OCP HiveQuest: Thread 2

1st Thread
Update Thread

Turn 10

[x]4d20: Colonize Planets
35: Okay (Colonization complete on partially colonized planet)
Terraforming and colonization is completed on the first planet.

[X]10d20: Complete research: Gas Giant Harvesting
76: Okay (Research complete, 2 Gas Giant Harvesters created)
At long, long last your research is completed. You have finally mastered the art of building creatures that can survive and thrive in a gas giant. The hive can now build Gas Giant Harvesters.

Gas Giant Harvesters are a new type of colony that can be built on gas giants (obviously). They are somewhat easier to build than colonizing an entire planet, but each harvester only grants 1d20. The big advantage to harvesters is that you can stack up to 20 of them on a single gas giant. Considering the fact that you have 27 Gas giants in your currently colonized systems, and that you know of many more in otherwise empty systems, your resource limitations are a thing of the past.

Gas Giant Harvesters have immense psychic strength, but most of it goes towards their own upkeep. As such, they are individually less capable of protecting themselves than planets. All the Harvesters on a single gas giant work together, though, and a full stack of them are significantly stronger than a single world.

Your last two prototypes have been tweaked and refitted to full productivity. You now have 2 Gas Giant Harvesters, giving you an additional 2d20 each turn.

[X]4d4: Continue construction on Proto-Carriers
34: Excellent (1 new Proto-Carrier created)
Your Motherships build a new Proto-Carrier. Just like they did last turn, and the turn before that.

[X]Spec new Proto-Carrier as a Combat Carrier
Done. You now have 3 active Combat Carriers.

Diplomacy (dice spent):
[X]1d20: Negotiate with Asari to open trade relations
2: Pass. You can now trade with the Asari.

[X]1d20: Negotiate with Turians to open trade relations
8: Fail. The Turians don't really seem interested in trading with you at this time.

[X]1d20: Negotiate with Salarians to open trade relations
14: Pass. You can now trade with the Salarians.

Diplomacy (no dice for the moment):
You continue on as normal, but don’t learn anything new
(If you want to get any results for diplomacy, you have to spend dice, even if it’s just a d4)


Current Resources

8 systems

9 Fully Colonized worlds (2d20 each)
1 Uncolonized world
27 Gas Giants
2 Gas Giant Harvesters (1d20 each)
4 Motherships (1d4 each, can get bonuses from resource-rich systems)
2 Rich asteroid belts (1 in relay system)
1 Relay (sharing system with the Citadel)
3 Proto-Carrier (1 turn till fully grown) (Ready to choose role)
1 Proto-Carrier (2 turns till fully grown)
1 Proto-Carrier (3 turns till fully grown)

3 Combat Carriers
290 Cruisers
777 Frigates
16,124 Strike Craft

Completed research for suicide chemicals
Completed research for diplomatic creature
Completed research for gas giant harvesting

Production/Research (Dice: 20d20 & 4d4)

[x] 16d20: Construction: Gas Giant Harvesters.
------ We have potentially 400+ 1d20 with all the gas giants we have currently in our systems. Told you we should do this before exploring.
------ 27 Gas Giants, 20 Harvesters each equals (27*20=540) Five-Hundred and Fourty Harvesters we can build (540d20) before we need to expand. (538 now, 2 already built)
[x] 2d20: Fleet Construction: Fighters.
------ We have 3 Carriers, we should have fighters in reserve.
[x] 1d20: Analyze the "Gift" of Eezo from the Volus ambassador.
------ This is only preliminary analysis, nothing earth shattering. Just verifying the properties (increase/decrease mass with current).


Non-Dice Activities

[x] Allocate all further Proto-Carriers conversions to Super-Carriers until further notice.
------ We just got an additional potential 500ish dice (d20 not d4), we don't need Motherships anymore, we got Gas Giant Harvesters.
[x] We have 1 Super-Carrier waiting in the Ort-Cloud of the Relay system, send the others to support it with a full load of strike craft
------ I don't think we did anything with the second carrier, but I am not sure.
[x] Determine if our sensors possess the ability to detect other ships in Mass Effect based FTL.
------ All this requires is ships near the Mass Relay focus their sensors on Council ships in system and wait for them to use FTL.


