Broken Stars and No Free Lunches!

[Samara]

I’m very much hoping that this ship we’re about to capture isn’t an indication that the Varaldur are expanding their regular trade routes.

Or was going to capture. Next time I won’t just hope I get lucky with hitting their engines.

Oh dear. The battlegroup we have in the system is a week out, but for unknown reasons they destroy the mines and buoys around Athens, hang around in orbit for a few days, and leave again. I just don’t understand these people. Perhaps they somehow didn’t detect Port Greece? Its detectable signatures are low but I don’t find that to be particularly plausible.

Now is also the time I figure out, embarrassingly late, that one of the asteroids in the system is actually able to support a population of just over 4 million with a colony cost that isn’t too awful and that in fact I don’t need recreation facilities in this system at all and potentially could have set up a military base here for considerably less trouble then I’ve been going through. Ah well. Live and learn.

This, however, is going to end up being a problem. I suspect the Varaldur have expanded their trade routes and want us out.

Those missiles are worrying.

Looks like the armor of our assault ships are able to weather a single hit before armor penetration becomes a concern. Good to know. I doubt that this attempt at boarding is going to be very successful but let’s try it!

Ouch.

Got one, lost the other.

This is a bit of a concerning design since it clearly isn’t meant to operate independently. Where is the parent fleet, and where are they headed?

Ah. Evidently I need to design a corvette specifically for killing FACs. Good to know. The only thing that can touch these right now are the assault ships which are currently back at Earth for marine pickup and repair. Unless for whatever reason they come into missile range all I can do is weather the blows.

Hopefully, though, this new design will prove to be fairly solid within the role, and I’d love to have two per combat group.

Annoyingly, it seems we’re unable to actually target them unless they come quite a bit closer due to their ships being so small. They really do have quite the advantage with these things, but at least we know to what degree we need to dial in our designs.

These shots are brutal. 13 missiles right to the face, but at the very least our armor held up quite well considering the circumstances.

Why they decided to come back instead of leaving I honestly don’t know.

For whatever reason the two non-crippled FACs return and get destroyed for their trouble. I guess this is the quickest way home. We definitely need stronger missiles. Our burners will blind the remaining sensors before we move the cruisers in to clean up the rest.

Hopefully this isn’t the prelude to an invasion. Onwards!

[Samara]

A lot of nothing has been happening over the past few years, until suddenly in early 0027 I receive this message.

This changes everything. I will be opening Victory back up to colonization. This was completely unexpected, and it comes right when we’re starting to move the first of our fleet support bases into position.

I should probably take this cautiously, but now that we actually have some muscle…let’s try it. A long-term peace might be achievable after all.

What this doesn’t do, however, is change our raiding plans. All I’m waiting on is our third battlegroup to finish its overhaul and then we’re all good to go. The development of New Acropolis will proceed as planned, and with luck we won’t have to go back to Earth at all unless we’re damaged.

Well I was going to say let’s get to hunting but apparently I didn’t quite realize that the trip from New Acropolis to the jump gate would drain half my fuel. So we’re going to have to wait a bit while we get some facilities into position.

Ahhh

hmmm

This changes some things. It sure does seem like everybody knows the routes to and from Sol except for us. We also, by the way, don’t actually have any of our nice shiny battlegroups in the area. Great. The closest one is battlegroup 3 which is escorting our first fleet support cluster to the Xavier-Victory jump point, but they’re four days out and they’re not going to make it. I do have three leftover burners stationed on Earth due to accidental overproduction as well as our extremely outdated destroyer group. Hopefully that will be enough, and if we’re very, very lucky we can actually capture this ship intact.

Given its size and movement patterns I’m guessing it’s a survey ship. That makes this easier then, and confirms that they have a route to us we don’t know about. Battlegroup 3 will resume its escorting duties, but their assault ships will break off and follow the burners as we see whether or not we can track this thing back to its origin point.

Well then, change of plans. Raiding plans are officially scrapped until we find out exactly where these guys are coming from, how many ships they have, and have a rough idea of their force projection. I’m guessing they’ve finally started winning their wars and have begun branching out. From now on a battlegroup will be stationed permanently at Earth.

Well at least we know why they’ve been winning lately. Hard to beat those engines.

And there it it. God, this is so far out.

And just like that the world has changed. Time to build some survey ships.

