Space Empires V Players And Those Interested In Playing:

[Spleen]

(This post is old but the next in the thread is new and relevant -Spleen, 12/6/07)

I broke down and got myself a licensed copy of the game with box, etc. I'm beginning the transfer of the .rar archive with the .iso inside to Bes as I write this. Having the CD will improve the program stability, and being able to apply the latest patch (which we couldn't before) should improve it even more. Plus, I figure, for the seven or so of us who can already play this game, I figure we owe them some money, dig?

There are two files in the archive, which is in the .rar format: One is the ISO itself, the other is a .txt file whose title is my CD-key for the game. It is unknown as yet what effect multiple people installing with the same serial will have, but as Bes and I could start a multiplayer game with something that can barely even be called a "copy of the game", I don't foresee a mess of trouble.

If you're on Hamachi (either Spleen Command or RPGWW_SC), just poke me to drop my firewall and gank this file: //rededge/Other Fancy Shared Files/Space Empires V.rar.

If you're not on Hamachi, hit me up over AIM and I'll send the RAR over to you.

[Spleen]

So now a patch has been released that eliminates all the problems that we had with multiplayer in Space Empires V (as far as Bes and myself can tell), and with winter break coming up I was wondering if anyone was interested in starting a big game, probably play-by-email (or play-by-RPGWW-Wiki, even). If you don't have a copy of the game, someone with the .rar I made can send it to you. The tutorial's pretty good, but explore for yourself.

Something I was thinking about, though: We could play without telling each other who is controlling which empire, and in-game communication can be roleplayed out. That would kick ass, roleplaying diplomacy out according to the race/government types we pick during empire creation, and not knowing the identity of the person on the other end would add an extra touch of alien-ness to it, I think.

[Besyanteo]

I totally support this.

[Spleen]

I AM SURPRISED TO HEAR THIS, BESYANTEO. DO YOU PLAY THE GAME OR SOMETHING?!?!

[Besyanteo]

I DO ON OCCASION. ARE YOU A MIND READER, SIR?

[PriamNevhausten]

I AM TOO LAZY TO DO RESEARCH ON THE GAME. GIVE ME A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THIS TITLE AND I SHALL TAKE THE APPROPRIATE ACTION. SELL ME.

[Besyanteo]

Sort of like Civilization, but set in space, and infinitely more complex due to total player customization. You create your alien race's governing style, society, racial advantages and disadvantages, ship design style, your minister (toggled computer control on specific units, planet,s etc) style, initial areas of technological development, and so on. You assemble your ships, small space craft, ground troops, sattelites, space stations and such from scratch using components from technology areas you've researched, choose a strategy they default to from a list, and if you learn how (I never did) you can code your own strategies for them to follow.

Your society's state of being (happiness?) is determined by a wealth of factors in the game, most of which are indirectly under your control, and their happiness impacts their productivity. You can perform intelligence operations, and sends spies to other empires to learn about them, to sabotage them and their operations, or even to help your allies. There's dozens of different types of weapons to make use of, armors and shields to defend your units, facilities to customize your planets. Late in the game, if you've researched Stellar Manipulation, you start gaining abilities to reshape the galaxy to fit your needs: Creating and destroying planets, stars, warp points, black holes, nebulae and such. You can make your race psychic and use weapons that mind control the crews of enemy ships, or take organic manipulation and build ships that heal their damage after battles like living creatures.

I've been playing for a few months and I still don't know or understand everything that the game offers. I haven't described a quarter of the game here. It's very immersive.

Also, because I feel like it: People who want to make custom racial portraits for their empires can send me image files of a member of that race, and I'll put it into the game for them.

Screen Shots!
A system!
A solar system that I share with one of my Allies, the Drushocka.

Research fields.
Many many fields of research excluded due to display constraints!

One of the two design windows.
This is a list of all the designs I've made so far that I still use.

My alliance menu!
Six members. I only have 11 votes. The Drushocka empire grows alarmingly fast...

My system's finances.
Ah, silly Phong. They give me Tariffs because I felt like asking for them.

Space Combat
Some of my short range fighters against an enemy colony ship that wandered into my territory. They are so very doomed.

[Spleen]

You can make your race psychic and use weapons that mind control the crews of enemy ships.

ALLEGIANCE SUBVERTERS!!! I wish the success rate was higher.

