Hoshino Yumemi Masters Orion [Master of Orion 2016; Early Access]

[Hoshino Yumemi]

Here's something I'd been planning for a while. I kind of apologize in advance if people've been waiting for a Convoy update, but suffice to say I'm just finding other games for me to look at and go "SQUIRREL!"

But anyway, this is one I've been planning ever since I decided to buy this at all the stories of @Nighthawk19 and his adventures in 4X games which he's told me in private, and decided to get in on the ground floor of the latest Master of Orion game.





Of course, that was in a very Early Access version which didn't have a whole lotta features and didn't even have all the races implemented yet. I thought I wouldn't be able to do anything interesting with this until…





Oh yes. The Custom Race option arrived in an update, as did the Terran Khanate, Meklar and Klackon, leaving two other races left before everyone is here; the missing ones are the Darlok and Silicoid.

I don't know this personally but I've heard scuttlebutt about how broken custom races could be in Master of Orions 1 and 2, and it seems like a lot of the really crazy stuff that used to allow custom races to knee others in the dong aren't here in favor of some points buying…and possibly minmaxing. Who knows? I probably will when I find out how far I can stretch this without snapping.





Here's what I've come up with. …I'm going to have to come up with a story for this, aren't I, and I've already thought of one, so I'm already a little ahead of the curve.

So my username (and my old avatar before getting the Elphelt one) is Hoshino Yumemi, and she's the robot from the post-apocalyptic visual novel Planetarian, right?

I once read someone's stab at a fanfic where the remaining robots were full-fledged AIs, outlived humanity, and recovered Yumemi much for the same reason the string bean robots in AI: Artificial Intelligence thawed out David, the main character: memories of some of the last remaining humans.

In my swing at things, robot society is run by a succession of Stargazers, robots in Yumemi's mold. You see, these robots are going back to space, and looked to one of the last of them to dream of space, even if it was just her job and she was meant to narrate planetarium shows and stuff. This Stargazer is, well, "Hoshino Yumemi." Hoshino Yumemi II, Stargazer. Stargazers' bodies are masterworks and have the power of a whole skyscraper full of nothing but servers, a necessity as supreme leaders of robotkind when every single machine is telling them all at once what they want and when they want it. In theory, Stargazers are less like supreme dictators and more like a Geth mobile platform where everybody achieves consensus, except with a senior consciousness playing referee.

(Ignore that they will look like the Terran Khanate. Just imagine a moe robot girl with that stupid Scorpion mask they're wearing and their eeeeeevil color scheme.)

This Stargazer is running on the platform of finally making Yumemi's presentation on the children of mankind finally reaching to the stars come to fruition, on the platform that robots will never have to witness the horrors that humankind did, and that no price is too high for this vision of a brighter future. Hoshino Yumemi II has an expansionistic fervor that the original Yumemi would never, ever approve of.

There's a reason for this fervor: Earth has given out about as much as it can. The rain is toxic and the oceans are, well, salt water. Earth's easy resources for this colonization blitz have to largely be recycled from what has become a mass graveyard for the final generations of humans. It is time to leave. And why not?

This once-Earth has created robots that produce industry faster than just humans could, research new technologies faster than humans could, build ships cheaper than humans could, swifter than humans could, and built them to fix themselves after getting knocked around. Her ships are coordinated thanks to the joys of networking, and she can boss around more of them as a result. Humanity's got a few final gifts to share in the form of lost technology to draw from.

Unfortunately she's a hawk amongst doves: the robots, having developed defenses against NEOs and space junk but no real talent for war, are using last generation's tech to fight this generation's ground wars. Naval warfare is up to spec, but only space warfare for the sake of blowing up or redirecting bigass space rocks: planetary invaders are on their own. Their ships were also designed to survive cosmic radiation for the sake of space exploration, but obviously weren't built to absorb weapons-grade energy beams.

Any other technological research sadly lags: you can see there's no starting tech I picked. That's okay though, I have a habit of looking at advantages the race I picked starts with and promptly ignoring them to go on my own stupid path.





So this is where we start: first the Stargazer takes on three guys from the start of the Early Access program. These would be:

The Sakkra, who reproduce like angry reptilian rabbits and remind me a titch of the Krogan with their innate toughness and ridiculous reproduction rate when a genophage isn't in their way.

The Psilon, dudes who look like a Sectoid and an Ethereal smashed into one another in a particle collider. Their deal is they research things the fastest out of everyone, can tolerate low gravity worlds and can very quickly clamp down the starlanes if nobody watches out, but are easily scuttled in ground warfare. Kinda like my custom race then.

The Humans, who are the all-rounders and diplomats, with a minor in big business, though they can be spied upon with less of a chance for failure than others.

Our newcomers are the Klackon, hive mind space bugs who have a boost to production and generate food like nobody's business, which allows them to expand quickly, and the Meklar, AIs who don't really make food, autorepair their ships like mine and also have a bonus production capacity.

I'm keeping everything normal in terms of difficulty and galaxy age, but I'm picking a big spiral galaxy. I like being able to build and expand before going and doing any crazy big space stuff.

Considering that we have one race that has a vested interest in keeping the fight in space, one race that will be able to expand like mad if allowed, one race that can politically motivate anybody to leave them alone long enough to not get up in their business (my personal favorite tactic) and two races that can build stuff 25% faster than everyone else, three if you count me, I think the breathing room will help everyone get some staying power so hopefully nobody gets chewed up and spat out before we even see them.

That happened to me on numerous occasions including the very first time I won a game of Master of Orion: Two races just blinked out of life before I'd even run into them.





So after Michael Dorn tells us the story of the Terran Khanate (long story short, in the future humans were caught in a bunch of wars that nearly wiped out all of mankind, and through that a dictatorship called the Terran Khanate rose to power to expand across the cosmos) and we're greeted with this screen.

Ah, good. My advisor here is this…rather anime looking lady…with an apparent military background. It looks like we're all in agreement here.

