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[joulupunikki]

Turn Sent

Eh. So much for Hawkwood's deterrent, I guess.

That was my thought as well, but the "protection" is still alive and well.
And very very fragile. No one assassinate it please, it will get all over the carpet.

I have no idea where the Decados message came from, I didn't get it on my screen.

Yet another undocumented bug feature ? I've had messages about the Spanish Inquisition coming to purge my heretic labs, but I haven't seen church ships in orbit (I doubt the church has much ships left ...), or inquisitors on the ground (I have checked with high spot units in orbit and around labs) ... and for quite some turns, I've had x labs, but x + 1 labs have been reported on the research screen. One phantom lab has been allocated to the last tech in the list. No research points have been accumulated. It's fun seeing this stuff for the first time, you are like "Oh 5h17, is it gonna crash ?  " Maybe the inquisitors are going after the phantom lab ?



And with Plague bombs, you can have your cake and eat it too !

A Plague Bomb can only be set off by combat. It's set off whenever it attacks or defends, regardless of the outcome of the combat.
BUG: If a Plague Bomb survives the combat in which it's set off, it is not removed from the game. This means it can be used again elsewhere!

So if you send just enough assassins to kill nobles the bomb will survive.

[Kebooo]

I imagine the inquisition messages are independent of the church's ability to carry out their threats. Which makes me wonder, what if every church unit in the galaxy was eliminated, would they still send threats? Would they have a turn, and vote? I don't think I've ever experimented with that.

[Gollor]

I am sorry, I currently have an exam session in my university and this takes a lot of time... So I am not sure when I will finish this turn. It can be this weekend, but you should better expect it only after the 25 June, when I will have my last (and also the math one!) exam.

[Gollor]

Turn Sent (5 days ago, exactly)

The High Lords of Great Houses!

Al Malik pronounces that from now on we withdraw from the warfare with Hazat!

The decision, though, was somewhat usurped by the actions that were taken by Al Malik secret troops performed the month before. They assaulted the chemistry facility of Hazat on Byzantium Secundus and subdued it to Al Malik banner. The gossips in Al Malik military also tell about Hazat captured officers and soldiers on Criticorum, but they were not proven.

The politic relations between Al Malik and Hazat now heavily rely either Lazarus will accept the current situation or will proceed with counter attacking.

[Margrave]

How's the turn looking folks?

[joulupunikki]

Turn Sent (8.5 days, a record which hopefully will not be beaten soon ...)

20 gems paid to the Vau for one settlement

[Il Palazzo]

Aaaaaaah! It crashed!
And I was nearly done 

Eh, I'll redo it tomorrow morning - it should go faster this time since I know what I'm doing.
I bet the RNGod will hate me this time.

[Margrave]

Oh that sucks. My condolences, clearly the Vau did it, they who turn our chickens green, abduct our maps and cause gum disease and the dreaded gingivitis.

So I propose to my fellow humans that we rid the universe of the schemers and make war on their kind. I'm sure it will kill a great many of our soldiers so I volunteer the pious Decados and cunning Li Halan to do it.

Good luck, the very stability of our heretical League think machines depends on you.

[Il Palazzo]

Turn sent

The crimes of Decados know no bounds!
Last week our reporters broke the news of Vladimir Decados (we won't tarnish the holy name of Zebulon by using Vlad's self-styled mockery of a name) being mean to old ladies and little children. This week he upped the ante by deliberately crashing his flagship onto an unsuspecting village on Criticorum. What a heartless bastard! We spoke with a local peasant who witnessed these events:
- 'I was ploughing my wif... I mean, my land, m'lord, when I looked up and here there it was that hideous thing falling right from the sky. It killed my Bessy - that's me cow, good animal it was that one - and plonked out the bell from the tower of a church next village away. I mean, only Decados would let it fall on a holy place of worship, let me tell you.
It also killed the pastor as he was giving a sermon on the dangers of space travel. Everyone agreed he was very convincing.'

-Brought to you by Completely Unbiased Newsagency of Aragon(R)

[Kebooo]

Turn sent.

What this game has taught me so far is that the low level ship spam is very effective.

And, ahem, Zebulon II's birth name is Nicolai.

[Il Palazzo]

The question is whether it is too effective, and requires adjustments to the unit.dat file (for future games), or do players just need to learn to adapt?

The way I see it, the tactic depends on being able to attack with more ships than the defending fleet has, since every extra ship you've got means that one of the defenders will be targeted twice. With the damage table such as it is (i.e., all hits do 'some' damage), this can nicely stack up and destroy even heavily armoured dreadnoughts. Same goes for regular battles, btw - you always want to have a full complement when attacking.

The best defence is then to keep those of your fleets in danger of fighter attack at close to full strength. The maximum of fighters that can be brought to bear in one attack is 16, so having a comparable or a ship or two larger a fleet should be sufficient to fend them off without suffering much damage.

That's how I understand the mechanics of it, at least. I gotta I haven't seen the defensive strategy tested yet.

[Kebooo]

I think the biggest thing is their combined mobility and how cheap/fast they are to build. I'm certainly going to start churning them out, which isn't exactly the kind of ideal EFS space battles I like, but neither is the 20 dreadnought stack. It's unfortunate EFS wasn't built in a way that units could provide synergies with one another to encourage mixed fleet stacks, rather than huge bomber raids or huge ultra dreadnought death stacks.

