Helter Skelter

Helter Skelter was my first game with most tonnage sunk victory condition. I played as Klingons just to give them a try. Also the scenario was quite uncommon. Crazy intermix game meaning nearly every planet is owned by someone and ownership is random, no borders or such. I first thought all those outer worlds are going to be captured sooner or later. I did built factories and mines and defences on them, and taxed natives but I did the building just automatically, didn’t much look at them after first turn.

The game started and in turn 2 Feds, Borg and Empire thought it was ok to show their HW locations to others. Also I got sensor scans from all over my HW and decided to show myself to two Lizard planets. Mission pillage of course :) By turn 4 it was clear that Birds and Crystals live very close to each other, and also close to me, and that Crystals are on offence over Bird HW. That same turn alliance talks with Lizards started and ended too, in success. Next turn Bird HW fall, and I was a bit worried of Crystals next move. Soon after I was allied with Rebels too, since he was allied with Lizards.

The first 10 turns were quite pleasing, I was taking planets with D7’s and others, especially Pirates were taking my planets. But then Borg started to look scary, since they got good number of bases and that worried a lot.

Turn 15 was a turning point to me. Pirates make a "mistake" and tell that Birds have risen from dead. I look at normal scores and notice that indeed Birds have come back and built nice bases too. In fact Bird player changed around turn 10 I think. But back to scores, I look those and see that many have lot’s of bases and all I have is 2, in my HW and planet next to it. So what do I do, I build 11 bases in a turn and jump ahead in scores. This was the first time I actually thought about those outer planets. Then I started to built pillage ships and pillage everything I can to get money, built better ships and so on. In few turns I built huge amount of pillagers and transports.

When shiplimit is reached in turn 26, I got mere 121 capitals and 63 transports. Mostly crappy ships, but still. After limit I can see that I got no tonnage sunk and Pirates got plenty. I started recycling those crappy ships to get PBPs to build good ships back home and to prevent Pirates from getting score by killing them. In fact, if Pirates would have attacked my ships he would be probably writing this, not me. Then I started thinking about attacking. I had built my Vics knowing I will attack Crystals, meaning I got some 3 Hphasor Vics. I had also a fleet going to visit Empire but that was poor fleet. Originally I sent one Vic with transwarps, but on the way I managed to build 2 more Vics on border between me and Empire. Sadly those ships had warp 6 engines which caused my attack to run slowly.

Turn 38 I killed a Biocide, it had poor engines and I killed it losing only a Vic and D7. Same time I was attacking Crystals. I knew they were poor but I still sent 5 Vics, about 6 glories and Rush, not to forget the numerous D7 and other support ships. I have a huge fleet and found nothing. Only few poor Opals, onyx, Ruby, Emerald and Diamond. And if memory servers correctly, none of them had any torps. I was very disappointed to Crystals, I used so much resources and found very little ships to kill. I didn’t even lose any ship against his HW, one Vic took out diamond, few opals and then the planet. Later I lost the Rush, though. I guess because it’s low amount of beams it lost to a well deployed planet.

Around turn 40 I lost interest to most of my planets. I built only on few outer planets, and all my larges were towing warships. Turn 44 I attacking Borg HW, and there was a Bioside too, newly built. Two turns later I killed its fighters with Ill Wind and some other ships and Vic just killed last fighters and the ship. Got nice score from that one too.

Turn 48, just before end, I managed to kill Gorbie. That was the biggest beast of them all, with transwarps and load of fighters it was very hard to kill, since I didn’t have carriers around. Even thought I gave it 50% damage with glories, it took down 2 Vics and finally run out of fighters got blow up by third Vic.

I’d like to thank all my enemies for building those all those nice ships for me to destroy. Pirates gave me a very hard competition, in fact I only killed 386 kt more ships that he did, and it was very good achievement as Pirates. Also I like to thank my allies for being patient, specially Carl(lizards), since in turn 49 he wrote:

"<<< Universal Message >>>

I've been pillaged, RGA'd and now a few

ships have been blown up by a Glory

device. All of these acts were done by

my Allies. They've done more damage

than the enemy!!!

Whoa, it is true Planets relates to

real life situations :-) Joke <G>."

Well what can I say, I was a bit bored since none of my enemies was attacking me, and I was attacking them, so I thought blowing up few hissers as time being :) Thanks for Pick for hosting this game, it brought lot’s of fun.

Khan aka Akseli Mäki