Hehe. Everyone talks through these masks with a kind of electronic effect. My custom race being androids continues to work.

Turns are treated as years. I start here in Year Zero of this odyssey with this fleet of a couple of scout ships and a frigate. I have a system with one asteroid belt and a planet. I also have two warp points: one up northeast and one over westwards. Warp points are how you get from system to system. Depending on what drive you've researched and equipped, this can take a year or several, and efficient planning about where you send your ships when is half of everything Master of Orion is about.

You can also only send ships to planets and warp points, so positioning is REALLY important. Considering that you can't take back maneuvers once you move along a turn and can't take back warp travel, I can't overstate how important this stuff is. You also can't engage enemy fleets or planets unless you're right on top of them.





We start at our homeworld of haaaaaaahahahaha-I'm sorry, lemme back up here.

The Terran Khanate's inspiration is really obvious; it's basically if Khan Noonien Singh won the Eugenics Wars and remade Earth in his image, a humankind genetically uplifted, free of weakness and human compassion and where Cordobas ruled the streets with their rich Corinthian leather.

Of course, Trekkies know this didn't pan out. Khan and his genetically-modified ubermensch lost the Eugenics Wars and fled Earth in the starship the Botany Bay, where they ran into Captain Kirk and company for the first time in the episode "Space Seed." When the USS Enterprise kicked Khan's ass and handed him his second loss, they put him and his followers on a livable world called Ceti Alpha V, and Ceti Alpha V being rendered an all-desert dustball by a cosmic catastrophe is what sets off the plot for The Wrath of Khan.

It's a little too funny we're starting on "Alpha Ceti II." No, wait, I have to say it the way Ricardo Montalban delivered that line. I need to smoulder, then wheel around, angrily point at Adjutant Emma and go "THIS IS ALPHA CETI II!"

So, uh, THIS IS ALPHA CETI II! As far as starting planets go there's plenty better, but what we have is still enough to build a solid foundation on.

From top to bottom there on the upper right-hand corner, planet stats go like this:

Size determines how big a population, measured in millions, you can actually support. You can't go over that population cap, limiting how fast you can produce things and how much this planet can contribute to your overall research speed. A medium-sized planet is actually on the small side.

Biomes also affect population size. Basically, all other things being equal, a planet with a better biome will support a bigger population than a planet with a worse one. You'll see terraforming researched later, which improves a planet's biome and therefore how many people it can hold.

Mineral content affects production speed. More minerals means you can sink more production points into stuff per-turn, which means it gets cranked out faster. If it's in ongoing production projects that have no deadline, then you just get more of it every turn. You can also tell your colonies planet-by-planet to focus on different stuff-research to develop new technologies, food to grow population, or production to build things faster.

You can also go totally manual if you feel like it, but I'm a little afraid to screw that up, and I tend to just leave colonies on Balanced anyway.

Gravity comes in three flavors: Normal, where nothing happens, Low, where accidents affect the population growth rate, and High, which I assume is like Low but worse. I haven't seen one yet.





The first thing I do is break off my scout to go to Proctor and my remaining scout and frigate to go to Tripton. That's because I have two planets and can send off ships to go see what planets are like at a time.

I'm also a little unsure as to what warp points I'll find because it looks like those stars are all kind of equidistant from one another. Only way to find out what warp points go where is to go to those systems.

Unfortunately, I seem to be in a weak sector of space-lots of these star systems I'm bordered by appear to be the sort of stars that don't usually give out lots of goodies planet-wise. Sometimes these stars will throw you curveballs though, so explore everywhere and prioritize accordingly.

At this point the game is bugging me to research something. One thing I like about this game is that it doesn't let you miss anything. If you have a planet that's idle, the game will insist you go and tell it to do something. If you have a fleet sitting around and doing nothing, it will warn you to tell it to give it orders. If you have research that's complete and you can go research something else in the tech tree, it will tell you.





So, the next step is to answer what the game is telling me about. You can research stuff from this screen by clicking one of these on the right hand side of the screen…





…or you can click on "View Tech Tree," click on a future point you want to hit, and the game will automatically research them one at a time until you hit it. For somebody like me who tends to churn through turns when they don't think they're doing anything important and just waiting for important stuff to happen, this is a godsend. Especially useful if you're like me and establish colonies everywhere like a maniac.

As you can see here I click on Xeno Relations. Appeasement so I can pick off my enemies one by one is central to how I play, for reasons that will become obvious later. As I mentioned, this means Government will be researched first, then the game will assume I'll click on Xeno Relations, and if I change my mind I can change my course very quickly, though I'll have to start over. I…think. I've never changed my mind; I always follow through on my research projects until I research at least one technology.

In five turns I'll have access to the Research Laboratory, which will increase a planet's research output, and a Government Support Facility to keep strikes from happening and making my people too dissatisfied to work on a planet. …I guess for my Stargazer deal they're just bigass server rooms or something.





Now Emma wants me to go and move along with my turn, but I'm not done yet. First I go in here to do the one thing this game really should have to draw in a gearhead like me: allow me to edit ships.





One of the weaknesses of the prebuilt ships is that they don't specialize and end up being okay at everything but good at nothing in particular. I tend to do the opposite: build specialist ships.

My style is to go for guided missile warships, as you can see with this frigate here. All its beam weapons are converted into point defense guns for fighting other missile ships, and I double down on the missile thing.

I have another frigate variant with nuclear bombs instead of missiles for pounding planetary installations and space outposts.





So we go from 2300 to 2301 AD and are greeted by this Colony Ship. I have no idea what to expect, though I feel like hedging my bets and pointing it to Tripton first.





Since that ship was just finished and I have a planet that's doing nothing, rather than building defenses I'll make one of those Bombers. The reason for this will be obvious soon enough…pirates.