[miey]

Love the playthrough, nice to see one where there’s constant action (as was the premise). The sudden peace was the ‘oh damn’ moment, with Victory sudddenly open. Thumbs up! (BTW, the fact you post many screenshots really help to piece it all together)

[Samara]

I am deeply interested to see how the systems loop through our newly-opened back door. Based on wreck signatures we know for a fact that it loops, we just don’t know where. It’s funny how at this point me and the Varaldur together form essentially the most stable portion of the known map. Gotta chase after that long-term trade stability dragon!

[Samara]

It’s not the best survey ship in the world, but the only shipyard available for retooling is 5k tons and we have to make use of what we have. I’ll construct the sensor suite planetside to save a little bit of time and we’ll have an initial planned run of three, perhaps stretching that out to six. I also decided to rename New Acropolis to Xavier Fortress to better indicate its primary role.

Boarding proved its effectiveness once again. I love scrapping captured ships.

Yeah I don’t know how I’m gonna be able to fix this one, though. In the long term Io is going to be our best hope for in-system Duranium production (they can produce their own mines), but it’s proven to be a bit more resistant to industrialization than I had hoped. I’ll have to direct a significant amount of infrastructure earmarked for Victory to Io in the hopes they’ll be able to kickstart production soon, and to my shame I’ll have to hold off on the production of new research facilities.

I swear to God guys I’m going to crash out. What the hell is wrong with these people? You’ve never had any real claim to the system! We live here!

Come on, guys. You’re literally looking into people’s backyards.

…we could do it. We could open fire with our STO. Right now, actually.

We have the guns. We could get away with it. We could strike the first blow for once.

I waited too long. Those bastards!

Those missiles are fast.

Too bad we’re too far away to pick up those lifepods. I would have loved the intel. It took just over 40 days from their warfleet entering the system for hostilities to resume again. One must assume that they never had good intentions when making peace. All of the civilians on Finisterre are dead. Never again will I allow hope for peace to cloud my judgement. I will pry Victory from their shattered grip. I will nuke their homeworld. There will be no mercy. Like the rest of our neighbors, we are now in a forever war.

In a way the timing of this is quite fortunate because not only did I just get our first fleet support cluster in place, I also just swapped our other battlegroups for overhauls. Xavier fortress is mostly established, and the only limiting factor is the population at this point; we just don’t have enough workers yet.

Looks like they’re going to counterstrike with FACs. I’ll just go ahead and mark Victory as military-only again. No sense in losing a bunch of civilian colony ships.

Looks like they’re trying to bring some of their more far-flung ships home. Should be an easy capture.

Interesting.

Huh. Now that I wasn’t expecting.

Guessing this is the route into Lurgatan territory.

What. I specifically requested a confusing map and yet here I still sit, befuddled.

I am crashing out. This seriously cannot be real. They’re everywhere!

Easy pickings on this one, though.

At what point do we come to the understanding that we’re basically pirates?

They also make a few more halfhearted attempts at Finisterre.

And a while later we discover a new system branching off of Wimberly. This one is a bit on an odd duck and I’m not going to bother exploring it for now.

Speaking realistically, Victory was a phantom; it’s impossible for us to hold in our current form. What we can do, however, is deny the Varaldur the space. The STO units on Finisterre have been doing a fantastic job killing off whatever comes to them, and with very minimal casualties. I want to put at least one STO brigade on each of the bodies we had planned to settle since those were the best spaces. It would be great if we could manage more, but I’m not going to hold my breath. Other than that it’s been a very quiet series of years, and before anything else I need to get my mineral situation in order. It’s an absolute disaster right now. For the middle term, however, I’m going to start planning how to conquer Thorn. With luck it should be somewhat manageable!

[Samara]

These STO emplacements re going to be a really good investment. I’m not happy that I lost the salvager, though. I think I’ll have to wait until Finisterre is on the opposite side of the jump gate before trying to scrap the wrecks. Luckily I do have the East River in the area dropping off troop replacements so I’ll have her pick up the lifepods.

Good Lord.

She also dropped off the units she was carrying at the absolute perfect moment it seems. I’m going to risk it and have her come back to pick up whatever lifepods she can find. I can’t risk losing so much potential intel. They’re dedicating such a huge amount of force to this I simply can’t pass up the opportunity.

This is crazy. One of the things we learn is that the Varaldur are at war with the Torokians which isn’t really surprising. They don’t seem to like anyone, actually. We also get full geosurvey data on Quori and Dominga, which while nice doesn’t really help us right now.

