jack

OK, after my last update, I tried to do what I said I'd do, I spent about 5-10 years of game time building up resources, surveying everything around, improving my reputation with other potentially friendly empires and setting up trade deals where I could, and getting a sense of the state of the galaxy.

Apparently I'd been at 2235, about 35 years in -- I was worried it had been longer, but apparently I'd been playing fairly slowly. OK, so I'm not doing *great* but I'm not doing terribly either. I think it was mostly chance I spawned not very near other empires, which means I may be able to grab more territory if I'm smart about it, but meant there was quite a time when I'd not met any of them.

There were some domestic politic activities. There was an election, and the previous governor was ousted in favour of one of the other candidates (one of my scientists) who had different bonuses. Then of course she stopped doing science and I needed to replace her. I'd previously favoured one of the *other* candidates, an admiral who was proposing bonuses I found slightly more attractive, but I was happy with the result.

I toyed with adopting the main egalitarian faction officially, shifting my empire's politics to "fanatical egalitarian" but I hadn't realised that would remove one of my other ethos. That might have been ok if it had been spiritualist (the main benefit is unity gain which I need more of, but I'm not currently taking enough advantage of anyway), but apparently because of preparing to fight the space shiitake pacifism lost ground, and when I tried it, I lost pacifism. Which was REALLY inconvenient, because one of the benefits of pacifism is being able to control an extra two planets without spinning them off into a devolved sector run by an AI governer -- I didn't object to that in principle, even if it's less efficient, but having my screen suddenly covered in warnings that I was over capacity when I wasn't expecting it wasn't good. I restarted the game without unpausing and fortunately it hadn't autosaved.

I claimed one or two more significant choke points, but didn't feel completely in control.

When I moved my military fleet around and zoomed in on it, there was a lovely visual of ten corvettes all flying in formation.

The shiitake still hadn't declared war on me despite me insulting them several times, so I decided to try out a war against them on egalitarian grounds (a war of liberation, but hopefully for real) mostly out of curiosity to see how I fared against them. They were not very bright -- you'd think they might reinforce the system right next to my ones! But their military outclassed me, I managed to take a couple of systems while their armies were elsewhere, but my attempt to take one of their lightly populated planets failed (which means I won't be able to keep the other systems unless I *can* take a planet), and they took out one of my starbases, leaving me with no outpost on one side of their space.

I'm not sure if I can do more during this war or if it's best to just withdraw and build up more strength before trying again. Or go for plan "sneak a science and construction ship through their lightly defended systems so I can expand on the other side".

Oh, and the Legion Eagles have managed to spread across the whole radius of the galaxy, so even if I can go through or round the cautiously friendly Napoleopes, I'd need to fight them to get into the empty space between them and the south side of the galaxy (which is filling up fast with ANOTHER hegemonic military race).

After quite a while only meeting the Fungus Bigots and starting to wonder if anyone else was out there, I suddenly met a LOT of other empires.

I sent a science ship exploring round the outer edge of the Fungusoids, it found a couple of planets and some anomalies, it found some dead ends, there's a few points in the galaxy where there's only one or two hyperlanes that connect further round, so I ended up curving back close-ish to the Fungoids on the other side.

And then I ran into a fallen empire! I can't remember what they looked like, but IIRC they were technological preservers, their big plan was to squat in a half-derelict ringworld being more formiddable than anyone else around but then never do anything apart from act supercilious to any young races who stumble upon them.

They came out with such gems like "yes, yes, we've heard it all before" and "stay out of our space or you'll face certain doom, and so forth" and "before you ask, no we will not share our technology." They are the "grumpy empire", not the "bigot empire".

Sadly, their territory included the only other anticlockwise route, other than that owned by the fungusoids. Expansion temporarily curtailed.

However, they were in contact with another empire further round, who eventually heard about me and managed to open communications despite having no physical connection. I refer to them as "Space Antelope Klingons" because they were described as honourable warrior types who looked like Space Antelopes. They were not *very* warm towards me, but they were mildly positive which is an absolute fuckton better than the previous two empires whose attitude amounted to "never".

I fiddled with trade options. They weren't willing to give much, they were willing to trade resources they were short of, but not at a very good rate. And weren't enthusiastic about giving real-time sensor links (so you can see what's going on in their space). But they were quite interested in trading my research (which I hope doesn't give them too much of a boost), and willing to trade communications, i.e. for empires that they know, fill me on the basics and introduce me.