[Besyanteo]

I also forgot to mention earlier:

The in-house communication suite. It's what would allow people to roleplay anonymously. You can choose any type of message you want from a large list, and set various parameters to your messages that have various in game effects depending on the response of the message's target, with a few exceptions (people can't ignore, say, you going to war with them, or vice versa.). What's neat about this is that no matter what type of message you choose or parameters you set, you can always type out a custom message that accompanies it, which can be very lengthy.

So, to sum up, the communications window seems to have been designed around the idea of roleplay.

[Archmage]

I was IMing with Spleen about this earlier and I kinda told him I'd BRB and inadvertently lied.

I'd be interested, but I'm worried about the fact that the pace of the game is liable to be incredibly slow.

[Spleen]

We'd probably set it up similarly to how Bes and I have the current game he and I are playing set up. The technology level will be higher to start out and we'll start with multiple planets, so there will always be a wealth of stuff to micromanage on your turn. That way, the fact that it might takes hours to get all the players' save files together (hopefully it won't) will be mitigated by the fact that you can take a lot of time on your turn to do a lot of stuff. Or people can even plan several turns ahead and possibly not have to actually input anything on their next several turns, as ships follow their set trajectories and planets move down their build queues.

EDIT: I am also reminded that the Wargame you ran had similarly long turns, Brian. This will be similar in scope (but not human-GMed) and so probably take about as long, and we were prepared to accept it from the Wargame.

[Archmage]

Oh, I know. The pace of the Wargame was one of the reasons that it didn't work so well, but also all of the bookkeeping. I'm totally cool with the idea and fairly interested in playing, and since I don't have to sit and micromanage everything mechanics-wise I'm certainly interested.

Count me in.

[NamagomiMk0]

After Bes and Spleen talked with me about it, eh, what the hell, it's something new. As well as free. I'm interested, at least.

[Archmage]

As Bes commented, this game is absurdly deep and complex. After skimming through the 300-page manual and dicking around with a highly-advanced society's tech tree for about an hour last night, I realized that last time I played this game I managed to play it for five or six hours without actually figuring out how to build proper fighters.

The tech chart starting on page 214 of the manual is your best friend unless you want to flail around in confusion, wondering why the hell you can't colonize gas giants, build homing missiles, or develop ship boarding parties.

As an aside for those who've played the game for a while, what're the merits of the different racial tech trees? I've thumbed through the manual trying to get an idea for what is and isn't practical and it seems like all the racial tech trees offer really unclear benefits; the weapons aren't necessarily more powerful than standard weapons, for example, but you get to develop a whole new branch of technology that differs from the regular stuff in ways I haven't quite figured out. A few of the advantages are obvious, like the psychic technology tree offering you the ability to mind-control enemy ships, and bio-organic structures regenerate, but I'm not sure about some of the others.

[Besyanteo]

Some of the various benefits of various racial technologies:

Psychic-
This technology tree offers a variety of fun weapons and facilities. For example, the crew loyalty subverter will, when effective, allow you to temporarily take control of an enemy vessel. The ship and fleet training facilities allow you to bypass a much longer tech tree that would allow you to do the same thing under normal circumstances: make your ships' crews more effective while in combat. They learn so long as they're in the same system as one of these facilities. There's a facility that gives a static bonus to any of your ships or fleets being attacked in your system, on top of any bonus their training gives them. You gain a ship component called a psychic scanner that fills both the function of basic sensors and tachyon sensors: you can see enemy cloaked ships. Further, you research that as the same time as you research your facilities.

I feel the other weapons are fairly meh, but I haven't looked to see if they bypass shields or armor or such yet. These things will be displayed in the weapon description when a weapon is right clicked on in ship creation, or in the help menu's weapon tab.

Religious-
The gods favor you! Or something. This creates various totem components that give your ships static bonuses, and facilities that make your systems more propsperous, your populations happier, and ward off natural disasters. I don't recall there being any weapons in it, but I may just have never researched them.

Crystalline-
Before getting into the good bits, a warning: a Crystalline Chassis of any type will use different resources in it's construction than a normal chassis: A normal Chassis is mineral heavy, a crystalline chassis is Fissionable heavy. So, if a normal ships costs 1000/400/400 to build, this one costs 400/400/1000.

Crystalline armor! Stronger than normal armor, hella heavier than normal armor though. Redirects energy fire from the armor to the shields, even if that weapon would normally bypass shields.

Crystalline weapons bypass armor when firing at a target: That means there's a whole defense type that you just don't even have to bother with when shooting at people.