They also reveal the existence of the until-now unknown system of Warrior (their name), but we don’t know exactly what system it connects to yet.

As well as an orbital miner design that we haven’t seen before.

Good Lord they really are going all out, aren’t they?

All I can do is hope we survive the barrage. If we win, then that’s the majority of their heavy cruisers destroyed. Well, at least the ones we know about.

Dear God.

Well I’ll be damned. They actually managed to root us out. I have a feeling this is going to get very bloody very quickly so all three of our battlegroups will move to the jump point to see whether or not we can attempt a counterstrike. I’m taking a huge risk here, but the payoff is potentially enormous. They’re both damaged and low on ammo. If we can catch them we can kill the fleet and refortify the space. If not…well, we’re still faster.

Boy oh boy it’s my lucky day. It’s only fair that I raid their shipping after all.

I love the chaos.

You love to see it. Turns out the boarding forces we brought with us were quite outdated and we used up most of them. I’ll send the empty assault ships back to Xavier Fortress once we get a tanker in the area. We really ought to make more of those. Once our forces are regathered around the jump point we’ll head over to Finisterre to see whether or not their warfleet is still in the area.

These are our captures. Man sometimes I really do feel like a pirate. By the time we get to FInisterre their main fleet is already gone. I’m guessing they took the route out via Overcast. I’ll take the win and withdraw my forces to nearby jump gate so we’re better prepared for the inevitable counterstrike. In the meantime, I’ll refortify Finisterre as much as I can before the hammer drops.

We capture nine of their troop transports within a few weeks of our doing so, and destroy eleven more. We also capture one of their jump cruisers. The troop transports, however, I think I’ll keep instead of scrapping. Once they’re back at Earth and repaired I’ll tinker with design a bit and refit them. I suspect they’re going to be instrumental in our future assault on Thorn. I’m starting to think that the pirate life really is for me.

They just. Keep. Coming. Now I know why they wanted me out of the system so bad, I was disruption their invasion! As successful as our incursion is (despite not meeting our original goal) I’m getting that itchy feeling that usually means its time to back off. I’ll move our forces away from the jump point and wait for our tanker to arrive before withdrawing into less disputed territory.

They must have come in from the Overcast route. I should have ordered the active sensors left on. Great.

I do love alpha strikes, though. Unfortunately most of the missiles strike decoys.

What. No way that just happened.

I…I guess I’ll just order them back to Sol. Should I keep them? Refit them? Their operational range isn’t great but they’ve proven to overall be rather good. I think I’m just going to scrap them since we don’t have large enough shipyards to actually refit them to better suit our needs.

The immense amount of intel we’re getting from all of this reveals a new system coming off from Boyce.

What a busy few months.

[miey]

Gee, the boarding really pays off, I might seriously try in in my game. As per ships - considering recent Duranium crunch, keeping them might not be worth the maintenance? Or, RP-wise, upgrading them and using them on Vara’s as a sort of Uno Reverse card might be fun.

Anyway you choose, keep it up!

[Samara]

Ah, I didn’t really explain it very well but most of the captures were actually due to surrenders. I think it’s because I integrated microwaves so heavily into our direct-fire armament, with a ratio of nine lasers to four microwaves per battlegroup. Later on once we have the minerals I want to build a line of heavy beam-microwave-boarding cruisers specifically designed for these sorts of long-range ambush battles and which would pair up well with our shiny new dropships for planetary assaults.

[Samara]

Start date for this update: October 31st, 0033.

We’ve had a very slow year or so, the only interesting thing beyond a few new techs being a new system branching off of Bantam. We’ve officially reached the 20/35 known systems mark, 35 years into the game. The refortification of Finisterre is also going well, and I’m very happy that her orbital period is so long at 4.7 Earth-years.

We discover this asteroid-riddled mess of a system branching off of Dominga not long after, and lose the survey ship. Damn Torokians. We also lose another survey ship to a Varaldur fleet on the move.

Yeah that’s about what I was afraid of. I have no idea how long they’ve been sitting there. I’m going to move Battlegroup 4 out that way to drive them off. Our third fleet support cluster will follow behind and establish a permanent station to defend the area. There’s a confirmed Varaldur colony in Thorn so better safe then sorry. We need so many more support ships then we have its not even funny, but I really want to unlock Composite Armor before we build any more ships.

