Subject: Advanced Joat Design and Play (extremely long) From: scoph@bga.com (Scott Phelps) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 23:44:51 GMT I’ve been watching the exchanges here regarding PRTs for quite a while. I was hoping someone else would publish a guide for playing the Jack-of-all-Trades race (Joat hereafter). Since it seems likely that 2.6a will make direct changes to the Joat PRT, I decided that if I was going to do this at all, I had better go ahead and do it now (and then my system went in for repairs and I neglected to copy this file to my backup system, so I’m late anyway). A few caveats before I get into the meat of the article. Like the majority view on the newsgroup I regarded the HE race as being the most powerful race when 2.0 first came out. Then 2.0a came out and made 3 changes to the Joat race, two small and one major, which made me re-evaluate the Joats. I liked what I saw. I REALLY liked it. Yes, I’m opinionated. I think that the Joat is almost certainly the single strongest race in the game, from versions 2.0a through 2.5a. No, I haven’t played any 2,6 games yet. But I’m liking the IT, CA and SS changes right now and will have to investigate those races. I will probably wait for 2.6a and also look at the changes made to the Joat PRT (if any), as well. I believe one reason that the Joat PRT is generally overlooked is that most people start with it because it is easiest (and the default) and then ‘graduate’ to other PRTs once they get some experience. They forget to look back and see if they’ve overlooked something. The other reason is that the Joat PRT is geared to a hyper-growth race model that seems to be contrary to the general way races are played and designed. Hyper-growth leads to more micro-management. During race design many (perhaps most) people will pay for many of the neat LRTs they’ve bought and other goodies by reducing the growth rate of the race. Not a good idea for a Joat. If you are one of those people who would rather be doing something else, anything else, other than play in a style that requires LOTS of micro-management, this race is not for you! You may wish to read on, just to see what your opponent is doing. To me however, this sounds like, ‘I want to play (and win) I just don’t want to have to work at it.’ If you feel this way, please don’t play in the same games I do—I prefer a challenge to an easy victory! The way of the Joat is hard but ultimately, very rewarding! I will be covering a number of things that will apply equally to any race, especially a hyper-growth race. Please be patient with me if you’re only interested in Joat specific things. It is necessary so everyone understands why I’m recommending particular LRT and play styles for this race. Also, if I mention something obvious, don’t berate me for it. Just because it is obvious to you and me, does not mean that it will be to everyone, I have been very surprised by the number of things that I’ve seen in this newsgroup where the (to me) obvious was missed. I will be discussing one particular race design I have used recently with great success. It also makes a great breeder for a super/breeder combo. This particular Joat design requires 2.5 or higher to implement. I have also had excellent results in 2.0, but will address only 2.5 and higher. I will also be discussing some requests I have for the Jeffs on minor alterations for Joats and which universe parameters are good or bad for this Joat design. Let’s carefully look at the advantages that the Joat PRT provides: 1. Penetrating scanners built into the hulls of all scouts, frigates (still referred to in the Ship Classes help topic as super scouts) and destroyers. This ability is the Joat’s single most important. The destroyer class was added to the list in 2.0a. It also dictates what ‘thematic play’ is for the Joats. By ‘thematic play’ I mean playing up to and maximizing those traits (themes) that a race is best at. Joats start the game with 2 scouts and 1 destroyer. No one else will have penetrating scans until they reach Elect 7 and SS are the only ones that even start close to that. So, why are penetrating scans so important, especially at the beginning of the game? After all, it is only a 40/20ly scanner, big deal! Well it is a very big deal. By using the ships with penetrating scanners well, you can greatly increase the speed with which you scan planets. Early in the game this means that you can find habitable planets more quickly than anyone else. You can also scan planets w/o orbitting them, which is the easiest way to lose your starting scouts (not really likely in 2.5, unless you run into a WM, but quite likely in 2.0 and 2.6). Scanning planets quickly, early in the game immediately suggests some things about how to design the race to play to that strength. You don’t want to use a race that has either total immunity to all three environmental factors or even has such a broad range that you would do better just to send out colony ships with colonize orders and let your settler’s reports be your early scouting. So you DO want to use a race where you need to pick and choose which planets you want to inhabit. OTOH, don’t narrow the ranges so much that you sitll are unlikely to find a habitable planet in the first 10 years, even with more efficient scouting. Anything else you can do that will speed up those ships and/or extend their range and useful life would also be useful. This advantage is almost meaningless after the first 30-50 years of the game. About the only usefulness it has then is that you can build minelayers and sweepers from frigate hulls w/o bothering to put a scanner on them and still get some scanning. Once you mount any regular penetrating scanner on one of these (or another ship in the same fleet) the built-in scanners become insignificant and irrelevant. 