Darloks In A Box


In between Meklar attacks, I had the Space Crystal to deal with:

I don't have my games last long enough for this thing to show up too often. It attacked me at Nazin, and despite having 60 bases on hand, I nearly lost the planet to this crystalline threat. This was due to the Lightning Shield that the crystal was packing; that's a very high level Force Field tech that destroys nearly all incoming missiles, with the base chance being 100% minus the tech level of the missiles fired. Even for Hercular and Zeon missiles, that means that close to 70% of the missiles will be destroyed and do nothing. I was using considerably less advanced weapons than that on the tech level, and if I hadn't managed to steal Scatter Pack VII missiles from the Meklars by this point in time, I would have seen Nazin destroyed completely. Those Crystal Rays did a number on the missile bases - does anyone know what the stats are on those things? Ouch. Not to mention this thing having the base-killing Black Hole Generator that I used recently to good effect in my Uphill Struggle game. I was happy to get out of this encounter with the loss of only two dozen or so bases.

Over the following turns, I played a game of whack-a-mole for quite some time, trying to stand up planets in the face of unbeatable Meklar fleets. Here's a picture of this in action over Mentar:

Yes, the poor brains had bit the dust when one of the Meklar death fleets finally decided to pay them a calling. I was kicking myself for not invading here and conquering the planet when I had the chance. This is a ruthless game, and I could have reaped a real advantage by being crueler towards my former enemy turned ally. Anyway, this kind of situation is quite common in the lategame of Master of Orion. The AI will routinely have fleets that the player can't defeat, and the challenge in the gameplay is working around those unbeatable ships to take and hold planets regardless. Having Mentar as an unsecured spud world worked to my advantage in some ways, pulling the AI pathfinding of the Meklars up here and away from my core planets. I would found and lose this colony repeatedly over the course of several dozen turns, always destroying the Meklar colony when they tried to build one and replacing it with my own startup effort.

My attempts at creating a colony at Mentar were doomed to failure. There were simply too many fleets passing through this area to ever get the planet secured for long. (As I've written previously, something about the AI pathfinding makes it harder to do this in the center of the map as opposed to around the edges.) However, this was not a waste as I managed to buy enough time to secure my hold over Paladia, the Meklar world in the south that I had recently bombed out of existence. I kept expecting that colony to be destroyed, but the Meklars actually came to me asking for peace at one point, and I gained a brief reprieve while controlling the world. Eventually I managed to get a strong factory count going and get enough missile bases in place to be safe against anything other than the core Meklar fleet. It's almost always worthwhile to make the effort to stand up the locations, since the AI will sometimes surprise you and if it works, you've gained a whole new planet for your empire.

The other thing that I was doing over these turns was continuing to spy on the cyborgs left and right:

I kept four ticks of espionage spending going with them, and made sure that I always had parity or an advantage in Computers tech. If the Meklars discovered something new in Computers, I would keep stealing nothing but Computers tech until I had it too. Then I was free to pick their pockets in the other trees after that. The Meklars chose to emphasize Construction tech over everything else in this game, and that meant I had enough Computers ability, along with the Darlok racial bonus, to keep grabbing new techs at a steady pace. I've only highlighted the most useful thefts here; this was far from the full list.

