Advanced saved game post turn 700 as the Omega in sandbox mode

[UesugiKenshin]

The oldest parts of the empire have highly complex resource routing, but the frontier does not. In each turn, when it's obvious that the resource route is unnecessary due to local sector ore/crystal production, then I turn the resource route in question off. This takes a LOT of time to hunt down and can have cascading effects. I won't untangle all of it. It's good experience for new players to attempt doing so. You just about have to use resource routing at first. You don't need it after turn 600+. That is a complex discussion found elsewhere.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_Room
In the sixties when the Xmen comic came out, they had a "danger room" where they practiced tactics. And in Edge of Tomorrow, that is what the Angel of Verdun Virataski uses to become an incredibly fighter as does later demoted Major Cage.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ce_VIumHv_M
That is what the advanced save game is supposed to do. You have the tools so you can practice and decide what buildings strategies and invasion tactics and defending methods best work for you. And then manipulate the economy.

[UesugiKenshin]

...and five joined as new members. After playing many games in hundreds of hours of beta testing, then you get a sense when you can make demands.

Since so many colony ships were generated, I'm using them up and making faction specific ship classes albeit customized so players can test a variety of ships. Likewise some minor race specific ships, but also customized, will also be available. They suit a variety of niches.

There will be two varieties of fighters as well. One is not as hardy but packs a wallop in torpedoes and then there is a stronger one and that has better range.

I may put units in fleets but don't use them that way. I'm doing so to make it easier to reorganize and at Andromeda and Omega Alpha. What I would do is save your game and practice starship composition in a fleet. Like a fleet of fighters or a fleet of transports. Then YOU organize them for your use. Otherwise there would be likely be a lengthy list of various ships. You should compare modified ship attributes by class.

At advanced turns, then range is nearly meaningless. Note that dreadnoughts have short range but now that means they can travel 90% of the explored territory, so range is practically meaningless.

[UesugiKenshin]

In regular mode with major race opponents,then without resource routing,you would waste money and so have less to commit to military forces. That is something I want to mod. There should be more routes per sector with upgrades.

Deritium trading is such a pittance of deritium that it hardly seems worth it. That makes no sense. Empires would have to route deritium or be paralyzed by it versus ship speed and range. So I plan to mod that too. Even at this stage, this generates 6 deritium, so what I use that for is to activate deritium trading at an upgraded new sector. Or I could make a very small class ship. Kind of pointless.

Like with dertium trading and then link to deritium refineries (mine are most commonly maxed out at level 4), then even allow resource routing to that sectors. You would funnel it there.

I thought that it would be like tapping into every source of deritium and it being sent where it was required. That would be a likely scenario. You genuinely want local resources and surely the many solar systems that would make up a sector, there would have to be all the resources there in some manner, but some would be more expensive, and require high levels of tech, and expense, and large amounts of energy. Then deritium location or even iridium would not be problematic or insurmountable.

I hit Level 15 research with no benefits. I could scrap research buildings, but then new players wouldn't see what is available and how they use energy too. Then some labor would not be wasted. You can modulate the research rate in the manager and you can also have areas of focus in the research menu. New players should try both. You can "lock" a rate in an area of focus, so it might be possible to set all six areas to zero.

Consider that the smartest way is to plan starships long before, send them to training facilities, so quite a bit of time is lost to send them to those sites to "level up", and then carefully placed in fleets, then deployed and redeployed. That is a LOT of time. The speeds should be faster on giant galaxies and accounting for these logistical issues.

All of these things are why you really want to wage war starting about turn 700 where all these things are already largely done.

[UesugiKenshin]

What would really would be fun is have all the ship classes show up, and then you could test how they hold up against their peers by early models, then first serious starships, midlevel, and late generations. That would probaby take about 3 months to configure from scratch for every empire. Then you could do real beta testing. The primary issue early on is high upkeep costs vs your frail new economy.

Who knows? Maybe a highly decorated veteran crew on a older starship might just barely win against green raw recruits of a newer ship class?

[UesugiKenshin]

A way to do missing resources in a sector would be "illegal resource acquisition" where pirates go out and plunder freighters by making an rather expensive and complex, high energy building. So maybe level one is pirates and level two is deritium and level 3 is the actual added deritium as above. The player needs high tech levels and has to jump through a lot of extra hoops. Naturally it would lower your diplomatic attribute.

[UesugiKenshin]

Turn 675
At this point, my goals have significantly changed. The Omega Alliance is at a war time footing and fully prepared to wage intragalactic war which is why 10 minor alien race sectors switched to membership in the last few turns. They do not want to be invaded as quite an amount of customized heavy cruisers, destroyers, battleships, fighters, and transports have been asssembled as well as scores of the heaviest robot mechanized armor. Those smart capitulating sectors know they have no chance of resisting. In 3 cases, they were in terrible shape and lack basic infrastructures. Others can whip out infrastructure in a single turn.