2. Joats get a 20% addition to the maximum population for all their planets. This is the one that is most often mentioned on the newsgroup. Obviously this means that, all other things being equal, Joats will have more resources and they will have more mines to produce minerals. Of course, all other things are almost never equal so what this most often translates into is being able to achieve reasonable production levels while spending fewer advantage points to achieve those levels. What I have never seen mentioned in the newsgroup about this advantage is actually the most important and what makes it rival the starting penetrating scans in importance. Since the maximum population is 20% higher than any other race, you reach the 25% mark, where population growth stops being exponential, later than everyone else. Similarly, with the 33.99% maximum growth level. This means that once you pass the point where everyone else would have hit 25%, you will grow faster. In fact, a Joat can produce more colonists per turn on a single planet than any other race. Most people believe that the Hyper-Expander has this trait. Not true! An HE planet can not produce any more colonists per turn than a normal planet of any other race. An HE will reach the point of maximal growth MUCH faster however, since HE grows at twice the speed and needs to grow only half as many colonists to reach his max point. Let’s assume a normal race (non-Joat or HE) and a Joat. Both have 20% growth rates and both are on 100% planets. The normal race will be able to produce 50,000 colonists when it has 250,000 colonists on the planet and will hit its maximum of growth of around 53,000 when it hits 333,300. The Joat will also grow 50,000 colonists at 250,000. But then at 300,000 it will grow 60,000 and when it reaches 400,000 colonists (1/3 of its maximum population) it will grow over 63,000. The actual max figures work out to be a little higher in practice due to the way the Jeffs calculate it. I can’t emphasize this point enough—when used to grow colonists the 20% addition to the maximum, means that you grow colonists faster than any other race, once you have reached the 25% population point for any planet you inhabit (assuming that you compare similar habitability %s). 3. Joats start at tech level 3 in all fields and for each field where they take costs 75% extra and check the starts at tech level 4 (3 for other races) they get tech level 4—and so do all their starting ships and their planetary scanner. So a Joat always starts with the Scoper 150 planetary scanner. Also a Joat will start with one Stalwart Defender, a mining ship, two scouts, and a medium freighter or Privateer. So you start with an early tech advantage that can be used in a number of ways to help your hyper-growth efforts move forward. I always take the ‘costs 75% more’ in all fields and then take the starts at tech level 4 checkbox so that I start at tech level 4 in all fields. More particulars on using this advantage later. LRTs So which LRTs should you take and which should you avoid with this race? Let’s look at each one. Yes or no enclosed in parentheses indicates that this was the choice I made for this particular race, but I do not see that choice as being ‘thematic’ for either the Joat in particular or hyper-growth in general. Improved Fuel Efficiency—Yes! If you take this all of your starting ships will have the Fuel Mizer engine built-in (well not after 2.6b, if you start at Prop 5, you get the Daddy Long Legs 7, yuck!). This greatly increases the ease with which your starting ships can get out there and find your habitable planets. Total Terraforming—Yes! For this race design, definitely. For Joats in general, probably, but not absolutely essential. Look at it this way—since habitability % affects both the growth rate AND the maximum population (except for AR, which only experiences the growth rate effect), when growing colonists on a planet that is near the 25% habitability level, each 1% change in habitability results in a change in the actual number of colonists grown that is proportional, not to the new effective growth rate, but to the square of the habitability %. So being able to change the habitability % more quickly and further is a very good thing for a hyper-growth race. One thing that is often overlooked about total terraforming is that you get to start out terraforming ‘yellow’ planets to ‘green’ ones . For a race that does not start at tech level 3 in bio, you can only do 3% in any one area. If, like the Joats, you start at tech level 3 (or 4) in Bio, then you start with Total Terraforming +/- 5%. Advanced Remote Mining—No. Anti-thematic because it conflicts with ‘Only Basic Remote Mining’. For more, see ‘Only Basic Remote Mining’. Improved Starbases—Yes! Another thing I have not seen mentioned in the newsgroup. I can think of