1 turn, 2 gem bombers is probably a bit too little in cost given their effectiveness. A single Charioteer dreadnought takes 5 turns and 20 gems. I wouldn't think anything of this disparity, since quality over quantity matters once you hit the 20 limit, but their mobility is game-changing. The only reason I split that fleet like that was I assumed you didn't have enough left to mount an effective raid. Their presence, given how cheap they are, will force me into the ultra death stack slow-attrition kind of strategy, which tends to be the eventual death knell of EFS games.

[joulupunikki]

(Note: I've been even more slow than usual in my play lately, I've had persistent stomach problems and subsequent lack of sleep. Must be this plague that has been rumored on Byzantium II ... hopefully things are going better/faster now)

I think the biggest thing is their combined mobility and how cheap/fast they are to build. I'm certainly going to start churning them out, which isn't exactly the kind of ideal EFS space battles I like, but neither is the 20 dreadnought stack. It's unfortunate EFS wasn't built in a way that units could provide synergies with one another to encourage mixed fleet stacks, rather than huge bomber raids or huge ultra dreadnought death stacks.

1 turn, 2 gem bombers is probably a bit too little in cost given their effectiveness. A single Charioteer dreadnought takes 5 turns and 20 gems. I wouldn't think anything of this disparity, since quality over quantity matters once you hit the 20 limit, but their mobility is game-changing. The only reason I split that fleet like that was I assumed you didn't have enough left to mount an effective raid. Their presence, given how cheap they are, will force me into the ultra death stack slow-attrition kind of strategy, which tends to be the eventual death knell of EFS games.

Regarding the attack damage table having too flat curve, I think Matt Caspermeyer's Hyperion mod has been the only one to address that. Here is the table from the latest Hyperion.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Code: [Select]

// Attack Damage Table
// Numbers are adjusted to favor advantages for a high attack to armor ratio
// and disadvantages for a low attack to armor ratio
//
// Damage computed is determined by the attack strength to armor ratio,
// generating a random number from 1-10, and then selecting the damage
// done from the following table:
//
//      1-5     1-4     1-3     1-2     1-1     2-1     3-1     4-1     5-1     6-1     7-1     8-1
//--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
{
"         0       0       1       2       4       8      20      38      56      71      86     95 "
"         0       0       3       5       9      20      35      54      69      82      93     98 "
"         0       1       5       9      16      32      49      66      80      91      98    100 "
"         0       2       7      13      23      41      60      76      88      97     100    100 "
"         0       4       9      17      29      47      66      81      93     100     100    100 "
"         1       5      10      19      32      50      68      83      95     100     100    100 "
"         0       3       8      16      28      46      65      80      92     100     100    100 "
"         0       2       6      12      22      40      58      74      86      96     100    100 "
"         0       1       4       8      15      30      46      64      78      90      97    100 "
"         0       0       2       3       8      18      32      51      68      81      92     97 "
}
//--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Avg: 0.1     1.8     5.5    10.4    18.6    33.2    49.9    66.7    80.5    90.8    96.6     99 "
//
// Changes from V1.1 to V1.4
//
// Reshaped columnar damage distrubitions so more consistent damage is
// generated (note highest values are in the middle for easy plotting in Excel).
// 1-5 now does not do any damage (well, an average of 0.1 so that
// infinite loops do not occur) - a unit with less than 1/5
// of the defender's armor is assumed to have weapons that cannot
// penetrate the defender's armor.
// 8-1 now almost always (70%) destroys the target - a unit with 8 times
// that of the defender's armor is assumed to have weapons that
// incinerate (or nearly incinerate) the target.
// 1-4 to 7-1 have been changed so that an S-shaped curve is formed
// with respect to the damage.
//
// Changes V1.0 to V1.1
//
// Increased the resolution of the attack tables, not as many redundant numbers.

[Margrave]

Turn Sent

One trend I've noticed so far is there are a lot of units that take only one turn to build. It might help balance the game at least a little if they were bumped up to two turns or more. Especially for units like the star fighter and the fighter jet. Slayer Assassins might benefit from this too.

I'm all for swarms of killers to roam loose on Byzantium but it would be nice to be able to compensate with reliable bodyguards that don't take three turns to build. The Vorox would have worked well for this if the game wasn't quite so easy to break.

Also this version of the game definitely rewards pumping out quantity, (taking from my faulty memory) the difference between the rank 1 light tank meatshield with 70 armor is two turns and piddly resource costs. The same rank Assault tank with just 20 more armor plus some okayish agility is three turns and some hefty advanced resource costs not to mention the research investment. It gets more move points and a spread of other small upgrades but it lacks the potency of the Nova version.

I'd rather churn out the first tank you research in the game and get almost the same deal. Sure more will die, but unless I'm restricted by stack limits or transport capacity I see no point in the investment.

Of course there are still units I have yet to see/use like these infamous floating planet destroyers, but a good number of the units in the game lack a a clear niche, or at least still get unused because there are either better/cheaper versions or the time to build/resource cost is out of whack.

Don't get me wrong, I like the game, but this crazy diamond needs more shining.

[Il Palazzo]

Does anyone know if there's a good unit viewer where you plug in a unit.dat file and can more easily read all the information about them? Rank, tech, etc. If one doesn't exist, I think I'm going to go ahead and make one

Here is an ODF spreadsheet of the current game unit.dat. I did a bit of preprocessing to get the dat-file into LibreOffice. Sorted by MT/Rank

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7pbLNesu2qwM2lMRm5JSXZoV0k

Hey, joulupunikki, how did you get the dat file into the spreadsheet format? I suspect you did not painstakingly copy everything by hand?

I'm asking because I've got my mind half made up to put all the techs, and maybe some other files into spreadsheet format. Play with it all a bit, maybe.