Excavators

Well, the first five Excavators have been built and sent off.

They're taking three hours apiece to build, which means I can build 8 per day - definitely time to crank up the Shipyard a little, too.

As to the spoils - to date, I've had one that didn't find a thing; two that found resources (quite what a couple of thousand units of wheat was doing on an uninhabited planet escapes me); plus one Glyph and a Plan.

The good news is that the Plan is for a level 1 Pantheon of Hagness, which gives an extra building slot on a planet. The bad news is that it seems you can only have one per planet, and since my homeworld already has one, I can't use it there - none of the other worlds are out of room yet. So I have a Plan I can't do much with at the moment.

Anyone want it? Feel free to make an offer... Otherwise, I'll just have to see whether one of my colonies can make use of it.

Subspace Supply Depot

Thanks to the building queue, my Subspace Supply Depot finally got finished this morning - that would put it at about five days after it was added to the queue.

Ow.

It was after it was built that I discovered that the 'Complete Build Queue' option only worked if the build queue was less than five days; any more than that, and you get a message saying that the queue is too long, and nothing happens. I'd been expecting it to simply expedite five days off the building queue and then disappear, and there was about a week's worth of building in there already. Bugger.

So it was time to use some precious, precious Essentia to finish the queue, and then start adding extra bits and completing those instead.

So I do now have a level 15 Archeology Ministry, and can finally start building Excavators; and shall fire off a couple of those just to see what happens. More through luck than planning, that Archeology Ministry is on my homeworld, which is currently generating resources faster than I can spend them.

So super glyph buildings, here I come!

On spies and the Saben Demesne

So, the Saben Demesne established a colony a couple of systems over from me. In fact, there were two, but I fixated on the closest one, as they were the most imminent threat.

One of my colonies started to get probed. The Saben would send a wave of scanners followed up by other things - Scows, Snarks and Scanners, with the odd Spy Shuttle mixed in, hence the earlier post about spies. I built enough drones to fight off the attacks - well, aside from the spies, as it looks like they're impossible to stop.

And I took my revenge on the nearby colony. I gifted them a large amount of waste, somewhere upwards of a million units, I think. And the next time I checked in, the planet was unoccupied. Woo-hoo.

(And on a related note, it looks like the attacks were originating from the other Saben colony; someone else managed to bag that before I could)

And now, someone's moved in to the Saben colony I encouraged to relocate. It's in the wrong orbit for me to occupy it, so someone else has moved in and is now doubtless taking advantage of the Glyph buildings abandoned when the Saben left.

So; would it be wrong of me to infiltrate spies onto their colony to steal the plans for the glyph buildings? I assume that since it's a very new colony, there won't be much in the way of serious opposition if I do....

Memo to self

When doing your daily check in, you should add buildings to the building queue before noting that the level of waste on the world that recycles 25,000 an hour is low.

That way, you'll avoid sending 250,000 units of waste to a world where you've just filled the waste storage to the brim from new building projects.

Oooops.

Starports and Cargo Ships

After a couple of weeks, the colony I've decided to dedicate as a starship factory has come online - that is, the Trade Ministry has reached the same level as the one on my homeworld.

I'm intending on increasing the level of the Trade Ministry, too - I managed to get a Freighter with a cargo capacity of 250,000 from one of the missions, and boy, do I ever want more of those. I've also got a Propulsion Lab and a Pilot Training Facility on the same world, as well as a Crashed Alien Spaceship, so the ships I'm producing there are almost twice as fast as the ones on Homeworld, and have considerably more stealth and a touch more cargo capacity.

So the plan for there now is to increase the storage facilities quickly, while also increasing the resource producing buildings. I'm happy to feed resources from other colonies by transporting them there, but I need to build up the resources produced on planet to support the rest of the infrastructure.

In the meantime, I'm replacing all my old Cargo Ships (and even a couple of Dories) with the new ones over the course of the next couple of days. And the, of course, I'll be faced with the same problem of what to do with a vast over-production of resources....

Spies, and dealing with them

(Two posts in one day. I'm in the zone)

So I notice that on one world, the Saben Demesne - I assume - have dispatched about a dozen level 13 spies. I've got enough spies of my own to stop them being able to do anything, but it looks like both sides are similar enough in level that we're pretty much cancelling each other out. Is there a way to actually get rid of them? The only one I can think of involves upping the level of the Intelligence Ministry / Security Ministry / Espionage Ministry, but for the reasons mentioned in the last post, that's liable to take the best part of a week before it'll actually happen....

Where next?

I must say, it's quite exciting - this would be my second blog post, instantly making this blog larger than about three quarters of the other blogs on the web.

So. I've been playing Lacuna Expanse for around a month now. I have a total of six planets, plus the resources - thanks to the recent Thanksgiving Happiness Boost - to start a seventh. I'm wondering, though, where I should be going....

Thanks to the ever increasing time to upgrade things, I've got a build queue of over a day on each and every colony I've got - my first world currently has enough upgrades in the queue to keep it building for almost a week, though that's thanks to upgrades to both the Archeology Ministry and the University, both for three days.

Which means that I'm building up a huge resource backlog. My homeworld is currently generating about 50k of each resource per hour, and I literally can't use it fast enough. I'm supporting the newer colonies with ships full of resources regularly, and I'm still accumulating resources faster than I can spend it.

So. What should I be doing? Should I start building Munitions Labs and extra Space Ports to build Snarks for the war that will doubtless be coming? Trading large quantities of resources? Your suggestions, please, in the comments!

A Formal Apology to the Culture

I must say, it's terribly exciting for us to be here. Up until just a couple of years ago, we'd no idea about this whole 'space' thing; we'd expanded to cover just about the whole of our planet - quite easy to do when you're little more than a ball of protoplasm that can digest anything - and thought we were rulers of the whole universe.

We knew about 'distance', of course, but when you communicate using long-chain peptide molcules passed through the air, contact, or ingestion, then distance really doesn't seem to be a function of dilution. So it came as something of a surprise to us when the Culture Ambassador landed in his shiny new spaceship, and introduced himself to us.

We say 'introduced'; he did make sterling efforts to communicate with us, but sadly for him, we'd never seen the point of evolving organs that could detect sound or light, so he didn't really have much chance of actually talking to us. And really, it's not our fault that aside from us, the only animals moving on our planet are edible. So it was a foregone conclusion that we would, in fact, end up eating him.

We acknowledge now that this was the wrong thing to do, and that eating other sentients is very poor form. Would it be any consolation for his widow to know that he was delicious?

But once we got over the initial shock that there were other things in the universe than us, we got stuck straight on into this evolution lark; we've figured out how to speak to things that aren't us in ways that don't involve the careful creation of specific molecules, and learned your language; we're even careful to refer to ourselves in the plural, as apparently some of you find the idea of a single creature dominating the landmass of four entire planets a little disconcerting.

So, our fellow sentients, we apologise for digesting your ambassador, and promise that it's unlikely to happen again; and we look forward to working with you as a useful and productive member of your alliance!

(A piece of in-character - er, in-race - prose for the Lacuna Expanse real time strategy game)