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[Il Palazzo]

No it did not show in my reports. It shown noble/battlemaster, and your relic only.
No matter. The improtant mistakes had been made earlier anyway, the current situation is but a logical conclusion.

[Kebooo]

Interesting. It must not show up in your battle report because they were destroyed on my turn. I imagine if they hadn't counted then the first round would have been very lopsided in my favor, due to the dreadnoughts + strength bonus.

I think if you hadn't moved your main fleet from Byzantium, you could have held control of the space for another 3-4 turns at least and it would have been very hard for us to clear the surface in the 2-3 turns left after that.

[Il Palazzo]

Hmm, by this logic my noble's bonuses should be absent from there as well. Probably just some interface glitch.

If I had a shred of hope for winning that engagement, I would certainly hope for better luck with accuracy rolls. One hit in ranged phase with five shooters and the Eye was not exactly what I expected from the famed relic. By my calculations a cruiser should have a 35% chance of hitting a cloaked archangel, 40% for a dreadnought.
Alas, with initiative on your side, it was but a question of how much damage will I be able to inflict, so there's no point in dwelling on it.
Although I would love for the combat mechanics to be a little more clearly laid out(among myriad other things).

I think if you hadn't moved your main fleet from Byzantium, you could have held control of the space for another 3-4 turns at least and it would have been very hard for us to clear the surface in the 2-3 turns left after that.

Indeed. The reasoning behind that move was half-arsed at best.
There's been other quite damn silly moves on my part, I must admit. Including resting my damaged ships on Vril-Ya after battling mainiac - cue Aqizzar destroying them handily. Or scouting that same planet's orbit with a dreadnought just to find Margrave's ships there, and then deciding to send half the Imperial Fleet there to serve as shooting practice. Or wasting half my Dopplegangers on Aqizzar's defenders for no good reason at all(again, Vril-Ya. What a pain in the neck, that planet).
I'm not above complimenting my own planning, up to the claiming of the throne, but since then I've been doing lots of really elementary mistakes. Boy is it painful to watch all that good work go to waste.

Which is not to say that I'm giving up. The throne is rightfully mine!
The people voted me in.

Turn has been sent

[Kebooo]

Yeah, honestly it seems like some weird mechanic or chain of bad luck (maybe units being destroyed by indirect fire and the combat visual not properly showing it) has to be what explains that second round. It seems like there should have been at least a hit. I wonder if I simply had miraculous luck, or if that is how a lot of simulations of that encounter would go.

Chaos reigned on Byzantium Secundus, heralding the long awaited return of the Decados to the throne world. Cities were callously scorched by ruthless bombers built with heinous and forbidden technology. Armored, soulless soldiers, hardly distinguishable from machine, went door to door, fighting tooth and nail. Everywhere the corpses of the Decados and Hazat were strewn about in the streets. Mighty Hazat hosts still stood unscathed, barricaded while holding out hope for a final, decisive election that the masses would respect. Decados fleets poured into Vril-ya, expanding the war and ensuring more blood would be shed. And all this for a crown.

Turn sent.

[Aqizzar]

Turn sent.  Now things are getting interesting... right as the lull in constant expansion attempts has finally given me a stable economy at the very end of the game.

[Kebooo]

Weren't things pretty interesting when Palazzo destroyed mainiac's fleet so you, the sitting emperor pretender, destroyed Palazzo's fleet above Vril-ya, then he ejected us all from Byzantium, made a daring grab of your scepters on your home world, waged war with you on Vril-ya, declared himself emperor, followed up by al-Malik's incursion against the Hazat homeworld, the fight over Absolution, and epic space battles with the other two houses and now open warfare on Byzantium?

And that's to say nothing of the Cadavus saga.

[Il Palazzo]

While I can't be certain, I think Aqizzar was complaining about the amount of attention one needs to divert towards building a functioning economy, for the better part of the game. Once that's out of the way, it's just the meaty stuff to play with, and the game doesn't feel like so much of a chore.
I'm sure nobody is denying the drama and intrigue that this game has abounded with, it's just that it gets diluted in the other stuff so much that it's sometimes hard to appreciate

That's what I like about the mod the guys that popped up recently made. The galaxy is already settled, so the fun starts at the outset.