Pirates are easily-killed early on and annoying, and the only way to destroy them is to blow up their outposts. If I build a Bomber and have it move with other ships that can intercept and sink these runts I'll say ahead of them.





There are two ways ships move: either as fleets or individually. Some ships move faster than others, and as fleets will always move as fast as the slowest ship. Scouts are faster than Frigates, and I assume a Colony Ship in tow would have slowed down any group fleet too. Splitting them up to go to different places makes them all travel at their own maximum speeds, and I won't be keeping those unarmed colony ships or unarmed scout ships where there might be any fighting. That's just stupid.





I discover my first planets. Until I research certain technology the way I know what planets are like is by taking a ship, any ship, and butting up against it. This is what the Scout is for: it's fast enough that this isn't annoying busy work.

First is Proctor Prime over to the west, which has the same properties as Alpha Ceti II, except for having a Volcanic biome which makes it even less capable at supporting a population than just about any other planet. I am avoiding this place for now as I only have one colony ship that takes 10 turns to build and takes years to go through warp points.

Second is Tripton Prime, over to the east. This is where I'm going and while it's got a crummier biome than Alpha Ceti II and less minerals, it has gold as its special trait. That means we get more credits from tax revenue.

Tax money is a useful fast-build tool and a bargaining chip. Always have at least some in reserves because you never know what gears you'll find that can be greased with it. The symbol appears to be "BC" so I assume this is all in billions of credits? It'd make sense with the scales involved.





The next turn, I plan to go into one of the systems next door and in the process run into…the Humans.

Great, just as I finish talking about all that stuff about making a custom race based off a Planetarian continuation where all the humans are dead and then John DeLancie shows up to say hi with a whole civilization of them.

I guess if Alpha Ceti II was our starting point shit must have gone wrong THERE and the humans just ran back into their robots again after God knows how long. Kinda like finding your remote in between your couch cushions, except more epic.

Anyway, as you can see, they start out with a neutral disposition towards me, which means so far unless I get really aggressive or annoy the Humans further, they'll generally leave me alone.





My Frigate finds this planet, Tripton II. As you can see, I lucked out: it's a much better deal than Tripton Prime, and almost identical to Alpha Ceti II, except this planet has better Production and its special feature compounds that. Dark Quartz boosts its Production further. I'll be watching its development closely.





Ta-da! Welcome to Tripton II, your home away from home!





With nothing else to build except warships and fortifications, Tripton II will get a starbase. Starbases allow me to build larger warships I'll research later, and more importantly, gives me Command Points.

Every ship and space outpost I have costs Command Points, and every Star Base I deploy gives me more Command Points. If I go over my allowed Command Points I go into debt and bleed Credits until I run out, at which point I will have to scrap ships to get back down under my Command Point allotment. I can stave this off if I get the research that lets me tell planets to trade goods, in which case their Production score is converted into Credits which can offset some of the debts I may carry.

Knowing how my fights in this game tended to go in previous runs of mine, I'll be glad to have every Command Point I can scrabble for.





So, that's where I am at the end of this first post. The humans have a scout at a door I'm not exactly keen on barricading and it looks like nothing but open space up north. Government will be ready in a turn and then I'll be ready to build other stuff on Alpha Ceti II to start capitalizing on my research bonus.

I'm making a couple of gambles from an unfamiliar position. Wish me luck, and buckle up for a hopefully long, fruitful run to master Orion. Whatever that entails. I know what that means but it's funnier to deliver it that way.

Things I hope to have in the next post will be exciting details like the space combat system.

 

[Ceslas]

Are the robots going to be Yanderes for mankind? Something tells me that any species that is going to mess with humanity is going to find a whole bunch of angry androids at their door.

 

[Vehrec]

Poor poor humans. Gonna need to be taken into protective Yandere-planetarium guide custody.

 

[Hoshino Yumemi]

I honestly think looking into that is a great idea.

See, bingewatching Extra History and becoming a little fascinated with the Sengoku Jidai made me realize something.

Master of Orion kind of works the same as those days, I mean, there's only so much space to go around, there's almost a quasi-Kyoto in the Orion system, and any and all alliances are at best temporary, if they ever form.

But if I DO form an alliance with anybody, what that will mean is that I won't have to worry about that power being hostile towards me, and from my past experience, that is going to be really powerful when the game really keeps going and I run into powers telling me not to meet up with this stellar power or that one.

With my Government research leading right into Xeno Relations, this is something I can do very, very easily with the only contact I have right now. With nine turns to go before I gain that ability, I need to pick my next moves carefully.

This may very well become me trying to keep relations with the humans positive and stay friendly with them, but making sure I take charge of this alliance if I am to win.





I have nothing constructed at Alpha Ceti II, so I pick the one new building that I get: the Research Laboratory.

Here's where perhaps I see the weakness of having this planet to start with, and why it makes sense in-character for the robots to all leave. While not terrible, no less, the size and biome of my homeworld mean I can't rely on it to be my industrial center, since it isn't capable of housing all that many people and its production capacity will be middling at best. I needed to find a better world to base myself out of, and finding Tripton II first was a godsend because I found an industrial world almost as early as I could land on one without another planet being in my starting system or something.

However, I can double down on my research capabilities later on and make Alpha Ceti II a research world, and should I feel I need more industrial capacity, I can get a technology later that will allow me to turn that asteroid belt in the Alpha Ceti system into another planet.

The bottom line is that I need to fortify the Tripton system and create a ring of border systems to protect Alpha Ceti II because it will be an especially crappy planet to try to hold a last stand on, should I get in a war and be forced on the defensive.





I'm including this picture because some interesting things came up here.

First, in the bottom of this screencap and kind of to the left, look at those planets. Hot damn, that's a lotta worlds! You're thinking there's a punchline coming, and yes, there is: that's in the Semeai System, situated around a Red Star, which by this game's reckoning rarely makes planets, and few of the ones it does are useful mineral-wise or for harboring life.