That introduced me to a lot of new empires. All with different beautiful sci-fi cites :)

The most promising were ALSO peaceful egalitarian (or spiritualist) federation builders. They started off very positive and I need to see if they want to trade.

There was also a theocratic monarchy, who were so-so about me, but more positive than not. Not sure what tongue-in-cheek name to apply to them.

There were the someone-or-other reavers, who were FANATICALLY xenophobic, and sadly more expansionist than everyone else put together, including the Fungusoids.

And a fallen empire who REALLY liked me but were unwilling to trade in any fashion whatsoever, I think they think of the younger races like cute pets. They were all "hello! hello! good to meet you! but don't come in!"

And I think maybe one new race I've forgotten.

Everyone disliked the reavers and the reavers will always hate me no matter what, so I can pick up some cheap popularity hating on them. (I think I can't officially 'rival' them unless they border me, but I may be able to do something?)

Alas, the Klingons and the two fluffier empires don't like each other either, so I don't know if I can keep them both on side or not.

And then, after that, ANOTHER race just bimbled into one of my clockwise systems. I had to decode their language myself, it seems like there's still unexplored territory between them and the galactic south empires. They are dubbed Space Napoleons, because they are egalitarian but militaristic. The leader is a Charismatic Reformer. They were cautiously positive about me. I managed to offer a trade deal where we both DID offer an active sensor link, PLUS I offered research and got some mineral income in trade.

However, for better or worse, they're in a state of increasing hostilities with an empire just to the south of them, which between them block off clockwise expansion. Who are XENOPHONES and FANATIC MILITARISTS. And are dubbed "Space Parrot Eagle Evil Roman Empire" because they are a space parrot eagle evil roman empire.

So I hope I can keep borders open with the Napoleons, at least long enough to claim some systems on the other side. Although that spreads me pretty thin. I'm *also* tempted to risk closing borders against the napoleons and hope to keep them sweet some other way, until I've managed to claim as much territory as possible, or at least, grabbed the most valuable systems near my borders.

Or maybe it's a cross between Battlestar Galactica and Eastenders :)

I've recently been playing space exploration game Stellaris. I've livetweeted random bits of my first few sessions here: https://twitter.com/search?q=stellaris%20cartesiandaemon&src=typd

It makes an effort to capture the sense of wonder of space exploration extending from pulp scifi, through classic scifi, and up to things like StarTrek, and does surprisingly well. It's not perfect, all the random cool stuff is not as central to the game as it might be, but it does a good job of representing, venturing out between the stars and finding mysterious relics of powerful civilisations, awe-inspiring natural space fauna, and squabbling other civilisations.

In this playthrough it took me a while to find anyone else! I kept expanding, trying to balance my economy -- the difficult balance of how much to invest in infrastructure, how much to invest in precautionary military defences, how much to invest in scientific research which pays off in the long run...

First I met space fauna -- space whales and amoebas. You can hunt them for parts, but my lovely pluralist pacifist Duckbills don't, instead studying them, learning to avoid antagonising them, bypassing them, and eventually getting some technological innovations from the study.

Then I met the first actual alien empire, sadly militaristic fungus-racists (the racism was by funguses to everyone, not against funguses). And for quite a long time they were the only other people "out there". They seem to have comparable tech, I'm not sure who would win if there was a fight, but I'm expecting it to happen.

I explored diplomatic options, but they already hate everyone, you need to butter them up a LOT before they'll even trade with you (trading things to them for no return), and I wasn't hopeful that even then I'd be able to get their opinion of me high enough to do the things that would turn them into an ally (defensive pacts, free movement of people, etc). So for now I left them be.

But I precautionarily built some outposts at the chokepoints between me and them. I knew that would irritate them -- partially, there's a negative to diplomacy for having adjacent borders, partially they probably want to expand through there, and partially in order to stop them just driving through to build outposts near my capital I have to officially close my borders to their ships, which pretty much tanks diplomatic hopes. They started it, they closed borders to me almost immediately, but while I was hoping for peace, I waited to do that.

