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[Kebooo]

I hate to see this game end, since finding this topic in a google search is how I ever found these forums, plus watching games I'm not a part of is great.

Having loaded one of the latest turns and looked around, the AI is heavily exploitable and mainiac was taking them over.  With the worlds he controlled, and eventually traditional Hazat worlds, he would have been hard to stop.  I'm actually surprised maniac even cared people were ganging up on him since he is outpacing everyone in basically every meaningful resource by almost double except metal and gems.

As I've said before, most EFS games inevitably die, if you think this micromanagement is bad, just imagine turn 150 when turns can take 2 hours to play.  Of course, that's my favorite part of the game, when you have 100+ warships and seemingly limitless armies to pit against each other.

[mainiac]

two hours?  I reached that around turn 35...  Which is probably why I had the strong economy.  People say you can't squeeze water from a stone, but I say you can squeeze water from the fuggin desert sand with enough micromanagement.

But the economic lead wasn't as strong as it seemed for two reasons.  Number 1, the fleet.  'Nuff said.  Number 2, extremely tenuous logistics.  I not only needed to keep resources flowing between ten different worlds, but I had to keep troops flowing between those worlds too if I wanted to keep my lead.

Now combine those two things...

[Il Palazzo]

I myself was very proud of my crazy efficient homeworld, and how I could assemble enough ships to actually challenge mainiac on equal terms, despite being de facto stuck on one planet for most part of the game. Damn, I remember how I had to take loans from League several times and then struggling to pay them back. Fun times.

[mainiac]

Il, you want to continue this game as allies and call it a draw once we stomp the other two?

[Kebooo]

Well, I usually don't consider the fleet since eventually it becomes destroyed, never rebuilt, and its size pales in comparison to stacks of 20 dreadnaughts and so forth.  It's really powerful early on though.  Your ships can be replaced, its won't.

I think your game in general didn't really pick up the pace it should have, which can make the game less fun since plans end up taking so long to set in motion.  If you have say, 40 bulk haulers, logistics no longer are an issue.  For example, in turn 29 of our random game, I'm producing more metal than anyone in turn 60+ of this game, partly because I believe in forcing an obsession with metal/food and avoiding early conflict at any cost, since food/metal should be the players' focus until they can make 20-25 engineers per turn.  In your game, mlittle is producing the most metal, which I assume he focused on after taking over the Decados.  In the random game, he's keeping up with me and I'm certain his resource production is on par with mine, possibly greater.  mlittle was definitely your greatest long term threat in your game because deep down I know he has the metal obsession.

[Il Palazzo]

Il, you want to continue this game as allies and call it a draw once we stomp the other two?

Hehe, that'd be a nasty surprise to Aq and M. Unfortunately, I could easily see that if I hadn't opposed you, I could never reach your level of economic advancement. In the end it'd me in my small corner of the galaxy, and yo,u owning the remaining 90% of it. If anything I'd have to admit that you've won, rather than calling it a draw.

Kebooo, I actually liked the way things unfolded here, with (relatively)small fleets, constant shortage of resources, and frantic searching for any imaginable asset that could tip the balance on one's side. The vision of hundreds of bulk haulers and fifty engineers per turn seems somewhat unatractive, however efficient.

[mainiac]

I much prefer resource scarcity myself.  Makes for a funner game.  Thats the big problem with EFS.  It's supposed to portray a dark ages, a stagnant society.  But if you actually look at how the game unfolds it's a very, very dynamic society that is in the middle of explosive economic and technological growth.  The rush to colonize essentially virgin lands is fueling a massive boom in heavy industry.  The wealth of these lands create huge industrial megacities and fund huge research investments into new industries.  Just consider how easy it is to have a cyclotron by turn 50.  That means that you have a single city who's output is worth as much as your entire kingdom's was a hundred years before.  Far from portraying the dark ages, EFS is about the industrial revolution.

[Aqizzar]

Cyclotron by 50?  Hell, I think I had one by 30, I just couldn't hold onto enough metal and ceramsteel to build a serious fleet.  Most of my planets were pretty underdeveloped, because I would just pack up my low-tech invasion force and hop off to another rebel planet as soon as I finished conquering the last one.

