Even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then.

11 Jul 06

Wow, I actually get to answer some email. A reader writes, "Could you put up the stats from your Hiver game like you did the last game?" Sure thing. I lost 93 of the 399 destroyers I built while killing 912 enemy destroyers. I lost 37 of the 224 cruisers I built while killing 254 enemy cruisers. I lost one dreadnought of the 19 I built while killing five. All five fell into the 'mysterious space monster' category so I didn't actually kill any enemy civilization dreadnoughts.

Next up: Did you see this thread at Kerberos http://www.kerberos-productions.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=469? I presume they're pointing me to the questions at the end. However, I would like to say thank you to everyone who said nice things about the story in that thread. On to the questions in question, Kaorti asks, "He said that he'd played all the races sucessfully, do you think that means that he'll give us writeups on his campaigns with the other two races?" You mean going back to old games and trying to reconstruct what happened and turn it into a story? No. I don't have the notes on my early games to do that. The game logs are helpful, but not enough to do that. Besides, there was a lot of me floundering around trying to learn things. That doesn't make for good reading. I'm not adverse to a new story and game against the updated AI. I'm open to suggestions.

Then we have Mecron saying, "reinforcements are not random unless he was missing a command ship." What an interesting statement. There's the clear implication that I'm wrong without pointing to anything specific that I might be wrong about. I was talking about a number of situations that were brought about by gate tech. Situation one, you get the gate deployed and it survives but your command ship doesn't. You send in a new command ship via the gate, but you fight the battle with random ships. Situation two, the gate is deployed, the command ship survives, but you don't have enough ships left to fill out your command points. You might send in multiple reinforcements from different systems, but I never found a way to tell them how to deploy on arrival. That might not be truly random but the effect is the same. Situation three, you have a small defense force with a command ship at a planet. You detect a threat one turn out. You send a more powerful defense fleet from another system with a bigger command ship. Somehow I always ended up with a mix and match defense fleet. I suppose I could have pulled out the smaller fleet. The point is that these were problems I didn't notice with the other races, but had to be considered with the Hivers. It's not a flaw; it just encourages thoughtful planning and deployment.

That's it for today. Feel free to ask me any questions directly either through email or comments. I'm happy to respond. If there is specific content you'd like to see on the site, please let me know that as well.

Jason