Anacreon Era III Discussion Thread

General discussion for the game Anacreon
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--Imperator--
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Updated the front page bulletin (after 1 year of inactivity, hooray for dedication) to reflect current events rather than 2017's.
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Finnian
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In the list of the empires I have noticed the absence of a little nebular empire named "Soviet" with 18 worlds, the emperor is unknow
IN GEORGE WE TRUST
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--Imperator-- wrote:
Sat Mar 31, 2018 10:07 am
Updated the front page bulletin (after 1 year of inactivity, hooray for dedication) to reflect current events rather than 2017's.
FYI, I moved the starter guide to https://forums.kronosaur.com/viewtopic. ... 780#p72780.
--Imperator--
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Updated. Your guides are indeed very helpful for new players.
L.W., Windsor
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The Windsor Report

Technology Report:

The scientists of Windsor have labored long hours and produced good goods! We proclaim the Quantum Age for Windsor. The good men of Windsor have successfully manufactured Eldritch and Gorgos, a truly advanced civilization has graced the empire of Windsor. The Post Industrial Age could be a possible next step. The Megathere-class Starcruiser has been on the desk in the planning office for some cycles now.

Production Report:

Manufacturing facilities are well founded and producing Adamant-class Jumpships, Minotaur-class Gunships, Relient-class Transports. Many of the brave and a few of the bored Windsor galactic citizens have joined Infantry units and the grand Imperial Guard. Combat seems distant, but there are many planets with Hexacarbide that need to be wrestled from the hands of the barbarous multitude. Population densities are rising, and Planetary Archologies progress readily, construction is on schedule.

Colonization Report:

The Hexacarbide Miners Colony has been officially established and is well underway. Good luck to all future miners and their prospects. The construction of the New Hangzhou-HMC Direct is on track to be completed within the current session. Windsor analysts suggest Hexacarbide futures are skyrocketing.

Future Report:

The development of the southeast and south western corridors of the Windsor empire are entering into their full implementation stage and over the next 5 sessions will undergo a clean sweep and complete colonization effort that will hopefully be fully supported by the galactic community. On the home front the base empire exceeds 15 production worlds and will approximately double in number by the end of 10 sessions. In the north quadrant the western sector has been under intense conflict with entrenched barbarian dogs with large guns. We built larger guns though, so we should be good. In the east, complete success in Hexacarbide acquisition has led to the amazing technological revolution of the Quantum Age.

This concludes the first Windsor Report

L.W., Windsor
The H in H2O is Hexacarbide. The H in Hexacarbide is Hexacarbide. Heaven is made out of Hexacarbide!!!
L.W., Windsor
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HELLO!

I suppose there is a new war between Imperium and the Saxophone Traders Union?

Such violence and intrigue within this game!!! I LIKE IT!!!
The H in H2O is Hexacarbide. The H in Hexacarbide is Hexacarbide. Heaven is made out of Hexacarbide!!!
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Finnian
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L.W., Windsor wrote:
Thu Apr 05, 2018 11:44 am
HELLO!

I suppose there is a new war between Imperium and the Saxophone Traders Union?

Such violence and intrigue within this game!!! I LIKE IT!!!
yeah, sometime this game is a volcano of emotions! :mrgreen:
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Is uplifting your Goods worlds up past Bio-tech worth it? Is taking Trillum and Hexacarbide worlds past Fusion worth the luxuries hit?
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Walloping wrote:
Thu Apr 05, 2018 6:51 pm
Is uplifting your Goods worlds up past Bio-tech worth it? Is taking Trillum and Hexacarbide worlds past Fusion worth the luxuries hit?
Short answer: yes and yes.

Long answer: At some point I did some calculations related to this, but unfortunately I can't find them right now. As I recall, they suggested that Work Unit production gains from raising TL always offsets increased resource demand by the population up to TL8 after the population stabilizes AND assuming that you build habitat structures as they become available AND you have enough trillum to supply everything. This may not be true for desert and empyreal worlds, they might be best at TL7 but I'm not sure. You also want to have good uses for all the resources being produced - it's easy to overproduce hexacarbide, for example.

I don't recommend using hostile worlds (all worlds EXCEPT underground, ocean, earthlike, desert, empyreal) for Consumer Goods autofacs because of the Death Spiral bug, but the bug is rare enough that it's ultimately your choice. Ocean, earthlike, desert and empyreal worlds get invisible bonuses to organic food production too; Organic food costs less WUs to manufacture on these worlds. Earthlike > Ocean > Desert = Empyreal.