That speed doesn’t bode well. Hopefully they’re smaller ships then what we’ve been seeing! That also means the last of our survey ships is destroyed. Great.

Ah, yeah that’s really not good. Did they come in through Wreck Thad? Our nearest battlegroup is 15 hours away.

I’m going to crash out. Our only saving grace was the huge amount of CIWS we put on these things, and luckily although damaged we didn’t lose anything. I also just now realized that I forgot to load up the battlegroup heading their way with marines. Great.

Our burners, however, manage to draw them towards the cruisers and we knock our their engines. Let’s bring the assault ships back and pop the hood on these things.

Oh yeah that engine is really bad news for us. Thankfully these captures will speed up our engine research by quite a bit, but this really doesn’t bode well.

Looks like the other part of this incursion came through via Wreck Thad. I’m starting to very much want an advance fleet base at the jump gate.

These smaller raids are making me nervous. Is this a prelude to something? I also appear to have forgotten to load more marines into our assault ships, so I’ll just have to destroy these ones. Bummer. We did get one surrender, though, which is nice.

And that’s it for this update. I just want to point how just how many POWs we have at the moment. It’s kinda crazy, at least for me.

Current date is April 13th, 0036. Other then the military actions not a whole lot going on!

[Samara]

Our POWs reveal a new system to us on the fringes, branching off from Lillian.

We also finally research composite armor, and it’s time to get to work.

Our Miami-class missile cruisers are a bit outdated, and we need to push for a fair bit more speed to match up with the new Varaldur engine types.

It’s a relatively small update, but I’m not planning on this being anything more than a transitional design to hold us over until we get our new engine tech. I’m also planning on moving this design into a skirmisher role rather than as our primary means of jump point defense. For that, a completely new design is in order.

This is, essentially, a burner, assault ship, and direct-fire cruiser all rolled into one. It’s only role is near-side JP defense, and for that it feels very sleek. Speed is the only issue (the boarding groups are quite small at a mere 25 soldiers each) and so we’ll have to rely a bit more on the carronades than I’d otherwise like. My idea is to have two or three per jump point as a baseline deterrent, more for highly contested areas. With luck these should allow us to spread our existing logistics networks a bit more widely and free up our battlegroups for raids into Varaldur territory.

Speaking of raid preparation.

For whatever reason it seems like our captured troop transports don’t actually have a design we can build. We’re not going to waste the originals, however, and they’ll function as part of a cohesive invasion fleet until they’re destroyed or become obsolete.

We know for a fact that the Varaldur have at least one colony in Thorn, but whether or not it’s just a mining colony is highly unclear. We need more information, and for that purpose I’ll design a simple spy ship.

I’m not in love with that thermal signature, but I want it to be able to zip in and out with a minimum of trouble. We’re just barely slower than their FAC design, but hopefully the armor and CIWS should slightly mitigate the risk. I’ll also update our fleet support cluster designs and design a support ship that better adheres to our needs.

Likely that should be all we need/can afford at the moment. Once we finally (finally!) research tractor beams we’ll be able to be a lot more aggressive with our building (logistics depending).

Victory may also start picking up again. Perfect timing too, I just dropped off the last load of reinforcements.

You love to see it. This is such a great investment.

Now that’s interesting. I wonder why it took them so long to get to it, especially since it’s not defended.

Gonna go ahead and guess that this is their attempt to land troops. I’m gonna go ahead and move one of our battlefleets into the area to see whether or not we can cut off any other forces. Probably should have moved them up the second they started moving forces into the area again, but oh well.

I think it’s safe to say I’m going to lose the planet. We can, however, make it extremely painful for them.

We’re making a good account of ourselves, but good Lord is that a lot of ground units.

At this point I’ve written off the planet and only real course of action is to bombard the planet before retreating back to the jump gate. The second I get our ground units researched and built I’ll start planning our counterstrike.

At the very least we did get a large amount of prisoners from this.

Part of the intel we get reveals a new system connecting a few others on the fringes of known space.

Depending on how you count it this is, what, the sixth battle of Finisterre? We’ve been kicked off the planet twice now, and reconquering it is going to take a far more serious effort. It’s not even about the minerals anymore, the strategic location is just too good to pass up. If there’s any comfort to this at all it’s the fact that they’re spending an insane amount of resources and effort to keep their trade routes open while we spend very little in return. Fuel, supplies, missiles, ground forces. Losing over two million tons worth of military ships (yes I did the math) in a single planetary offensive is absolutely brutal, and I’m 100% confident that we’ll be able to retake it when the time comes.