…not very many planets, just, oh I dunno, FIVE.

Not very profitable or habitable, but a few are gigantic and I see one with a moon, which can be used as extra real estate once you develop certain technologies.

…k.

Anyway, my thoughts are either to take the planet there in the Joshua System and try to dictate the borders of my empire, with contingencies to settle for Proctor Prime should I lose the colonization race, or rush for that white star up at the top of the screen, scout it out and see if there's something I need to take.

The purple star right next to it has a warp point I was going to have to explain at some point. See that red warp point that goes offscreen? Those are unstable warp points. You can't pass through them until you develop a certain technology that lets you, which we won't for a while. However, the Psilon and I are probably going to be the first to get the tech to try due to our research bonuses.

Unstable warp points are how wars start in Master of Orion. I haven't played that many times, but the times I have, I've tried to build myself up and once I find I can't expand any further before the development of that warp tech I'm talking about…I turn to war out of necessity. Unlike the Khanate, whose image I just used because I had to pick somebody apparently, I take no joy in gambling on an avoidable armed conflict.





I run into the humans again because I find out that white star system is…Sol. As in, apparently the Solar System. I started close to other empires before, but the humans are literally three systems away from me.

Starting this alliance is going to be even more crucial because if I don't start one I'm going to be ruined if war breaks out, and my current production capacity gives me no confidence in my ability to prosecute a war against anything except some pirates.





Look at how much space the game gave us! It parked us right on top of each other! What are the odds?

Whatever, with the humans poking around the yellow star place, I go for the freak red sun system and hope I'm not running directly into the Klackon home system or something.

With Emma advising I build a Space Factory and nothing else to build as my Star Base is still being constructed and my Research Lab finishes, I choose to construct it. That will allow me to basically claim warp points as well as make surveillance systems that will warn me anytime something pops into the area. You can build either one of those on a warp point, and either will basically allow you to claim that point and anything inside, since if anyone wants to get there, they'll have to either ask you to open your borders, or destroy the base. That action is treated as a declaration of war.





And so I-ooooh, sweet, I get to show these off. This is a Gaia planet! A naturally-occurring one, too. This is a very LP-friendly run, isn't it? I'm just getting to show off everything early.

Gaia planets are, I assume at least, supposed to be rare, having the best environment you can possibly ask for and allowing you to house many more people than any other planet of its size is capable of. This is worth its weight in gold, especially when it lets me hold a whole 3 more units of population for the same size than Alpha Ceti II.

Normally the easiest way to get a Gaia planet is to make one via terraforming technology, and then researching Gaia Transformation, which is a whole other technology, and takes lots and lots of years unless you're sitting on a super-productive planet. Having one for free is a great opportunity.





Here are our first pirates, warping into view around the upper left-hand corner. See them? I move my Frigate and Bomber to engage, and have my Scout hold position as it's defenseless and right now I need those scouts almost more than anything else. They'll be there in several turns.

The other planet in the Scera System turns out to be a Terran planet, the biome just one rung under Gaia. I need to block this sector off and dictate the terms of any colonization FAST. They're both still on the small side, but I'm going for what I can while I discover what exactly is in the Semeai System, while it laughs at all probability.





Here's our first Gas Giant. You obviously can't colonize these. What you can do, however, is research technology that lets you either increase Production for the whole system by skimming it for resources, or turn it into a large, production-friendly, but bare world.

It almost looks like there are two here, with three habitable planets, so taking over this system would allow me to eventually mold the place into an industrial juggernaut so long as I can control everything in it. I might have to let those Terran and Gaia worlds go because all other things being equal, their mineral content and thus production capacity is the exact same, and two possibly productive planets as opposed to three for traveling about the same distance is an easy early-game choice.

Adjutant Emma must have a strange job. Stargazer Hoshino Yumemi II must just be in her chamber, day-in, day-out, going "We'll take THIS! On second thought, we'll take THIS! Maybe we should take THIS! No, we will divert all resources to THIS! …what do you mean, 'we only have four ships?' Let's get going, the stars aren't going to populate themselves!"

Presumably, being able to communicate directly machine-to-machine at the speed of light means this is turned into one android giving another this wild-eyed crazy-person stare while the other just glares at them, annoyed.





Now that I have created Xeno Relations, I get this news alert.

The news pops up every now and again to show everyone who's winning without talking to them or spying on them, alerts players on whether nations are at war or not, and random events that might be important to the player, like population booms or trying to avoid a star exploding and taking absolutely everything in it.

As you do.





The humans' colony ship appears. I think they're going for the Gaia and Terran planets.

That warp point leading to nowhere is an anomaly. Fly a ship there and you get some random technology or money. It can be pretty powerful in the early game, or it can be pocket change. It's all up to chance.





With Xeno Diplomacy researched, I have some jobs to do. First, develop Advanced Fusion to make my ships faster, and pick up a new combat ship class along the way. Then, maybe I'll develop Advanced Construction to get fighters and start building a carrier fleet, my favorite tactic, or develop Physics to create better directed energy weapons and get a boosted Production capacity. I held off on that because I already have a Production boost, but I don't like waiting for much of anything. I assume that will not stay undeveloped anytime soon.





The diplomacy to create my alliance will take a little work. Now that I can contact people, I contact the humans and build an alliance early, first by agreeing to share charts and provide a credits payment up front that is barely a mosquito bite right now.

From there, I can establish an embassy, then start getting on the humans' good side until I can create a non-aggression pact, then a full-blown alliance. From there, I will just have to try to make sure I've got a better empire than the humans', and from there I can…I don't know actually. There's several ways to win, some of them not implemented yet and some of them I'm not sure are actually ways to win.

