Whether weather needs to be weathered.

I think that the weather today was good.  Day temperature rose to be on the hot end of T-shirt weather, and night temperature is on the low end of T-shirt weather.  Good for people who wear T-shirts.  Like me.

I guess that next it will become miserably hot during the day, and only be decent during the night.

Sci-fi.

I just realised that I watch a lot of sci-fi - or rather a specific segment of Sci-fi.

Stargate

Farscape

Babylon 5

Andromeda

Firefly

I swear their must be a pattern... some traits common to all of them.  I seem to little or no interest in Startrek, or the expanded universe of Star Wars.  But Stargate?  Farscape? Firefly?  Something there...

Also: I think that a lot can be said from second episodes.  First episode introduces, but second one is where the creators want to go.

Farscape's second episode has the ship crashing on a planet of 20th century technology aliens, very similar to humans.  Puts the main character on the wrong end of a first contact situation - it's him with the other (much more alien) people on his crew that are the aliens.

Firefly has the Train Job, which introduces their life of crime and their sense of morals.

Andromeda has the ship landing on a station where the decendants of High Guard families--all dying young from radiation poisoning--have developed a Lord of the Flies-ish culture based along the perverted remains of High Guard protocols.  Surviving for generation after generation against brutal attacks by other races, they wait for the coming of the High Guard.  The captain is, in fact, time-frozen High Guard, and is seen as a messiah by the children, leading to the Day of Lightning... which is when the children man and fly off in slipfighters armed with nova bombs to destroy the star systems of all their enemies...  Very interesting, with Dylan trying not to abuse his power as messiah while keeping the fanatical children from doing anything horrible.  There are so many moral questions raised in the episode, and I love it.

*cough*

Anyway.

Let's make a game.

I want this game to be made...

I used to play EV Nova, and while it is a good game, I always wished for multiplayer. When I saw the game EVE Online, I was very intrigued. Fly my spaceship around a persistant universe? How cool is that?

Except it isn't, really. You don't fly a ship, you tell a ship where to go. And the game has a variety of Truly Awful features. A lot of the game is spent mining, training your stats, etc. Drudge work. Worse than many other MMORPGs, the training process isn't even fun - it's very much a ProgressQuest sort of grind, where your character's improvement is slow and based on how long you have owned the game.

So screw all that.

This is what I want:

I want to fly my spaceship around a persistant universe, interact with Player Characters and Non-Player Characters, carry out interesting quests from both types of players, and goddamn fly. Have I mentioned flying?

So let's start from the ground up. Flying. In Space.

Control scheme is flight simulation. Inside of a cockpit or with the cam following the ship. A variable degree of automation, so that newer players can play alright, and the real piloting experts can have as much control as they want, and as their ship can preform.

I am an advocate of a full six degrees of freedom for manuverable ships, though obviously crappy ships or huge ships would have a lessened number of degrees. 2.5 degrees seems to be the least needed - Yaw, pitch, and thrust (which is half of the forward backwards acceleration).

Fighter battles when every ship can accelerate right, left, up, down, forward, and backwards, as well as turning left, right, up, down, and rolling left or right... it will be fun. Obviously some thrusters will be more powerful than others, and some tools and weapons will be mounting on one part of the ship, not others, but... yeah.

Physics scheme. EN Nova gets points for how ships fly - rockets and gyros. Your controls consist of turning, and firing the engine. To slow down, you spin around and accelerate in the opposite direction. It's not like you are flying through a fluid atmosphere - you are in space, and an object in motion remains in motion. This may take some getting used to, but I'm sure that players can catch on. Think Bablyon 5.

Of course, there's dumb things in B5's flight as well. Maximum speed, for instance. Most space probes have thrusters that provide a fraction of an ounce of force. But there's nothing slowing them down, so they just go faster and faster.

