Anacreon Beta II Discussion Thread

General discussion for the game Anacreon
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Wayward Device
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Hey WatchTV! I should have known it was you, that lone cluster was too slick and I already knew where the Human Imperium was. You came way closer to winning than you know in a couple of ways. When I logged in to check on my empire after work I at first freaked out a little bit - I'd left almost all my Warphants spread out the night before when I lazily forgot to move them to my main jumpship cluster cap. They were split into 4 groups in the cluster that borders the IoM, cleaning up some barren worlds, and I thought you had seen that, defeated them in detail (thus removing my ability to counterattack) and started digesting me at your leisure.

You actually had about 15k Gorgos at your cap when I took it out and another fleet of 5k~ arriving just as my jumpfleet did, taking part in the fight. But it wasn't enough against the 1.1 million Eldritch I had left. So your 485k~ space forces vs my 600~ space forces. I "only" lost about 450k Eldritch. If that had been 15k Gorgos arriving at the last minute instead of 5k though...

The second way you almost won was with my mini-cluster empire cap. Removing that trade hub lowered the tech level of the archive and that tanked my empire tech level. If I hadn't caught things when I did almost all my productive worlds would be at 1% efficiency with a bazillion rebels. I'm still having a few issues (underestimated the rebels on the empire cap archive and lost it again, another round of trillum shock on all my barren worlds and a lot of my jumpyards) but that's nothing a podcast and some boring imperial guard admin can't cure.

As to your observation on Exotroops - I agree but the point of exotroops isn't to beat imperial guard in cost effectiveness. If you go full imperial guard you need a fleet of at least 3 million jumptransports and the dedicated industry that supports it (which could go to something else, like a fleet of, idk, 12-18 million helions? Another 1 million Gorgos? Something nice to have) to guarantee a 10:1 strength advantage vs a full developed cave/earthlike/ocean tl10 Law&Order cap, which can support at most 300k imperial guard. Armored infantry are almost as bad. This time around I'm considering going all infantry since I'm planning on a large transport fleet anyway once I'm secure, I remember something about them being the most cost effective overall, transports not considered. Anyway, the point of this rambling is that exotroops are basically a way for big, efficient empires to not have to have loads of transports. Or not loads of transports in the fleets they send against other large developed empires. Gotta have a reserve to move imperial guards to those ungrateful barren worlds who can't handle a 0.1% production shift in their life support without millions of deaths.
gc2
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Well, it looks like everyone wants a piece of the Autocracy.
As of now I'm certainly leaning towards building nothing but basic infantry, because all the other types deal way too much overkill damage. Exotroops do 40 damage, but no infantry has 40 hp. Basic infantry and imperial guards both have only 1 hp, so I think that an equal number of basic infantry and imperial guards will be evenly matched.
While it is true that stronger infantry need fewer transports, they need a dedicated component autofac. Exoarmor is so industry intensive that from my experience, a fully dedicated exoarmor planet will not even be able to supply an infantry academy on a planet of the same tier. Although I haven't run the numbers, I'm pretty confident that I can dedicate an academy to building basic infantry and the planet that would have been building exoarmor to make reliants, and end up with a stronger ground force, not to mention that academies building only basic infantry don't need luxuries.
WorldsStrongestNerd
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gc2, keep in mind that to field an equilivent force of conventional infantry, you would need many more transports. You can either use some worlds as infantry part autofacs to help make exotroops, or you can build regular infantry and have to have another jumpship autofac to build the extra transports you would need. A detailed study would be needed to see which is the better use of industry.
Watch TV, Do Nothing
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In my tests exotroops have never taken ANY casualties against infantry-only forces. Has anybody ever lost exotroops to regular infantry?
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Finnian
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:shock: exploring the galaxy only with vanguards is a madness!
IN GEORGE WE TRUST
Watch TV, Do Nothing
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Anyone notice patches of open space spontaneously turning into nebula?

Image

This is an area in almost the dead center of the galaxy. The region NE of Silo 2 was open space enclosed by nebula a couple days ago; there already two starship yards in it (Oien and Pelith) and it doesn't contain any nebular-type worlds. However, as of today it's all dark nebula and ramjets are able to path into and through it. However, the planets themselves still appear to "think" they are in open space- they can get starship/starship component designation and can't be designated as ramjet types. The starship yards were designated before the change but their starships are unable to move, generating the message "starship fleet cannot enter dark nebula".