As far as what I took... Powered Armor was a giant leap forwards in Construction tech, and perhaps as importantly, also gave me the possibility of conducting ground invasions. Prior to this, the Meklars had been at something like a 50 point advantage, which is essentially the limit at which invading becomes impossible. You can't really invade 100m population worlds when the defender holds an advantage of 10:1 in casualties. Class XIII shields were another giant leap forwards: my previous generation of Huge gunships had been using Class V shields! In particular, this new shielding would make any ships that used it immune to the Scatter Pack VII missiles that the Meklars were still employing in great abundance. Scatter Pack VII fires seven missiles at once that deal 10 damage apiece, which isn't enough to get through Class XIII shields. Finally, the Pulse Phasor was a huge upgrade from the Fusion Beams that I had been using previously. Phasors are the next gun tech up from Fusion Beams, and the Pulse Phasor fires three times per shot for 5-20 damage each. Because the Meklars were using Class XIII shields on their own designs, I would have preferred to use a gun with higher base damage, even without the pulse effect. Disruptors would have been perfect here. But I could only use what I had available, and my own Weapon techs were nowhere near this advanced, so the Pulse Phasor it would have to be. Along with the Tritanium armor that I had just discovered, I developed a new Huge gunship / Small bomber pair, now able to fit the Omega-V bomb onto a Small hull. Once I had time to build these new ships, I hoped that I could finally start to go on the offensive for real. I was back at war with the Meklars by now, of course. I think I managed to get eight whole turns of peace from them, and that was more than I expected. Was this our fourth or fifth time at war? I had long since lost count.

Sadly, it was also time to bid farewell to the Sakkra. I knew that they were doomed the instant that this fleet was headed for Sssla, and there was nothing I could do about it. The Meklars had several new ship designs that I was tracking, with these new ships packing even more missile defenses and Bio Terminator weaponry. They had also gone over to building nothing but Huge ships, which made the AI ships even more effective. They're so much better at the design setups here in kyrub's patch; in standard Master of Orion, one of these designs would have been overloaded with weapons, and the whole stack would be crawling around at warp 1 speed. Not anymore; the AI knows enough now to keep everything on the max warp speed available, and so everything in their fleets was zooming around at warp 6. At most, I would get one turn's worth of warning before they hit one of my planets.

After obliterating Sssla, this same fleet targeted my empire. Yarrow had drawn the unlucky straw this time:

That was my Poor planet, of course. I had built a strong defense of missile bases here, knowing that I wouldn't be able to do much in the way of crash-building them via Reserve spending, and wound up with just short of 50 bases on hand to meet the attack. This screenshot reveals what Yarrow was facing. The Tornadoes were still as bad as ever, although with Scatter Pack VIIs on hand I could now smash them pretty good as soon as they decloaked. Unfortunately, those missiles were useless against the other new Huge designs, all of which had 13 points of shielding. My Stinger missiles (which do 15 damage per shot) weren't particularly effective. But wait, it was even worse than that: the Annihilator and Nexus designs also had Lightning Shields, cutting missile damage even further. I had one volley of Stinger missiles hit a Nexus design and do something like 50 damage. Against a ship with 2400 HP. We might have scratched the paint with that shot. Even the Nemesis design, which had no Lightning Shield, was packing a Cloaking Device and had Neutronium Armor II for 3600 (!!!) health. Holy cow.

Yarrow was doomed. In fact, any of my planets that this core fleet came against was doomed. The Meklars had managed to put together designs that were effectively invulnerable against missiles, and between Omega-V bombs and Bio Terminators, my own planetary defenses were almost useless. There was little point in building more bases. I needed enough to stop the small probes of one or two ships that the AI will send out, but there wasn't going to be anything that would prevent a Meklar core fleet from destroying my colonies. Because the Meklars were so heavy on shooting their own missiles and defending against enemy missiles, I needed to counter them by building my own fleet and taking it to them with gunships. Autorepair Huge gunships with their own Class XIII shields could hang in there for extended battles with these ships, regenerating health all the while and slowly whittling them down. Rather than build missile bases for defense, I would now start concentrating on building ships for defense, although it would take some time to build up a true fleet of my own.