a few race designs where this would be a waste of advantage points, but very few! Most of the discussion of this LRT has centered around Ultra Station and Death Stars. Even in 2.0 the cheapness and ability to build light ships of Space Docks was almost certainly underestimated. In 2.5 and better Space Docks become essential. Can you say ‘gas station’? Good! A Space Dock will automatically refuel all of your ships that dock there. It can also build colony ships, scouts, medium freighters, minelayers, destroyers and frigates. All the things a hyper-growth, rapid expansion race needs and at a fraction of the cost of a full starbase. That reduced cost means that you can produce a Space Dock much sooner on a new colony than you could build a Starbase and take away fewer resources from the early development of the planet—the time when you can least afford to divert resources from development. A Joat can start at tech 4 in construction, which means you have the ability to buildd Space Docks from the beginning. Generalized Research—Irrelevant. (No) Generally I recommend using this in solo games or one-on-ones against human players. But any game where you might wish to ally with another player and do tech transfers, this will cost you. Ultimate Recycling—No. I like this in general, but you have to stick with those things that play to your race’s other strengths. This does not. Mineral Alchemy—Yes. Although you could get by w/o this one. Generally however you will have little from remote mining and, if this race does well, you will have more resources than you know what to do with. It can also help you across some initial problems early in the game. Especially an Ironium shortage, where you need Ironium for your colony ships and for the very mining ships that could bring you more Ironium. No Ram Scoop Engines— (No) I feel that this is a natural for this race, and yet I have not yet been able to bring myself to give up all those other ramscoops (even with this you would still get the Fuel Mizer engine). I probably should use this but have not, maybe in 2.6b. Cheap Engines—No, never! Not for any race. Not being able to count on ALL of your ships arriving when and where you tell them to is really bad. I might be tempted to take this if it gave you a few thousand advantage points to play with. Even w/o the problems it presents for being able to conduct effective military campaigns, it is also anti-thematic, because it essentially increases the time it takes to reach any given destination. The key here is rapid exploration and expansion. Cheap Engines hinders that. Only Basic Remote Mining—Yes. This is thematic because it gives you an extra 10% to your max population. Put together with the Joat’s built-in 20%, this means you can house 32% additional colonists on any planet. It also means that when growing colonists around the ideal levels, you grow 32% more colonists per turn. No Advanced Scanners—(No) Another one that I have toyed with taking, but have not. I am finding planetary based penetrating scanners (and Dolphin scanners on ships) to be very useful in planning military maneuvers. Neither thematic or not, but stay tuned for developments in 2.6a that may make this an automatic pick for Joats. Low Starting Population—No! About as anti-thematic as they come. Bleeding Edge Technology—(No) I could be wrong on this one. You get points. But I do not like the increased costs for building stuff as soon as you get it. I like to build a LOT of tech level 3 and 4 stuff early in the game and before I’ve done any research. Regenerating Shields—No. It’s only 10 points. And it limits too many other choices. In 2.6 with more powerful torpedos, this one is going to be really bad! (I understand that torps were toned down in 2.6a and 2.6b, but I still don’t like this LRT). Time to move on to page 4 of the Race Wizard and set up the habitability ranges. For this race design I wanted to improve the speed with which I could develop a planet w/o making habitable planets too scarce or spending the farm on points. In 2.0 there was a trick you could use here, where you would take immunities in two areas and then narrow the third range and slide it to one side or the other. The result was a race that could inhabit 1 out of 4 planets w/o terraforming. The worst green planet for such a race had a habitability of 41% and each point of terraforming produced for a planet improved its habitability by more than 1%. Total cost in advantage points? None! Jeff^2 realized this was not good and fixed 2.5 so that such a race would now have to pay over 400 points. By taking one immunity you can get several similar benefits though. I chose to take immunity to Radiation so that the Radiating Hydro Ram Scoop engine would not kill colonists. Since then I have found that I’m not using that engine very often, so I’ve tried redesigning the race taking the immunity in one of the other two areas and found that it always seemed to cost me more points. Gravity 0.18 to 1.04 with 0.56 ideal Temperature 4 to 156 with 80 ideal Radiation immune Worst possible green planet is about 15% habitable. Each 2 points of terraforming yield about 3% in habitability, And only one in 5 planets are habitable. Really that’s 1 in 5 are green with about 1 in 4 being green or yellow from the start and about half the planets being green or yellow by the time you hit Bio 17. Cost in advantage points: a gain of 92 points. Now let’s spend those points and then some! Move the growth rate spinner up to 16%. That cost 64 points. Now go to 17%, that cost 63 points. 