Also the area containing Silo 2 appears to have changed from bright nebula into some sort of hybrid between bright and dark nebula. Previously it was unambiguously a bright nebula and it contains only bright-type worlds (empyreal, aetherial, etc.). It is now dark purple - darker than a bright nebula and brighter than a dark nebula - and ramjets can path between it and the dark nebula (not sure if they could before). This makes me think that the game is classing it as both bright and dark at the same time.
Wayward Device
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The Autocracy warned you fools about the insidious dangers of living in gas clouds and you called us mad. Now the corruption is spreading!

Pretend scifi nebula racism aside, this is a weird bug and it's not just in your corner of the galaxy. Luckily I've been taking screenshots almost every day, even when I haven't been playing that much. This definitely happened between cycles 4053 and 4054. Here are some images (direct imgur link because large images):

4053

4054

If you open both of these and flick between them you can see that a big section in the south has also had this happen, as well as a bunch of small clear space/light nebula bits and pieces. Very odd indeed. At least is not spreading beyond the Great Nebula for now but the Autocracy will morn for the people of New Agraria.
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Tragic! And also probably a bug, so I'll report it to Ministry. Nebulas growing or shrinking could be an interesting mechanic if it were implemented in a consistent manner, although it wouldn't really make sense at the time scale that the game takes place at unless it were catalyzed by player action somehow.

I've resumed tracking space forces and significant statistics for major players in the game, so look for an update on that within a few days. Needless to say Imperium is way ahead of everybody else in the Gorgos game, but there are a many other tidbits that players will find interesting. Some empires are paper tigers, while others reveal hidden strength. It's a big galaxy and there's still room for new players to make a big splash, if any can overcome the learning curve...
WorldsStrongestNerd
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I know George is very busy, and we were lucky just to get a new galaxy. It could be a while before this bug is tracked down. Starships could suddenly become useless. The calculus of power shifts in a new direction......

Speaking of bugs. I use chrome and can't scroll around the galaxy smoothly. Its a very jerky motion. Anyone else?
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The main effects in gameplay terms seem to have been that:

1) a few small areas of open space that were completely enclosed within dark nebulas turned into dark nebula, and any planets inside them that were already part of an empire got a little screwed up in terms of how they could be designated

2) ramjet transit between certain bright and dark nebulas became possible, they now appear to be connected somehow. For example, I don't think that it was previously possible for ramjets to pass between the bright nebula that's NE of the center of the galaxy and the big dark nebula, but they are able to pass freely now.

Since there was an issue in Beta I with ramjets passing between light and dark nebulas, this could even have been an intentional act on George's part, although that seems unlikely.

There were also some cosmetic effects.

The area around New Agraria that got "nebular-ized" only contained like 20 planets and it was by far the largest region affected. I'm not expecting that nebulas will suddenly appear in big open areas like the southwest, but who knows what will happen.
gc2
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I actually think dynamic nebular clouds would be a pretty nice effect. I do recall seeing in beta I a few patches of purple nebula and nebular worlds that can be designated as starship factories but the ships produced there can't move.
I use chrome and can't scroll around the galaxy smoothly. Its a very jerky motion. Anyone else?
I use chrome as well, and at times it freezes completely and I have to refresh the page. On some occasions the scrolling is smooth, but it's quite rare.
AdmiralZo
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I recall something similar to this in Beta I. I vaguely remember I sent an explorer fleet through a nebular, and it instantaneously changed to a darker colour.
Wayward Device
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gc2 wrote:I actually think dynamic nebular clouds would be a pretty nice effect. I do recall seeing in beta I a few patches of purple nebula and nebular worlds that can be designated as starship factories but the ships produced there can't move.
I use chrome and can't scroll around the galaxy smoothly. Its a very jerky motion. Anyone else?
I use chrome as well, and at times it freezes completely and I have to refresh the page. On some occasions the scrolling is smooth, but it's quite rare.
The weird thing is, I used to have the exact opposite problems in Beta 1. Firefox was mostly slow and laggy with patches of normal quality. I switched to chrome and it was butter. On rails.

Now in Beta II chrome is like I'm on some 90's dialup and 256 mb of ram while firefox is smooth as ice. I often have both open when I check out my empire in the evenings after work as the "galaxy screenshot button" only seems to work on chrome, can't get the popup to appear no matter what I try on firefox. Anyway, the difference is noticeable.

The only thing I can think is that at some time in the last year the Chrome dev team started listening to people's complaints of "omg chrome why you take my comp resources and touch them in special place!?!?!" while Firefox brought in something along the lines of "if you are using some weird browser thing than needs more resources than a normal webpage and your computer is up to it then we will let you do it". Sadly this seems untrue as the simple experiment of opening Anacreon with task manager open in both Firefox and Chrome tells me that it seems to use less than 1% of my cpu and about 35kb of ram on both platforms.