Of course, there are restrictions for game-play to make sense. First, acceleration is of major importance for spacecraft flying like this. If all craft had fuel-efficient drives and provided a ounce of pressure for a year to build up decent speeds, what kind of space battles would that provide? But if they had insane acceleration, the kind that makes flying interesting, then they could accelerate and keep accelerating, and go at a pretty insane speed. With a few tweaks, it can be balanced:

Fuel: Acceleration costs fuel. This can be bought cheaply at a space station, an orbital dock or planetside(atmospheric capable only, costing some to go down). This means that while the fastest way to travel sub-light is to spend half the trip accelerating and half the trip deaccelerating, but the cheapest way to travel would be spending a fraction of a second accelerating, drifting for a long, long time, and then spending a fraction of a second de-accelerating. Or hell, just let the docking bay arms grab you, you are moving so slow. Most people will pick somewhere in the middle, but trade-offs are never bad for game balance. (In fact, if a choice has a right answer, it shouldn't be a choice.)

Shielding: It's mostly true that there is nothing slowing you down in space. Mostly. But the faster you go, the more dangerous objects in space can be. The faster you fly through, say, a gas cloud, the more damage your shields will take. Plow into an astroid belt, and you better hope you have some mighty ship with incredibly powerful shields... or you can slow down a bit and dodge all the astroids, should you be piloting something more fragile. ...or not slow down that much, and have a hell of a time saying in one piece. This opens all kinds of scenarios, what with most planets having some degree of gas surrounding it, the existence of nebulae, astroid belts, solar flares, etc. Much fun.

Friction: In direct proportion to the damage being done by impacting objects, there is a degree of friction. Traveling through a gas cloud will slow you down a lot if you are going really fast, but the effect is less noticeable at lower speeds, and while theoretically it will bring you to the same speed as the surrounding cloud, in practice it will take a long, long, boring while. (Good if you run out of fuel, have no generator, and need to be picked up.)

Relative motion: Actually not really so much a fix as an observation: If you are moving at 600 km/s, and I move at 600.001 km/s , I'm only going one kph faster than you. And since I don't have to be running my engines to keep moving, the two of us could have an entire dogfight while both of us continued hurdling towards our destination. To the two of us, the 600 km/s velocity in some direction doesn't matter much at all, only our speed relative to each other.

Relative motion2: Don't forget that not everything is moving at 600 km/s with you. If you are too busy dogfighting and don't notice your stop coming up, you'll probably wind up making a nasty fireball in the night sky, or having the spacestation tractor drones pull you off-course to avoid collision.

Other parts about the physics scheme: Gravity. Yes, you are in space. Yes, gravity exists in space. Yes, that means that space is warped. Yes, that means that planets orbit suns, yes that means that moons and space stations orbit planets. And yes, that means you should get in an orbit unless you want to spend your time thrustering upwards according to the strength ofthe local gravity. Match your speed with your planet, match it with the orbital platform... at least the means of interstellar travel have matches you to the net velocity of any gravity well you reappear in. Of course, if you have a good sense for these, things, you can let gravity work to your advantage, just imputing a certain velocity and letting other things do the work. If you do, go sell that information.

Again, everything is relative - if you are in the same orbit as a orbital platform, then both of you would be relatively weightless. Move out of the orbit, and you're going to be messed with to a good degree. Makes flying interesting, especially if you turn off the automated features.

Of course, some bits of physics will have to be ignored. Time dilation, for instance, if anyone chooses to fly that fast through very, very empty space.

Movement is not just within a star system, however, as what's the fun if there are only a number of planets, space stations, and a single star? What about all the other cool phenomina out there? But the distance between stars that have interesting debris around them (any type of planet, planetoids, useable gas, or anything else that provides a reason for people to go there) is pretty extreme. So faster-than-light travel is something nifty, especially since relativistic travel makes for messy time questions.

My proposal is to use Second August's system of FTL travel (SA was a forum-based RPG game/setting I made with Celiana). Ships move from real space to a sort of lower-energy, more delicate version of our space - infraspace, let's call it. Ships power down (any velocity, no acceleration), and slip into infraspace. They turn back on again, and flight through infraspace to their destination. Infraspace is affected by the real world, and gravitational effects bend space much more than normally is the case, leaving slow-moving wakes, ripples and crunched spots. Infraspace is highly non-euclidian, and ships use that to their advantage by simply flying through the most compressed areas, reducing the distance traveled. Additionally, ships systems are much more powerful relative to the physical laws of the alternative realm - this is part of the reason ships power down - the different physical laws can cause energized parts of the ship to surge destructively, blowing out capacitors, etc.