18% costs 65 points and 19% costs 64 points. 20% costs 138. What?! That last % cost twice what each of the other ones cost. Was it worth twice as much? Not in my opinion. So I settled for a 19% growth rate. Why increase the growth rate at all? In fact, many people lower the growth rate to buy other things. The single most important change you can make to an exponential growth curve is to increase/decrease the base—in this case, the growth rate. A 15% growth rate allows your population to double every 5 years. A 19% growth rate allows the population to double every 4 years. So after 20 years, the 19% growth planet will have twice as many colonists as a 15% growth planet (five doublings for the 19% and only four doublings for the 15% growth planet). Of course, in games where ‘Accelerated BBS play’ was selected’ you’ll be out of the exponential growth phase before the second doubling, And w/o ‘Acc. BBS play’ you still will get fewer than 4 doublings before leaving the exponential growth curve. Still, the doubling time is a very useful way of visualizing the difference between different growth rates. That leaves quite a deficit in advantage points. I already mentioned that on page 6 of the Race Wizard, the research page, I take ‘costs 75% more’ for each field and then check the ‘starts at tech level 4’ box at the bottom. Now on to the production page. Here I always checked the box ‘factories require one less of each mineral to produce’. I’m not so sure that I will do that in 2.6. But the point was to extend the length of time that you could build factories w/o building any mines. Again to grow maximally, you want to build factories first (as long as you don’t have to resort to mineral alchemy). The more factories you have once you start to build mines, the faster you will be able to build mines. Your factories will also help you to terraform more quickly, so you can build to your optimal growth sooner. As soon as you run short of a given mineral, start building mines, but make sure to build all the factories and do all the terraforming you want, before building mines each turn. I leave the ‘one resource is produced for every x colonists’ alone. Making colonists inherently produce fewer resources is anti-thematic. While having colonists produce more resources is horribly expensive. I leave all the other spinners alone except for the cost to build a mine, which I move up to 15 to go back positive on points and then spend them all to bring the resources produced by factories up to 13. If I were to take ‘No advanced scanners’ and/or ‘no ramscoop engines’, I would most likely spend the points here on either factory efficiency, mine efficiency or factory cost. If I wound up with 3 or more points left over I would spend them on mineral concentrations. That brings the advantage point total to zero. What we have now is a race that is designed to grow fast, very fast. To achieve that I have accepted a few handicaps/limitations. First of all, this race will never profitably inhabit more than about half the planets (still you can turn this into a limited advantage through good diplomacy). This race is going to have to throw lots of resources at research to get anywhere after the ‘free’ start at level 4. This race will never be a super-productive race—planets max out at 3,036 resources per turn (with current settings for factory efficiency). The race also has a number of advantages which, I think allow it to more than compensate for those disadvantages. It grows on any decent planet very quickly. It can locate and settle decent planets very quickly. It can convert planets easily into near homeworld quality worlds. It can lay mines and build Space Docks from the very beginning. Because of the skewed habitability ranges, it can easily negotiate with other races for cohabitation of controlled areas in a galaxy. Also, because you and your neighbors are less likely to be racing for the same juicy border planets, you are less likely to get sucked into an early, debilitating, border war. How to play: At the start of the game I set my research % to zero and the field being researched to Weapons with the next field set to Propulsion. I may change the fields before I spend a single resource on research, as circustances dictate, but this is what I start with. I set the production queue to auto-build at least 100 factories, followed by a similar auto-build order for mines. Now for the start of the micro-management: I take my starting armed probe and give it a series of waypoints that map out about 12 or so stars I want it to visit. Then I give another set of waypoints to my long range scout. This one generally gets about 20-30 waypoints depending on universe density. Then I assign waypoints to the Stalwart Defender (DD hereafter). For all the ships except the long range scout I try to stay in or near the edge of the 150 ly scan from my homeworld. Next I look to see if any of the paths that I have just plotted, either miss a nearby planet entirely or make it take a serious ‘jog’ out of its way to cover a particular planet. I try to identify 1-4 such planets. If one of them is