Advanced Save Game Six Empires Huge Map and Minor Races

[UesugiKenshin]

Reading through what people wanted, they wanted a Dyson Sphere, which would be transforming a star into that, and so requiring a programming change analogous to terraforming.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_s ... r%20output.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
Like this on the Kardashev scale.
That would be a Type II civilization.

[UesugiKenshin]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrang ... %20systems.
With colonization say around gas giants either Lagrange point colonization plausibly doubling total population in an inhabited sector or moon based colonization around gas giants as they have so many. Then that would add a twist in advanced levels on total capacity of output of everything.

Jupiter as of 2020 has 53 named moons and 26 as yet without official names. Saturn has 82 and Neptune has 14 moons, so imagine how much they could provide in terms of additions to total population.

[UesugiKenshin]

Say a major race arrives and has an ethical quandary: indigenous life already exists on a planet in that sector. The AI would terraform right over it without specific instructions not to based on major race attributes, but human players would have to choose whether or not to exploit it.

It is a major opportunity to do storytelling.

The AI on occasion will bombard a minor race into extinction to have that sector and thus ends any ability to make any spaceships or special buildings of that species. The ugly aspect is some minor races have negative attributes that would cause serious harm to the empire at large, but some have magnificent starships after being redesigned and so an incalcuable loss.

[UesugiKenshin]

Turn #458
The Omega finally got around to sending a ground invasion force to the Baflids. I don't like that so many billions are killed and it is likely that with advanced technology that nonlethal forms of attacks would be employed. As the Omega are symbiotes, this would upset them and be considered an egregious waste.

http://birth-of-the-empires.de/wiki/ind ... r#Bafliden
The Baflids have two special starships, a fighter and destroyer class vessels.

They have two special buildings as well.
http://birth-of-the-empires.de/wiki/ind ... E#Bafliden

Note that it takes awhile before you can even see the conquered minor race's vessels in the starship design window. I believe that is a function of the morale level in that inhabited occupied sector.

I redesign most and even though some are not much better, make some of each just to have them for novelty sake, but with a properly redesign starship database with revisions, every starship would fulfill a combat or otherwise niche use to be a pragmatist.

Note that the Terrans sent a single starship to see what was transpiring, but the Heyoun sent two fleets! They badly desired that Baflide real estate.

[UesugiKenshin]

http://birth-of-the-empires.de/wiki/ind ... ker#Mozwar
Note that there is a minor bug with the Mozwar who are members of the Omega Alliance. Their standard destroyer, the Mozvra class, for some weird reason never shows up, but the heavy destroyer, the Zvska class, does show up. That is the only bug in the starship classes I have found. It may be only not showing up when conquered?

[UesugiKenshin]

With 1600+ starships, it is easy to make an error as you click on a destination twice to also confirm it. Many times while rushing as fast as I can, I have sent 30-40 level 6 troops toward someplace like the Baflides, then realized that a stellar anomaly is in their navigational path, and made course corrections, then got distracted, or made an accidental click, and they end up in the wrong sector.

It is dangerous to combine the space combat fleet with the transport plus escort fleet for ground invasion. If the AI targets those ships, it could doom your ground invasion.

My plan is to eventually equip a Cartare supertransport that has redesigned so they have better protection. You really need:
1. A cheap transport designed to make outposts and starbases in domestic territory.
2. A stronger transport for pushing back the enemy's sphere of influence.
3. A stronger transport as freighter who might get attacked as a juicy target.
4. Protected transports for ground invasion troops.
5. A very robust military transport for dangerous mission far away past the borderlands into potentially hostile territory plus escorts.

The first two might be disposable, but the rest are not, so should be designed to the rigors of their appointed tasks.

[UesugiKenshin]

Part of the problem is a transport might be so far away on a 40x40 1600 sector galaxy map, that it will be a long time before coming back. A wise strategist sends them for combat training and then dispatches them. Otherwise you have a logjam at the combat training sector. That is a mess as it takes forever to scroll through them all and create fleets.

A vastly superior technologically advanced empire would not put all their eggs in one basket. Most likely an expensive secondary combat training center as infrastructure would be created in zones all throughout the empire. Then you would have a Rapid Deployment Expeditionary Force.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_deployment_force
https://www.rand.org/topics/rapid-force-deployment.html
https://www.army.mil/article/192563/bui ... the_future

With an empire of 300, maybe 5% are tasked for that role so 15 zones.

[UesugiKenshin]

If you had the misfortune of being in one of the two middle empire start positions, you have no natural protections and would have to have at least 10 Rapid Deployment Expeditionary Force zones or you get smashed by the competition.

