On Stealth

Information is the lifeblood of planning and strategy.  Gathering information, and denying it, or distorting it, to your opponents can be key to gaining the upper hand.

Early in the game some races may be looking to launch aggressive attacks before their prey is ready for them.  This is especially true of cloak-capable races, and doubly so for those with strong ground assault capability (lizards, and to a lesser extent the fascists).  For this reason you need to avoid giving away your position early on, and to limit information about your key areas of strength and weakness later on.

What follows is a laundry list of activities I have seen players undertake in games I have played (which is not that many, so take this with a pinch of salt!), which leak important information.  As such it is more a list of things to avoid to some extent, than of positive suggestions, though in some cases the converse implies an active decision.

• Moving ships such that they end up in deep space, especially with naive (real intent) long waypoints:
• Most obviously this reveals your presence in an area of space.  Do this early enough in the game and it limits the possible position of your homeworld based on the maximum range of travel of the ship in question.
• Long waypoints show a destination, and allow inference of a point of origin.  If a few of these can be triangulated it reveals a lot of information - again most prominently the location of your homeworld early on.  Having said that, this can also be used to generate misinformation if you fly ambiguous non-straight line paths.
• Habitually using the warp-well of planets to reduce travel distance without variation.  This is a good way to save some fuel over time, but if the destination planet happens to host an enemy cloaked ship (or even turns out to be owned by someone else), then the heading indicated shows the general direction you approached from.  It is therefore probably a good idea to not always use the closest edge of the warp well to connect with, at least occasionally, to muddy the waters a bit.
• Using the ship's name to hold notes!  I have had games in which a player called his ships things like 'homeworld refresh run'.  Needless to say, if this is actually true intent, and the ship is visible at all, it gives a lot away!  Again, this can trivially be used for misinformation (lots of people seem to use the rather transparent tactic of calling their warships things like 'LARGE DEEP SPACE FREIGHTER', though this seems too obvious, and hence has little actual misinformation value, in my opinion).
• Not hiding industrial activity behind appropriate numbers of defense posts.  Again, this is most significant relatively early in the game (later on territories will be more obvious anyway), but even later on allowing your enemy to see which worlds are heavily industrialized, especially the aggregate distribution of them, can say a lot about where best to strike the most telling blow.  Up to 15 factories and/or 20 mines are not visible to sensor sweeps, but as soon as you go beyond those numbers 15 defense posts are needed to eliminate the possibility of detection by sensor sweep (dark sense you can do nothing about, I don't think).  Similarly, natives are visible to bioscans if you have less than 20 defense posts (natives only grow if the planet is owned, so existential ownership information can leak this way).  Often, building up 15 defense posts before you can go over 15 factories can mean worlds take a long time to develop, so later in the game (when general positions are known anyway) you may be better advised to build up factories first regardless, but early on probably not so.  To get planets up to speed reasonably quickly this means that it is important to try to seed them with enough supplies/megacredits (mostly the latter since it weighs nothing) to get over the 15 defense post hump as soon as possible (at which point natural growth through factories is exponential up to the factory limit)

Somewhat related to this, but not strictly information leaking, is the general principal - don't be predictable.  If you must leave a ship in deep space, try to leave it somewhere that maximizes its possible destinations (and points of origin).  This applies when attacking also - if you can position your attack fleets so that they can potentially strike against more planets, then doing so makes it harder for your opponent to predict your actual intent, so ending the turn at a location within 81 light years (typically) of multiple possible targets makes it harder to cope with.

As an example of not being predictable (obvious in retrospect, but a revelation to me at the time), my opponent, the Colonies, in a recent game was attacking me with a fleet consisting of Virgos with a supporting Cobol.  I rather naively assumed that if I had cloaked ships waiting at all likely points of attack I would be able to hijack the Cobol, after which mopping up the fuel-hungry Virgos would be much easier.  What he actually did was attack with the Virgos, while leaving the Cobol to stand off with a random small move in deep-space nearby, which meant I could not pick it off this way.  In retrospect I should perhaps have performed a cloaked intercept as well, as insurance against this.  Regardless, this was a good example of an unpredictable move (to me at the time at least) being very effective in dulling my own tactics in the ensuing battle.

Initial diplomacy

It's tempting to concentrate on exploring your own little connected area, and ignore the outside world until you have nowhere else to expand, but it is probably a mistake to do so.