within about 50 ly and away from the others, I will send the cotton picker (miner) there instead. For the others I plot out waypoints with my Swashbuckler (privateer), being careful to get it out to those planets and back to the homeworld in the fewest number of years. I also return to the ships with penetrating scanners and delete from the waypoint list any planet that I sent the privateer or miner to instead. Now for the messy part. I return to the ships with penetrating scanners and zoom in to 400%. Now I move along the path, starting at the beginning, and move the waypoint away from the first planet. If there are 2 or more planets that will be covered by the 20 ly penetrating scan then I put a waypoint in a place that will scan as many of those planets as I can, deleting waypoints for each of the planets that I will get to scan from that point in space. Even if I will only be able to get one planet in the penetrating scan, I still move the waypoint away from the planet. I try to do this in such a way that I can reduce the time and fuel spent to get a scan on the target planet. I go along the line repeating this for each remaining planet waypoint until they have all been done. This is not a precise process at all and I certainly wish for better tools to do it with, but I find the results sufficiently rewarding to warrant the effort. You can use intermediate waypoints that take you from a given point in space to a particular planet and then shift the waypoint in space around and read the distance off the fleet waypoints window to get the waypoint within 20 ly of a target planet. This gets more complicated as the number of possible planets that can be included in a single scan goes up. As to setting the speed so as to minimize your speed, just set your speed so that you will get to the waypoint in the fewest number of turns and then choose the slowest speed that will get you there in that amount of time. It helps to remember that for each warp speed the total distance traveled in one year is no more than the square of the warp speed in ly plus 0.99. That is, warp 9 can take you as far as 81.99 ly in a single turn. Your scanners however, get no truncation or rounding, if you are 20.01 ly away from your target then you won’t scan it. Repeat the entire process for each of the 3 ships with penetrating scans. Try to have the armed probe and DD on a sort of looping course so you can send them back to the homeworld when done so you can scrap the armed probe and scrap or refuel the DD. It is possible that a planet will begin within 20 ly of your homeworld. If this happens then you will have a penetrating scan of it on 2400. If its green, colonize it. If not, then send your miner there, unless the mineral concentrations are truly pathetic. You may relocate the miner later to a better site, but meanwhile its free minerals. Before ending the first turn, look at the paths you have mapped out for exploration. Are there any really nice clumps close by that you just couldn’t fit in? Hopefully not, but if there are, copy the long range scout, remove the scanner and save the new design. Then insert one of these cheaper long range scouts into the production queue. The number of such scouts you feel it is necessary to build will vary depending on universe size, density, your geographic position (you will need fewer if you are backed into a corner or flat against an edge). If you are near the center of a medium or bigger universe, then you will likely need at least one or two extra scouts. I’ve actually built as many as 6 extra scouts in the first few years. If you decide to build more than one extra scout, I recommend spreading them out and building 1 per year. I’m not certain that this is best, but it seems to work well for me. If you start near a corner or edge, so that a region is somewhat blocked off for your own private use, explore that area last. You want to leap out and be the first one to find and inhabit planets that would be taken by someone else if they got there first. You may not get to hold all of these early acquisitions, but whether you lose them or not, you will gain a lot of useful info on your opposition, including how war-like they are. Don’t delay exploring the private area for long, wormholes, SS and the like will let unwelcome visitors in. Perhaps even a neighbor who has read this may think to steal a march on you by exploring it first. Once the scout’s reports start pouring in, start sending your colony ships out to inhabit the green planets (ignore the yellow ones for now). Colonize the one’s with the highest habitability %s first. Favor near ones over far ones. Build just enough colony ships each turn to successfully colonize every green planet you see, except those already targetted by your colony ships. Once the colonies you are trying to establish are about 150 ly or more away from your homeworld, you will probably want to build a long range scout to go with the colony ship as a sort of poor Joat’s fuel transport. Once the homeworld population exceeds 150,000, start building medium freighters with a cargo pod, fuel mizer and nothing else. If your privateer has returned from its scouting mission, use it instead of building a medium freighter. You should reach that population by 2403, unless you have been very lucky and aggressive in finding and colonizing