Diplomacy (Dice Spent)

Volus: Open Relations with the Volus. (1d20) (Use as "gift")
------ Send a Send a "gift" of Raw material (mined ore) and previously offered biologically produced material to the Volus. Use this as a opportunity to open negotiations.

Elcor: Open Relations with the Elcor. (1d4)
------ Find out what they want, and what they are willing to trade.

Krogan:

• Open Relations with the Krogan. (1d4)
  • Ask about their "war" with the Council, from the Krogan's perspective.
  • Ask if we can open a embasy on their Homeworld.
  • Ask what they want from us and what they are willing to give in return.
  • Give them the list of what we are willing to trade with them.

Quarian:

• Open Relations with the Quarians. (2d4)
  • Offer them trade of materials in exchange for in-depth knowledge of the Galaxy at large. Relations of races between different races, tech levels, military strength, ect.
  • Offer trade of raw materials for in-depth knowledge of the workings of Eezo and Eezo based technologies.
  • Find out why they live in suits. (OOC: Asking GM right now if we can genemod other races, I'm sure you know where this goes)
  • Offer them the standard trade of Eezo and related tech for Raw materials.

Diplomacy (No Dice Spent)

Raloi: Open Relations with the Raloi.
------ Ask them what they want, if anything, and what they are willing to give in return.

Vorcha: Open relations with the Vorcha.
------ Ask them what they want, if anything, and what they are willing to give in return.

Note: The Hanar and Batarians are both minor factions and don't like us, therefore we ignore them as they are not on my list.




Edit: Guys, I talked to Mizuki_Stone, and he said we can genetically modify other species "relatively easily." That we would need DNA samples, cloned batches and modify those to be able to accomplish it. But this means that we can create a cure for the Quarians.

I would like to use this (in future turns after relations improve) along with our empty garden world to bring them into a full Military and Trade alliance. They would help make up for our inability to produce, analyze, and use technology besides our own biotech if we were to form an alliance with them. They could eventually start producing technological (mechanical) components that we would integrate into our bio-ships that would give us the best of both worlds.

The Military alliance would be that if someone were to attack either party (not if we attacked someone else) that we would support one another with our full military might's. If the Quarians got attacked, we would step in and defend them, and if we got attacked, they would send ships our way.



Edit 2: After either this turn or the next we need to use our newly minted (gas giant) dice to build a fleet worthy of Mordor the Hive. Because I just know that now that we have the ability to create a huge fleet in a short period of time, we will have to use it. As of right now, we can produce 20 Dreadnoughts per turn (3 months). When we finish up the Gas Giant Harvesters, we will be able to produce 558 Dreadnoughts/Super-Carriers per turn (3 months). In a year, we will have over 2 thousand, and that is if we don't expand any more and just keep our ships "as is."



Edit 3: Copied over from previous thread.
@ DrakkNyte32 - Thanks for making new thread.

I have GOT to stop typing up a large post just in time to find the update when I preview it.

Gas giants, hooray! Hang on - on second look that's not quite as great as I thought. They can raise our cap enormously, but if each Harvester costs almost as much as a full colony then they are only slightly more than half as cost-efficient. Of course, factoring in exploration costs might compensate for that a little, but we're probably going to continue favoring rockballs when we can.

We really didn't need another combat carrier at this precise moment (if our ground-based strikecraft are evenly spread, there are less than five hundred per system), especially since Motherships can apparently apply themselves to guiding our diplomats. The waste-of-dice diplomacy actions went better than I expected, but the quest for freebies went exactly as I thought it would. By the way Truth, since that's at least twice now, the word you're looking for is 'allocate', not 'accolate'. Before we start a massive fleet buildup I'd want to think about combat doctrine and at least tweak our craft (remember when Mizuki said that specialising from balanced defence/offence/speed gave good returns?) if not do a bit of research (eg. Eezo integration for ridiculously fast fighters).