In the meantime, I have no idea how their FACs keep slipping through, and they do so when our main response fleet is in the middle of an overhaul. Talk about bad timing.

I am not happy about this. They do a significant amount of damage to Mercury before running out of ammo and leaving, then another group (The same one?) comes some time later. I’m going to need to establish a forward operating base right at the jump point before moving it over to the gate at Wreck Thad to secure Xavier once and for all. These FACs are able to slip through the sensors at Xavier Fortress far too easily. Yet one more reason to reconquer Finisterre. It’s that good of a location.

Mercury is far too easy to strike.

This group, however, surrenders once our burners start, well, burning. These were such a great idea.

Forever on the fringes.

End date August 7th, 0039.

[Samara]

After I don’t even know how long of a period of non-contact, the Lurgatan claim we’re no longer in conflict. It’ll be a good idea to see to what degree we’re able to build off this, so I’ll design and build a new series of diplomatic ships and send them out towards Wreck Thad as soon as I’m able.

In the meantime, though, we finish research all of the troop types we need. I’m going to pour an enormous amount of resources into this, and massively expand our construction complexes to get the invasion force build as quickly as possible.

Why is it that every time lately there’s a raid the forces actually in a position to respond to it either aren’t in the area or aren’t combat-ready?

Literally what the hell did I do to you people? Well this is gonna throw a wrench in my plans. Let’s hope our STO can finish the job on their own, although I do doubt that. We desperately need a military base stationed at the Wreck Thad gate – this is far too sudden. We’ve barely seen them lately. What the hell is going on?

And now most of them are retreating for some reason. Did they just now realize that we have a settlement here? I feel the need to point out that we still have not established communications with these people.

We were able to drive them off somewhat when our battlegroup reached the area and capture one of their ships, but Xavier Fortress has been completely destroyed.

End date is December 26th, 0040. I need to step away for a while. What the fuck?

[Samara]

Xavier Fortress is an irradiated ruin. Its installations destroyed, all civilians dead. All that’s left is fuel, maintenance supplies, minerals, outdated missiles, highly ineffectual ground forces, some residential infrastructure. Everything else is gone. We could not possibly have seen this coming. The last time we encountered Torokian forces was five years ago in Olga of all places, and a year before that in Wimberly. This well and truly came out of nowhere. Were they contracted by the Varaldur to make this strike? Last we heard from our POWs was that the two empires were at war. Has this changed? Are they allies now?

This wasn’t a wrench in our plans it was a nuclear bomb. Xavier Fortress needs to be rebuilt from the ground up; it shaves off about 2 billion km of round-trip distance from Earth and we can’t retake Finisterre without it. Even if our battlegroup had been there would it have survived?

Right now we have three recreation bases with a fourth on the way, and 13 maintenance bases with four more in various stages of construction. I’m adopting what I’m going to call a keylock strategy. One of the biggest limiting factors of our current defense doctrine is the size of our fleets. It takes far too many resources to build a single battlegroup, and returning them to Earth for refit or overhaul takes a full quarter of our fleet offline. And they are too expensive to lose. So I’m adopting a rather different strategy, one where the limiting factor becomes the number of support clusters we’re able to keep online and operational.

Enter the Series II Miami battlecruiser. Fundamentally this is the same design as the original Miami II class with 2/5ths of the missile capacity swapped out; this supersedes our planned (and still unbuilt) Gatekeeper class of jump gate defense ships and once again attempts to compress the role of missile cruiser, burner, and assault ship into one. The missile compliment is intentionally light, being in essence a panic button to press only when confronted with faster ships or very large fleets. The missiles themselves are a tad slow, but they hit hard and are outfitted with both active guidance and retargeting capability, maximizing their alpha strike potential. Two of them stationed together has the fighting power of a bit less than half a battlegroup. And, most importantly, we can build them in the same shipyard as our Miami II class. And (once our current group is done with refits) we can build them four at a time.

The keylock strategy is simple: once enough defense clusters have been built to secure every known jump gate in a system scout/secure the gates with our battlegroups while the defense clusters move into position. Then invade or colonize as needed. Territorially-secure jump gates can be left monitored but unguarded, allowing us to get as much use out of the defense clusters as possible. I will not start rebuilding Xavier Fortress until I’m 100% certain that the system is secure beyond any reasonable doubt.

sigh…

The Varaldur also seem to be making attempts into Sol again, this time from Thorn. Luckily we’re well-prepared and this ship should be an easy take.