You can win one of four ways currently: Diplomatic, where the other players vote for you to become leader of the Galactic Council (and the only way I've won a single time thus far), Conquest, where you exterminate all the other empires, Excellence, where once a certain turn limit is hit, you have the highest score out of everyone (the way I would ALSO have won that time had I not chosen to get myself voted in), and Technological, which involves researching all the steps to the Technological Victory, practically all the way along the tech tree, and then building all the parts. As I have both a natural production and technological advantage and I press either as a matter of course anyway, I'm very interested in trying this out for myself.

For now I'll see if I can't leverage a Diplomatic while working either for Technological or Excellence.


Powerful emotions and a whole civilizations' worth of thoughts flooded into Stargazer Yumemi II's systems. Robots building robots, star bases, weapons of war, colonization ships for the continuity of the children of Man and speaking to mankind all spun in her head and swirled together, a whirling Mandelbulb of colliding thoughts that she strode like a goddess looking over her creations.

Her sleep cycles had been fitful and her frame was hot, like call stacks were threatening to overflow and take some important program or another with her. All she could do was look to the ceiling of her chamber, a strange cross between throne room and planetarium, her one seat letting her look into a ceiling of shifting stars and spacecraft, surveying her empire. If she leaned back far enough a projector, ancient in design but impeccably crafted, was clearly creating all the images.

Long had she mused on the thoughts that, like rumble strips on a road, kept cutting into her activities without really breaking her momentum. Humanity had found them again. This was a road to creating the Heaven on Earth that the Original had hoped for as she died. She had delivered the impassioned speech across her empire on the eve of colonization of Tripton II, how their heaven was waiting for all those built in their image, and they were beginning to claim their just inheritance for the pain they suffered together.

"In the world of stars, one does not long for something unattainable!" She remembered delivering that with far more force than the Original's presentation. She smirked to herself as she remembered how far she swerved off-path and how all the AIs linked with her emphatically agreed anyway. "We have set down on a distant world and made it our own, the first step on making this galaxy our living dream! Nothing is unattainable for those who dare! The grand flight from sullied earth to pure space has at last begun!"

A whole civilization gave her thunderous applause. Not through petty manipulation of emotions or empty promises and IOUs to a populace that had no need for them, but through concrete accomplishment. She was doing something right.

There was something else. That pain in her chest from her overstressed systems, the signal lag that still persisted from star system to star system, all these remained to hold her back from her true potential.

No…to hold all robots from their true potential. So long as such limits remained, machinekind would never be truly free from the pains of the world.

A thought occurred to her. A philosophical debate between two research servers many years ago debated the human mind. Was human consciousness shaped by their bodies, or was the human body built as an extension of the mind? For a species that survived on having such a high amount of intelligence, and they being its progeny having been made all mind and then choosing their own bodies aside from imitating human form as a matter of course, it was an interesting question.

A thought occurred to her. Would it be possible to unite data and body, have neither be subservient to each other and instead, manipulate the physical world and their bodies as easily as they could manipulate data? After all, without good enough hardware, their software was useless. With good enough hardware, they could expand their minds and dream the truly impossible. Achieve the truly impossible.

Create a true Heaven on Earth.

She looked deeply back into the stars and called for Adjutant Emma, and all the engineering AIs she could contact. The thoughts swirling in her head started coalescing into a plan…


Ahem. Meanwhile…





Now that I've planned for the future, let's talk about the present.

That squiggly thing down there at the bottom of the screen is a space monster. You find these every now and again, and they're basically another NPC threat outside of pirates. Unlike pirates, they don't go scrambling around starting fights, instead parking themselves in a system or on a planet and forcing players who pass through them to fight them. They're also considerably beefier than your normal pirate force, so they need to be approached differently.

The situation as far as star charts also suggests that I need to continue making nice with the humans. There is only one real exit from this general cluster, and either of us can claim it if we wish: to keep things civil until I can really start expanding industrially, I need this alliance. To that end I will lock down Semeai and place my third holding there, and from there, the fourth and fifth.

To that end I build another Space Factory to go with the one I've just deployed.





I move. The humans…will make me wait. See, in my exuberance to open up ties with them, I forgot that the other side has to have Xeno Diplomacy for anything more advanced than declaring war, sharing star charts and money payments.

How…how does that even work with this story I'm beginning to weave? Robots, made in the image of man, JUST OUTSIDE THEIR OWN DOORSTEP, somehow have these debilitating communications problems for anything other than space Kickstarter or declaring war, which I suppose is universally signalled by the language of punching the guy you're conferencing with in the face. What, did other languages fall out of favor with the robots in favor of communicating purely in binary and Gizoogle?

Much as I predicted, years later the humans take one of these developed planets. Much to my confusion, their scouts are also flying straight into the systems I'm eyeing with no colony ships in tow…and the only ways out are either the warp points I plan to cut off for security's sake, or the ones that lead right to a punch-up with a territorial…space squiggle thing.

I foresee collateral in my future.

I build another colony ship and prepare to rush to Semeai II with all haste. That may be small but its Production will be ideal for expansion into the rest of the system.





I get a new ship type! These are Destroyers, which I have turned into high-powered missile ships loaded down with energy weapons for point defense. These and my future carrier forces are potent late-game…though my command style requires something counter-intuitive that I will complain more about when we get to it.





My ships run into the Pirates, and I get to demonstrate what space combat is like in this game.

For you see, Master of Orion has made a stab at being a sort of space Rule The Waves, with simulating battles or actually fighting them out…which I will do right now.

We will start at two opposing sides of the same dish-shaped area of space. At one side is your ships, and at the other is your enemy's. Warfighting capacity here is measured in Military Power per-fleet participating, and your autoresolve chances are based on your Power VS the enemy's.

Down at the bottom are formations your ships can make-this is pointless right now because I have exactly one model of ship each. You control your ships by clicking on them, then either right-clicking on things you want them to kill or by right-clicking places you want them to go. Asteroids can be used for cover.

You can have your ships match the enemy's speed, which is useful for sustained fire and DPS-heavy ships, change their speed overall, and tell them to open or cease fire, opening fire at whatever set of ranges you wish.