In the meantime, how do you defend your planets when they come under attack? The answer is that you don't. The key is to let the AI destroy a world, and then refound it and stand it back up again as quickly as possible. Anyone who has experience at playing around the Negative Fleet Bug has likely run into this at some point in time and gotten practice at dancing around the AI's invincible forces. I was actually fortunate here that the Meklars were using bioweapons, since when they killed a planet all of the factories would still be present. I just had to send a colony ship and import the population from other worlds. This is visible on the map for 2550:

If you look closely, the Meklar fleet is retreating back to their planet following a successful mission, while I have a colony ship ready to refound at Yarrow. That unlucky planet would be wiped out several more times by the Meklars, but I always kept refounding it, forcing them to send their fleet back there to keep destroying it rather than hitting other planets of mine. Between Yarrow, Mentar, and Sssla, the core of the Meklar fleet spent most of its time attacking spud worlds and not my core colonies. This is a weakness of the AI, as it likes to go after lightly defended or undefended targets, even when it has an unbeatable fleet. I continued to dance around their core navy while slowly building up my own force. I hoped in time to hit their highly exposed world of Nordia, the single purple flag out by itself. Nordia was a veritable Gibraltar with over 60 missile bases and close to 200m population. If I could ever take it though, I could deny the Meklars the range to hit my core planets, and that would be the breaking point that I needed.

My Rich and Ultra Rich planet were both exceptionally good at shipbuilding, and I had Nazin and Cryslon contributing as well. I split my focus between Omega-V bombers and Huge gunships, roughly splitting construction 50/50 between the two types of ships. The Ultra Rich planet was cranking out Huge gunships every 2.5 turns despite the 5000 BC production cost. They are real hot commodities! Sorry Silicoids, but I needed that planet. Once I had half a dozen of the new Huge gunship, I found that I could start to take on smaller and even medium sized Meklar fleets:

The highlighted Phasor6 was my new gunship: 36 Pulse Phasors, 30 Omega-V bombs, Battle Computer IX, 1800 HP, and the Autorepair special. The Meklars provded unable to deal with this design; their Scatter Pack VIIs did zero damage, and the Hercular missiles on the Nemesis design weren't in large enough numbers to cut through the Autorepair healing. Naturally, their bombs and bioweapons were also useless against these gunships. The Meklar fleet had almost no guns at all on their designs, and in any kind of extended fight, I was getting the better of them. In the image above, one volley from my Phasor ship was doing about 1000 damage, so a full round of combat did about 2000 damage, nearly enough to kill one of the Meklar Huge designs. Best of all was when I could catch them over a spud world; their ships would stupidly stick around to bombard/biohazard the planet with all of its 5m population and zero factories, and the whole time they were dropping bombs my Phasor ships were firing away and thinning out their ranks. The old Fusion design of ships (the 10 stack above) provided helpful logistical support, serving as a convenient target for enemy missiles and using the Warp Dissipator to freeze some of the slower Meklar ships. The Nemesis design (the cloaked ship above) only had a speed of 2, and several times I was able to freeze them and stop a retreat, then slowly whittle the ships down until they were destroyed.

Overall, this was a long and slow process that took place over dozens of turns. There was no one great battle, no singular turning of the tide. But the Meklars could not figure out how to respond to my Phasor design, and as time passed my naval strength only continued to build.

The capital gunships were the product of only half of my shipbuilding efforts, however. The other half of my production was being used to churn out Small Omega-V bombers by the thousands, amassing them against the day that I could try to conquer a Meklar planet intact. Nordia was my goal, and when I had several thousand along with a healthy complement of Phasor gunships to provide cover, I called for the attack. Once again, I took very heavy losses among my bombers - including all of my older Medium Omega-V bombers which were still very much effective - but I had estimated correctly and managed to break through to the planet's surface. Then it was time for the ground invasion, which I had the confidence to pull off now that my fleet was strong enough to maintain space superiority. Unfortunately I still had a huge disadvantage here, with the Meklars holding a 35 point edge; I was sending 200m population every turn and killing perhaps 30m to 35m defenders per turn. Ugly stuff. Then I managed to lift the Personal Absorption Shield via a tech theft, and that dropped the disadvantage down to merely a 25 point penalty. This lowered the Meklars to "only" a rough 4:1 edge in casualties, and that was enough to get the job done:

Both of us using Hand Lasers in 2565? Well, the Meklars hadn't researched anything better and most of my stuff was stolen from them, so go figure. Nordia and its 1300 factories opened up the floodgates on tech, delivering the maximum six discoveries and some highly advanced toys to play around with. There's the same Lightning Shield that the Meklars had been using on their designs to stop my missiles. Given the missile-heavy designs of the Meklars, that would be highly useful for some of my own ships. Ooh, and the Subspace Teleporter. Perfect for bombers, and I would quickly create a new bomber design to make use of this special. Personal Barrier Shield helped to reduce the Meklar edge in ground combat by another 10 points, and Adamantium Armor kicked off a further 5 points. Now I could expect to invade at something approaching parity instead of ridiculously lopsided losses.

Strategically, taking Nordia also cut off the western half of the galaxy from the range of Meklar fleets. I had lost nearly all of my core planets at some point in time to the Meklars, including Nazin at one point. They gave it the same bioweapon treatment and I was forced to reestablish it and flood in population from other worlds to repopulate it. At least the thousand factories I had built up all remained there. However, now these worlds were all safe from the cyborgs, and I could concentrate on further pushing the offensive. The tide was inexorably turning in my favor, as it nearly always does in favor of the player in the extreme lategame.

The spud world of Sssla offered another opportunity. The Meklars had managed to build up several hundred factories there without finishing any bases yet. With my newfound ground technology, I conducted an invasion and wrestled the planet away from them, pulling the maximum of six techs yet again:

Sssla offered an even better haul than Nordia. Neutronium Armor is the best armor in the game, with +30 attack for ground combat and quadruple the starting health value for ships and missile bases. Combat Transporters allow 50% of your transports to ignore missile bases; good thing the AI has no idea how to use them properly. (They're REALLY good for the Bulrathi, for obvious reasons!) Hercular missiles were the best the Meklar had to offer and another step up in missile tech; I had researched Pulsons a bit earlier, one of the few things I didn't take via espionage or invasion. Battle Computer XI was the top targeting system that the Meklars had and the best Computer tech in the game (tech level 50), while the High Energy Focus speaks for itself. Now there was nowhere that the Meklar ships could hide from my gunships on the tactical combat screen.

With new ships incorporating these technologies starting to roll off the assembly lines, the game had swung decisively in my favor. If the Meklars hadn't been able to beat me when holding a massive edge in tech, they weren't going to do it now that I had achieved tech parity. It would all be downhill from here.

Sssla was an easy planet to hold against the remaining Meklar fleets with its location tucked away at the top of the map. With Mentar still an unclaimed spud world, I pushed on next to the Meklar core worlds on the eastern side of the galaxy. My plan was to roll them up in a clockwise circle, leaving Meklon itself until the end of the campaign. This picture highlighted the swarm of population transports inbound for Reticuli, the next planet in line for my offensive. Thrax, the only remaining Silicoid world, is also visible in the eastern corner of the map. I didn't want to eliminate the rocks as that would force me into Final War with the Meklars, and I prefer to avoid the Extermination win condition. One other small detail I'll note from this picture: this was the first game where I had access to Hyperspace Communications for any length of time, and the ability to reroute ships in mid-order was more useful than I expected. I hadn't realized that you can also change the destination of transports with that tech, and so with a lot of micromanagement it's possible to store up population in midflight ahead of time and have hundreds of even thousands of untargetable transports hovering around in space. While I didn't need to go down that route here, it's something worth thinking about in potential extreme lategame scenarios.

Check out this find at Reticuli:

Advanced Construction Tech IV? Yeah sure, OK. It does help with miniaturization after all. What a long game.

