Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

n/a

0 (0%)

n/a

0 (0%)

Total Members Voted: 0

[Kebooo]

Yeah, thanks for that. I honestly wish there was some better chronicle of our game, a view into the wars mainiac and I are fighting, or the riveting southern Vau wars, which must be especially dramatic since the Vau ambassador keeps telling me to keep humanity in check.

The highs, the lows, the actual in game drama, most of this is missed by outsiders. Then again, I don't really know anything that's happened outside of my own worlds, Cadavus, Vera Cruz and Tethys. Oh and that assassination.

(Turn is going to have to wait until tomorrow)

[Parsely]

What IS this game really? Just glancing through Unread Posts and happened upon it.

[EuchreJack]

This lurker has enjoyed the Stigmata Garrison Update, thanks Margrave.

[mainiac]

What IS this game really? Just glancing through Unread Posts and happened upon it.

It's a 4X game with a couple twists.

The first is the economic system.  Different cities are factory types that turn basic resources (food, metal, oil, rare elements, exotic plants, diamonds) into more progressively more advanced resource types (chemicals, electronics, biochems, ceramsteel, monopoles, wetware, singularities).  This creates a dynamic that makes you want to struggle for raw resources but still need to ship them between worlds.  For instance gems are essential to the singularities that ship jump drives require and are in limited supply everywhere so a world with three or four gem mines is a major strategic asset.  But a world with gems might be lacking in other things.  This drives player strategy.  For instance I only ever started my assassin recruiting plan because I had a world that was rich in exotic plants but had few rare element sources and was under church blockade.  As such I had few unit paths available to me, asssasins being one of them.

The real masterstroke however is the ministry system.  There are three ministries but five players to divide them among with no player being capable of holding two.  The most powerful ministry is generally agreed to be the imperial fleet (a pair of powerful navies), the next the stigmatia garrison (a middling navy and some strong infantry as well as an economic base on a world bordering hostile aliens) and the least powerful the imperial eye (a garrison on every player's world and a powerful garrison on the neutral world of Byzantium as well as some transports).  The regent assigns these ministries (and can enter binding contracts ahead of time) so triumvirates are formed to vie over the regency and it's ministries.

The game is set up in a way that makes it more unstable as time goes on.  As the players expand the relative power of the ministries decline.  The imperial fleet will probably get trashed at some point as well, making it an empty ministry.  Additionally players can't cast their votes or hold ministries if they don't have one of thier "noble" units on the planet Byzantium and nobles can't be built (although it is possible to capture them on rare occasion).  So the triumvirate system breaks down eventually.  In the game we are currently in Keboo lost his nobles on Byzantium to my assassins so he is shut out of ministry politics.

[Parsely]

How very interesting. Sounds like quite the game there.

[Il Palazzo]

@mainiac

I disagree with your analysis of the ministries' value.
The Fleet has indeed the easiest to use and posesses strongest units, but it's very situational. That is, you have to be at war to make good use of it. Sure, you can bomb some rebels from the orbit, but that's a minor thing.
It's other stregth lies in the "fleet in being" effect on other players. That is, it dissuades aggression against the holder of the ministry, but it's practically irrelevant in the early game, and from the mid-game peak onward it's got an ever diminshing value.
I should also mention that even devoid of its ships, it still posesses a large garrison on Byzantium, with less-advanced, but significantly more numerous troops than the Eye, and backed by the infrastructure to produce and, perhaps more importantly, transport more. So it's not like it ever becomes an empty ministry.


Still, for the better part of the game, when most players are not at war, I'd much prefer the Eye. Mainiac did not mention the main asset of the ministry, which is a number of spies and easy way to transport them across the galaxy.
The knowledge of other player's actual strengths and weaknesses(as opposed to the useless score graphs) is invaluable to planning one's strategy.
The many spies and lander transports allow for rapid exploration, and facilitate pinpointing and conquest of ruins and valuable land.
These are all immediate gains, with large impact on the way you conduct your expansion and diplomacy, while the Fleet spends most of the time just sitting there, doing not much at all.


Stigmata, apart from being too much of an additional micromanagement for my taste, similarly allows for immediate gain by clearing the ruins on Symbiot worlds.
In most games their tiny fleet is almost certainly destroyed by the symbiots, but in this one it is intact, allowing it to gain access to ruins on other worlds, and perform a similar to the Fleet's role of aggression deterrent, albeit unlike the fleet, it's mostly about the land units.
Of course, the ruins are a scarce and non-renewable resource, so the potential gains are limited.
There's also the possibility of the ministry controller gaining access to the resources in Symbiot worlds, but this is very much dependent on how close to the Stigmata a given house is located.


What I'm saying is far from trying to rank the ministries. In my opinion the value of each depends strongly on the circumstances one finds himself in, but it so happens that the circumstances for usefulness for the Fleet are the rarest, even if it does pack the strongest punch.

[Kebooo]

The fleet is kind of a double edged sword. Abuse it and a decent cast of players will simply kick you out from the ministry and use it against you. That is the beauty of the ministries, in my opinion. I could have used the garrison to clear out worlds, but if I lost it, then the garrison is on my worlds. Actually, I might as well fess up to using a few DNA assault legions on Cadavus to clear out the palace area. Mainiac didn't meet much resistance there at all because of it, which drove me crazy. But I didn't want to admit to using the garrison for my own gain. Now that we're pretty much in all out war and I don't even have a noble on Byzantium II, I figure that admission doesn't amount to much.

And I know Palazzo has probably gained an outrageous intelligence advantage over everyone with the eye. I have no idea what is going on in the southern reaches. I couldn't tell you who has the most powerful fleet or force or industry down there. I have a complete lack of intelligence outside of Decados/Li Halan worlds. And I think those kinds of things are important. I have a hard time imagining what's even going to happen in the next few decades. Mainiac and I are destroying each other's units and resources, while every other house grows richer and fatter. What kind of galactic chaos is going to happen? I can't wait to find out.

[Margrave]

I'm glad that folks liked the Garrison Update, although I probably won't produce another for some time until something interesting happens besides moving the army three spaces and building mines.

And once this struggle with the Vau ends I could probably post a short update on how it went about. Its certainly going to be an interesting fight that's for sure.

[mainiac]

Might I inquire as to the nature of the delay or is it something Keboo would rather not discuss?

[Kebooo]

Just a work related delay.

Turn sent.

[Aqizzar]

Turn sent.  I actually found myself running out of things to do.


I'll agree that the Fleet is a bit of a paper tiger.  It's power early on when everyone else has three ships to stand against it, but it's not long before it's completely outmoded and unless you have stupendous amounts of cash you can't replace any of their losses.  If you have the kind of resources to build starships, you can just build a starport at home and make ones for yourself.  And if you do dare to use the Fleet, you can count on being a diplomatic pariah for a long time after.

Honestly, I think the Eye is underrated.  The ability to know exactly what the other players are up to is pretty powerful in its own right, except for how easily demolished the Eye is.

[mainiac]

Yeah the moment you go into open war with someone they will remove your fort if you are the eye.  Makes me think that the eye should be given some sort of invincible base instead of an easily conquered fort.

[Il Palazzo]

But the forts are the least of Eye's assets. With house rules preventing attacks on them until after the first controller can evacuate the important units, their existence is of little value - mostly in the fluff department.

[mainiac]

I'm just saying that eye forces are pretty easy to eliminate once the eye is at war with someone.  The eye will be quickly reduced to it's holding on Byzantium making it even more hollow then the fleet.

[Margrave]

(Turn sent.)