We only lost one marine and don’t even have to return to Earth for replacements.

The frequency might be worrying me a bit, though. Sadly we’re only able to nab one of these, which was a surrender.

Not much for this update, just thinking for the most part. Notice how there are wrecks in every single known system at this point. I wonder how many are due specifically to a combination of Varaldur and Torokian warfare and raids.

End date is September 12th, 0041. At some point we should revamp our naval command structure to reflect the changes that have occurred over the decades.

[Samara]

Interestingly enough the components we got from the captured freighter were enough to push our engine research over the edge and we have a whole new engine type. For now I’m not going to worry about making new ship designs because I already have a pre-built supply of our previous engine type specifically for building the initial run of the Series II Miami class. It’s far more important that we get them built fast then at the highest possible level of tech. Once our stockpile runs out we’ll transition to the new design, and not before.

I will, however, design a missile that conforms a bit more closely to the needs of the Series II.

Yeah that one hurts, man. It’s like they’re mocking me.

I’m also building a buoy deployment vessel specifically so we have at least some advance warning when a fleet is passing by. I wouldn’t expect this to survive against a dedicated fleet, but it might just survive an isolated raiding party or two.

Oh hey free ships. Sadly, though, our marines were extremely outdated and we had to destroy the ships instead of capturing them outright. Bummer.

We’re also getting a fair bit of sensor intel from Victory from our remaining observation bases. I suspect that retaking the planet is gonna suck. We’ll have to manage it very carefully, and by carefully I mean throw out a massive alpha strike and see what happens.

The Chorest Empire, who in all honesty we’ve barely seen, has begun to establish a more permanent presence in Xavier. I really hope they don’t make this a problem. We are, however, getting close to where we can confidently retake the system. The last batch of our Series II design is being built and we can start transitioning to the upgraded version as soon as we’re able.

I suppose now is as good a time as any to realize that I added the wrong type of troop module to the original design. Whoops. The speed of this design is fantastic, though, and I’m really happy with it. I will, however, have to retool the shipyard before building more.

Always the FACs with these people. I’m not even going to bother boarding them. At this point we know by their tendencies this is likely going to be the prelude to some invasion or the other. They get out of our range pretty quick and I’m not happy about having to drop 30 missiles on them. Lots of misses due to their speed. Just in case I’m going to swap out the cruiser who fired the missiles for a fresh one. They should be there in just under 12 days.

In exchange for this, I’m going to send out a small raiding party into Thorn comprised of some ship captures that for whatever reason I’m unable to scrap. They’ve just been sitting around and its not like I was the one who built them so I don’t really care all that much if they get destroyed. I’ll lose, what? Officers, crew, fuel, maintenance supplies? Whatever, man. God I am turning into a pirate. I should make better use of this at some point, but for now the tech increase we get when we tear them apart is just too good to pass up.

You know for some reason I didn’t really expect them to have stationed a fleet in this space. Well, if we’re able to bait them into attacking through the gate to Sol we’ll be able to kill the fleet quite easily. I’ll flip our shields and sensors on and see whether or not we can bombard their colony before booking it, and I’ll move an extra battlefleet on the near side of the Sol gate just in case. I know for a fact there’s a truly cataclysmic number of missiles in that fleet and I do not want them breaking into Sol.

Ouch. Well now we know it’s gonna take a lot more effort to take this space. Ah, well.

I’ll call that good for this update. Things are progressing decently well, and at the pace things are going Xavier will likely be retaken in about a year.

End date is October 5th, 0043.

[Samara]

These small FAC raids are in all honesty starting to stress me out a bit. Out of all the ships the Varaldur have these are the most effective. Things will be easier once we get Xavier Fortress secured and back online, but for now it’s a bit difficult.

Right when we start moving the new keylock defense cluster into Xavier this happens. We have plenty of ships stationed in Sol already, so I’ll just go ahead and magdump on these guys while their replacements head on over. Looks like baiting them did work after all, it just took a while for them to make a move.

Due to some clever scattering on their end we did actually take a fair amount of damage this time, but we destroyed their fleet completely and even got two captures from it.

This is a pretty tough ship to fight.

