Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm thinking RC + SS just to make it interesting as possible. But ultimately RC + spread out is fine with me.

"As interesting as possible" would suggest to me "no RC + SS" - do you mean to suggest we should or should not have AI major regimes? I'd assume you mean we should.

It occurs to me that a strong point in favor of having 4+7 majors is that it would put a hard limit on the possibility of snowballing via charismatic foreign affairs directors, which was definitely something we saw happen in our last game. As soon as a minor goes to war with any major it can't become a protectorate/vassal, so having 11 majors would mean wild expansion would require actually expanding for the most part.

I'm wary of going in too heavily for seas - they're hard barriers that can only be directly bypassed via airbridges, and that's quite an undertaking. OTOH, mountains are soft barriers once you get your industry rolling - IP smashed through very deep mountain ranges in the prior game. Likewise swamps, jungles, and canyons.

I'd be happiest with xeno or terran ag being possible even if it might not be ideal conditions for one or the other. That rules out magma and ice planets for the most part. I'm sorry, but I have a sick, disgusting areal fetish and it really revs my engines to see farmland spread and supplant native forests. I'd also like fairly advanced forests just b/c it's less boring. Ideally, I'd like a pink, teal, or taupe plant color pallet, but that's really being finicky. I'm willing to hear opinions, though - if someone wants red or turquoise seas, or borderline-fluorescent-green or yellowish trees we can probably make that happen.

I'm leaning towards mid-sized megafauna - a max of 10-15m is probably the safest, and that's actually enough to create some horrific death beasts. It also makes it easier to avoid having too low gravity, which tends to lead to fewer minerals to mine. Moderate gravity and reasonably thick atmosphere will allow for flexible aircraft options as well.

Any other thoughts?

Based on the last game we played and some subsequent conversations I think I can say IP and I agree on these preferences:

Complete FOW
Cults/Corp/No Syndicate
Tech 4 + Air Forces
Slower developmentt
4 Councils
Extreme + More AI time
(We were also leaning towards allowing saving during turns b/c towards the end that'd've been VERY nice)

Severe Violence
Alien Life
Spread Out

What we're less settled on are the following:

Robinson Crusoe and no Survival Stress  -VS- No RC with SS -VS- RC and SS

2-3 Zones + 1-2 Armies

Planet size, geography stuff and planet population

I'm kinda leaning towards no RC + SS, and 2Z + 2A on a big but sparsely populated world. This would give us 7 AI majors and a lot of minors, but the minors should generally be smaller so capturing each of them should have a reduced impact on snowballing. No SS and no RC means there would be 2 AI majors, which would be potentially awful for balance. I prefer 2Z over 3 even though it's less normalized b/c it'll be easier for the game to spread us out - this is also why I'm leaning towards someplace bigger. I'm tempted to suggest RC because of this as well, TBH - while Spread Out helps, the engine can often use all the help it can get to get a decently spread-out setup...

Thoughts?

The most reliable way was to pick Medusa class and look for the long evolution length, but even then getting kaiju was quite rare. While the first reddit post there mentions air density, they couldn't find a strong correlation

Given the difference b/tw 0.6-0.8g with 350mbar planets (mostly 7-15m, with 40m as a wild outlier) and 0.5g with 660mbar (mostly 20-40m, with a 67m that I generated showing up after maybe 20 re-rolls), I'd say if anything you want as dense an atmosphere as possible with as low gravity as possible. That would also track with my understanding of relevant physics and physiology. Note that all of these were 5b+ age, so I don't think that was making a difference.

Note as well that 0.5g + 660mbar is enough for your starting recon plane to go 12 hexes.

The downside of this is that you'd either need smaller planets or a lot lower crust density (i.e., worse mineral content)...

Done. It appears that 4 players is the limit, so we're halfway full already.

So given how they managed to kill me off, I decided


deserved to be immortalized by an art AI. I probably could have done better given more time, but here's a quick effort:

The Burrower Cow is something you could co-opt by sucking up to aliens? Eek.

I'm curious what exactly they decided. I basically never roll Siwa and I have trouble getting over teens for fauna size.

(I have a vague memory of rolling a 44m squid before we had creature variants. That's the nastiest I ever saw, but its feats were probably a lot less awful b/c back then I didn't play on the harder levels.)

So, uh. I decided to roll some different world types and was testing one with these things. I'm not sure I'll be able to live long enough to find the 25m intelligent lizard regimes...


[Edit: I probably should have included the Longbeasts as well; fixed. They look so innocent and harmless until you consider what 8 attacks per round and Toxin V means. I lost a full battalion in one round to these things too...]

It'd make things more interesting. I'm not sure about how planet size would work best with it - this planet was a decent size but with more players I'd want more minors too - it was kinda barren for expansion if we were gonna hit a major sooner than we did, certainly on my side. Less water might be safer, too - the lake right by my capital hurt me a lot more than your lake did. In that respect, I'm kinda eager to see what Vic does with naval factions/forces.

OTOH, more minors make logistics less important and speed up tech development a lot. I'm really not sure what a happy medium is.

I might screw around with some different planet types. In principle, the oasis-type planet seems like it's made with MP in mind, but I've never done much with it. It would be nice if we could recycle planet seeds - I really think the god-awful SP planet I sent you would be a sort that'd work well for MP even if I spent the first 40 turns doing nothing but fighting off dragons, basilisks, and other kaiju-scale abominations. That's like an accidental version of an oasis planet where you've got valleys with 1-2 cities and mountain ranges between them.