Building the outposts was quite a lot of drama itself. I kept seeing their science vessels and worrying they'd survey the system and claim it first. Before I learned how to avoid antagonising the space amoeba, I lost TWO construction vessels to them, when I thought I could carefully skirt round them. It's a right pain moving construction vessels at all, usually they sit at home building mining stations, but in this case I needed to get them out a fair way through space. And now I'm not sure if I should keep the extra ones or disband them.

I looked into how the diplomacy works. As an egalitarian pacifist, my species can only initiate a war on one or two grounds. I think I can fight to get back planets I lost to another empire, or possibly planets with many of my main species populating them. And I can fight a war of ideology -- if I can complete defeat the opponent, I can reform their government to an egalitarian pacifist one instead of a xenophobic militaristic one. Which looks more moral than a war of "we hate everyone and just want them to die" that some philosophies get, until someone describes it as a war by "Space Tony Blair" or "Space America".

What I *can't* do is capture just one or two systems from them, to get a spacelane to be able to explore past them, because I don't have any moral justification for it. (I suppose I could declare war and try to sneak my science ship and construction ship through the conflict but that doesn't sound great[1]) I guess in the real world this is why people care so much about controlling ports and canals and so on.

However, what I can do, deliberately or inadvertently, is upgrade my military station on their borders, build a bunch of military ships, and generally bait them until they declare war on me (they're xenophobic militarists and I'm in their way, after all). I can't remember if I can officially insult them through the "insult option -- I think I can if I want to hasten the onset of war, but it only works on these sort of bigot-mongers who are comparable to me in strength and not allied with anyone.

Either way, once they attack me and I have the moral high ground, I think I can THEN conquer their systems if I'm able to.

About this point the Fungoids started escalating the tension anyway so it's probably going to be moot. But I need to make sure I have a navy ready.

And sadly, I think living next to them is making my Duckbills more xenophobic, from their original spiritual/pacifist majority. Hopefully if I meet some other empires they'll stop the trend.

[1] I'm still confused when ships can just keep moving and get out of trouble and when they can't.

I spent a bunch of time upgrading my resource fields. I'm going to be doing more of that. But then I was finally able to get grey and purple science being produced.

I had a set-up like a single looooong line of assemblers with three belts of basic resources, and one belt for "everything else", so I could just add extras on the end (with blueprint to copy-and-paste).

There's a lot of lessons in scaling here. When I'm adding 5-10 new assemblers, it's easy to copy the assemblers and belts, and then fix up the connections between manually. If I was doing a much bigger base, it'd be more important to be able to drop in another identical row without manually fiddling.

Similarly, it was a mistake to mix everything-else assembling and science-research assembling. I had enough assemblers the proportions of the intermediates got all out of whack. I fixed it for a few things by adding "if this item is already on the belt, don't produce more logic", but that's not really sustainable. If I go further, I should probably have a science section which produces only intermediates consumed by the science, and a separate "stuff for me and for building" section which produces only-so-much and then stops.

But I was able to fix this up by manually adding a lot of the inputs that aren't *very* quick to assemble, but I already had lots of in storage, and fixing up anything that was under- or over- producing. And I need to remember that's often true -- some things need to be 100% automated because you need to use them thousands of times without thinking about the details; other things, 90% automated is fine because you can just fix up the details a bit and get the result you need with less work than further making the automation "perfect".

So I got a steady stream of blue, purple, and grey science going to my labs. For a while, I even had 20-ish labs going at once. And I started researching some of the post-blue technologies. I'm not sure what's most useful to have at this point -- the ones I most want are personal fusion reactor for the exoskeleton, requester chests, and rocket silos, but I think those all need yellow which I'll set up next. In the meantime I'm filling the technology out with anything that may be useful: incremental mining and logistic improvements, nuclear power, rocketry, etc.

Personal

I love having something I'm able to get really involved in. Ideally those would be hobbies which produce something useful, not only feel good but don't achieve anything, but it's ok to do that sometimes. But it feels good to have some concentration binges.

I'm really cautious about becoming "oops, spent 8 hours playing computer games", partly because I sense I might be prone to that, but partly, I think, out of unnecessary worry.

But there are positives too. Getting really wrapped up in something does make me feel satisfied -- I think I sleep better and feel less need to snack when I'm not hungry.