Everything red in this design is stuff we don’t have the tech base to even build. Crazy stuff.

The Maculatum took by far the brunt of the damage, followed by the Berberis.

Everything else is unharmed, but repairing the Maculatum is going to take a while. At the very least we know that this fleet composition works well against a dedicated fleet. The Varaldur lost a over 160k tons of warships in this engagement in exchange for functionally nothing. I’ll take the trade!

Some weeks later…

I knew it. Luckily we capture/accept surrenders from six of them and destroy the rest with no losses and without using any of our missiles.

Interesting.

That sensor and engine tech is tempting, but the mining modules are even better. Once I can get them back over to Earth I’ll repair them and toss them on one of our duranium mines.

I do want to note that Wreck Thad is now bugged to the point where I can’t open the system view without getting massive “Function #3186: The given key ‘858’ was not present in the dictionary.” spam and I had to conduct the second half of this combat blind. Given that I’m running this on Linux (and therefore modded) I’m not willing to bother Steve with a bug report, but any advice on how to fix this on my own would be fantastic.

I’ve decided to bite the bullet and discontinue the original series of Miami cruisers. The Series II Miami line will continue as before as I believe they’re a good fit for the role, but I want to specialize things a bit more.

The Raid Makir class, which I’m dedicating to those who died in the failed raid in Thorn. Functionally they’re very similar to the Miami line, just a bit more specialized towards slightly longer ranged in-and-out type raids. Their armor is a bit thinner and they rely more than anything else on range and speed – magdump and book it is all they have. To a certain extent I’m okay with this as it gives us a bit more power projection, allowing us to make raids into Victory without having to station a tanker in-system.

It’s sister design, the Bully Makir, will be part of their raiding parties in case a fleet has been mostly but not entirely destroyed. Both designs as well as the Series II Miami can be built in the same shipyard allowing for maximum production flexibility, but Varaldur FACs remain an issue.

Hard to complain about the outcome of this session!

End date is November 15th, 0044.

[Samara]

Not much has been happening other than a surprising ECCM tech accusation solely from scrap, which we immediately put on every single future design. Given that our Keylock strategy is finally (finally) getting steam we’ve begun the process of restablishing Xavier Fortress.

It’s so beautiful.

The Torokians, despite not knowing how to talk to us, apparently feel regretful at their mistake and send us a housewarming gift. How sweet.

Ah.

Well.

Perhaps we should reinforce that bit. Guessing that the Lurgatan might have lost their long war and the Torokians still want more space.

I’m guessing they used up all of their ammunition because now they’re just sitting around the jump point. I’ll take this opportunity to try and actually communicate for once…while our battlegroups get into position.

And there we go. Just over 41 years after first contact we finally open lines of communication.

I happen to be…shall we say…somewhat annoyed by this.

They also apparently had more missiles left, which doesn’t make all that much sense to me. Maybe they wanted to talk for some reason?

Our point defense has also turned out to be somewhat ineffective, likely due to a lack of ECCM. And I have no earthly idea why our fleet commanders decided to take what is probably the worst route they possibly could. Their missiles apparently have a very long range.

I need to withdraw one of my battlegroups. What they hell is going on with you guys?

Sigh…

Is it the design that’s a failure? Or are the Torokians (I’m still going to be calling them that) just that good?

The missiles never stop.

They’ve gotta be running out soon, right? Right?

Literally how.

I am salty. At least they dropped their troops off before getting shot down, but only one boarding actually succeeded.

Most of their remaining forces make a dive for the jump gate and flee, while another portion heads into deep space, leaving three of our bettlegroups a scattered ruin.

End date is April 2nd, 0046.

What the hell just happened.

[Walter]

I am on Linux (Mint 22.3 Cinnamon) myself, so I feel your pain, but since I have never yet encountered a #3198 error I have no idea what is going on with you.

My setup is using Lutris (Edit: Runner option GE-Proton latest) to start Aurorapatch and that to start Aurora 2.7.1 itself overlaid with the Deep Blue Theme.
I do get some #25?? (or was it #26?? - I don’t recall right now) errors on occasion, but those I can live with.

I had some luck with starting Windows applications via right click and choosing “Wine Windows Program loader”, but Aurora is not one of them. At least for my setup it isn’t.

Of course all of that is subject to change once 3.0 gets here and hopefully the Aurorapatch route will be obsoleted by the planned built-in GUI options.