green planets. These freighters will hold 26,000 colonists. Ferry full loads of colonists out to your nearest, highest habitability planets, go out as fast as you can and still have around 100mg of fuel left (you’ll burn a lot more fuel going out than you will coming back), then return as quickly as you can. Build as many of these as you need to to service all of your new planets, but no more than 1 per turn and don’t plan to build one when an existing freighter is due to return the same year the new freighter would be built. The idea here is to develop your new colonies as rapidly as possible, while allowing your home planet to contiue to grow and develop. Try to never take more colonists off of your homeworld than the planet summary says you will grow that year. In the first few planet reports you should find a good planet for mining. Don’t worry if it isn’t perfect, just pick one that has a reasonable concentration in something your home planet started short of or you expect to need soon (such as Germanium in 2.6). Then send your miner there. Depending on how desperate you anticipate your mineral situation becoming (after you have built as many mines on your homeworld as you can operate), you may want to build some extra miners. If possible hold off on that until year 2410. I’ve been in a situation where the Ironium shortage was so bad, I had to start building extra miners by 2404, but this was an extreme case. Once your first colonies reach the 80,000 mark, stop sending loads of new colonists there, switch to another planet. Those first boatloads of colonists can shave 10-20 years off of the time it takes to develop a planet. Once the population hits the 80,000 mark the growth will be pretty rapid. That extra 26,000 colonists would only help out such a planet by a year or two. So take your colonists where they will do the most good. Design a Space Dock that has nothing on it. I call mine Gas Stations. As soon as you can build one in a single turn on a new planet, do so. Now you can build scouts, colony ships, freighters, minelayers, etc. here. All of your ships can refuel here. Redirect some of your returning medium freighters to this planet for refueling and colonists. At this point the planet should be well enough developed that you can grow more than 26,000 colonists a turn, so loading the freighter won’t set you back any colonists at all. Soon you will find that you are no longer using your homeworld to supply colonists for new colonies. The routes from your first colonies to the new colonies will be shorter and your ships can refuel there as well as pick up new loads of colonists. About the same time you will also find that you have built as many factories and mines as your homeworld population can operate, so you will now have leftover resource points which will automatically go into research. I like to get Weapons 5 first so I can build a Beta torp equipped starbase, Then propulsion 5, mainly as a prerequisite for the first stargate, but the w7 engine also works very nicely on colony ships. Then construction 5, for stargates, and construction 6 for frigates. At this point is when I usually start bringing out minelayers. Once the homeworld reaches about 900,000 population, you will notice your growth rate really start to deteriorate, at this point it is a good idea to start ferrying colonists from the younger, faster growing colonies, back to the older ones, being careful not to overpopulate. Changes in 2.6a and above. Fair warning--I have not played 2.6 much. I played a Joat in 2.6b (based on the design I gave above, but taking the disadvantage ‘no advanced scanners’ and using the points for slight production benefits) just one game against the computer players and one game against one human opponent and 5 computer players over a LAN one evening. When my opponent and I quit, I was no higher than tech 9 anywhere, was about to crush the human and the computer players were nowhere near my score or resources. Hardly overwhelming evidence, but it seems that all is not lost for the Joat in 2.6! There is really only one Joat specific change for 2.6 and this was introduced in 2.6a, when it was felt that the advantages given to the IT, SS, and CA were too overwhelming. It was even argued that the HE, without stargates, was still more powerful than a Joat. I never bought the HE being superior to the Joat, even when the HE had stargates, unless you go all the way back to 2.0. The change introduced in 2.6a was to make the scanners built-in to all Joat scout, frigate and destroyer hulls have a range dependent on the level of Elect of the Joat. These built-in scanners became 20x/10x scanners, where x is the Electronics tech level of the Joat *at the time the scanners are being used*! So a Joat such as the one I described would start the game with a built-in 80/40ly scanner on 3 of his starting ships! For the Joat I was playing with ‘no advanced scanners’ the starting scanners were 160/40ly scanners! This raises three immediate questions: 1) Why would a Joat ever put a scanner on a scout or destroyer? And a little calculation will show that the gains from putting even 5 scanners on frigate aren’t worth the cost, either. 