20d20 + 4d4 available
[x] spec all three babies as Motherships.
[x] 12d20: Colonise empty world.
[x] 4d20: Produce Harvesters
[x] 3d4: Produce strikecraft.
[x] Assign all combat carriers, with full loads of parasite craft, to stay outside the Relay system and support patrols of local space.
[x] 1d4: Investigate the Krogans, their situation, and their interest in us, primarily by asking them. (Being the only people they'll talk to is a very exploitable situation, but also very potentially risky if their actions or reputation splash on us. We need to step carefully and plan ahead.)
[x] 4d20: Trade with anyone who will give fair price, but if the opportunity arises, improve relations with the Volus and Quarians (eg. by not haggling quite as hard as we could - unless they respect business acumen?).
* Specific capability desired: ability to detect ships in Eezo-based FTL (but try not to draw attention to it - make it look like we suspect they have better systems than we do, not that we have nothing).
* For information, concentrate on understanding our new environment: politics, fundamental theory, capabilities of the various races and obsolete (thus cheap) technologies.
* For hard goods (much lower priority) look at production-boosters and information technology (boost the two things that feed our dice pool).

Supported, with one minor change. 8d4 should be enough to colonize a single world.

Motherships only give 1d4 dice and take 3 turns to mature. A gas giant harvester will give 1d20 (5 times as much) and (if it works the same as planets) developes on the same turn you build it. Even if it didnt, we get 5 times the dice from one of these than we do a mothership. We don't need motherships anymore, we got better stuff.

I do want to colonize planets we find but I think we should keep at least one open for the Quarians so that if we ever do broker a treaty, then we got something to entice them with.

We should be spending much more on this than anything else to give us more Dice in the future to make negotiations, do research, expand, build fleets, fight people.

We should be able to do this as our sensor (psychic based) is FTL (instantaneous). But I do agree, we should to trails with it to make sure. Will add this to my post.

I support The Truth's plan.

Motherships are mobile though, which gives us the ability to quickly create logistical and industrial support somewhere far away from our territories. Power projection. That's well worth the effort.

Are we levo, or dextro-protein? The quarians won't have any use for levo-planets.

Heck, with a bit of effort we could probably engineer a planet to be perfect for them.

Sure. Next turn. This turn we also have a terrestrial world to colonize.

We likely have both lexo and dexto based lifeforms. Hivemind, after all.

I'll go with Truth's plan, though I highly doubt that the Quarians will want to be a client race, no matter how comfortable we make them.

Edit: I'm with Walkir, Grue's plan with Brain's changes.

Truth, actions without dice assigned may as well not exist.

Supported, with this edit:

I had no intention of making them a client race. Where did you get that idea? The whole point was so that we would have a military, intel, and trade alliance with someone we can trust. What better way to get them to trust us than by solving their immune system problem and giving them a whole damn planet while saying that if anyone picks a fight with them that we will be there to back them up?

Edit: Anything we would get from them we would trade for, like when I was talking about getting tech and stuff from them and integrating it into our ships? I was meaning that we would get them to build it then we would pay for it. And we wouldn't limit them to only building in our space, just that in a dozen years or so, not even the Geth and Rachni reincarnated could fuck with us.

Edit 2:

Its only for the Vorcha and the Raloi, I'm fine with that. The Quarians, Volus, Elcor all have dice assigned.

Edit 3:

When we can get anywhere in the galaxy in a matter of a week with Mass Relays it doesn't really help to have a mobile industrial support when it takes 3 months (1 turn) to build anything. When we eventually do get Mass Effect + Other Space, we wont even need the Mass Relays. We gain no advantage by making mothships now, they take a full year to gestate when Colonies/Gas Giant Harvesters take 3 months and both produce 5 times as many "points."

You basically just answered it yourself. The planet itself does not rely on Levo/Dextro, it is only the Flora and Fuana on the planet that is limited to those categories. We wouldn't even have to modify the planet, just let them build hydroponic bays to grow their own. As long as they have a good immune system, they can exist on any garden world, levo or dextro and be fine as long as they don't eat the plants/wildlife. And as you said, we can eventually engineer that planet ourselves so it fits what they want EXACTLY.