I prefer resource scarcity myself, because it makes for a more tense and rounded game, otherwise it's just a matter of production speed.  If anything, I think mainiac's ownership of half the galaxy was proof that we really needed a fifth player to balance him out of that whole southeast wing of the galaxy.  Pity you can't change a player from AI to human after starting.  I don't know why we didn't wait for somebody else to join.

[mainiac]

I don't think a fifth player would have slowed me all that much, as my presence in the southwest was extremely light.  My economy strength was due to engineers built, not planets conquered.

It might make for a much better game simply by multiplying the cost of an engineer by 10 or 20.

[Kebooo]

I like the role playing aspects of resource scarcity, but unfortunately I feel it tears apart the gameplay.  For example, there is a lot of randomness to combat, to have an entire game decided by a single turn of a fleet battle would just destroy the strategy aspects of the game.  There's not much you can do if your opponent is luckier than you.  With more units you have a buffer against that, and can wage multiple wars on multiple fronts and don't have to think "ten turns from now I can do X" when ten turns in PBEM could very well be months.

In the lore of the universe, each house ended up having huge, technologically advanced forces and the emperor wars were supposed to be the time of rapid advance and recovery, at least militarily, showing humans really could only get it together when it comes to finding new ways to kill each other.  I think you guys are underestimating the joy of enormous EFS battles in PBEM, blitzkrieging planets becomes viable, which creates this paranoid environment where everyone suspects everyone of plotting to take one of their planets.  Being able to send in 30 marauder legions to start a ground invasion of some fortress world is something resource scarce games just can't reproduce.  Feelings of desperation and betrayal grow that much greater.  I guess I just love the absurd levels of micromanagement an EFS game blooms into.  I'm already paranoid about mlittle in the other game because of the fact he is possibly outpacing me.

[Il Palazzo]

Well, we've never really seen huge battlefleets, so we can't really tell how fun it'd be.
Actually, maybe mainiac's idea of multiplying engineer's cost wouldn't be that bad? After all, it'd be only engineers that would get more expensive, you could still churn out armed forces at the usual rate(well, limited by resources, but still). All the conquerable cities would become so much more important. Right now, when you conquer e.g.a fusorium on some outlying planet, it's hardly ever used for it's designated production, as your industrial centers handle all that stuff. Transporting resources between planets would become much more important. Same with trade, which is probably the biggest problem, knowing that the League doesn't handle Agoras' replenishing very well(why is there no easy way to trade with other players?).

[mainiac]

Does anyone have an opinion on the idea of turning EFS into a forum game, btw?

[Kebooo]

There's been mods that explore resource scarcity, Hyperion was more along those lines.  Default EFS and Nova ultimately all have a form of resource scarcity in gems which restricts you on how often you can build jump capable ships.  The expensive engineers are a theory I like too, but I just don't think it would translate well into how the game flows, primarily because the galaxy is not balanced and it would slow down an already very slow game that virtually no one ever finishes.  I too would have liked to see industrial cities cost more and be more important.  Perhaps if there had been two kinds of engineers, one that builds primitive, low tech cities like mines, farms and wells, and 20x as expensive advanced engineers used to build forts, starports, production industry and so on.  That way you could build up the resource infrastructure at the same pace, but a fort, or starport, or cyclotron would all become immeasurably more important than they already are.

Suppose you were betrayed early in the game and lost most of your starting transports, with greater engineer costs of that magnitude, if there wasn't some kind of compensation of resources, it could literally be 75 turns before you create transports again.  I think the ability to create overpowering forces that can overwhelm defenses is one of the only ways its possible to win at all. 

A forum game is interesting, considering fading suns itself was a role playing game in the vain of D&D.  But I'm not sure I would be very interested in it, if only because I prefer graphical representations when a game is of this magnitude.

[mainiac]

That would mean that transports are actually worth something, eh?

[Kebooo]

It would also more or less mean a couple lucky confrontations decide the rest of the game to the point one player is completely crippled and the other isn't, taking out all the drama and intrigue right from the beginning.