2) Why would a Joat NOT take ‘no advanced scanners’? You can make some arguments for not taking this, but when you look at the cost of building a single scout and figure how many scouts you would need to equal x penetrating planet-based scanner, they really don’t hold up! 3) Why is it that the Joats get a technology dependent ability that retroactively affects existing ships? The AR get a production boost for each Energy tech level, but the growth there is less than linear. Joat scanner range growth is linear with Electronics levels and affects ships already in use. I pointed out earlier that I regarded the built-in penetrating scanners as the Joat’s single biggest advantage, but one that had to be utilized quickly because the advantage soon disappeared. This change makes the advantage continue all the way through the game. I still maintain that it is most important early in the game, but now these scanners will continue to be important throughout the game. I was playing in a game recently where an SS player complained about the Inner Strength special item, the Tachyon Detector, being able to negate the Super Stealth sole advantage (actually SS does have a few other advantages, but I digress). Think about this, it takes Elect 14 to get the Tachyon detector, which then costs 1 Ironium, 4 Boranium(!) and 59(!) resources to build. Each Tachyon Detector yields a 5% reduction in the effectiveness of scanners. So to be useful, the IS player has to build Tachyon Detectors into a hull AND add scanners, plus the cost of the hull, engine, etc. Now consider a Joat at the same Elect 14 and assume that he has done the automatic thing and taken ‘no advanced scanners’. This same Joat can build a scout, with engine for a cost of 2 Ironium, 1 Boranium, 2 Germanium and 4 Resources! Such a scout would have a built-in scanner with 560/140ly range. Since the best possible cloaking (according to the help file) is 98%, such a scout could see even the best possible cloaked ship if it were within 11.2 ly. It is possible to then construct a ‘net’ of such scouts and use them, with appropriate backup to sweep away even the most cloaked of ships. To completely cover a grid 100ly by 100ly you need fewer than 150 of these scouts, spaced about 8 ly apart (with some clever alternating of patterns, you can cut this down to about 120 scouts). Total cost for 150 such scouts? 300 Ironium, 150 Boranium, 300 Germanium and 600 resources. About what you would spend for 1 good galleon or cruiser. The human cost to the player in terms of micro-management is another matter. But if you think that part of it is bad, think about how daunting it is to play against. Since each scout is within 8 ly of at least 2 other scouts, any cloaked ship that kills one will be seen by its neighbors and so can be targeted for destruction. Yes, there are ways around that and ways around those workarounds. But what happened to the SS ability to come and go as they see fit, unseen? Not into the center of that net, they’re not! And as the Joats skill in Electronics rises, the mesh of the net gets bigger, needing fewer ships and/or covering more area, but for the same low price. Please excuse the extended example, but I wanted to show just how powerful the ability to build such plentiful cheap scanning ships is. There are some important limits however, the 512 fleet maximum being foremost. What about the effect at the beginning of the game of having built-in 60/30ly or 80/40ly scanners? Staggering! The Joats are now even faster out of the starting blocks than they were before and with ‘no advanced scanners’ extending the normal range of those built-ins to 120 or 160 ly, the utility of these ships in identifying early threats by and weaknesses of your opponents, is greatly enhanced as well. It should be quite easy to assess the situation from afar and either dance around a strong foe or direct a devastating early attack against a weak opponent. What about the other changes in 2.6 that affect Joats and hyper-growth races? There is the change in factory cost. This actually works to the advantage of the hyper-growth race. Since everyone runs into similar difficulties with Germanium availability on the homeworld, your ability to grow colonists, hence resources very quickly becomes an even more pronounced advantage. Not to mention that since you have more colonists manning mines, once you have built your homeworld’s industrial base (number of factories) up to its maximum, you will quickly develop a local surplus of Germanium which can then be ferried out to your growing colonies There is one more change in 2.6b that affects the Joat (and no other race that I know of). Its sort of an odd little change actually, that appears to be beneficial, and in some ways is. The LRT ‘improved fuel efficiency’ lost exclusive rights to the Prop 16 engine. No biggie. But that LRT now also gives an extra starting level in Propulsion. Great! But now the Joat who has taken +75% to research in all fields (propulsion specifically) and checked the box to start at tech 4, now starts at tech 5. And so all his starting ships have the Daddy Long Legs 7 engine, instead of the fuel mizer. That’s actually OK for the colony ship, but bad for everything else. And for the scouting ships, those wonderful ships with the built-in penetrating scans, it is terrible! I’ve gone so far as considering leaving the research cost of propulsion at normal, just to get the fuel mizer engine instead! I can’t afford the points. So