Organized races can modify the delicate infra-space. While a smart and diligent pilot can navigate the moving gravity distortions to his or her advantage, this is not neccesary for travel on the major space lanes. What governments (or corporations, even) do is plant small space stations that project a false mass. Inside of infraspace, each station provides a point of crushed space (gravity hole), and compresses the corresponding infraspace. Strings of these stations provide roadways of compressed space, plus plenty of gravity holes to leave infraspace.

Which reminds me: Gravity holes. When a realspace object weighs enough, it's reflection in the corresponding infraspace doesn't just bend space, it punches a hole in it, similar to a realspace black hole (which makes for quite the distortion in infraspace, btw). Though gravity itself does not exist in infraspace, the degree of distortion allows infra-space ships to exit infraspace into real space (which is part of why infra-space is so empty - it takes work to get in, but you can just wander out). Note that space is highly compressed around the hole, and the actual hole - a point in space that is infinitely compressed - corresponds to a large portion of the entire gravity well. Entering the hole pops you out to the nearest corresponding bit of realspace - the edge of the gravity well where gravity is strong enough to entirely punch through infraspace. Game mechanic-wise, this means that people cannot drop to subspace within a gravity well, and people cannot emerge in non-safe objects, as whatever makes an area non-safe generally (always, in the game, because we can) provides enough of a gravity well to have people arrive on the periphery. Note that super-massive objects like black holes and blue giants would have you arrive a distance away where the gravity is no stronger or weaker than arriving at a rogue planetoid (though the distance would differ extremely).

Weapons are next, because they are fun. There are three types of weapons: instantaneous (IW), unguided(UGW), and guided(GW). Lasers are instantaneous - you fire a laser pointed at a target, and it hits there immediately, albeit warped by gravitic distortions (especially in subspace). Tractor beams and several other technologies fall under this catagory. Unguided weapons (U are fired where a ship will be, on an intercept course, and there is an appreciable delay between it being fired and when it arrives on the target. UGWs start motion relative to the weapons platform(ship, station, drone, etc), and have a fixed velocity relative to the gun. Railguns and gauss cannons fall are the faster end of this catagory, while flak cannons are slow to the point of being used as area denial weapons. Guided weapons are those such as missiles, magnetic grappling hooks, and anything with the ability to follow a craft. Launched similarly to UGWs, GWs possess homing capabilities. An important facet of this is that the launcher does not need to be facing its target or its target's projected location when it fires, and better missiles can avoid obstacles, thus not needing line-of-sight. They also can be intercepted or jammed.

Drones are a special case - they are guided, similar to missiles, but instead of ramming into the target, they follow it and fire other kinds of ordinance - IWs and (U)GWs. A tractor drone falls under this catagory, as does a ion device and most weaponry that would not function if it ran into something. Mass-impact weapons also benefit if the drone is attacking a fleeing enemy - see below.

Damage types also differ.

Mass impact damage (MID) has to do with the relative velocity of the (U)GW and the victim ship - in essence it is no different than the normal problems of moving fast, save that the object may be more damaging for the amount of speed you run into it. Effects physical defenses more than energy defenses, though may penetrate energy defenses and hit physical defenses instead. MIDs generally have an effect on the velocity of the victim ship.

Payload damage (PD) is damage from an explosive or otherwise damaging payload - this is dealt regardless of velocity. Most missile weapons deal a combination of MID and PD, the proportions of which are dependant on relative speeds of missile and target. A missile filled with sensor sludge is really meant to cover and jam sensors, but if you fly directly into it at high velocity...

Energy damage (ED) is mostly from IWs, and operates independent of velocity. Affects energy defenses more than physical defenses, in general.

