Bay 12 Games Forum

RNG hates you then. That's all I can figure.

In all seriousness, I feel we both paid too much attention to the structural design. The difference between, say, 90 and 110 ain't that big in practice, while redesigning eats up valuable time.

IDK the exact relationship but structural design impacts other design elements too - engine/weapon/armor are described in the design log as "based on base design modified for struct. design". My first and only attempt at Mechanized Artillery is a good example; it had an initial BD of 94 (80th percentile of initial BD) but its 76 SD left it with 54 ED, 63 WD, and 77 AD. Its 180mm gun had the same attack value as my initial dragged artillery's 105mm gun (plus, yes, -30% move modifier on a 555 weight vehicle w/an 800 power engine). I went back into one of the final saves and re-designed it - first changing nothing, then modernizing. The iterated version is not terribly impressive (bad rolls for design improvements are always possible) and at this point a 4th iteration is as expensive as a new base model (480pts in either case, but iterating off the new one will be 120pts):



Doing a redesign may not only give you a better high-end model, but it may give you a better model than the intermediate one you'd get by using and refining the crappier one. The main question becomes whether you'd be better off using something else to fill that tactical role while you do a redesign, or if there's no better alternative. Forex, my initial light tank was so bad (SD 86, BD 85, ED 60, WD 71, AD 86... all of which ended up with crappy combat stats and a -60% move modifier) that just to usefully field test that design I'd have to iterate on the initial unit b/c it wasn't combat-ready as out-of-the-box.

(Ofc, again, RNG can make or break you in either case.)

You forget how we started by playing the first 5 turns on the same day. At least the ones(?) that I was in.

We did 8 and 7 in the first and second 24h periods of this game. Though again, only 2 players.

Tanks were less king than they often are b/c the brief war we fought involved a great deal of fighting in mountains and then forests. Tanks played a strong role the last few turns, but the decisive thrusts were largely large blocks of infantry. Well, I suppose the northern chokepoint was tanks gradually pushing back tanks. The best tanks they had were heavies (hence above discussions of running low on fuel) and the best I had were assault guns (which meant that once the heavies came into play, my tanks got pushed back despite being nominally harder to kill).

Our game organization was very haphazard. I generated a world to the specs we'd agreed on, and then generated another one with PBEM options on b/c I'd accidentally done the first as hotseat. Then we just threw turns back and forth as soon as we did them. We were only doing one or fewer turns per day for the last few; for the most part, we'd get several in.

Focus isn't as hard to retain as you think; normally you've got a few areas of interest where your fronts are, and relatively few cities where things can be happening. Additionally, there's A LOT of reports generated that can point you towards what you should be checking.

It feels counterintuitive, but you're probably right majors would help. They'd both war with minors (thus preventing diplomatic absorption) and be more of than a speedbump as far as conquest goes. Capturing their capitals intact would be much more of a boon than random minor zones, but you'd also have to sink a lot more resources into doing so.

A big reason I had fewer OHQ was just b/c I relied very heavily on militia to fight minors and marauders. That ultimately was a mistake; the additional level of bonuses from the OHQ CDR would have likely made a significant difference even w/o considering postures. To a certain degree, this was b/c I fell into a trap where constantly replenishing lost troops felt like I wasn't draining my civilian economy b/c I wasn't deploying 5k troops all at once, but I'd've been better off doing so. I put enough effort into replenishing militia forces with modern troops that they could fight effectively, but their leadership was always sub-par.

Another place I suffered was not getting any Mind profiles early on. Given my bureaucratic focus, that hurt me a lot - even the 18FP (!) I spent on Science Outposts gave me little more research bonus than what the first level of Mind would have, and I didn't backfill and get that until... turn 50, maybe? I can't remember for sure, but it was late. I also wasted about 10 turns early on researching a useless civvie tech so as to avoid risking later getting it from a free tech card, but I'd've been better served by letting those points go to discovery and possibly getting Heavy Industry sooner.

And yes, my cabinet hated me. For much of the game I struggled with my Word score or from refusing faction demands to avoid hurting my Word score, and those two factors reduced my popularity repeatedly. There also was just a lot of discord in my cabinet WRT profiles. I ended up going deep into Heart to try to keep people happy, and they still weren't happy. Looking at reports, I also appear to have had a lot of cult problems in this regard; one of them (Mystic?) was regularly harassing leaders with high Egoism scores and that resulted in a lot of lost relation.

You're right about how much I was hurt by industrial lagging, though how much that was hurting me was lost on me first by my struggles to get enough metal and machines, and then once we started fighting by my recruitment shortfall. My lack of industry was also a big reason why I ended the game with a bunch of protectorates/clients to my west but no connection to them - indeed, that was a big reason it took me as long as it did to unify with my southern holdings.

I think the water made more of a difference than might be clear from your POV; it wasn't so much what it let you have as what its absence (and also how much cheaper my sell point seems to have been than yours) caused me to give up to stay solvent. I sold off a lot of stuff I'd rather have not sold, especially food (see the above discussion of mass starvation) but also my nuclear reserves. Had I had more of those, Id've probably fielded A LOT more nuke RPG units in the last few turns - the reason you saw as few of those as you did despite them being fairly effective was mostly a lack of rads.

I'm not sure counterbatteries would have helped much. Your attack bonuses made your artillery brutal while mine was fairly lackluster, although IIRC I had a pretty good structural design for them.

On the subject of structural designs, you definitely seemed to have more luck with that. I spent a lot of time redesigning common models in hopes of getting something passable, and often settling for something in the 90s as the best I could get. I will say that my mechanized artillery design was striking; Improvised Explosive Artillery may be the single worst unit design I've ever rolled...

I did a batch-resize in IrfanView to cut the size of all of them in half, then a batch-convert to make them all into gifs, and that turned 136 maps into 26.6mb, which the first search result I saw (ezgif.com) handled admirably and further reduced to ~12mb with some lossy gif optimization.

Likewise. I've been AFK for the last 48h so having more than ~5h to get caught up will be welcome...

I wish water sold for that much for me. When it sells, it's more in the 0.2-0.3 range, so the merchants hit their saturation point a lot faster.

This coming turn will be the one where I roll out laser rifles, so we'll see how that changes things. I should probably have debuted them at least 10 turns ago; I discovered the tech 20 turns ago but foolishly thought cluster munitions, highspeed->quad-machineguns, and missiles, in that order, were more important. I'm pretty sure I was wrong on all three counts.