There are two reasons for this:

1. Any bilateral trade (assuming it is beneficial to both parties) is a gain relative to the other 9 players, so getting (beneficial) trades set up is an advantage over players who do not.
2. Eventually you will have to expand outside of your own little area if you want to do more than merely survive.  When you do so, dispute is inevitable and war will break out. Since you don't want to find yourself fighting wars on multiple fronts, it is advantageous to secure agreements and good working relationships on at least some of your borders.

Consequently here are some tips that seem to be working for me so far (or which I wish I had realized sooner in some cases!):

• Send ambassadors to everyone on turn 1.  It doesn't cost you anything, and it puts in place faster communication paths that you can use to develop relationships when appropriate.  I'd go so far as to say that I would tend to read something mildly negative into NOT receiving an ambassador - a weak indication that someone may to be easy to deal with, and therefore perhaps not a good partner later.
• Try to identify your nearest neighbors as early as you can.  Partly that means just keeping your eyes open for ships that finish turns in deep space and are thus visible on the starmap (which probably won't happen early on if the players are at all experienced), and partly it means using sensor sweep missions to look for industrial activity.  Also intersperse some mine sweeping with sensor sweeping to be sure to pick up any developing minefields in range (I oops'd on this in a recent game, only performing sensor sweeps, and marched cloaked straight into some webmines). Of course, your opponents are probably being stealthy at first (my next post is going to be on this subject), but it does no harm to look.  As an aid to maximizing the reach of your sensors, I think it might be good policy to expand to the furthest reaches of your connected star cluster preferentially over some sort of spiraling expansion from your homeworld.  However, this has some consequences for logistics (your early ships won't be able to come back so quickly, so you have to be sure you can still feed your homeworld before it runs short of resources).
• Having identified your neighbors, consider as a high priority which you want to try to deal with an an ally, and which as a (potential at least) enemy.  Once you make this decision bind the friend with trade deals as quickly as you can, and secure the relationship.  These should be mutually beneficial, straight deals - don't try to eke out minor advantage here - you're looking for a partner, not a stooge.  When considering which neighbor to try to befriend I look at:
  • Have they sent an ambassador?
  • Are they a race I can work well with (or really not fight very easily)?  In particular does their ship list contain something I want (and do I have something they want)?
  • Do I have valuable assets on their side of my space that I would prefer to be in a less risky strategic environment (e.g. - large population bovinoids and so on)?
  • From what I can see of the distribution of natives, do they have multiple of a key type I am missing and visa versa? (e.g. - if I lack a humanoid planet, but have 2 Ghlipsoidal and they have the opposite imbalance then there are obvious trades to be had)
• Especially with neighbors you have not come to an arrangement with, try to gather intelligence, and stake territorial claims that prevent them pushing the border too far your way - at least try to keep them out of the connected set of planets containing your homeworld (assuming you're not on a map, that puts you both into the same connected region).  If you can move into their space undetected I'd do it, at least until contact is made, after which you may want to respect their borders, depending on the nature of the diplomacy that ensues.  This may mean moving between your cluster and theirs cloaked (if you are able to do so, and you don't think they are taking counter-measures yet), or it may mean directly moving to worlds in their connected cluster you believe (hope) they have not yet colonized if you have access to gravitonic accelerators.
• Don't move to a full ally status any time soon.  It's a public declaration, and doesn't buy you that much beyond sticking a target on your backs!

Key to all of this is finding a trade you want to make, so what sort of trades might you look for and propose?  Personally I like to look for key capabilities I am missing, of which the following are top contenders:

• Can one party construct fighters efficiently (Robots, Colonies, Rebels) and the other has need of them (has carriers significant to their fleet, such as the Borg)?  If so then the first player can offer to produce fighters for something in return.
• Does one party have ships with important special abilities the other lacks?  The top ones for me are:
  • Cloaking.  Cloakers are very valuable for a race that cannot build their own.
  • Gravitonic accelerators.  Being able to move twice as far is very, very valuable, even if you only use it as glorified tugs (which means some other ships can be built with very low tech engines often).  Obviously MCBRs, which can also cloak are especially valuable.
  • Glory devices.  If you are trading for these bear in mind that they are use-once, so you need them in numbers.  They are super-cheap to build (even to clone) though (at least in sensible configurations), so generally this just means you need to get one early.
  • Fuel production.  Cobols and Ariels are worth their weight in gold.
  • Chunneling.  Only fireclouds can chunnel, and sometimes that can be a hugely important ability.  Initially I rated this as the top ability from just reading through the rules and a little private game play, but I now rate it below any of the above.  The reason for this is that fireclouds are really only usefully deployed in numbers (at least 3 are required to make a reusable route), so to be useful trades, you need to either get them early enough to clone a fair bit, or get several.
  One other thing to say about ship exchanges - assuming the receiving party is able to clone (so not privateers or crystals), the ships are far more valuable early on than they are later, since cloning will only be possible before the ship limit is reached.  You should also explicitly request (and propose in the interests of straight-dealing!) a configuration that maximizes the use of the special ability while minimizing cloning costs (since cloned ships cost double).  This tends to mean you really want ships with low level beams and torpedos rather than higher level ones (though in most cases [all but poppers?] you do want high tech engines)!  It's actually rather annoying to be given a firecloud with Mk VII torps, and heavy phasers, when you plan to just use them as taxis, and would prefer to be able to duplicate them cheaply!  In the case of cloakers especially, you probably want to go for x-ray lasers so you can more easily use them to capture rather than kill.
• If the ship lists are mutually reinforcing, then rather than just trading ships, consider trading starbases.  For example have the privateer run a Ghlipsoidal SB for you (to produce MCBRs), in return for running maybe a humanoid one (to produce some sort of heavy fighting ship) for them.  This offers a couple of advantages:
• No cloning is involved, so costs are not doubled
• Production can continue after the ship limit is reached, either by luck (regular builds) or by mutually agreed priority building

Having decided who to befriend (and presumably having received indications of mutual interest), bind them in, to make it hard for them to later go back on the arrangement and stab you in the back (and make it hard for you to do likewise of course - this is reciprocal).  A good starter for this to agree to move to an intelligence sharing diplomatic status with them immediately.  This is a great trust-builder since you can see each other's troop build-ups, and that force disposition is not moving to threaten your supposed ally.  Starbase exchanges, as described above, are also good binding measures, since you control a proportion of each other's production, which makes deal-breaking more expensive (for you both).

Finally, and this may be more a personal philosophy than necessarily a definite best way to play, don't go back on deals you have agreed to.  Ever.  Remember that you're not just playing an isolated game (at least hopefully), but rather a meta-game in the larger Planets.nu gamespace (or even space of all multi-player games, or even of life if you care to take the logic to its extreme!) - in the larger sphere getting a reputation as someone who does not keep their deals will not be strategically advantageous!  The corollary of this is that you shouldn't make deals lightly.  In the first few games I played (which I'm still playing, in fact) I came to peaceful arrangements with both my neighbours - this makes for a quiet life, but it also makes it very hard to expand after the initial phase of the game, and I'd say it's usually a bad idea for that reason.  The lesson is not to put yourself in situations where you will probably want to renege on a deal, or stab a supposed ally in the back (I haven't incidentally, but it means I don't have much potential to do more than survive in those games).

Limited Resources

It's quickly obvious that growth will be restricted by the availability of certain resources, but not immediately apparent which are actually the most important ones to worry about (especially in the long term).  A player will immediately see that the ability to grow one's fleet is limited by the availability of minerals and of cash.  Clearly these are the key resources to worry about, right?

Wrong!

Don't get me wrong, they are important, but usually they will result in localized short-term bottlenecks, which while they are better avoided, will not usually be game-killing.

So what are the key limited resources?

This is based mostly on my own limited experience, and some reading, but it seems to me that each of the following is a resource, that will ultimately cause you far deeper strategic difficulties than supplying minerals and cash:

• Fuel.  An army marches on its stomach.  In several games I have found myself with some mighty marauding fleet bearing down on an enemy home area, only to discover that it doesn't have enough fuel to see through its mission.  The result is that it has to cool its heels while it waits for refueling to catch up.  Always plan your fuel logistics carefully.  Bring tankers (Q Tankers, Neutronic carriers, etc.) with you.  If you can get them, ships which manufacture fuel (Cobols etc.) are invaluable.  Expecting to be able to pick up fuel from the enemy worlds you conquer as you go is all very well in theory, but it seems to often fail in practice (either because the enemy hasn't developed their worlds, or because they have taken a scorched earth policy and denuded them before they can be taken).
• Colonists.  Unless you are playing the Cyborg (who can ignore this point I think), you basically have to carry all your colonists out from your homeworld.  This has two consequences:
  1. You have a significant logistic process to manage to ensure colonists continue to flow out as you conquer more territory.  In particular it's usually good to follow up a battle fleet with some camp-following colonists!
  2. Population growth on your homeworld is very important.  You need to maximize this, so don't tax them more than you can avoid!  I find 'pulse taxing' works well - most of the time have your homeworld at 0 tax to maximize population growth, and every now and again (ideally when happiness is back at 100, and not until you need the cash), tax them at whatever percentage will reduce their happiness to 70 for one turn, then go back to no taxation until happiness recovers.  This way you have maximal population growth about 5 turns out of every 6.
• Ship slots.  Unless you are playing a game with a standard ship limit (500), but only a small number of players (so only private games, set up that way), then you will very quickly hit the ship limit (in beginners games this seems to happen around turn 30, with more experienced players I believe it happens nearer turn 20 due to higher priority given to starbase production).  Even with the new priority build system, the total number of ships in the game will not exceed the ship limit by much (and over time it will tend to the ship limit, since PPs earned for ship destruction are always less than required for their creation).  That essentially means that every ship you own is one the other players don't.  Horde those slots.  Filling ship slots quickly (and/or generating PPs ahead of the ship limit) means having as many starbases as you can reasonably manage.  At first I did not realize how important it was to increase your starbase count (aside from the obviously useful ones on Ghlipsoidal and Human native worlds), but the more I have played, the more I have reached the conclusion that it's best to pretty much spam starbases everywhere you reasonably can - even if you cannot feed them all in mineral (or cash for tech levels) terms, they at least produce PPs for you, and significantly add to planetary defense.  Also most races have some useful low-tech ships they can build, even if not all races can leverage them as well as others (go, Fascists!)
• Natives.  I'm pushing the boundaries a bit to call this a 'limited resource', but they are at least sparse, so identifying and controlling the right ones is important. Early on you want to colonize native-populated worlds as top priority (if you can build something that bio-scans, doing it really early seems good to me - I have played the robots in quite a few games, and I now build a bio-scanner on turn 1 with them).  Once you identify useful native worlds try to exploit them efficiently, or at least the best of them.  This means getting sufficient colonists on them to maximize taxation in the case of high government types, and to maximize supply production in the case of bovinoids.
• Minerals and cash - ok, they are important too, but usually they will tend to be more localized shortages than global ones until quite late in the game, so really they are more of a logistic issue than anything else.  Later in the game, as everything starts to become mined out, it will be important to have alchemy ships generating new minerals (and possibly fuel unless you get your hands on some Cobols or similar).  As such it's generally a good idea to build a couple of Merlins before the ship limit hits (you don't want to be spending PP on them really) and getting them to appropriate worlds to operate at (ideally high pop Bovinoid worlds).

Oh yes.  One other easily under-estimated limited resource is your available play-time!  I really screwed up on this since everything seemed so fast at first, and find myself somewhat over-committed (trying to play 7 games at once).  The result is that I cannot give any game the time it deserves to think about and play each move.  Ramp up slowly to, find your comfort level.

Introduction

A few months ago, a friend introduced me to a new game he was going to try out (with a group of other friends while on holiday together).  As is generally the case for this group, it fell loosely in thew category of  'strategy wargame' (previously we have pretty much been through the Civ series, played as multi-player, amongst others).  This time the game was 'Planets.nu' (http://planets.nu/), an online incarnation of a 1990's PC game 'VGA Planets'.

In this game you take charge of a space-faring race out to conquer the galaxy (well, a local star cluster anyway).  In general it follows the usual outlines of the 4X genre (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4X), in the setting of an interstellar (2 dimensional) map, with star systems (aka planets) at various points in the space.  Each race starts with a homeworld, from which expansion takes place, by building starships, which can variously carry cargo and/or colonists to other worlds, and fight against ships and planets owned by other races.  The ultimate goal is to take and hold more than a certain threshold of all the planets on the map.

At first sight this game looked very like a play-by-mail game I first played, and then wrote a version of and later ran, at college.  This game was called StarWeb (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starweb) and was mildly popular (as much as any play by mail wargame is!) in the early 1980s (yes, I go back a long way!).  Anyway, my first reaction to Planets Nu was that it looked a bit 'dated' and not that interesting, but boy was I ever wrong!

I've now been playing a number of games of Planets Nu for a few months, and it turns out to be far deeper and more subtle than it first appears.  This blog is going to be somewhere for me to post what I learn as I get more experienced, since existing online resources with hints and tips seem rather fragmented (not that this won't be anything more than one more fragment, I readily admit, but hopefully, someone will find it helpful, or failing that at least get a laugh at how naive I still am!).

I should say before anything else that I am still very much a beginner, and in some ways that is why I have started this now.  As a beginner I am learning at a relatively high rate (when you don't know that much, there are plenty of new things to learn), so now seems like the time the capture any insights gained.