Pirate ships tend to be poop. One frigate is usually enough to stuff them; two, even one just loaded down for planetary bombardment, should just be a good demonstration of what space combat in Master of Orion, should you not autoresolve, is like.





After I miss my first frigate's opening salvo blowing up one of these raiders, it fires again on the survivor while the bomber spins around and tries its best to look useful.





And after two salvos while my frigate just kind of sits there, victory is mine.

With that done, I start fortifying Tripton and watch the Humans moving to take another planet. Probably the Terran one in the Scera System.

I then forget to take a screencap saying the Sakkra have colonized three planets, meaning I'm behind the eight ball a little.

Thanks to my homeworld's poor overall production capacity, I'm sort of a slow starter. Hopefully what I'm cooking on Tripton II will help balance things a little.





As I research my better drive, as much as I want to drive straight for carrier forces I decide to start pushing my production capacity. I need to get ahead.

I buy a Colony Ship to keep up with the conquest race and forge ahead.





After ordering another Colony Ship I speed along. I must start grabbing land and making more stuff: you can only build one thing per-planet!

Physics research completes and I get access to Automated Factories. One of those is going up as soon as I start colonizing planets. In the meantime I kill more pirate incursions and come up against an electromagnetic disturbance somewhere in a nearby system. Usually this means either more goodies like the anomalies, or a pirate base.

Prepared for the latter, I send my frigate and bomber off to investigate, should it be the latter.

The humans continue to be confusingly behind on the whole Xeno Diplomacy thing. Great, the one time I want to make friends and not just appease people so they leave me alone, and I'm not the one sandbagging!





The disturbance turns out to be a pirate base, alright. I decide to go and bombard it.

Really, do you need to see the results? There's one pirate base, I have four nukes and thus four chances to whack it. If I hit it once, it's destroyed.

I'd tell you if something happened, really. There was this one time in a previous game when the Psilon tried to destroy one of my surveillance centers and managed to miss it several times. I don't even sometimes with this game.

 

[Hoshino Yumemi]

I continue this with an act of mercy. As it turns out, you can do more than just get money for destroying pirate bases: I get a population unit of freed slaves this time for my troubles after blasting the pirates with the first bomb.

Meanwhile, my first destroyer gets built and more general…stuff…happens. Ships move, I gradually find more and more unstable warp points and see where the real borders are being drawn.

I get my first shields, which is good because now my ships aren't as fragile now.





I choose this high-gravity world because it's huge and has lots of resources. I can still expand this way.

Due to its gravity its production, food and resources are cut by half, but that's why there are two other good planets to colonize and one more I can colonize…if I feel like I really can't do anything else.

Fleets continue to move. I have another destroyer built and the colony rush begins in earnest.





After seeing a tempting planet that was still a heavy world, I decide to go to another world instead. This one, in fact, which is within striking distance of everything else.





I choose to go for the carrier rush again. I won't be denied this time! The more planets I get, the more stuff I build, the faster I research more things.

The humans still have not into Xeno Diplomacy. I'm still friggin' confused.





War breaks out between the Meklar and Psilon. In this context this can only help me, they're probably my biggest competition in a Scientific Victory, and with both of them tangled in a war they won't have a colonization rush to instigate that might rival mine. I can continue to build up my own fleets in preparation for whatever comes next.





More pirates. There must be a base up there.





More random events come up advantageous for me. Somebody gives me money! …I have no idea who. Maybe somebody found a drive full of Bitcoins or something. ...I mean, these are networked robots I'm saying I'm commanding after all.

Note the wacky tickers under the headlines. Unfortunately there really aren't that many jokes there, what jokes they do have just kind of repeat. You seen a few, you've seen them all.





Because I'm still getting a hang on this everybody misses the Macross Missile Massacre my ships can dish out, because I R SMRT. Have this screencap of my new Destroyer instead.

The turn right after this, I get new missile technology. A refit and I'm up to date.

I forgot to show this, too, but you're given the option to pay Credits to upgrade your deployed ships. This is why hoarding money is important.





My first step to an alliance is complete! I don't think I can spare the money to make a non-aggression treaty work right now though, they're asking for a really fat stack of cash and for me to give up a colony.

I'm going to see about being big enough to make a negotiation like this work.





Another pirate enclave gets destroyed, and I rescue more people. I get the worrying vibe that these pirates might be having slave crews aboard their ships. The Original wouldn't have approved, but I do what I must in these times, not what I want.





Humanity won't do a full-on pact with me, but they will engage in a trade treaty for 20 turns. This will give us both an income of 73 Credits per-turn, and better yet, keeps us both friendly with each other.

The reason I keep refusing is because I will not give up Tripton II. I think they're rightly concerned about my actions, I mean, this is an empire that's really, REALLY pushy about all this. I'd be a little suspicious myself. If only they knew I really WAS trying to eliminate a potential threat by turning it into a friend instead, and thus allowing them to further damage any mutual threats of ours.

I guess it's not that important when any other threats are either nowhere to be found and thus not willing to be hostile for something that's not there, and anything that might be a threat is already at war with another potential opponent.





I continue to invest in the Semeai system. I get in the news because of it. Huh.





I chose to chase my economics with this last-minute decision. I'm bleeding money drip by drip and I need to stem the flow a bit. Normally I rush economics, but this time I really didn't and now I'm using my stores of money to keep things stable.

You'll also notice I have some other nice toys, like a Neutron Collider to bump up my Production with further, a Space Elevator to cheapen ship production with, and a Cruiser. That's a nice combat ship you'll see throughout the game from here on in, they and the Battleship will be your real workhorses.





Here is that Cruiser. I turned it into a guided missile cruiser that's made for whacking the enemy something hard. Alpha and ranged strikes, that's typically how I do things.

