Blood Ties

Dines and I promised Pick to write a little chronicle about the game's development so here it is.

General.

After winning the draw for Picking our Races, we chose Rebels/Lizards. First of all we would like to say that this, with no exceptions, is the two most expansive races! It is also a deadly combination when played correctly...... As we did :) But never the less we would have won this game whatever race combination we got!

Setup:

As we chose our race 1st we got to chose our place in the cluster last! We got the north rectangle. The Teams placement clockwise was: Liz/Reb – Col/Bird – Bot/Fasc – Fed/ Xtal – EE/Borg.

As the bright reader already have figured out, we had Col/bird to the right and EE/Borg to the left. This left us with 2 completely different wars… We expected Bird to be out fast with a medium ship as the team game before us (Acts of Vengeance) where Xtals lost his HW early game. We also knew that early Cobol/Virgo could get past the gap and sweep to let the Cloaked Birds get deep into our area. We also expected a massive Probe war early game with EE/Borg. And had to have defending ships all over our area to catch those hyping vessels before they harmed our logistics.

Explore Explore Explore....

The first 10 turns we mapped our cluster, even at this point conversation was complicated, we wanted to be sure that NO planet got visited twice so coordination of the mapping was pretty important! Lizards (Dines) found a crappy native planet in turn 2 and started to hiss it like a mad man turn 3. As we started with 2 ships Dines got them to start the hissing of every thing that possible could squeeze a single mc out! Rebels (HAWK) Prepared for Probe wars and equipped a few falcons with good beams. We had minor confrontations with a few Borg Probes but nothing that we hadn’t expected and made precautions for.

Development….

We hit the ship build limit pretty fast - I think it was in turn 18… This was a "tactic" we developed quite fast as we experienced that we found no REALLY good native planets and had to hiss every thing that had a pulse! As a result of this we couldn’t get enough hissers and Dines build SB’s everywhere already in the early stage game (Before turn 10). Fast we hit 200 ships all in all….. Turn 12 the first Rush was produced and we started to prepare every SB possible to build crap Rushes (What ever Warp available and what ever beam.) Lizard started to mine the front towards Bird Very early to. And sent some LCC down the middle and towards Bird-land.

After SBL…

When we hit the SB we both thought for a moment that our coordination would be less, we where WRONG!!!! At this point turn 18 we spent some times 12 hours taking our turn!!!! Emails, Icq’s was red hot.. Both Dines and I are perfectionists when it comes to VGA and missing a rush somewhere in the queue would be devastating to our self-esteem. This resulted in Dines actually missing a few turn due to lack of time to coordinate – LOL

Odd enough we still didn’t see either our neighbours.. We started to suspect that this game would be a walkthrough.. (Or at least HAWK did, Dines is the always think the worst kinda guy - hehe) In the 20’s we where quite far down the middle and had a rather large fleet (Counting only Rushes), but they where all, except 4, back in our main cluster. At this point we confronted the Borg, he came bursting with a cube heading right for our area in the middle (At this point we nearly controlled ½ the middle). Advices was short and we got a little frustrated that only 2 Lizard rushes was in the area. Obviously we expected a bit more than 1 Large carrier from EE/Borg… But the time would tell that this was all they had for the time being, so ending it gave us plenty of time to send extras…… So we did. Nearly at the same time Lizard also meet Bird – LOL – this was the turning point in the Game….. Bird obviously got some kind of massive Brain Tumour’s and thought that having he’s complete fleet super spying over one planet was a GREAT idea??? A EVEN better idea he thought would be to lay ALL he’s torps as mines having nothing left to fight with aboard…. As a result of a ion pulse (Which was 100% sure to come when having 12 ships on super spy) 1 Lizard rush smashed the ENTIRE torp-less Bird fleet, not that it was a big fleet but still all he had at the time being.

Birds Out EE/Borg didn’t show anything, we basically started to upgrade our area and after a while MASSIVE fleet.

Walkthrough scenario…

Mid game above 20’s

After the Bird stunt we controlled the ship build queue with no chance for any other race to compete. This gave us the opportunity to spit out Rushes on nearly ALL planets having Falcons HYP’ing the queue with mc (avg. 60k pr. turn) it was no problem getting those sweet Rushes on hold! After a few turns we now controlled ½ the ships in the cluster J We had a golden goal 100 rushes….. Yeah you heard us 100 pieces of the sweet honey! We basically started to invade every one in sight We launched 12 Lizard rushes at colonies 12 Lizard Rushes at EE/Borg and kept 15 in the middle Time to let the war machine roll…. In turn 30 we counted 50 Rushes but basically we didn’t know where to put them. Fuel problem stuck us and 25 Fuel carriers was build primary on fuel planets and recycled on destination to make the travelling faster! (50 Rushes DO eat a lot of oil I must say!) After annihilating the colonies capital ships we captured 5-6 mediums they where transferred to HAWK and made a good RGA convoy for both Bird and Col area. From this point of it was a total walkthrough game…. We only lost Carriers when we wanted to and never took any chances, we simply didn’t have to! Federation and Xtals started to web us but nothing our 3*sweep capacity couldn’t handle. Basically it was a matter of time before total Victory already in turn 40!

Endösung….

It all ended in a game for fun already in turn 45 both Dines and I didn’t really have the enthusiasm to make the turn, which stride BIGTIME against the fact that we both want to be perfectionists in VGAP. We NEVER met any challenge and we "never" got in trouble….. As a matter of fact we could do what ever we wanted to. Actually as an example we build several SB’s in EE controlled Area and spitted out Rushes and Rexes, using priority points. Hell even a neutronic refinery ship was build in enemies’ area at the cost of measly 15 PBP.

We wanted to capture both Col/bird HW which we did rather early. We wanted to capture both EE/Borg HW which we would have but only got the EE before every one capitulated.. We could have got the Borg HW much earlier but it showed that EE/Borg had allied with Xtal/fed (we don’t know if every body allied against us) and this slowed us down because we had to shoot through web to get any where in EE/Borg area. At the end of the game we just fired up under our engines and started to head for Every ones HW J We was drowning in fire power and wanted to end the game so we cancelled all precautions and safety….. This was where the game ended!

Maybe Fed/Xtals thought they still had a chance? We still don’t understand why the game didn’t end 10 turns earlier but whatever people have their right to believe J

BTW we never got 100 Rushes only 60… But we did get 80 falcons (Some strange idea we got along the game to exchange all hissers with falcons)

What did we learn? Well we learned that one turn actually can take a complete weekend to plan and still be stuffed with mega failures… Some how the amount of coordination’s is proportional with the errors made J Which must lead to the conclusion that we shouldn’t coordinate at all?? I think this must have been the strategy of our opponents in Blood Ties!?

Thanks to Pick for taking he’s time to host some great games.