Ah, I guess was simply misreading then.

Nah, I just didn't make it clear enough. It does sound like I want to subjugate them, my bad.

Edit: Current vote is 2 for my plan and 4 for a modified DIT_grue/Brain_Caster plan.

Supporting the above as well as the Quarian military alliance plan, though having Geth as allies would probably be even more interesting. You know, fully organic race in a complete partnership with a fully synthetic one. Both strange in their own way.

I support TheTruth's plan.

I too support truths plan. In addition, we should probably go Prothean tech hunting if we can.

Hmmm, in the future we'll have to research everything about integrating or growing biological versions of technologies we get from the Citadel races and such. Also, don't assume anything, who cares if the Hanar or Batarians are minor factions or unlikeable, try to establish relations and trade regardless of that... our enemies are the Reapers, we are going to need every god damned asset to kick their asses, which are definitely going to be much tougher, to make this RP/BROB challenging for us...

I support this. While Motherships aren't really cost efficient, free dice is free dice. For now, military still take back seat to colonization. We may want to look into some augmentations, such as ability to re-spec them in the future, through.

EDIT : Motherships also likely to become our primary eezo harvesters and processors.

20d20 + 4d4 available
[x] spec all three babies as Motherships.
[x] 8d20: Colonise empty world.
[x] 8d20: Produce Harvesters
[x] 3d4: Produce strikecraft.
[x] Assign all combat carriers, with full loads of parasite craft, to stay outside the Relay system and support patrols of local space.
[x] 1d4: Investigate the Krogans, their situation, and their interest in us, primarily by asking them. (Being the only people they'll talk to is a very exploitable situation, but also very potentially risky if their actions or reputation splash on us. We need to step carefully and plan ahead.)
[x] 4d20: Trade with anyone who will give fair price, but if the opportunity arises, improve relations with the Volus and Quarians (eg. by not haggling quite as hard as we could - unless they respect business acumen?).
* Specific capability desired: ability to detect ships in Eezo-based FTL (but try not to draw attention to it - make it look like we suspect they have better systems than we do, not that we have nothing).
* For information, concentrate on understanding our new environment: politics, fundamental theory, capabilities of the various races and obsolete (thus cheap) technologies.
* For hard goods (much lower priority) look at production-boosters and information technology (boost the two things that feed our dice pool).

20d20 + 4d4 available
[x] spec all three babies as Motherships.
[x] 8d20: Colonise empty world.
[x] 8d20: Produce Harvesters
[x] 3d4: Produce strikecraft.
[x] Assign all combat carriers, with full loads of parasite craft, to stay outside the Relay system and support patrols of local space.
[x] 1d4: Investigate the Krogans, their situation, and their interest in us, primarily by asking them. (Being the only people they'll talk to is a very exploitable situation, but also very potentially risky if their actions or reputation splash on us. We need to step carefully and plan ahead.)
[x] 4d20: Trade with anyone who will give fair price, but if the opportunity arises, improve relations with the Volus and Quarians (eg. by not haggling quite as hard as we could - unless they respect business acumen?).
* Specific capability desired: ability to detect ships in Eezo-based FTL (but try not to draw attention to it - make it look like we suspect they have better systems than we do, not that we have nothing).
* For information, concentrate on understanding our new environment: politics, fundamental theory, capabilities of the various races and obsolete (thus cheap) technologies.
* For hard goods (much lower priority) look at production-boosters and information technology (boost the two things that feed our dice pool).

This. We can use those extra Motherships to produce more d4s for diplomacy rolls. Not to mention the Gas Giant d20s...

With so many motherships, next point of order for them should be spreading to other systems. Namely, ones without Relays. Get a relay map via diplomacy (ought to be relatively general information), and mark down systems physically nearby (but not right next to our current position) that lack a relay. Proceed to expand the hive without any particular concern for ME races ever finding them (unless particular reason is given by us for them to go looking).

Remember, ME is highly limited to the relays. The Hive is not.

This is a tremendous advantage that is not to be squandered, but rather ought to be maliciously exploited to its fullest.