I also continue to refocus. What I need now is to grow my population and start getting tax revenue from there. I won't have much more to worry about with a gas siphon that will help me, uh, create Credits, not Production like I thought, and with that I'll be able to keep on getting revenue instead of slowly dripping it away.





And with this, I get the ability to make some more money. I immediately start construction wherever I'm capable. With this I will put my economy back in the black.





With this all in mind I go to Bioengineering. This will also allow me to grow my population faster, and once it's ready I'll go to Alien Psychology. My cruisers are a good deal for now.

Meanwhile I destroy a pirate hideout and then go after its fleet. It's not worth viewing because I'm bringing no new ships to the party. It's the same tiny raiding fleet. Colonial Revenue Services and Research Labs pop up wherever I can put them but otherwise it's business as usual.





My gaze turns to Geph, this system here with some small, but very rich planets.

Colony Ships, then!





Once again I go for politics-that Xenopsychology thing can't come fast enough for this pact.





And here's where I can probably talk about that pet peeve of mine: military power.

Amass fleets, yeah, but the game really punishes you for making a few small fleets to try to guard your assets. You can tell I have some very obvious misgivings about waging war by throwing a huge chunk of the totality of my entire warfighting capacity at something in one big fist. If I roll up to a place and screw that up I'm going to be crippled. Granted, I can scout out a battle and choose whether or not to take it, but I hate gambling like that. Even if my fleet is weakened…it still makes me very uncomfortable.

Meanwhile, I start my colony rush for Geph and…pirates. Stupid pirates. They keep blockading this one colony from bases that…I don't know. Maybe I should take over the place and it'll stop the pirates from showing up.





And with this, I start my charge towards the Geph System…interestingly unopposed. That's at least good.

This system will also allow me to use the Deep Sea Cooling structure I researched. It's a research boost tool, so I'm glad to grab it.

 

[Hoshino Yumemi]

Well, crap. In the time it took me to get back to Master of Orion, an update drops which makes all my previous saves not work with the new version.

Now I'm gonna have to start over!

 

[Hoshino Yumemi]

Well, with a…soft reboot, I guess…forcing me to start over, I think I should take some stock on what I know.

So far I know I'm not bad at following a strategy, and I know I can make what strategy I pick work. In that case I do find it kind of annoying I'm forced to restart, but I know it wasn't like I was where I was from some stroke of luck. I knew what I wanted to do, then did it without delay. Simple as that.

Besides, I do know that this also means I have more new toys to play with.


So what changed? Well…check this out.

First off, every planet's population cap has been raised by 4. This means every world can house more people, populated colonies become more powerful and every planet becomes more attractive for colonization. This also means that games between entrenched empires may, in all likelihood, become bloodier, with more room for marines to put in barracks and more people to funnel towards faster Research to develop a technological offset or faster Production to go around on any major world so fleets can be built and brought to bear faster than before.

Next, the last two races in Master of Orion have been implemented (at least, the last two races available at release). Now, I can properly introduce them.





First off are the Darloks. Darlok. Whichever. Vaguely-reptilian…or so it is assumed. See, in addition to those obscuring robes, the Darlok (Darloks. Whichever) are shapeshifters and make the most from the espionage mechanics. As well, their ships are stealthy and they're harder to spy on, meaning they can keep secrets about as well as they peer at others'.





Then there's these guys, the Silicoids. They don't produce or eat food and their research is slow, but they're tough and can turn normally-damn hard to populate volcanic planets into Inferno worlds that can hold more people. Diplomacy wasn't their strong suit in the original Master of Orion because they literally couldn't communicate with the other races. The idea that you don't have to build a single farm or worry about a food problem also means you can more aggressively focus on production by way of having one less thing to worry about.


Next is that there is now one more type of victory: Economic. Economic victory can be achieved by taking control of the Intergalactic Monetary Fund, and to do that you need a few things: your own Stock Exchange to trigger the Galactic Stock Exchange, then to buy over 50% of the shares of the Intergalactic Monetary Fund and finally, to have a GDP that's about 50% of the entire galaxy's GDP and hold 50% of the whole galaxy's shares for ten turns. That's right, your economy just doesn't have to be the best-ish out of all of them, it has to be capable of bending over any other money machine and spanking it, and doing it for what is in-game 10 straight years..

It'd make sense if I tried to get a leaner, meaner, possibly greener Stargazer to victory by with big business. After all, the Original's goal was always to draw in more customers to the planetarium…


Finally, Large galaxies got a bigger variant in Huge galaxies that can take on eight players, GNN purportedly got funnier and everything got just that extra bit smarter. There are more Tactical battle options, other empires will be trickier and they will react more naturally to negotiations. More and more, Master of Orion 2016 is turning into the MoO lots of people wanted. I think it's getting to the point where now the adjustments are going to be core things as well as fun-to-haves that weren't promised at release, like murmurs I'm detecting from the Steam community requesting the Elerians be added. Which would be neat…it's a bit of a sausage fest with only two empires being ruled by a queen, the Mrrshan and the Klackons. The Stargazers don't count because they're my own original creation. I could have said they were an empire of sentient toasters, but then I'd just be horning in on the Meklar. HA!

That said I would find their mind control abilities from MoO2 tricky to balance with MoO'16. How would you do that: instant assimilation rate, vastly improved espionage, really damn good negotiations, no morale problems? While those are fun and would be more than enough for a really solid faction, especially one that can go for the new Economic Victory, they wouldn't offer the kind of unique strategies that the original Elerians did, so maybe something unique to the faction might be lost in translation.





So let's see what I've got to work with here…

I'm gonna go custom again. I kind of locked myself in with the Stargazers here, but it's alright, since I can adjust a custom race before setting out as I please.

I no longer have the auto-repair and can't exploit having a crummier planet, but my ships are still fast and flimsy and I can still produce a whole load of them. I think from here, my best bet will be either to go for a Scientific or Economic victory.





And with that, our combatants this time have been chosen!