[mainiac]

I think the 4X part is a necessary ingrediant for the fun.  If the galaxy starts out at a balance then it removes a lot of the certainty and the potential for dealmaking.  I do agree that the 4X is waaaay to micro intensive though.

[Margrave]

I agree with mainiac that a big part of the game is deciding how you want to set up your economy. A lot of my thinking went into on ocean worlds at least for setting up wells within protective cover of a shielded palace island in range of Laser to space defenses to house fleets and aircraft.

I think a mixed approach would work, more infrastructure on contestable worlds caught between multiple Houses while leaving some backwaters. I like that a big part of the game would be fighting over valuable and hard to replace biofarms/singularity/gem mines.

Now if only the Symbiots were a little smarter and could replace their fleet losses...

[mainiac]

I'd love to make a remake of this where factories are a limited resource that a given planet can only have so many of.

Hey, anyone want to make a remake?  I can't really do GUI but I could handle a lot of the behind the hood programming.

[Kebooo]

I've always told myself I want to remake this game and fix all the problems it had. Maybe even use the same graphics. I started to learn the XNA libraries but stopped. In the back of my head I still say "I'm going to remake EFS one day".

[Il Palazzo]

Lap was working on a remake up until a while back. The development seems to have died, though. Still there's quite a bit of code already in, if you want to check it out.
http://www.echoesofimperium.com/eoi-forum/index.php

[mainiac]

I think that's more of a spiritual successor then a remake.

I think at the core this game is a hex based 4X with the election mechanic, battle rules and resource chain based economy.  That's a combination that works surprisingly well.  There are things that I want tweak but I feel like those tweaks need to be minor like a simple limit on number of factories per planet.  This game has a lot of intrigue but it comes organically from the election and 4X elements.  So I think it should just be about getting those mechanics there.  You can even remove stuff that doesn't contribute, taxes, unit upkeep, church vote buying, research, relics, scepters, resource storage, maybe even space battles.  Because these things aren't what drives the game, it's those core mechanics of 4X, elections, battles and resources.

[Kebooo]

I always felt like EFS needed more decision making and less micromanagement. For example, I wish controlling a church and setting the sect had some long term strategic value to it, same with electing the Patriarch. I think the election mechanic should be done a little differently, the whole 10 years on the surface to vote again seems silly, but it's almost necessary for anyone to ever get elected. Assassinations should be easier to carry out without open war on the surface (perhaps there is special combat where only certain units, assassins, bodyguards, etc, take part).

I couldn't imagine doing away with space battles, but I'd also like to see it so you can't effectively blockade a planet with space superiority. Perhaps units can jump and still have movement points left to land, or there could be ships capable of two jumps, etc. I like the stealth raider mechanic, where we don't know the other has those units there. Spies too. I would like to see more covert movements in the game. I'd like to see rebels have more of a role in the game too. Too much of the early game is very predictable and vanilla.

Engineer building, resource management, and unit queues are really what take up a lot of my turn. Just the "such and such unit finished, what would you like to build next" screen being fixed would probably reduce my turn lengths by 30%. Waypoints, auto-queues, etc, could do that. Perhaps building multiple units at once, so you could build 5 assault legions and they all stack together. And the larger and larger your force goes, the more difficult it becomes to upkeep it, like in Dominions. I think there are a lot of ways to streamline EFS without taking away the core of the game. I don't want to open up my turn and play it in 10 minutes. But I also don't want 1+ hour turns. Also, saving mid-turn would have made life much better. And other little touches, like the church inquisition continuing to be a part of the game, symbiots staying a threat, the ministries not starting out ridiculously powerful and then ending up completely trivial, etc.

[Aqizzar]

Hey, anyone want to make a remake?  I can't really do GUI but I could handle a lot of the behind the hood programming.

See as I'm already programming a 4X-type game, I would jump at the chance to do something actually cool like that.  At the same time, I need another half-baked, overly ambitious game project like I need a hole in the head.