Do we have map information from the Citadel?

Such as maps of their territory and other species?

If the genophage is unleashed, I suggest we have a secret meeting with the Krogan.

We help them cure it, if they give us an alliance.

Yeah, you're right (except for the d4 instead of d20 typo ). I'm guessing I looked at the numbers for the last one, and forgot to compensate for the fact that it was originally attempting to do both worlds.

[x] Brain_Caster's change to my plan.

Getting a map of the Relays and planning our future expansion along the lines that you suggest is a good plan. Moving the Motherships right now is a bad one.

1. They are currently receiving bonuses for being in a rich asteroid belt.
2. They are slow, both in normal space and in Otherspace.
3. Finding usable new systems (even without additional parameters) requires successful exploration rolls. It really doesn't look like you're going to get people to pass a budget for that any time soon.

We have half-a-dozen proto-carriers maturing, and I don't expect significant combat this year. I admit that my assumption that Motherships should be busy self-replicating when we don't have a specific job for them was unduly influenced by my original impression that they didn't produce resources so much as consume them to create ships - Hang on. There might still be a very good reason to have lots of Motherships so we can surge fleet construction if we need it. EDIT: Come to think of it, aren't they around five times cheaper than a half-colony or Harvester?

Question for the GMs: Do we need one Mothership for every capital ship (or equivalent) that we produce in a turn? Also, while looking for existing posts on the issue I noticed what might be a slight discrepency:

Shouldn't that be 37 Gas Giants? (13 + 24)

Boosting our dice pool as fast as possible is our central goal at the moment, yes. It should be easy enough to find more planets that it is more important to squeeze out a little extra efficiency by colonising this one now.

You're right, I forgot that ME FTL is still in the same universe/dimension. Our existing capabilities should suffice, as long as we commit enough vessels to a sufficiently dense patrol shell.

Whether or not it was your intention, that arrangement would look like a client race to anyone even mildly cynical, because we would be a superpower, while the Quarians would have difficulty rating as even a second-rate Power. (At best it would look like the USA-UK relationship, except that the historic power balance would be the wrong way round for that simile to work. Curing them might actually be too much of a good thing, since if they didn't distance themselves from us they would look so indebted as to be a mere sockpuppet.) Your suggestions for ways to develop the relationship are good, as long as we remember not to push too hard, too fast or too far.

Speaking of exploration, though: is it worth assigning 1d4 until we have detailed surveys (of the sort that were recently proposed as a pre-colonisation measure) of the systems we already occupy? Since we do have a presence, it should only take a little attention, so it's low-cost; the only question is whether it would produce a worthwhile benefit or just fizzle. I think it's worth making the experiment at least once.

There aren't any specialised scouts listed among our Current Resources, so it's possible we've just been assigning ordinary frigates to the role. Endurance isn't a problem: "Your current scouts are fine hanging out in star systems near indefinitely. So long as they can find enough stuff to 'munch' on they're ok." Of course we'd want the greatest feasible strategic speed, but it's hard to know what that is or how to tweak it, so leave that to the GMs. Surely weapons and some defences could be traded for better survey capability however?

Are frigates merely more nimble than dreadnoughts, or are they also faster over tactical and/or strategic distances?


Also, I said yesterday that I would want to discuss military doctrine, force mixes etc before we embarked on a major military buildup. Since there has been some votes for exactly that the last couple of turns, I'll see what sort of debate my ideas kick up, even though I'm opposed to spending on it for the immediate future.

Incidentally Truth, even with the change to build some strikecraft, your budget for this turn would leave us 260 fighters short of filling our carriers, and with none at all to garrison our systems. Unless... hmm.

Would leaving a combat carrier in a rich asteroid belt be sufficient for it to build a load of fighters; or would we (as I believe) need to assign a d20 as well (possibly only a d4, but I doubt that too)?


When I was looking for evidence on the question of Mothership utility, I stumbled over this quote from before the first turn:
"You have numerous ship selves, many of whom can carry troops." So at least my recent worry that we couldn't move a ground army at all without building transports is baseless, and we do have "front-line infantry", even if it was mentioned (in the choose-a-faction thread?) that they are significantly less effective per-unit than Citadel troops. Might still be worth thinking about a specialised design, though.


