The turn was 140, ITZ over for the U.N. and good fucking riddance. Besides the egghead killing of the last couple of turns this PBEM game was mostly one giant exercise in frustration which I will explain in a moment. Even on my final TURN I had think really hard how to move units to kill all of my bases, for example U.N. F.R.A. which Absinthe didn't take but killed the defenders so nothing inside was left to kill the base. I got some lucky partial moves with a land transport that allowed me to get a scout into the base. This game didn't even let me quit easily, fucking jumanji of the binary age.
So let’s go over all the REDACTED thoughts and events that could not have been shared previously.
With wide-opened eyes and the rush of TURN flowing through my veins causing exhilaration, I opened the first TURN of this game back on March the 14th, and my eyes saw this:
My disappointment was the size of the Hive’s population in the prior game, astro-fucking-nomical. I got the same shitty start location as two games earlier when I played Lal, the scale was just different since back the we played on a smaller map of planet made wider and with two extra continents.
Taking a closer look unobstructed by fog of war so that you know further why I saw dissapointed (this screenshot is from the map editor):
North is barren or shitload of fungus. Sea west and east. Only viable expansion direction is south.
The other thing this location meant was that any base I settle will be very easy to attack from the sea or probe as the continent is too fucking narrow in this spot. Knowing how the other continents looked like and how the RNG like to spawn players, I decided I rather build closer, but not too close, to the western coast.
This was because whoever spawned on the largest western continent likely had at least one or two neighbours and with luck they would be busy killing each other (this didn’t happen, Absinthe and Gravy decided to carebear).
The other reason for picking west over east was that I assumed that the RNG might spawn someone on the much closer continent to east, somewhere around where AO was as Gaians last game. Later on it turned out Kalin spawned there, almost on the coast. I think I pissed off the staring location picking code at some point considering this other kick in the balls it gave me this game.
Ok, enough whining about the RNG, I saw this location and I thought what can I do to make it less miserable? Kalin had cuck island last game and won, surely there is a lesson in that. Yeah, I could go dutch and make me some landmass stealing it from that salty old fag Neptune. So my first long-term goal was trying to beeline for the Paradigm for that land raising.
The other goal was to scout south and claim the Unity wreck goodies, including of course the fabled reveal of the planet fall locations (tiles) of other factions which would tell me how fucked I possibly am.
Let’s fast forward...
...got a snazzy unity transport foil, good fortune, sent it out to pop pods and look for someone to trade tech with in case I am alone on the continent, moving more south to the wreck...
...and it turns out Janior already settled the area north of it and I share a border.
So I think, ok, at least I can trade some tech? There’s always some deal to be made. I sent him a PM...
...more than one. Look at the dates. Roughly takes 1 turn per day, sometimes we got bonus double turns. I think he only traded me it because at that point eggheads already made their bullying apparent.
So I have an uncooperative goy located in my only viable expansion direction. Really the only choice is to rush his ass..
...except it takes long as fuck to research anything. Normally you get this tech from a pod as a free tech sooner or later, or you get it via trade, first time I had to research it myself the slow ass way.
Kalin got 3 tech from pods, on top of his bonus tech as Uni and his superior research, main reason why he dominated the first half of this game. I got 0 techs from pods the whole game, not a single comm frequency from a pod, lots of worms though and junior who didn’t want to trade techs until a month later.
Anyway it soon became apparent Junior had synthmetal, so my dreams of lazorsynthmetal hippie-stomping blue helmets had to be postponed until impact guns. Huge fuck up that was, maybe should have went in anyway because Gayans have negative morale so even armored with t-shirts lazor dudes could survive. But I also think I postponed that because it turned out junior had lazors himself
Rhodinia continent expedition found signs of the Hive on the same turn. Absinthe at least wasn’t diplomatically lolrandom and he traded me tech, such as rover tech. My eyes were set on getting Impact guns to get rid of the southern obstacle.
University did some recon with probes. At this point it was a very peaceful send off.
The isle of the deep killed one of my unity transport foils. I got another one from a pod, send it south but it got a bad roll and sunk to the abyss. The UNCN Pacifica was still heading west after discovering the Hive and also got sunk by an isle of the ITZ after popping a pod with some bad vodoo in it.
Later on I got this message from the eggheads:
I made a mistake by replying before I saw turn and assuming the worst and that I am toast if I do not comply. Then I saw this:
I expected a rape force, and it is just some weaksauce probes and a single unity rover he stole from me. After I figured out my error I flip flopped and made some demands, which were basically “disband the stolen rover so that I can deport your probes”. And the famous nailing to the wall impact gun bluff:
The joke here was that if Kalin would agree to the terms I would actually stay pacted for at least the near term.
Anyway the rest is history and the official version in the egghead LARP was they got fed up with the UN and declared isolationism. If only that was true.
Apparently isolationism means opening cans of worms in my turf, while I was preparing to purge the fungus there to expose jungle tiles and settle a base (future U.N. R.P.O.) This stalled me by a lot.
I think I lost two laser rovers to those fucking worms and a scout or two. You can imagine how annoying that was when the next thing that happened soon was...
...the infamous botched sneak attack with impact rovers and probes for infiltration. I had to spend my cash to turn that into a poison pill scenario, good thing I sent out those 2 scouts after the mountain rose up (from a pod Kalin popped, which sank his ship as it raised the sea floor above surface). Kalin could have attacked my base, but it was guaranteed I either kill his rover next turn or probe it since I had enough trash in the base to stall for a turn. His other forces were zone of control cock-blocked by two synthmetal lazor troopas in fungus I upgraded from scouts. Killing them was likely to be costly even if successful, so Kalin retreated.
Still this was really bad timing for me.
See the rover south of P.T.O. and the formers killing fungus down south next to C.C.B. on this same TURN as eggehads were found in fungus? That was part of my REMOVE GRANOLA force. At this point the lazor rover was mostly a backup as the primary objective for now was infiltrating him and getting tech. Had to retreat all of that because Kalin of course planned roughly the same against me. Although in my defense junior was being more obstructive than the worst of UN Bureacrats so he had it coming.