So now my working theory is that Google used to bribe George to throttle firefox users as part of the seedy underbelly of the browser wars and that some time in the last year they abandoned that strategy after realizing that once they finish taking over every aspect of civilization they can just have their drone army shoot every mozilla employee and dump them in a mass grave. And of course George has retaliated due to the lost income and changed sides to Firefox.
Watch TV, Do Nothing
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It's back, baby! ContenderStats are go for Beta 2!

These track the interval between Cycles 4054-4059. I tracked player stats in Beta 1 for several months and now I'm doing it again, so watch this space for future updates.

My super hot take on the galaxy:
  • Autocracy of Order is running away with the starship game. Nobody can come close to matching Autocracy's Gorgos starfrigate fleet, and those starfrigates are deployed strategically to defend major worlds.
  • ASDF is the only empire with a comparable defense, but its nebular strategy does not have the growth potential of Autocracy. It has not been active for the past few cycles. ASDF has the only significant nebular force in the game, at about 30 million strength- not represented on the charts, but being tracked. ASDF has the second-largest transport capacity after Autocracy but fields very poor infantry.
  • Imperium of Man and bugzzzzz control a large number of worlds and have seen rapid expansion, but still have weak economies. Imperium is the only remaining power building jumpmissiles, possibly due to the empire's long borders with the Gorgos-rich Autocracy.
  • hoa0004,the Hexacarbide Brotherhood, and Agraria control compact empires with strong jumpfleets. hoa0004 and Hexacarbide have limited ability to wage war due to poor transport capacity and mediocre infantry. Hexacarbide has not been actively developing its military. Agraria is pushing the 100-world limit for a T&E empire and is unlikely to see further territorial expansion unless it radically changes its economy.
In the past 5 cycles 2 empires have fallen in war- Sanzu and Consolidated Consortium.

Sanzu was a huge but disorganized empire spanning much of the galactic North. Sanzu fought the Autocracy early in the game and the Autocracy appears to have systematically annihilated Sanzu after a subsequent border dispute. This later war was genocidal rather than expansionist, as Autocracy has made no effort consolidated the conquered territories. Agraria participated in the war on the side of the Autocracy but its contribution was minimal and it retained none of the worlds conquered.

Consolidated was a smaller, younger empire that was awkwardly wedged between the already-mature Autocracy and Imperium from the moment that it was founded. It disappeared under obscure circumstances and may have been conquered by either the Imperium or bugzzzzzz. Any insight into Consolidated's fate would be appreciated.
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Image
note 7/19: the original graphs posted were wrong and have been corrected

As of Cycle 4063, the great powers of the galaxy are in a state of controlled expansion. No major wars were observed during this period.

Other notes about the galaxy:
  • The Trade & Enterprise doctrine is unusually popular, with two medium powers (Hexacarbide and Agraria) adopting the doctrine and a few new empires perhaps unwisely attempting to follow their lead- unwisely because T&E is a niche doctrine that is easy to enter but difficult to leave and which does not directly benefit military output. The great powers all use Law & Order and this is unlikely to change given the ~100-planet secession limit that restricts the expansion of empires using non-L&O doctrines.
  • Autocracy remains an efficient machine for building Gorgos. Nobody is even close to the Autocracy's raw power anymore.
  • asdf & the Hexacarbide Brotherhood seem to be mature empires with net attrition that approaches their shipbuilding capacities. Hexacarbide does not seem to build habitat structures, so they have room to grow internally if they choose to take it. ASDF has maximum habitat structures everywhere and would need to expand through conquest.
  • My last list neglected to count bugzzzzzzz's jumpmissiles. They actually have the largest jumpmissile arsenal in the galaxy by a small margin.
  • Autocracy has established a sector capital on the planet that was previously the capital of the tiny Onyxxia empire- in an area deep in bugzzzzzzz space surrounded by bugzzzzzzz citadels. Meanwhile, bugzzzzzzz is developing the sliver of territory between Autocracy and Imperium formerly occupied by Consolidated Consoritium, and Imperium has also established a new sector capital nearby. This region of space in the southwest could be a future flashpoint between the galaxy's first, second and third largest empires.
  • I began tracking Telaris, a new empire in the extreme Northwest occupying space previously controlled by Sanzu.
Last edited by Watch TV, Do Nothing on Tue Jul 19, 2016 10:47 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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