would be impressed at their growth… were it not for the fact that it was due to egregious cheats being applied in their favour. Now let’s study the map together for a second, it seems hopeless yes? I mean there is no way I should be able to contest this game.

But what if I do? And more importantly what would be the cause?

Stay tuned…

 

One of the things I dislike about ISG, (which was not prevalent in MoO2), is how the AI expands. It does not take into account or give any consideration to defensible borders, it just spreads like a virus.

Apart from the fact that AI factions transverse through my territory, (try that in real life with a military force), the AI will just grab what it can, and stretch itself thin. Closed borders would help some as they would have to take a more structured approach to expansion, but I’m not sure that we’ll see anything like that here anytime soon.

Now for the session in play, we have the Moltar who decided that they would settle worlds directly to my south, putting my state right between two sections of their territory. First, I don’t allow myself to be surrounded, and second, they have made themselves an easier target than if they had more compact lines.

My first war is about to be launched. I have selected and timed my actions to strike at four systems simultaneously. One strike, at Iyigaa is a raid, a diversion. The rest of my strikes are intended to wrest territory from the Moltar and expand my state. (Why build a lot of colonies when my enemies can do the work for me?)

The Moltar are superior to me in every way, they have better tech and production, with a larger fleet. Let’s see how they fare against my smaller fleet which consists of a mostly Frigates and Destroyers with two Cruisers thrown in for good measure. In theory, at these settings, I should be beaten badly...

 

Man I got crushed… just kidding.

There are two tales to tell today.

On the strategic level, what occurred was a classic blitz followed by some furious counterattacks from the Moltar which were met and defeated by my own forces. I captured the Moltar colonies at Okadbor and Ophi as well as the outpost at Tarsiss. At the same time the Moltar established another colony at Ziabbif and an outpost at Gianna. I quickly took those two systems as well. Within six turns, the Moltar had lost a total of five systems, (three of those with colonies).

The Moltar counterattacked of course, but my more compact empire was easy to defend as I had enough strategic speed to rapidly send my forces to meet any threat and defeat the Moltar every single time. This is the first tale, one of rapid and fluid movements yielding excellent results… for me.

The second tale is one that can be best described as tedium ad nauseam. Every battle turned into a multi minute affair with some of those going over the limit of my patience. Every battle featured direct fire weapons missing more often than not, and missiles being ineffective. Every battle featured the majority of AI ships fleeing before they could be brought down.

The AI got the worse of it though. While these six turns took as long to play out as the entire game had up to this point, by the time they were over the Moltar had lost a “box” Titan, a Battleship, and a Destroyer. My own losses, (which my poor handling contributed to), were a single Frigate and one Destroyer. You can see by my SSP count, (subtract the assault ships that were consumed), that my losses were minimal and I would take this ratio every single time.

It was still early, and the war not long, but the results so far are indicated below.

 

Three arduous turns later I had completely expelled the Moltar interlopers from my back yard. During this time I took another system and fought numerous battles which resulted in a single Moltar Cruiser being captured and no other casualties on either side. Once again, neither side could score enough damage with the AI being slightly worse off than I was.

With my primary objectives achieved, I offered peace to the Moltar and to my utter shock they accepted. My intent wasn’t to exterminate them yet, and I had bigger fish, (lizards) to fry. (Yes, they’re next).

I had completed new designs for my ships which I thought would be able to take advantage of the AI’s shortcomings even more, and I started to upgrade some of them for the upcoming conflict against the Draguul. They too had started encroaching close to an area that I wished for myself, and I decided I would punish them for it. (Besides, taking on the most powerful AI faction with my small fleet should prove quite informative)

As you see, the brief war against the Moltar has left my state in a much better position and my fleet has grown.

 

I regrouped and redeployed my forces. A short while later I struck the Draguul at Zloas while also sending raider units at Grivutis and Vuklaums. The later two systems only had outposts and were not vital to my plans. My intent there was to distract the lizards more than anything else, if I could hold the systems, so much the better.

The main fighting centered at Zloas system. Here the lizards had two colonies and two outposts, meaning I had to commit forces to this location for multiple turns in order to take everything intact and fend off the Draguul counter-attacks.

For their part, the Draguul responded instantly by trying to relieve the systems I had targeted and also striking some of my own, but it was in vain. By this point I had a strategic speed of 8, (6 from Hyperdrive and 2 from my cultural pick), and was able to shift forces very effectively in order to meet their attacks. While only about half of my forces had been upgraded, the new designs were proving to be moderately more effective and I began to see my ships scoring hits more consistently than in the past. I saw no such similar effort from the AI.