Once the initial few planets were taken, my conquest of the Meklars settled into a smooth, steady routine. I would hit a new planet every 2 to 3 turns, taking out the bases and flooding it with population, then standing up the defenses before moving on to the next. I probably could have just obliterated everything from orbit, but I wanted to do this the proper way, and I had plenty of time before the next Council vote. I spent all this time cowering in fear of the Meklars for hundreds of turns on end; now it was time to exact some revenge.

Here's a picture of my fleet midway through this conquest. The last Fusion6 design had just been taken out before taking this screenshot, and they had given yeoman service for decades on end long after their guns could no longer damage the Meklar ships. That Warp Dissipator special had seen a lot of use. The core of the fleet was the Phasor6 design though, and as mentioned above, that was the design that had broken the back of the cyborgs. I was using an even more effective version of the same basic design, with the Phasor6A design packing twice as much firepower, a Lightning Shield for missile defense, and the High Energy focus. The Meklars had rarely been able to kill one of my Phasor6 designs when they gathered their own ships together, and I'd lost a few of them over the years. They never came close to destroying any of the new Phasor6A design though. Too much shielding, too much health, too much HP regen from the Autorepair special. I was researching Advanced Damage Control, the upgraded version of the same device, and the game ran out before I could put it to use.

I also had a new version of my Omega-V bomber design. This one had a slightly lower attack level, but traded that for a second Omega-V bomb (on a Small hull!) along with a Subspace Teleporter. I built these by the thousands and used them to run over the gigantic core Meklar planets:

Meklon had 250 population, 94 missile bases, and Neutronium armor backing its defenses. I brought 3500 of my bomber design to the party though, and teleported immediately next to the planet to drop 7000 Omega-V bombs. While that might sound like overkill, it actually took out only 25 of the missile bases! The problem here was the attack level disparity; my bombers only had an attack level of 7, and the Meklar bases had a missile defense of 11 thanks to their maxed out ECM tech. This caused only 10% of my bombs to hit the target, barely better than the minimum possible 5% to-hit rate. It might have been better to drop the second bomb and use Battle Computer XI tech, which I did have via capture from the Meklars. Anyway, the Teleporter was worth its weight in gold here, as I blinked this stack of ships back and forth across the combat screen without taking damage. There's a limit to how long you can do this, as the missiles from bases never disappear and will keep chasing endlessly. However, I could buy enough time for my Huge gunships to get in on the bombing action as well (one reason why I always put at least some bombs on them), and they helped out significantly, grinding down 5-10 bases per round of bombs that they dropped. I would usually take some casualties in each battle to my bomber stack, sometimes significant casualties, but I was producing them in the hundreds each turn, and the losses were easily replaced.

The only danger to my planets came when the Meklars managed to send a fleet full of bioweapons to a colony where I lacked my own ships. As I said before, missile bases were mostly helpless against the Meklar ships, and while I was pretty good at predicting where the AI would target next, sometimes I guessed wrong and a world would eat a bunch of Doom Virus spores. Usually this wasn't enough to wipe out the entire planet, fortunately, since I had trimmed down the core of the Meklar fleet considerably. When I saw that I had an antidote tech in my Planetology field, I sped there over half of my research budget. When it finished, so did any remaining chance for the Meklars.

Here's another demonstration of population invasions in the mopup phase of a game. With warp 6 engines, I had population transports that moved at warp 5 speed. I would send population from any planet that could reach the target in two turns of travel time (in other words, 10 parsecs) and have them contribute towards the attack. I would send just under 25% of the population from each of my worlds, as that's the most that can be regrown in a single turn's worth of Eco spending. After a while, you get pretty good at eyeballing where this lies on the interface and can quickly scroll through each planet assigning 20-25% of the population of each colony to go off and attack. It's also not enough to send just enough population to take out the defenders; you want enough to replenish the captured planet afterwards too. In this case above, I have two waves of roughly 270m population landing on two turns in succession, the first one to kill the Meklars and the second one to stand up Paranar with lots of Darloks. And yes, this was slightly excessive (I had over 300m landing in the actual attack and the excess population gets wasted), but better safe than sorry. Invading the Meklars is particularly fun because there are always so many factories there to be taken afterwards. In a grand total of three turns, you can flip around a planet to your control and it's sitting there with 250m population and 1800 factories, ready to be a powerhouse under your control.

