Vanilla IV

This was my second game ever and my first one playing at Lord Firefall's Lair. It was also the first game that I won. I was looking for a quick game to improve my tactics in VGAPlanets.

I took over the Lizards as a replacement player in turn 19, after the Q had played them for one turn. I was first place on the score, but a quick look at my fleet made me shudder. I didn't have a single T-Rex. However the previous leader had acquired a very valuable asset. I found a Transwarp Instrumentality, with a nice load of 60 Fighters :-) The rest of my fleet was not worth mentioning, a few freighters towing stardrive 1 Loki, 3 LCC and of course Eros for hissing.

I was at the bottom of the map, on my left were the Colonies and on my right the Robots, from whom the Q captured a freighter and a LDSF this turn. I decided that I wanted to make peace with the Robot, if possible ally him and fight (destroy) the colonies. So I emailed the robots and offered a peace treaty.

This is where the whole story gets funny. The Robot told me that he wanted to trade the Instrumentality to the Lizards for a LCC in return. This LCC should be given to him this turn, but instead it captured an LDSF, a Q-Tanker and a planet. I guess the Robots thought that they were backstabbed :-) Also the Colonies were quite surprised next turn that I ground-pounded them. The previous player also a sorta allied with them. They should send a Cobol in return for a LCC. Both ships were on their way, but my ship was already in his territory and had colonists on board, too bad for him :-) He felt backstabbed too of course. I "granted" safe return for the Cobol, as I only had hissers in the area, which couldn't even damage his ship.

Back to the game. I actually allied with the Robots and fought the Colonies, just as I planned. I found the Colonial HW in the next turn. Not much of defence there, some Lady Royales, Patriots, Cygni etc., but no Virgo. I decided to immediately attack his home-world. So I cloned the Instrumentality and built a T-Rex on my HW. With a huge :) fleet of 2 Instrumentalities. and 1 T-Rex I attacked the Colonial HW in turn 27. A Virgo was towed away with a LCC that had been waiting there for 6 turns. I won the battle (only lost the T-Rex) and was lucky enough to find a fuel-less Virgo, which just had been built, and a fuel-less Gemini. This was a nice booty. The two ships were towed to one of my starbases and surrendered.

After the Colonial HW had fallen, they were pretty much sunk. They defended themselves very well, but got virtually extinguished during the following turns.

In the meantime I was supplying my ally the robots with an LCC, a Loki, money and some hissing ships so he could fight the Privateer scum that neighboured him. He gave me a Golem and a MCBR in return. Unluckily I couldn't clone the MCBR anymore. But I had enough work to clone all those carriers, by the time the ship limit was hit I had about 20 carriers.

In turn 35 the Fascists were leading the score, followed by me. The game was going to end soon so I decided to focus on my economy and built as many bases as I could. I also attacked the Fascists with a Golem towed by my MCBR. This ship did a _hell_of_a_lot_ of damage to him. I think it killed 8 warships and 3 bases. I was really surprised that the Fascist was unable to stop my (rather weak) attacking force.

Economy was my key to victory. In this scenario (highest score in turn 50) usually the one with the most bases should win. And the lizards still have the strongest economy in VGAPlanets, so building lots of bases is quite easy for them. Also most other players didn´t built enough LDSF´s. No LDSF´s --> Bad economy --> Not enough warships --> You loose, no matter how good your strategies are.

I would like to thank all players for participating in this game and especially my ally Thomas Schulze and also Pick for hosting the game.

Stefan Henschke aka Aperion

aperion@uni.de