instead, I send those starting ships out on short trips, scrapping them on completion and immediately design and build a replacement long range scout with the fuel mizer, a fuel tank and nothing else. Then I build enough of them to make up for the short trips my starting ships are taking. The effect of game parameters: All hyper-growth races are penalized by Accel. BBS play. Why? Because if everyone started at 25,000 colonists and left them on their homeworld for 10 turns, a race with a 19% growth rate would have 140,000 colonists at the end of that time, while a race with a 15% growth rate would have 100,000 colonists. With starting penetrating scans the Joats advantage is greater the greater the density of the universe. In a sparse universe, a Joat will gain small time advantages when scouting by reducing overall trip length and time. But in a dense or packed universe, a Joat (especially in 2.6a and higher) can expect to scan more than one world on his path, each turn! In packed universes a Joat with tech 4 in electronics and a good engine (fuel mizer) can EXPECT to scan 3-4 planets per turn, per ship! The only way for another race to equal this is to build a lot more scouts, which will slow down their development other ways. Slower tech advances tends to favor the players who took the +75% research disadvantage AND checked the ‘starts at tech level 3 (4)’ box at the beginning of the game. This is because at no extra cost to that player, the costs for everyone else to catch up to you just doubled. Again, this is an early advantage that will go away later in the game. With all tech costing double, the amount by which that ‘costs 75% extra’ holds you down will also increase. Universe size is the hardest one to explain, but basically the fewer the number of opponents per planet or per ly, the better for the hyper-growth race. The best way to see this is to imagine yourself in a 16 player game in a tiny universe. The race I’ve just described SHOULD get crushed! There’s nowhere to expand to and the other races that spent their points on being effective early, but have crippled their long-term growth, should do well. Along similar lines, it should be obvious that the farther apart the starting positions are the better for the hyper-expander. However, those scanners in 2.6a together with ‘no advanced scanners’ may really let you take advantage of an unsuspecting neighbor. “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man would be king/” Changes I would like to see the authors make to Stars! for Joat and hyper-growth play.: Put fuel mizers back on the starting ships when the ‘improved fuel efficiency’ LRT was taken and starts at level 5 in Propulsion. Along those lines I would like to be able to define the designs used for the starting ships. I have never liked the scanners built into Joat starting scouts and DD. Nor have I cared for the scanner on the Miner. I also don’t like the design of the DD, ‘Stalwart Defender’. Its not really good at anything! Also for the Joat in 2.6a and higher, I would like to see the scanner slots on the scout and frigate hulls either disappear entirely (with a corresponding decrease in cost and mass) or else made more versatile, so that other parts could be put there. Joats being able to get points for ‘no advanced scanners’ is silly after the scanner changes in 2.6a. I will take the points (and longer scanning ranges) as long as they are offered, though. I would also like to see more help with micro-management tasks. I suggested to Jeff McBride some time ago making the Stars! program an OLE server, so that people who wished to could write their own assistant programs (or use one someone else developed and published or sold). Barring such ‘hooks’ being made available to the Stars! community, I would like to see the Jeffs provide more automation and reporting info. I mentioned earlier casting a ‘net’ of scouts to catch cloaked ships, This strategy can also be extremely useful when trying to tear out minefield defenses. I would like to see a way to mark a region (rectangular would be fine) on the map and give each ship (or each ship of a certain design in that region) the same orders (waypoint tasks). This would necessitate some additonal waypoint tasks such as--move in x direction for y light years, then [standard waypoint task here]’, ‘converge on some planet/object/coordinate’, or even ‘fan out’. I would also like to see shipbuilding added as an automatable production task. I would also like to see conditional tasks, such as ‘if resources > 70 then do 1 unit max terraform’. I would like to see the Acc. BBS play option changed so that it tends not to penalize hyper-growth (or hyper-production) races. One way to do this while gaining flexibility, would be to change it to ‘Simulate x years of growth’. To make this useful for large values of x, the next field to research should default to ‘lowest’. This would still penalize race designs like the Joat I’ve described or an HE with total environmental immunity, since they would usually be out colonizing planets while other races are still just getting their homeworld industrial base built, but it would still be better than the current system. Well, I think that is it for now. Thank you for bearing with me this long and I hope you found this enjoyable and useful. Scott Phelps 10/20/96