As a result, by the time of the screenshot below the Draguul had lost five Destroyers while I suffered no casualties. The war rages now and the Draguul are still attempting to strike back.

 

Seeing that I lacked heavy ships, the Draguul were kind enough to provide me with one of their Cruisers. This captured ship was quite informative and I understood why my ships were now slightly more effective while the technologically superior AI ships were not. My latest designs emphasized direct fire weapons to a larger degree than my earlier ships. The AI on the other hand was emphasizing missile defense to the point that their ships were under-powered. I smiled.

Our war continues along the border and the Lizards are still smashing against my rock solid defenses. Apart from the Captured Cruiser, I destroyed two more Destroyers and one Cruiser… (though many enemy ships made good their escape). My own losses? none.

 

The Draguul continued their attacks, losing more ships along the way including a Battleship. I still had yet to suffer a single casualty.

Every session reaches a point where I know it’s over, far sooner than the game actually ends. For this session, I started getting that feeling on turn 201.

First I crushed a Draguul force at Tarsiss and managed to capture a Battleship, excellent as I had none of my own, just designs.




Then I sent a small force to Yaihex to intercept a Draguul Destroyer that was on the way but the Moltar showed up and declared war on me. I suffered the loss of a Frigate here but as you see it was more than worth it.




Now take a look at what’s being constructed at my homeworld. That design isn’t just an upgrade, it is a completely reconfigured Cruiser optimized to kill ships. That Battlecruiser has the firepower of AI Battleships and is intended to serve along with my existing Cruisers, not replace them. Along with this design, I have also created new concepts for Frigates and Destroyers, I will start producing them soon and add them to my ever-expanding navy.

P.S. I’m including the save from the game start should anyone want to confirm the game settings

 

I killed three Moltar Destroyers and one Titan at Tarsiss, (lots of action in that system) while losing only a single Destroyer myself. I managed to intercept them with my captured Draguul Battleship, two cruisers a Destroyer and two Frigates due to my excellent speed.
I also managed to fend off additional Draguul attacks destroying one of their Cruisers in the process along with a Destroyer.

Now look at this

I will have more to say about this in the morning.

 

I’m an above average player, but there are much better players out there. The kind of guys and gals that will analyze every aspect of the game, create the best race possible and squeeze every production/research point they can from the game. During this session I’ve been slightly ill and it’s hard to concentrate at times, I’ve made many mistakes. I did not understand the implications of my reduced population growth, I actually forgot to use support ships for the longest time, and only recently set up robo-miners on my homeworld. Because of this I basically have only one world that is producing everything, my home world. I’ve also had bad luck with leaders and wasted one by sending her to the wrong colony, I only have two ship leaders.

With this background then and the settings I am using, the performance of the AI is an embarrassment. No wait, let me clarify that. The strategic AI is doing very well, and considering the cheats it is employing that is expected. But these same cheats may have led the devs to believe that difficulty issues were solved, they have not. It is as I predicted a long time ago, now we just have to kill more inept ships for the same result, it’s a grind.

While some effective work was done in prior releases to shore up the combat AI, it has been un-done by this latest patch.

Look at this




And this



I’m getting angry now, as I have to slog through the rest of this in the hopes that they understand that they are not close to where they need to be. Their silence on this is damning.

Yesterday I posted a shot of the rankings, I’m last in everything, in MoO2 I would have been defeated, here however it is the AI that is beaten and I now have to go through the motions in the hope of driving home a point that should have been more evident to the dev team than it is to a player. So be it.

 

As the game wore on it became easier for me to destroy AI ships while at the same time it became harder for the AI to score hits, much less kill my ships. There were two main reasons for this.

The first was related to experience. My Ships had been fighting almost non-stop for close to fifty turns, and with such few losses on my part they had gained a lot of experience. The AI on the other hand had been losing its more experienced ships and I was now facing greener crews. This was realistic and I have no issue with it, even though it hurts the AI.

The second was my upgraded designs. I was now putting out yet another updated design and it was effective. Granted, with just a single productive world, I couldn’t upgrade all my ships and had four distinct classes in the field, from older designs that were mostly used to bait the AI into expending resources and space on PD weapons, to newer optimized ship killers. For its part the AI also upgraded its designs, incorporating more advanced weaponry, better armor and shields. However it’s designs continued to be under-powered and were now also missing quite a lot.

The Draguul had offered peace and I accepted. I knew this was just temporary and they would declare war again soon so I used the time to beat up on the Moltar a bit. Here is what happened.

The Moltar sustained their furious counter-attacks and in the process lost their three remaining Titans and some smaller ships at the cost of one of my Cruisers, (I should have been more careful). With their fleet weakened and the Draguul having sued for peace, I launched another attack and laid siege to Iyigaa where the lava-heads had two colonies. The Moltar tried to relive the system but in the end I captured both colonies and added them to my Empire.