It's almost always worthwhile to raise underground, earthlike and ocean worlds to TL8 so that you can build a planetary arcology, which significantly increases Work Unit output by increasing max population. They take four days to build, though, so you won't see the benefit for a long time. I believe that TL9 planets with planetary arcology actually have higher net production than TL8 planets but I'm not sure.

Another complication is that an empire with lots of high-TL worlds is probably relying on foundations for uplifts. Those uplifts cost resources, which I've never calculated the WU cost of, but more importantly the uplifted planets are vulnerable in wartime if the foundation is captured. (In contrast, you can durably raise any planet to TL7 with no penalty via a simple exploit.)
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Thank you for the comprehensive response. Is there a reason why my Biotech level capital would not be rising in TL even with a TL10 foundation world supporting it to TL9? I've checked that the foundation for has spare TLs far in excess of the demand, and I've deleted and remade the trade route two or three times with watches in between. Is it just a display thing? It's not show the little TL7 ^9 arrow thing indicating a TL increase. I was also wondering if Eldritches or Undines are better as the backbone of your jumpfleets?
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Walloping wrote:
Thu Apr 05, 2018 8:40 pm
Thank you for the comprehensive response. Is there a reason why my Biotech level capital would not be rising in TL even with a TL10 foundation world supporting it to TL9? I've checked that the foundation for has spare TLs far in excess of the demand, and I've deleted and remade the trade route two or three times with watches in between. Is it just a display thing? It's not show the little TL7 ^9 arrow thing indicating a TL increase. I was also wondering if Eldritches or Undines are better as the backbone of your jumpfleets?
A foundation cannot uplift beyond the tech level of the imperial capital, so you can't uplift a capital from a foundation. You must use tech programs to uplift your capital. The exploit I mentioned early will allow you to evade the WU penalty that comes from using a program.

As for the question about jumpships: I am not up to date on the combat metagame right now. In general, it depends on who you are fighting. If they have a lot of gunships, Undines are much stronger against those because their attack is much stronger and their armor is much thicker. If you are planning to go on a jumpship offensive (nearby enemy or you think you can capture jumpship yards when the enemy is AFK) AND the enemy is using missile defenses like hypersonics, you will probably prefer to use Eldritches to take them out since Eldritches have missile protection. This also means that a big fleet of Eldritches will annihilate a big Undine fleet if it can catch it in battle. If you decide to build jumpcruisers, be sure that they are stationed on your most fortified world when you are not using them so that the enemy can't gank them with a jumpship fleet.

Back when I was playing, it "felt" like a large Adamant fleet was a better investment than an Undine fleet of equivalent cost, but I'm not sure if that's still true. The difference in speed has negligible effect on play. An Undine is basically a double Adamant- it has twice the armor, twice the damage, twice the missile resistance to interception, plus better attack range - but it costs slightly more than twice as much, and a cost-equivalent Undine fleet generates only half as many projectiles (this makes a big difference in combat) and requires a ton of chronimium to build plus a planet mix that is more autofac-heavy than the Adamant.

Don't neglect to build Helions too, although they are not as effective as they used to be. There used to be a strategy that would minimize casualties to valuable attacking ships by attacking with Helions on the turn before a stronger fleet entered orbit, I don't know if this strategy still works.
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Walloping wrote:
Thu Apr 05, 2018 6:51 pm
Is uplifting your Goods worlds up past Bio-tech worth it? Is taking Trillum and Hexacarbide worlds past Fusion worth the luxuries hit?
I conducted an experiment a while back that compared the production bonus against the increased foods/goods/luxuries consumption of worlds at various TLs. You can decide if it's worth it, but basically the optimal strategy seems to be CGA worlds --> TL8, everything else --> TL10 or 9 if you can support them.

If you can't support a full TL10 economy, it's OK to lower worlds that overproduce resources (e.g. trillum/hexacarbide are the most common offenders) to TL7 or 8. Yards and autofacs should be at least TL8 to build the "good" units. Units aren't completely balanced yet, so a high tech fleet is still objectively better than a low tech one of similar composition.
Walloping wrote:
Thu Apr 05, 2018 8:40 pm
I was also wondering if Eldritches or Undines are better as the backbone of your jumpfleets?
Both. A varied fleet composition will serve you much better than massing a single unit. Mass Undines, and a competing player can counter them by massing Eldritches. Conversely, Eldritches are countered by Minotaurs. A better strategy would be to look at what your opponent's (someone you're planning to invade, or who you think will attack you) fleet composition is like, and build units specifically to counter theirs. Of course, if the relative difference in fleet size is such that they outnumber you by more than 2:1, no amount of good counters will help! Jumpcruiser missiles will still get through if there are 200k Undines and 50k Eldritch for instance.
Watch TV, Do Nothing wrote:
Thu Apr 05, 2018 9:11 pm
There used to be a strategy that would minimize casualties to valuable attacking ships by attacking with Helions on the turn before a stronger fleet entered orbit, I don't know if this strategy still works.
It does.