Now orchestrated colonizations of sectors are made where maximal terraforming happened in waves such that 3 colony ships can routinely gather most (5)or all (6) resources on the colonization turn. What happens then is 4 mines in all of those 5+ areas and so some initial storage where minimal trade resources (usually deritium and iridium) are routed and just slowly doing some agriculture, but focusing on resource mining upgrades and establishing a deritium network. What began as 4 deritium that could be routed is now 18, and that means that if the empire needed to, they could have a well established sector (that has no local deritium of its own) that could make all but Omega battleships and in a respectable amount of time.

Instead these kinds of sectors churn out 1 robotic mechanized armor per turn and 15-20 sectors can do this, so a major ground offensive could take place in multiple sectors at once.

Soon every kind of ship will be awaiting the player including customized minor alien race ships from Andromeda and the Zhordanian homeworlds.One is significant and three others are fine starships in their own right due to modification.

Many new sectors have been made due to the colonization blitz,but the focus is not on rushing them, but using them as mining regions and pinpointing every minor alien race fleet without fail. I know where they are in explored territory, but a new player might accidently stumble into them.
So they need the best long range scanning.

Of 1600 sectors in the galaxy, all but 89 are reachable and those are in the extreme NE and SE. Then I will list all the potentially hostile ones with links to their specific cultures and starships.

[UesugiKenshin]

Your best few sectors can rapidly create starships. Then you have ones who can do so. Then you have regular sectors who can rapidly produce ground forces but who could switch to making a local warship if badly needed.

The economy is so smoothly running that it's not necessary to rapidly maximize industry and mining. This way there is plenty to do for new players.

You could scrap excess infrastructure and what that does is then alter what the AI manager has to control regarding laborers. You don't want to micromanage hundreds of sectors; that is just a headache. But eliminating infrastructure like excess farming and research facilities would mean very tight control and so maximal efficiency and heck you might crank out Omega battleships every turn at the best sectors. That is the level that would be required to emulate a Dominion War with massive fleets and huge ground invasions.

My end goal was to maximize everything so the perfect situation could occur before turn 800. I think it's plausible now as one empire can largely do that by turn 700. So it would theoretically take longer with fewer sectors on a grand galaxy map with 4-6 major alien races.

If I had a campaign editor, I could make a fantastic war simulation even with all six and lots of the best minor alien races. If I had a map program, it be the ultimate BotE campaign as I could balance the races by territory and resources and block invasions by pinchpoints with rare space phenomena. If BotE had scripting, then I could have anomalous entities show up when they would match the empires based on their logical plausible abilities at that turn.

[UesugiKenshin]

By every indication, deritium trading is really designed to work by turn 700 IF the player has carefully done all the economic strategy first. I bet few have played regular single player games that long. Very creative multiplayers could have modded a similar situation if a mod team prebuilt everything, then battled.

Yet that is when most players would truly enjoy BotE, but now it's rare as it's so much work.

If hex editing was straight forward, even though it's meticulous work, then I could accomplish everything but scripting. That is what must be overcome. The problem is it seems encrypted to twart such altering. If you look at a hex editor, on the left are the hex values and addresses, and many times on the right are English text that indicate what the hex addresses do. So then I could brute force create everything even without special tools by plugging in correct values in save game data.

So then you could alter the map data for a sector, populate what resources show up and planet size and class, then populate infrastructure and credits and research levels by empire, and then populate starships and troops, and in a fraction of the time, then create an ideal save game where the AI major and minor races are very strong, but so are the human player or players.

You could even set the experience levels of starships and troops, and so have older established major and minor races and newer ones that are up and coming and so have situations where one empire is very old, but may be cumbling like the fragmented Roman empire being chewed up by former client states.

That is the next goal. Otherwise you need an abilty to create map data first and load a map with those presets. Then each race would have certain opponents and others would be on the far side of the galaxy.

[UesugiKenshin]

Imagine a scenario where it's not just six major empires, but plausibly some minor alien races might expand and try to develop enough sectors to maintain their autonomy. It's already possible in BotE.

[UesugiKenshin]

At advanced levels, you don't have to use resource routing in sandbox mode, but some minor alien races get large bonus trade/resource routes like 7-9 instead of 3. So those sectors could get newly colonized sectors under maximal operation. They would get them established and when a critical resource is not available, then route it. Generally it's better to manipulate the price by other means. With hundreds of sectors, then it's less of a headache to do, and then focus on waging war.

