Please verify suspicion.

[Puke]

Will said:
Something sort of like this happened in CB#2.

Hey, howd that turn out? I'm pretty sure SJ's defenses couldnt be cracked by the heap, alone. But I had two more empires ready to jump in at the first sign of hostilities, to make a nice little multi-front war.

There was also a third one in the wings that might have been willing to turn on one of the other two, if everything played out right.

Too bad I couldnt keep that game up. How about some after action reports?

[AMF]

Randall,

This is a verified bug, at least as far as I recall from the NGC#4 game. The exact same thing happened, we re-ran the turn to ensure that the message was recieved, and then all was fixed.

I suggest re-run the turn and make sure that the dip messages are sent by the other empire at the end of their orders, and it should go differently.

Alarik

[Suicide Junkie]

Puke said:
Hey, howd that turn out? I'm pretty sure SJ's defenses couldnt be cracked by the heap, alone. But I had two more empires ready to jump in at the first sign of hostilities, to make a nice little multi-front war.

There was also a third one in the wings that might have been willing to turn on one of the other two, if everything played out right.

Too bad I couldnt keep that game up. How about some after action reports?

My outer defenses are actually holding up quite well.
However, the heap is gutting my empire from the inside quite effectively without any help.

Those ships of yours are making heavy use of a major balance flaw in the torpedoes.
Note: said flaw has been corrected in the other PBW games now.

Your solid shield warships are quite annoying. My hastily assembled defense lines haven't been able to scratch them significantly.
Intel bombs are slowly whittling down the fleet, but they damage is already extensive.
A wave of carriers and my new "Gravol" ships will be making a final stand in the next few turns.

I suspect the other races are not helping, since they know the Heap will be unstoppable if they win this.

[Atrocities]

This reads like a good naval novel.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Atrocities said:
This reads like a good naval novel.

Seconded.

What is the Heap? A powerful race or something? Space Monsters?

[Puke]

what, never been in a PBW game with me? The Nausea Heap has been my trademark empire for the last five years!

[Will]

Puke, I'll try writing up some reports from the last few turns, but I don't want to make it public yet. The story so far is fairly interesting, and I have a feeling it will become even more so over the next few turns SJ seems to be trying to mass a bunch of frigates with Multi-purpose missiles, which could prove to be troublesome with point-defense. Especially if my suspicion that he can churn one out every other turn from most of his worlds is correct.

I'm not sure when exactly SJ is going to switch the game to a set of data files with re-balanced torpedoes, but I'm going to have to make at least some adjustments to deal with that. I think it's just going to be a mix-up of fleets, so that they aren't overly dependant on one kind of weapon. The wonderful construction rate of a Disposable Society should let me make a more balanced fleet within the span of a few turns... too bad I also have a 25% combat penalty to go along with it :O

Oh, and SJ, I think the really annoying solid shield design ships were my modifications to some of Puke's designs. If they're named after philosophers, that's mine. True, you warned me that Puke's designs were a bit "too shield heavy", but I came to realize that it doesn't matter for this race. All that matters is the ship can take out as many enemies as possible, without worrying about survival. Since for this game, a crippled ship gives me jack-diddly, only takes up maintainence.

--edit: Oh, and another thing to consider about the current power of torpedos... if you're using the battle in Hongor, where I took out your warp defenses, the results of that are skewed for a different reason. I thought I would lose a few more ships, but when I replayed the battle, it looked like all your missile sats were set to Max Firing Range. So all the missiles got picked off as they travelled through my entire fleet formation to get at their target. I think the results of the battle would have been very different if you had them set to target the closest ship instead. Something to consider.

[Suicide Junkie]

Yeah, that's only one of the strategic flaws...

The torpedo accuracy bonus just needs to be the same order of magnitude as the rest of the modifers in the game.

[Puke]

bah. bloody hell. all that work subjugating a race so that I would have a puppet empire to fire the first shot at you. I'm guessing it didnt work out that way.

you should have seen it, the glory of the master plan. the other major power was the guy in the south-east, and his only hope was if he carved out a chunk of your empire for himself. that, or if he went to war with Mac.

man, you should have seen the look that would have been on your face, if a fleet of Heap warships (belonging to another empire) attacked you while we still had a treaty. It would have been beauty-licious.

[Suicide Junkie]

I'm surprised. Even with me believing you were an honorable ally, the other players are much softer targets, and with more territory the Heap would become unstoppable.