Bay 12 Games Forum

Without focus, would take 5 rounds and you would be expending half your power on it for those rounds.
With focus would take 2, and you would have to expend 9 power over those rounds. If you have initiative, then you would only have to endure a single round of fire, but that is plenty enough for you to be destroyed, unless you got very lucky with misses.
You can also do a regular retreat, but success is not guaranteed.

Logfile Arrival log #00002

1. Destination "D1" reached.
2. Spinning down FTL.
3. Successful Jump Logged.
4. No contacts detected.
5. Logfile end.





You jump to a random empty sector and proceed to vent a large quantity of radioactive and non-essential matter. The inside would still be quite dangerous for anything organic, but sensors on other ships shouldn't notice much.

The source of the radiation appears to be you. You don't consciously notice it happening, but as far as the sensors tell you, whenever you manipulate the ship or exert yourself, you start producing large amounts of radiation. The one thing you do notice is a small degree of what could be considered hunger, but what you would consume remains a mystery. You guess you will know it when you see it.

With the venting complete, you proceed to jump to observe the battle.

---

Logfile Arrival log #00003

1. Destination "C4" reached.
2. Spinning down FTL.
3. Successful Jump Logged.
4. 6 contacts detected.
5. Logfile end.



Side #1: Contact #1, #2, #3

Side #2: Contact #4, #5, #6


You arrive just in time to see the exciting part of the battle. There appear to be two sides, with 3 ships each. One side appears to have a larger vessel, with what appears to be a very large laser.

---

BATTLE BEGIN
Side #2 has initiative.

Round 1:



Round 2:



Contact #4 Disabled
Contact #6 Disabled

Round 3:


Contact #5 tries to escape.
SUCCESS

Side #1 WINS

---

Apparently the other side was woefully outmatched. Or just terribly unlucky. The unevenness of the fight will leave you with less salvage, but you suppose two disabled ships is good enough. Before you can even start thinking about what parts you can salvage, you recieve a broadcasted message.

"This is the cruiser Aphelion of the Gaunti Conglomerate hailing the amalgam ship to the south of our position. These destroyed ships are now the property of the Gaunti Conglomerate and piracy will not be tolerated. Identify yourself immediately or you will be fired upon."

Seems they think you are some kind of scavenger flying around in a ship made from other ships and simply showed up to look for scrap. They're not mistaken.

How do you respond?

---

Notes:
Doing battles like this is kinda hardcore with all the rolling involved. I'm so damn happy I know how to program and can automate some of it.
Side #2 was supposed to lose, but not quite this hard. Well, the RNG does what it does.
This update didn't take this long because of the battle, but because I was watching way too much Battlestar Galactica. A member of your crew might be a cylon. (Spoiler: It's one of your weak lasers)

Error on my pop, should be 4 not 5. 10 after this season.

(0) Co-Opt Swine
(3) Harvest 124, 138, 151
(1) Expand 150

You decide to salvage a laser and the reactor to power it. The radiation sensors on the ship go insane as you prepare the ship for attaching the additional modules and rearranging the ones already attached. Even your outbound sensors are affected and the ship automatically tries to turn the bridge away from the massive source of radiation, but only succeeds in turning in circles as it tries to dodge itself. Everything normalizes to some level when the modules are attached and you reprogram the computer to ignore radiation warnings.

---

SHIP MODIFICATION

Initial ship:

Converted to:


2x Weak Laser converted to Weapon Modification Points [+4]

Current Resources:
Weapon Modification Points [4]

No mods currently available. Inspect a larger range of modules to unlock additional mods.

---

Radiation level: Extremely high

You are glowing like a lightbulb for anyone with a set of sensors. It shouldn't extend the range at which you can be detected, but anyone who does so will find it very obvious that anyone aboard should be dead. You will gradually be purging the ship of it, but you can also spend some time to do it more quickly. It will leave you vulnerable for the time it takes, but you might need to do that if you want to do any infiltration.

Since the platforms are gone, you can freely access the Jump Network Beacon now. Jump Network Beacons are just a set of astronomical sensors attached to an exceptionally powerful supercomputer. They are responsible for keeping and updating a databank of jump routes between any two places in its designated area of space. Jumping is a complicated matter, and the movement of astronomical bodies is constantly shifting the routes. Even you are not capable of jumping around without their help. You will need to jump to another Beacon to explore a different sector.

As far as you can tell, this particular one was constructed by something calling itself the Gaunti Conglomerate. Your newly salvaged reactor seems to have also been manufactured by it. They seem to be a regional power of some sort.

You pull an updated set of jump routes from the Beacon, and inspect it.

Sector map:


Seems to be a relatively poor sector. Three inhabited planets, a few asteroid belts and even a battle, interestingly enough. You might be able to find some salvage there later, or you could even try intervening personally if you are so inclined. Going to the planets would be suicidal right now, as even in the best case scenario, they would read your radiation level as meaning that you are carrying heavy nuclear weaponry. You could head to any of the asteroid belts to ambush a few freighters or mining ships.

You could also set up an ambush here. Someone is bound to come inspect the distress calls of the two platforms, and you have plenty of firepower with your two lasers and reactors.

What do you do next?

Hahaha. Wow, it's interesting to see people retrace the exact same steps I did. I did some tests with the eastward spread. Also with a hybrid, where I alternated eastward spread and regular spreading. If I remember correctly, it did what I wanted, but didn't actually look very good.

In the end I settled on spreading in every direction from water tiles. I also used a noisemap to set the humidity of water tiles to a random value, just to add a bit of variety. I feel that even with terrain affecting the spread, it still looks pretty obvious when humidity travels the exact same distance in every direction.


I'm quite proud of my handywork.


But anyway, some tips that may or may not be useful:
-It's generally easier (and actually faster, at least with my skills) to iterate through the entire map, instead of composing lists of coasts and such. The less exceptions you make, the easier it will be to understand what is happening.
-Don't be afraid to refactor your code once in a while to clean it up. Trust me, makes life so much easier after you do it.
-Try to divide the parts up in a logical manner as much as you can. It's very easy to add more stuff, but making sense of it and changing it afterwards is the hard part.
-Use colours. Using different colour channels, you could be looking at humidity, terrain height, and heat, or any other 3 values at the same time. It's easy to spot if things don't add up, and it usually looks really cool.

So...

Is this gonna continue at some point? Was really enjoying it.

Where do you want the gun and the reactor in that case?

Bump a bubmp bump.