Since the Citadel doesn't seem to be in contact with humanity, which may or may not exist anyway, it will be interesting to see what their current fighter doctrine is like. (I remember at least one fic that said humanity initiated a shift to more carrier-based warfare because of the treaty restrictions on dreadnoughts, but I don't know how much canon basis there is for that.) Hopefully the research I voted for will tell us both how common fighters are in the fleets of the known races and how they compare to our own (speed, armour, what they're armed with). But just going from what we already know:

Although, can offensive pyrokinesis really be handled properly by the same organ that is providing telekinesis for movement and defense?

Anyway, we have an adequately workable system already, at least in theory (Mizuki's explanation of how murderous our strikecraft can be in numbers). With enough carriers, we can pound any fleet into rubble, and as long as the carriers themselves survive, we can come back and do the same again in six months, which is exactly the logistic strength that this faction is supposed to have. There are some improvements we can make, though.

For fighter-scale combatants, I don't see that a piddly little shield is worth going slower. And once we find out that pyrokinesis outranges the Citadel races' primary anti-fighter defences, we can probably drop most of the armour, too. The only consideration against those is the possibility that they might be useful when facing defending fighters, but if necessary we can deploy a space superiority fighter as escort. Of course, ground attack fighters will have different requirements again.

Space superiority: Needs just enough gun for a single fighter to reliably kill any known enemy fighter-class combatant. Likewise, it should have enough unspecialised telekinetic capability to block a (burst? round?) of fighter-scale weapons fire when used as a shield. Some armour would be useful, but probably not as much as it presently carries. The rest of its resources should be devoted to speed. Assign maybe five hundred per carrier?

Ship attack (I'm spacing on the proper term for this role): Can dispense with armour and shields, on the theory that any hit is unlikely to be survivable no matter how well defended it is. It needs to be faster than our present ("a tad slow") design; being faster than enemy interceptors and/or fast enough to keep up with its escorts might be nice, but is probably not achievable, because what it really needs is a ferocious punch. Forms the majority of fighters asigned to any general-duty carrier.

Ground attack: If it needs to do nap-of-the-ground (and come to think of it, any of our ships that can enter atmosphere ought to be perfectly capable of VTOL) then coordinating fire would be difficult at best. Since they are likely to be called on to deal with either very hard or very large targets, each individual craft needs a powerful weapon. Since they will be unable to avoid all enemy fire, they need decent shields and armour. While they could specialise towards a helicopter-like role by trading speed for all of those, that too could be essential in some scenarios. ...Our present design might do quite well as a generalist in this field, although we could look at the 'helicopter specialist' in addition. Would only be fielded on carriers specifically assigned to support an army, although if (reasonably secure) basing facilities are available on-planet, they will of course be used.


As to grand strategy, until we do the research for those particle-beam dreadnoughts, carriers are going to form almost the entirety of our effective fleet. Just in case, you'd screen them with a few squadrons of frigates and cruisers, hold back a thousand or so space superiority fighters for CAP, and send the ship attack fighters with their escort to kill the enemy, whether they're in the same star system or a nearby one.

Of course, neither fleet is obliged to restrict themselves solely to stellar systems, though all the interesting targets will be there... Which brings up the point that although we can probably detect Eezo-based ships in transit, we have no way of intercepting them; we'd have to track them to their destination by leapfrogging our ships (can't detect things in normal-space when they're in otherspace and vice-versa) then deal with them there. (Since our senses are psychic/telepathic, I do have to wonder whether they would pick up the Geth at full range, or even at all.)

So to invade a defended world, we would first need to attain control of orbit and local space, then bring in transports and land the army. Even if we can land out of range of the defenders - quite unlikely unless they didn't value the world much - moving significant troop numbers in dribs and drabs on individual combat ships would be such a pain that we'll really need at least one design of dedicated troop transport.

... Yeah, I think I've run out of things to ramble about.