And it's my favorite, at least until fleet priority targeting gets patched. It can be mitigated somewhat by using high numbers of lower-damage, high quantity units like Minotaurs for defense, as opposed to high-damage, low-quantity like Gorgos/Megatheres. Because combat is handled via probabilities, this will clear out the Helion "fodder" and allow defenders to get at the real attackers more quickly. The attack will very likely still work (a few minutes of one side not being able to reduce the firepower of the other, while still taking casualties is significant), but the fodder fleet will be limited to one use at most.

Are either of you Walloping or WTV actively playing in Era 3?
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I thought up another interesting strategy which hasn't been tested extensively, but could feasibly work.

As some might know, invading a world causes all surviving defending ships in orbit to flip over to the attackers' side in the minute after the invasion is complete. Usually we don't see this in action because transport don't attempt to land until the other ships in the invasion fleet have destroyed all the defenders.

But I happened to secure a very large force of transports and infantry in one of my recent wars (thank you Finnian for leaving 750k Reliants undefended), I was invading a world and ordered the transports to land while the space battle was still in progress. They took significant casualties, as the defenders seem to prioritize transports as targets (presumably because of this mechanic?), but in the end enough survived to flip the world and its defenders.

What if we warped in the transport fleet exactly one watch after attacking with a fodder fleet, then ordered them to land? The defenders would still be attacking the fleet that came in first, that should hopefully secure enough time for transports to land (use Warphants for this, they have a higher delta-V attribute which means their speed in orbit is much faster than Reliants). As a bonus, warping fleets in while a battle is in progress seems to spawn them much closer to the world itself, which will benefit this strategy a lot.

I'll have to try this in the next major conflict and report back.
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--Imperator-- wrote:
Thu Apr 05, 2018 11:05 pm
I thought up another interesting strategy which hasn't been tested extensively, but could feasibly work.

That's how the Bug King captured a .5 million Undine fleet from me at the start of the last war, although through a slightly different method. We both arrived at the contested independent world at the same watch, me with my .5 million Undines, 300k warphants and 180k Armored Infantry and the Bugz with 50k Imperial Guard in 50k Reliants. We both invaded on the same watch but my fleet of course stopped to blast the defenses whereas the Bugz just landed. The world flipped to them and they captured my entire fleet. Now that I think about this, with the in-game clock we now have a totally reliable way to gift ships. This could also totally disrupt the meta.

Aside from using this tactic with the old Helion bait and switch, how about this one? A lowtech barbarian setup (still max possible efficiency using clusters) that is a 50/50 industrial split between Armored Infantry and Reliants. Now, I had a single cluster making Armored Infantry for a while as the Auroran Hegemony. It wasn't perfectly maxed out when I converted it to star ship production, probably could have squeezed another two infantry academies out of it but it was solid. It was supporting 2.4 million Armored Infantry and still adding about 100k a cycle when I switched it. Call it a rough cap of 3 million. Likewise, I currently have a single cluster that is making 615 advanced jumpdrives a watch, supporting 4.3 million Warphants. With no need of Chronimium and reduced tech levels, I wouldn't be surprised if a similar cluster would get up to 1000+ light jumpdrives and support at least 7 million Reliants if not more. My most heavily defended sector cap couldn't shoot down more than half of 7 million Reliants in the 30 combat ticks it would take them to land and it would take my entire ground force of 4 million Imperial Guards to stand a chance against the remaining 1.5 million Armored Infantry. And that's from the production of 2 clusters. Ok, I know what kind of empire I'm playing after the Hegemony goes down.

Oh and thanks, now I have to figure out the right ratio of Minotaur production to reasonably ensure against Helions and implement it across a 2000 light year long line of starship clusters.
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HELLO<
JELLO :)

SUCH NICE CONVERSATION. WIZARDS OF WINDSOR WILL ANALYZE THESE WISE WORDS OF GREATER POWERS.

L.W., Windsor
The H in H2O is Hexacarbide. The H in Hexacarbide is Hexacarbide. Heaven is made out of Hexacarbide!!!
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