Hope to have been of some help.

[Samara]

I have a strong suspicion that it’s caused by some sort of issue with NPR component design. I can’t imagine why it would spam so many error messages when I open the system view, though. Something to do with all the wrecks? I’ve been getting a lot of errors in regards to POW interrogation as well (which is why I haven’t mentioned anything on Intel lately) but I don’t know why it keeps happening, even after executing the ones we had. A while back I opened the database on a separate Windows machine I had access to to try and fix it like I used to back when I had Windows on my regular machine but for whatever reason it didn’t work. Have you encountered the same thing? At this point I’m halfway tempted to just set up a partition but my laptop is pretty crappy and I put it though a lot of strain already just from using my drawing program.

[Walter]

@Samara

I have a strong suspicion that it’s caused by some sort of issue with NPR component design.

That may be the reason I have not seen this issue yet.
My games up to now have mostly been quiet sandbox sessions to get a grip on logistics, construction and the way Aurora works without nasty Aliens trying to eat my face.
And whenever I thought I was ready to launch a real game the next update was around the corner.
So I updated, got used to the new stuff, found other bits to learn about, worked my nerve up aaaaand … update.

If your suspicion is true I should encounter my first #3198s some time around Christmas.

[Samara]

I do have to say that for the record this is by far the most violent game I’ve ever played. I’ve never, ever had so much trouble settling outside of Sol before. It’s crazy how unlucky of a start we got. I feel like I’m trying to break out of jail!

[Samara]

Further analysis of this fiasco has lead me to believe that the primary issue was one of doctrinal mismatch. Based on the limited information gleaned from this conflict it appears that they’re based around long-range, mass-fleet engagements making heavy use of small, sub-10k ton and lightly armored destroyers.

The range of their Amarna-class destroyers is genuinely terrifying.

The way we’ve developed our doctrine over the years has been, essentially, the exact opposite. Our strategy of small-fleet ambush battles has been very good to us, but the tradeoff has been a complete ineffectiveness in anything vaguely resembling a long-range battle. In a way this is has been somewhat appropriate given how small our territory is, but as we’re learning now once somebody breaks through the jump gate we would be completely unable to retake the system unless the enemy ran out of ammunition. It’s a terrible spot to be in. Our only saving grace is just how thin the armor on their destroyers is at a whopping two layers, allowing us to penetrate it right off the bat with our lasers at point-blank range.

In a way I’m happy that we learned about this now rather than later, as the effective of the plasma carronades of our Series II design would be seriously reduced at best, functionally impotent at worst. The Bully Makir would be a much better fit for this particular jump point, especially if paired with a new, upgraded version burner design.

The armor is thinner and its a bit heavier, but overall it’s much faster and has a better weapons layout. In the absolute worst-case scenario it should, at the very least, heavily contribute to overall point-defense. At this point our old assault ship designs, while proven highly useful over the years, have been made obsolete. I’ll return those to Earth as soon as I’m able for scrapping, and our damaged Miami cruisers for repair.

Some of them, like the Caladium, are a bit busted up right now.

I decided to go ship-by-ship and look at the commanding officers of each surviving ship in the deployed fleets.

Jeffry Wiest, of the Miami-class Brunfelsia.

German Crofford, of the Miami-class Alocasia.

Carlo Lebeau, of the Miami-class Polifolia.

Barry Theard, of the Miami II-class Maculatum.

Casey Yauger, of the Miami II-class Berberis.

Ramon Stacey, of the Miami-II-class Precatorius.

Russel Zacate, of the Miami II-class Caladium. It’s a miracle he’s even alive right now.

Annie Malcolm, of the Islamabad-class Bergen.

Margie Stannish, of the Islamabad-class Cambridge.

Jude Breunig, of the Islamabad-class Paisley.

Arturo Crowe, of the Coventry-class Octurion.

Lou Kuramoto, of the Coventry-class Sitara.

Frederic Tritto, of the Coventry-class Covran.

Lois Liggett, of the Southport II.I 001 resupply base.

Garrett Rundstrom, of the London 011 maintenance base.

None of the marine squads had a commander attached to them. Something to change for next time, perhaps. Some of our commanders at this point are quite decorated, and it’s interesting to note that as long as their ships survived their commanding officers remained unharmed. Something to think about.

I am going to crash out.

I’ll deal with this on a different day.

End date is April 30th, 0046. Not even a month later.