There are a few of them. There are rare sectors like Parion (119 billion)and now Rockland (90 billion) that have very high population caps. The total amount of resource routes are a function of population size ordinarily or special infrastructure projects.

If you want to play with six established empires and many minor powerful alien races, then BotE requires more resource routes and or higher population caps. The former is easy to mod, the latter requires a new Java program alteration.

[UesugiKenshin]

I seriously doubt random creation of six empires would last to turn 700 that are strong on a giant map, but you certainly can plausibly create that IF hex editing and or multiplayer is possible. It would be helpful if a multiplayer save game can then be loaded and played as a single player as any of the major races. Then six expert multiplayers or one clever player can create something that either multiplayer or single players would enjoy.

[UesugiKenshin]

Imagine a ready made save game where every one of the six empires already had members of all the minor alien races. They already have established territory and colonization is 90% done. All they have to do is raise armies and starships and tailor this by major race and minor race attributes. That would be so much faster and you could do a campaign in a weekend. That is way more fun.

Most war games are set up to create unique buildings for army composition and a small few for the economy.

[UesugiKenshin]

I spent a considerable amount of time eliminating 37 redundant resource routes. I suspected that I would need them for the final push to turn 700.

Now half my colonies are generating either ground troops or starships. I went into the manager to eliminate wasted labor points for intel or research and focused on industry and mining. That took awhile to reconfigure. Now routinely 75% of construction takes 5 or less per turn. There is little need to rush infrastructure and I have to be more conservative to build a steady surplus for you.

I'm making 100,000 per turn in taxes. But upkeep will continue to climb due to all the ships. Luckily upkeep is not unreasonable in BotE. I was manipulating resources up to in excess of 1400 then selling them to 150, and using some to rush infrastructure and place main trade screen resources at newly colonized sectors. Now I have to be more cautious as I need iridium as every starship using iridium double hulls. And I need crystals to make level 5 troops. And while the surplus grows, I have little need to rush production given they complete so quickly and only half of sectors are cinstructing standard buildings.

So far since diplomatic demands were made by the Omega empire, 12 minor races have captulated for membership and many entered into alliances.

That ran down the surplus from 2.5-4 million down to about 900,000 credits as tremendous amounts of infrastructure had to done.

There are now waves of customized Vi class Omega dreadnoughts bound for combat training at Andromeda and soon customized Tzade class Omega heavy cruisers to the same designation and for the same rationale.

Quite a number of customized fighters and transports joined their veteran shipmates.

I''m orchestrating terraforming colonization to push the frontier to the east so that increases my medium range Aleph class frigates and long range scouts so they can explore as possible in the next 23 turns.

I'm getting ready to do a test of the scanning range of the Vi class dreadnoughts to get a count and indentification of the nearest fleet.

I started to reconfigure the resource routing to clean it up and there just isn't time. Maybe I'll do some at the end after every other goal is accomplished.

If the ship designer editor and the unit editor was available on Google Playstore, then I would create some new ships and units using Level 15 or even Level 16 tech levels.

There are two disappointments about BotE. Level 13 and 14 bio tech alludes to better terraforming and even that area of focus discusses things like certain planets plausibly having silicon based lifeforms. I was hoping that:
1. You could terraform some or all gas giants in some manner and get deritium from them. Or something. That would be extremely helpful as a payoff to doing the maximum research.
2. Some indigenous life should show up that would serve a purpose on some classes of planets even plausibly coexisting with colonists like semi-intelligent species similar to dolphins on O class planets or a variety of simians on L class worlds or similar. It's storytelling and might even be mutually beneficial to mentor their development.

I plan to mod these ideas. You know, it's better not to give everything away in the research database, but only give vague hints, that then later result in special projects and it's not necessary to name every tech area of focus, but just have learning them accomplish some project or troop or starship. Maybe an anthropology project as say the semi-intelligent species show tool use and firemaking or crude housing structures.

[UesugiKenshin]

Never understimate the "wow" factod of space travel and learning something that exists on new worlds that provokes a sense of grandeur at that planet just as we feel at the Grand Canyon or the rainforests or gorillas in the mist. I would be intrigued, not only with intelligent extraterrestial species, but what if you found plants with intelligent locamotion? What about semi-intelligent species that conversed in rudimentary language?

Then those are special projects unlocked that certainly would help morale but at this turn, almost every sector has "fanatical level" people.

[UesugiKenshin]

Maybe the very act of terraforming allows a struggling protospecies a chance to thrive instead of barely existing, and that spawns a beginning that will result in eventual societies forming? I think players would love that kind of creativity.

I'm thinking of David Brin and the Uplift War.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uplift_War