The action to relieve Iyigaa was to their credit, as was their attempts to strike at my own systems, but the disparity in ship performance, (even though theirs were more advanced) resulted in catastrophic losses for them and allowed me to capture another battleship intact.




Here I encountered a bug. One of the Cruisers was also captured but when the battle ended it was listed as having fled and I was cheated of one of my prizes. No matter, one less Cruiser won’t make any difference now.

The only thing holding me back now from striking their core worlds are the warp interdictors they have placed there, I am loath to commit forces for so many turns at this point as I may need them elsewhere. This proved to be prudent on my part as soon the Kaek who are allied with the Moltar would attack and the Draguul would resume hostilities. But that is for the next post where we can see how I fare against three AIs at the same time while outnumber by a factor of 20 to 1.

 

The Kaek entered the war on the following turn. Yesterday I wrote about being outnumbered 20 to 1 total, was I exaggerating?

Break out your magnifying glass and look at this. There at the bottom is my fleet strength, you can see the Kaek at the top. You can also see the history behind my recent wars, how I destroyed vastly superior forces throughout the game.




By this point my entire fleet consisted of 2 Battleships, 5 Cruisers, 8 Destroyers, and 10 Frigates. I destroyed more ships than were in my entire fleet within the next few turns, with half of those on this one turn shown below. Here the Draguul declared war again, (big surprise), and I defeated SIX attempts by the combined AIs in a single turn while losing a single Frigate.

Recently I read a player review on steam that claimed ISG is utter trash. I don’t agree with that at all. In fact, there are several aspects of ISG that are more fun than what can be found in a game like Stellaris, this game isn’t just combat.

I’ve praised and supported this game, and I’ve bashed it, but I always stayed true. ISG has a lot of great things going on but there are serious deficiencies as well. The AI is critical in a game like this, and while it performs well on the strategic level, adequately at the operational, it is unacceptably poor at the tactical. This combined with some overall balance issues are holding this game back and graphical updates won’t fix that.

I’m hopeful that the next patch will address some of these things, obstinacy will not help here.

As for me, the manual battles are taking their toll, (even though I’ve switched to outright destruction rather than attempting to capture more ships in the hopes of making the battles shorter). I have wave upon wave of AI ships coming at me, and not only can they not break my lines, they are slowly losing ground… but it’s tedious. In light of that then, I will take a short break before resuming my slaughter of hapless ships.

 

Thank you for the kind words @Kerobelis
Losing by vote is very possible... in which case I will refuse to accept it and fight them all at once. If this happens too quickly I will be overwhelmed, time is actually on my side as I can grow (slowly) while bringing down the AIs through slow attrition. We'll see, I'll pick it up again in a day or two after I get a little rest.

 

After taking a one day break from the game, I resumed my struggle against the Aliens. The next fifteen turns were basically just a repeat of what I had experienced so far. The AI continued to send wave after wave against my systems and was beaten back every time. I Destroyed dozens of ships and suffered no further casualties, I even managed to capture an additional three Destroyers during this time frame.

Apart from the combat, I saw some weird behavior from the Draguul. In the midst of our conflict, they sent a colony ship to Zrer which was behind my lines. I guess the AI is programmed to colonize everything it can and when there was little left to settle, it chose this world. Excellent, I allowed the colony ship to complete its task and promptly invaded the new-found colony. I did have to chase down the escorts which split up once the colony was established and attempted to strike deep into my territory, but with my speed and disposition of forces it was not a problem.

The Sulak have taken a beating and are almost wiped out, there goes my trade treaty.

Pike of course asked for shore leave in the middle of all this and I had to grant it, but he is back now. I’ve gained a bit more territory, switched back to the offensive, and have my third battleship under construction. Considering that I’ve been holding the enemy off with a fleet that has only two Battleships, I am salivating at the thought of what I can do with a third.

 

Epilogue

The game got the better of me, not the AI mind you, the game itself. I played a few more turns but it was more of the same. Each turn featured multiple battles as the AI factions were able to produce ships quickly and make up their losses for the most part. The thought of playing several dozen more turns and fighting an untold number of battles was not appealing. I couldn't win by vote and the AI could not defeat me military, so I quit.

It is here that MoO2, (which suffered from its own deficiencies), was clearly superior to ISG. At this point, I would have just attacked the Antaran Homeworld and concluded the game in that fashion. We have nothing like that here. In ISG we can only win by conquest or vote, and a lot of times, (on the harder settings), this is the same thing.

Lot of potential with this game...a lot of work still needs to be done though.