Well, guys, I FINALLY beat the Obscene level (out of about 10 starts, and =posted= stompings). Just posted yesterday. I had to tell someone, and you seemed like the right crowd.
Gigantic, Loose, all Rare, I think there were 9 factions (Random), Random minors - but there were 4 to start, Very Slow, playing Atarians, with extreme research focus.
I did contol-N to get a good setup. I think, with the above parameters, it is near essential. In any case, I never did find an out-system planet.
At about mid-game, the Arceans, at my back door, got the event that makes trash worlds (3s) out of the useless worlds in their system. I lucked out and got all 3, one of which flipped to them pretty quickly, but I was just in the course of exploiting 2 Infl resources. I got those pumped up and managed to save the other two little worlds until I could dump extra pop on them.
Eventually, I flipped the Yor, then flipped the Iconians, which put me competitively just behind the Drath, who had already knobbleded every other major. The Arceans were smaller, but long time allies of the Drath and positioned behind me, which helped keep the Drath from grabbing them. They were also my single 11-route trade partner, with trade bases along the route, so I didn't want to flip them for financial reasons.
So we sat there, getting along, all cranking up the tech and influence for awhile. I thought I had a pretty good chance at this point because, although I didn't have near the planet territory the Drath had, I controlled 80% of the unusually high (for Rare setting) number of resources on the map, and I was in the process of systematically enhancing/fortifying all of them.
Then the assassination event put me suddenly at war with the Arceans. Finances got rocky, and I was scared to death that the Drath would come in with the Arceans because they were already allies. I was Close already with the Drath, so I quick allied with them, which kept them out of the ensuing war.
As I said, the Arceans were smaller and lagging just a bit in the tech race, so after some initial successes against some of my less fully upgraded (and thankfully less critical) resource starbases, it turned out that their best fleets couldn't quite take my fully upgraded mil-resource base that was between our home stars.
I hadn't built many ships, just enough to make me look like a porcupine to most potential predators. I had only built Defenders, then kept upgrading them with latest tech, and adding a few at a time to the system protection fleets. I had also collected about 10 Rangers. I was in the process of bringing the five system protection fleets up to max logistic limit, to keep the so-far-friendly Drath from getting ideas, when the war broke out.
Turned out that my hi-tech, system-only protectors were good enough. The half-sized fleets were able to polish off raiders sniffing around the planets, with the aid of the Rangers patrolling out along the line of freighters I had trying to build new alternate trade routes to the Drath. My one fully maxed 50 log fleet of Final Defenders began making their slow way to Arcea.
Money got bad, but I had a 20K cushion and I was pop maxed (until I built a couple of big transports), so I was able to really push the taxes between elections. That and killing my (really expensive by this point) espionage program enabled me to get by until I could divert some constructors into my last few un-maxed eco resources. Toward the end of the war, 1-2 Drath freighters came to me, and 1-2 of my replacement freighters reached Dratha, but I was pretty much OK already.
A maxed up 50 log fleet of Final Defenders contains 16 fat little ships. They each mounted 5 Disruptors and a double layer of all ultimate defenses. They were each defending at ~28-30 vs any form of attack, but that didn't realy matter, because the fleet was attacking at 560-beam. They took about 10 weeks to get there, but they went through the Arcean home fleet dreadnaughts and battleships like a hot knife through butter (well, OK, maybe frozen butter).
When my newly built 4000 transport got there, it was pretty much all over. Seized the Arcean homeworld, plus my passel of little firepots had gotten there in time to save one of the marginal worlds I had in the Arcea system from a final assault. Between those two worlds and my 3-4 Influence resource bases, I had enough majestic presence to just wait about 4 turns and the remaining two Arcean worlds rebelled to my side.
Unfortunately, at that point, since I had been forced to take out some insurance at the beginning of the war in the form of that quickie allinance with the Drath, we got all mutually federated and the game ended. I had been really looking forward to seeing just how god-like all those resource bases (I only had about half fully developed) could make me. But I wasn't about to turn up my nose at my first ever Obscene win!
whew! I didn't really mean to make this into a mini-AAR when I started the report. Please forgive if you found it long winded or a bit mundane. I promise not to do it every time, but I had just been pounding my head against that Obscene glass ceiling for a long time. (ya know, that sounds a little like there is a very unique classic porno flick in there some where.)
regards,
drrider