Two facilities that I feel are of note: The crystalline restructuring plant makes your ships' upkeep costs less expensive. 5% at level 1, and +1% for each level of crystalline tech. I don't recall the name of the other facility, but it generates minerals, organics and fissionables at a set rate per facility, per star in the system. It's less than, say, a a standard facility generates of it's own type, and less than a monolith facility (stellar manipulation) will generate at the same level, but it's also multiplied by the number of suns in the system it's placed in, whereas the others are not. This makes them wonderfully useful on planets that otherwise look like they have no value.

Organic-
My personal favorite, fleshy ships.

Before getting into the good bits, a warning: an Organic Chassis of any type will use different resources in it's construction than a normal chassis: A normal Chassis is mineral heavy, an organic chassis is Organic heavy. So, if a normal ships costs 1000/400/400 to build, this one costs 400/1000/400.

Another note on organic chassises: They regenerate. They're flesh, and will slowly heal over time. This is nothing to scoff at. Being trapped in the middle of nowhere with broken engines SUCKS. Since the repair component for ships is 150kT, it can't help your smaller ships. Being made of flesh can.

Organic weapons! Organic weapons are the only weapons I know of that will give you the power of a missile weapon while still being direct fire weapons, and thus working with weapon mounts to do multiples of their standard damage. However, missile weapons are still more powerful on smaller ships that can't make use of mounts. Be careful to check for this.

The Ordinance Vat. Oh hell, ordinance vat. This is the only component in the game that generates ordinance. Solar collectors will generate supply, but that doesn't help your missile ships any, now does it?

A word on facilities: The genetic re-sequencing plant. increases your populations' birth rates a fuckton. This is good because the more people on your planets, the faster you produce things in space yards on those planets. There's another facility later in the organic tech line that will further augment that birth rate, increase population happiness and prevent plagues. A medical facility will prevent plagues of higher levels sooner, but you could eventually replace them with this.

Temporal-
Last, but certainly not least.

Temporal scanners! This is a carbon copy of Psychic scanners with a different graphic. Huzzah!

Temporal weapons: Shields? Bullshit, I ignore your shields.

Facilities: The temporal entertainment facility. Increases population happiness by a set percentage every turn in an entire system. This is a good thing. Rioting populations don't make things for you. Angry ones make them slowly. Happy people are gooood people. the Temporal Shipyard. So, let's say a shipyard lets your population produce ships at a rate of 2,800 , plus the standard 2k a planet already provides. A temporal space yard adds another 2k onto that. What you see is what you get with these numbers: If your ship costs 1000/400/400, and you have a construction capacity of 6800/6800/6800, you produce nearly seven of those ships each turn. There's a third temporal facility, but I forget what it is at the moment. Sadness.

So, no, they're not all the same. They all have various advantages and disadvantages that you have to consider and weigh. Finally, something else I've learned... It's hard to maintain two racial tech trees at once. They're expensive, and are better augmented with something like 25% faster build rate, or advanced power consumption... and so on. But that's just my personal opinion.

[Spleen]

Psychic weapons are fun because there are a bunch of them, they do a number of different things, and they're all one relatively low-cost tech area. There's weapons that blast, weapons that blast harder less often, a weapon that temporarily removes crew experience, a weapon that stops a ship from firing, I think a weapon that stops a ship from moving, the Allegiance Subverter which has been explained at length, and a couple others. It' s a fun tech area.

[Besyanteo]

I've made eight new racial portraits for SE5, that will work as soon as they're extracted from the .rar they're in into the SE5 folder. But Net2FTP refuses to upload it to my webspace because it's slightly larger than their (incredibly fucking tiny) maximum upload limit.

So, anyone interested should totally IM me and stuff. Doug and Brian: The same pictures I showed you the other day, plus one or two others.

Edit: Because it's been annoying to me in the past to navigate through and find the stupid thing:

"C:\Program Files\Strategy First\Malfador Machinations\Space Empires Compilation\SE5\"

[Spleen]

Should I make a separate thread for signups for a big play-by-email game? What's the thought?

[Capntastic]

The thought is that you're a drunkard and need to put on a goddamn shirt, you slovenly orc.

[Spleen]

BUT WITH SHIRT NO ONE SEES BATTLE SCARS! MORE ALE.

[Besyanteo]

It might be more noticeable in a new thread, yeah.