And I've had a couple of late nights, but it's good to test my resilience a bit. I used to have late nights all the time, more through, "oh god, I don't want tomorrow, I won't get anything done" than "woo, today". Now I'm sleeping a lot earlier and better (having someone to sleep with is v much better). But as with other things, when I feel like I've established the habit, and then cautiously relax my vigilance, I discover I'm developed habits that seemed normal for many people: of being up late *occasionally*, but being able to absorb it as long as it's not too often.

And as I said, it's produced quite a lot of useful introspection about software engineering :)

Oh gosh, I knew this was going to be addictive for me and it was. You're crashed on an alien planet and need to build enough smelting, industry, power etc to eventually launch a rocket. But most of the game is about the layout of stuff, about getting a million conveyor belts getting the right components to the right machines without bumping into each other, and about layout out pipes between lakes, oil refineries, factories etc without getting into a giant knot.

I knew it would be but it's *really* *really* like software engineering. Like, you can *see* exactly what spaghetti code is: when you lay things out neatly and can see where everything is, it's easy to change things, but when you grow your conveyor belt layout organically, you can add *one* line fairly easily just fitting it in here and there, but if you do that often, everything ends up an unchangeable mess and you can't do anything with it without breaking half the existing stuff.

Somewhere in the middle you get useful tools like grabbers which can be programmed in unlimited ways, so you can turn things on only when you need the outputs, and even construction bots which can duplicate large sections of your factory.

Introspection and perfectionism

And you realise things. My instincts are always to build exactly the right amount of intermediates that the outputs need. But that doesn't actually work most of the time. Intermediates you always need for a specific product, and don't need LOTS of, it's often sensible to build a "manufacture the intermediates and final product" block with the assemblers all next to each other. Intermediates you need all over the place it's usually sensible to just manufacture lots of. But then you need to say -- you don't want to process ALL your iron into cogs, or you'll run out of iron for everything else. But you do need a *lot* of cogs. Is it better to just make cogs, and rely on that when you have "enough" cogs and the conveyor belt backs up, the cog machines stop taking iron? But then if you build too many further machines that need cogs, they'll never be satiated and everything that needs iron will start shutting down. Is it better to split the incoming iron 50/50 or some other proportion between iron and the basic iron intermediates like cogs and steel? But then what if that ratio's not correct. Or is it better to adjust depending on which important final products are running short?

My instinct is that there should be a perfect "right" way. But because you need to add new final products and change proportions and cope with raw fuels temporarily running dry, that's basically impossible, it's better to segregate the various stages, and turn on the earlier stages as needed (I haven't actually done that yet but I can see the benefit).

Specific parallels

And likewise, duplicating a section of your factory once you have the right construction bots, and once you manufacture enough of all the buildings etc needed, is just a push of a button and a short wait. But it takes ages to make all the edges line up right so the new conveyors get the right input etc.

Or, a thought occurred to me driving to work, you know construction sites always seem to be "nothing, nothing, nothing, suddenly a building"? Well, software development often *is* like that, and I know exactly why even though I don't like believing it: because there's an awful lot of work in getting things working together, so the actual working on things is comparatively scattered. (And you can either frontload it, and then have years of technical debt and trying to bodge things together, or build everything right but it's ages before you get things working. And wisdom is knowing the right balance :) )

It also gives insight into firefighting vs planning. You need a certain amount of "fixing up" things, at some point ore runs low and you need to lay out dozens of smelters and stuff on a new ore field, there's no way of avoiding that. And often, *something* will back up, or run out, or get mixed between two belts or something, for completely deterministic reasons that you *could* have forseen, and you need to take care of it. But if you spend *all* your time doing that you'll never make any progress. And conversely, sometimes it's easier to take a shortcut, like loading an assembler with the appropriate inputs manually, if you expect it to be a while before you run out -- but even if you do, it's useful to think through where you would put the proper conveyor belt feeds, e.g. by having an inserter that grabs from a chest, but you can replace with a belt when you need. That, "do the simple thing, but leave the connectors in place for replacing it with a polished version when you need" is often a very useful approach.

Aesthetics

It's pretty atmospheric. The background sounds vary according to what's on the screen, so you can *hear* radars blipping and furnaces roaring. I played on peaceful because I didn't want the pressure of fighting off alien wildlife at the same time, but those are pretty beautiful in a monstrous way. And when things are humming along perfectly it's really impressive. It reminds me, how much I love making complicated elegant mechanisms, and I need to do more programming where I design a thing as well as learn a new thing.