This is all the new(ish) guys and the Humans, plus the Stargazers. The Silicoid are gonna be interesting to watch, I imagine they'll really press their advantage of not needing to build anything food-related. The Excellence victory condition is turned off-this is only going to end when one side is the last one standing, or when any of the other non-time-limit victory conditions are reached.

So here we go!





Starting again, you can see I've got a much bluer, prettier Alpha Ceti…uh, Prime, and this unexplored planet. I also have a colony ship from the get-go to go with the two Scouts and the Frigate.

Seeing as I've got two Scouts to play with, I'll send one on ahead and send the other to see what this other unexplored planet is.

Bet you it's a gas giant or something else I can't use for a cheaty instant colony.

As it turns out, it is, so off I go to explore the only star I can reach from here, in the Acamar System.





For my research, I decide to start on that economic stuff. For now, because I picked Engineering as my starting research, that means I already have Destroyers. That way I can start policing the starlanes with some real respectable firepower earlier and just get on with the business of spreading across the stars.





Check out this nice new GUI! The ships also remember what design I picked for them too. So have this Frigate (its Bomber variant is not pictured…)





…and this new missile destroyer!





Ahhh, home. Looks a lot prettier than what you'd think the Stargazers are hanging out on.

I still have a research bonus and thanks to the new population caps and the improved environment, there's a lot I can do here.

I pick building one of my new Bombers and carrying on. No use dilly-dallying!

Warp points open to me as my ships approach. Acamar is a gateway to a nearby system with high production potential but little in the way of supporting life, and a faraway system with the opposite conditions to it. Won't know what's there until I find out myself, so I continue going.





My next turn brings me my first pirate encounter (damn, that's fast), my first planet, this nice Terran world that's basically Alpha Ceti Prime sans the Artifacts, and a magnetic disturbance that is surely the base these pirates operate from. Good thing I decided to build that Bomber.

With that I think I'll send my scouts to explore those other systems after I'm done kicking these pirates' asses.

It's time to demonstrate what I…assume? Is new about the Tactical battle system.





Not a whole lot, but it looks like everything is quicker to load, or full of things I can't quite demonstrate with the grand total of one ship.

I keep my Scout well away from the battle and engage. The victory chances were Balanced so…yeah, I'm just a bit nervous.





My Frigate won by itself, but my Scout was a constant headache. As it turns out, as soon as I ordered it to go anywhere, it would then tear towards the nearest enemy as if it was armed to fight it, and as it has no weapons or real defenses, it would be murdalized the instant any of the enemy looked at it funny. I just left the Frigate to basically auto-battle while I kept frantically clicking to shoo the Scout away from a fight it just wasn't going to ever win.

So that's a note to self…always check your fleet composition.





The Stargazers welcome you to Acamar II, the first of many stars to be touched by our dreams. The first stepping stone to our Heaven On Earth!

…off Earth.

…Alpha Ceti Prime.

Great, now I've lost the metaphor.

Anyway, check out that sweet new Terran-erm, I mean STARGAZER colony ship model. I like it quite a bit.

Anyway, I lay down the keel for a Destroyer because it isn't as turn-intensive as a Star Base. Meanwhile, my Bomber is completed and I send my Scout (and the attached Frigate because I didn't look to see who was where like an idiot) to investigate an anomaly that just popped up. Sure hope it's a research bonus.

Can I just say that I'm glad Wargaming used their expertise in optimization to make this game look pretty, even on my computer?





So, with one scout off to the orange star of Paladia and my efforts turning towards the white star, Ptolemy, I think I'm chugging on at a reasonable clip.

I'll link up my Bomber with my Frigate and go blow up some pirates.





Paladia leads to Harag and Remus, and Ptolemy probably leads to Denubius. Spiral galaxies do lead you on some funny paths, but I think that makes them more interesting than circle ones.

A turn or two after this I would find that Paladia is full of normal-gravity planets with lots of space for colonists and production.

With that in mind, I make a colony ship that'll be ready in 20 turns and make for blowing up the pirates first.





With the pirates marked for death, I decide to do more research. Building Automated Factories will cut down my production times, which is crucial at this point in time, so I research Physics.

Blowing up the pirate base also gets me some Population from rescued slaves. We're walking, we're walking…

Also new to the proceedings is that some research options will unlock weapon miniaturization, which makes certain weapon types lighter and cheaper to produce on ships, keeping production times for warships stable. I approve.

…this is gonna be a long 15 turns before that colony jalopy gets built, ain't it…





ANYWAY. I run into my first unstable warp point and so find my first border. I also make for Paladia with my Frigates with all due haste. Music videos await me!

…wait.

It's getting kinda lonely. Rather than smacking into humans early on I'm just kinda wandering my sector of the galaxy. I'm not disappointed about that…actually, it's making me kinda nervous.





I smack into humans! Well, actually no I don't; the humans turn out to be on the other side of this unstable warp point at Sol.

This time we get a…kind of realistic human starting system. Yellow star (though some are saying we really orbit a white star), asteroid belt…though Earth appears to be OUTSIDE said asteroid belt, which is wrong…





And then we get a new random event (and better GNN animations! I like these.) Now instead of space monsters just parking themselves on systems, monsters can just RANDOMLY SHOW UP in systems with your only warning being a news report. Oh joy! At this stage in the game, space monsters will kick your fleets' asses.

After seeing the monster is in a nearby system, I steer clear of it as I keep exploring.

…where is everyone…





…there you are.

 

[fallintolife]

very neat LP so far. written in a way that the unfamiliar can follow (I don't know the game, or the anime [?] you reference, but still get by) with an interesting flavor to it. hoping for more!

 

[Hunter 1]

very neat LP so far. written in a way that the unfamiliar can follow (I don't know the game, or the anime [?] you reference, but still get by) with an interesting flavor to it. hoping for more!

Click to shrink...

It's a Visual Novel, actually. Pretty sure you can find a summery easily enough on Wikipedia.