In this game, the Omega had their western and southern borders protected which is a very lucky situation. The reason that the Cartare fared so poorly was they had a central location and next to the Omega and Heyoun and Terrans who all were aggressive expansionists, while then the Khaoran and Rotharians, though small, then competed for territory. The Cartare were screwed from the start.

[UesugiKenshin]

In a designed galactic map, the central players either have to be better players or have a bonus of some kind of it is not fair. They should have more starships or better inhabited sectors and probably need stellar anomaly protection as the traffic will be fierce as the others explore.

[UesugiKenshin]

BotE is an especially fine wargame, but in actuality, to handle so many military forces, would you need a huge parallel supply chain and logistical support. The sci-fi concept is every starship would be autonymous and have that on board, but still probably need to be within a radius of starbases.

To BotE's programmers credit, this idea begins in turn #1 regarding short medium and long range.

Obviously they would begin with machinists, engineers, electronics, mechanics, etc, but soon would need replicator technology, and a team constantly fabricating every part on that starship or else they are screwed postbattle and with extensive damage reports. Plus food and medicines and routine supplies.

[UesugiKenshin]

There are three Master of Orion2 open source clones coming out like Remnants of the Precursors, and they will be doing an open beta soon. This makes me sad as BotE is a vastly superior MoO2 clone with crisp graphics, but this last year, not only did nothing come out to update, not only are all these posts not able to be found through Google searches, not only can players not find advanced save games to bypass their legitimate complaints about sabotage, but Precursors is largely an English language project, thus it will get tons of good reviews. It also features a customizable ship designer just as GalCiv2 had so you can as the player create specialized ships.
BotE only allows the player to customize pre-existing ships. See I have a lot of energy to do starship revisions to have a simple straightforward mechanism so players did not need to do that. And if that pans out, it makes the AI stronger as the AI will be able to use better revisions as their empire's tech levels improve.

It is a real mistake to do nothing between the glowing reviews of RotP in beta and Uciana. BotE is better by far, but makes modding on the Android a pain in the butt.

RotP has actual crude 90s style ship combat using various weapons to sort of have an RTS. RotP has a compelling soundtrack.

BotE has enormous untapped potential, but it only seems to matter to me.

[UesugiKenshin]

The Android solution for modding BotE will most likely be running a parallel space app and loading a modded version of BotE to that parallel space, as most players will want to keep their original BotE from Google play or the beta test from Google play on their main tablet space which is in root directory, thus can't be properly modded...especially if autoupdate is turned on. That parallel space then will be running the modded version.

And to make that work requires a modder to load the windows version of BotE in Exagear, make the changes, then port the changes to an Android version of BotE.

See that is very involved and prone to error and it will take some teaching to guide modders and players through Exagear, the windows' version, parallel space, a second installation, and keep everything straight just to play a mod. It will confuse people and any changes then require documentation of the new mod like the Balancer.

[UesugiKenshin]

BotE for Android is very mod unfriendly. There is no hidden screen within BotE to access a mod section or to load a mod or even to alter the research tree, troops, major and minor race attributes, change diplomatic dialogue, add planet or ship names, design a map, or add a 100 new ships. There is no way to create a campaign or alter the treasury or alter the initial troops, infrastructure, ships, etc. There is no way to design a map or edit a save game or set the diplomatic stances of major and minor races or lock alliances.

All of those are very standard for mod design so modders achieve endless replayability for a great wargame like BotE. If you want a million players, that is what is necessary. Then 100 mods would spring up.

[UesugiKenshin]

If you make any changes in most Android games, then autoupdate will write over the mod. And the only way to do those things to some degree is the brute force text editing method that is prone to lots of errors and crashes.

The only exception I am aware of is unciv. That was written to be easily modded. That is arguably why unciv has half a million downloads even in beta.

[UesugiKenshin]

Exagear is designed to emulate windows and run turn base strategy games and can't handle RTS gaming very well on the Android. See that should work for BotE for Windows as there isn't an RTS element, just resolution of troop movements and rare battle calculations.

Exagear can run something like Rome 1 Total War on the Android, but it drops the frame rate so low that it never will work. That is probably why they redesigned it for Android and why such an old game is so expensive now.

But Exagear should work extremely well on BotE. The only suspected issue may be if empires like the Omega in this example have 1600 ships and all the empires are like that. That may not down the resolution of ship movements and combat on rare instances.

BotE for Android is so well written that a pre-Android 4.0 OS will run it even with a 1000 ships but gets slower in turn #750. I tested that on a venerable old tablet nearly first generation.