By 2594, I had reduced the Meklars to a single planet: Laan, a Poor planet in the extreme southeast corner of the galaxy. I was content to let them stay there and win in the next Council vote in a few more turns. And look at this:

The Meklars were displaying without any fleet strength on the bar graphs. They didn't have a single ship; I could see the entire map with my scanners and there were no Meklar ships anywhere. Zero. This was about as dominant a victory as I've ever achieved short of simply wiping everyone else out, and I could have done that with ease had I desired it. It was a thoroughly satisfying feeling to crush my nemesis so decisively.

It turned out that Orion was located down there in the southeast corner of the map as well, right next to where my fleet had finished its conquest. Coming off of my experience in Imperium 42, I figured why not test out the Guardian and see how my Phasor gunships would do against it? I went into the battle with the hardened veteran commanders of my Autorepair gunships, 38 total Huge ships to face off against the automated monstrous defender of Orion. The Guardian's Scatter Pack X missiles had almost no effect at all, but the rest of its first volley killed off one of my Phasor6A ships. Hmmm, first one I had lost all game. Then I closed the distance enough to shoot back with the High Energy focus, and two volleys of massed Pulse Phasors instantly destroyed the beast. I had two racks of guns on the design, and the first volley did 6000 something damage while the second one did the remainder. Wow. One shot, one kill. I guess this was a powerful fleet after all! It also confirmed what I've written previously about Orion: if you're strong enough to defeat the Guardian, you're strong enough to win the game in some other fashion anyway.

I have the cursor pointing to Orion on the final galactic overview map. Every planet was flying red flags except for the Silicoid and Meklar enclaves at the fringes of the known universe.

The game therefore ended with a Conquest victory in 2600, with 44/47 votes (94%). What a wild ride. It was another one of those rare games where I had to climb the entire tech tree to run down an AI that had taken control of the map and crushed all of the other competitors. Despite my dislike of the Darloks, this was one game where their racial abilities were incredibly helpful. Because I was able to stay current with the Meklars in Computer tech, I was always able to steal from them, and it's not an exaggeration to say that repeated tech thefts from the Meklars (and the other races earlier in the game) were what kept me from losing. If you're going to be in a position of needing to chase down a runaway AI, the Darloks are one of the best races in the game to pick. Their poor diplomacy doesn't matter when you're in a state of virtual Always War anyway with the runaway AI top dog.

Out of all the games that I've reported on, this one was the most similar to my Holding On effort with the Meklars, also on a Small map. My position in this game was never quite as dire, as the Meklars never came too close to winning the Council vote in this game, while my runaway Alkari opponent in the Holding On game came a single vote away from winning multiple times. However, I had a lot less experience with Master of Orion back then, and I believe this game was significantly harder. The Alkari in that other game were close to winning in the Council, but they didn't have any weapons capable of cracking my missile bases. For most of that game, I was huddling behind planetary defenses and waiting for an opportunity to strike back, without any real threat to my planets. In this game, the Meklars had Omega-V bombs from a very early date, followed by deadly bioweapons, and I was never in a position of safety until the very end of the game. Not to mention, this game was played on kyrub's patch, with much better AI ship designs, plus the Meklars are a much worse opponent to draw as a runaway than the Alkari. Their production bonuses result in terrifyingly large fleets, and when they also have the most planets on the map... well, you're in trouble!

This was actually most similar to an unreported Psilon game that I played (AGA30), also on a Small map, which I wasn't able to win until 2675. And that was with the Psilons and all their advantages too! All my longest games seem to take place in these tiny galaxies. Small maps are tough, but they do make for some memorable games. I hope you enjoyed reading about this one.