Outside of that basic framework (which could be expanded) many weapons have specific effects - one IW might try to drain the shield battery, while another may overload it temporatily, and another might be a way to hack the target's systems from a range to prepare for boarding. Some drones could act as mines, and the poor man may fly backwards at the launching speed of his UGW to lay them as an evironmental hazard.

Movement upgrades are relatively specific for each ship, but generally involve thrusters for acceleration for rotation, grappling hooks for hitchhiking, gyros for rotation, etc. Note that each upgrade may only affect certain aspects of a ship's preformance - they might improve main thrusters but not strafing thrusters. Movement upgrades fall under the general category of upgrades.

One of the main thrusts of the game is buying new and inventive upgrades for your ship. All manner of improvements are possible, limited only by your wallet and the amount of weight you are willing to carry (the heavier you are, the harder it is to accelerate along any of the six degrees of freedom), and the usage requirements of the upgrade (tractor beams take energy, for instance, while magnetic grapples are lighter and do not, but have their own problems). General philosophy is that there is not a right choice and a wrong choice, just different choices - everything is a trade-off.

Another main facet of the game is manning a ship. Larger ships involve far more than a single pilot can manage. By default, many tasks are taken care of by automation, but a free downloadable cilent should allow non-paying customers to pose as volunteer gunners, communication specialists, Remote-controlled strike-craft pilots, etc. Thus a player might invite his friends over for a online party where everyone mans parts of his crusier. This promotes the game, and makes it more fun for everyone.

If you don't have friends willing to volunteer, you can put out requests for whatever position is required, along with a salary, on the BBS of a station. Players sign up, and you can view their history, achievements, and reviews, and then pay some lucky soul some money to (hopefully) man a gun better than the computer... and review them later on how they did. Or save costs and not buy an automatic gun, and hire some cheap goon to man the gun every time. Actual players can also drive other ships that you own - if you buy a large enough ship with a docking bay, other ships you own that are small enough can be launched on a hiring basis (plus hired help you might buy can repair and refuel in your docking bay). More on player interactions later.

Players start with very little. Instead of buying a ship outright (they could buy a crappy one...) players can get into the action immediately by renting good ships and performing missions to pay the rent on the ship, or being hired to fly a ship by someone else - PC or NPC. Escort missions are frequent, as pirates(including other players) may attack trade ships if they are not protected - setting a gravity mine in realspace to create a gravity hole to pull trade ships out of subspace and into combat until they can escape the temporary gravity well. On the shady end of things, assault missions also exist. Before each mission, the player may choose whether the mission will appear on his or her history. Marked missions provide prestige and a good resume, but failure or unscrupleous jobs also show up. Unmarked missions aren't recorded, but you still can get paid or otherwise profit.

Eventually, the player can get enough money to buy his or her own ship, and between flying their ship and flying in other ships, continue to get money to improve their own ship, until that becomes the primary financial source. The point is to make improvement matter, but also to make improvement fun.

Ships dock, of course - you can land in space stations, orbital platforms (w/ or w/o space elevators to a main station and planet), and on planets (depending on habitation, facilities, ship, etc.) If your ship is too massive to actually dock in/at the facility in question, you can park it in orbit / in space and fly a smaller ship to the station (if you don't have a smaller ship by that time, you can probably hire one).

Once docked, the player can communicate with the shops, read the E-boards for jobs, etc. Alternatively, the player can go into the station.

Inside the station, or planetside, the player has a customizable avatar and can interact with other PCs in the facility. Stereotypical facilities exist, though player requests and usage can cause expansions. Voice channels exist, as well as text channels. Rentable quiet rooms for explaining missions in precise terms also exist. Depending on usage and profits, stations or planet-side facilities can expand, as explained on AI behavior.

Enough chatter for now.

Good morning!

So I stayed up last night rather late.  Why?  Because I dropped the 9:40-10:30 MWF class, and my first class on Friday is now at 12:55pm.

Yay!

So this morning I hear my phone go off.  My phone is generally my alarm clock, so I grabbed it and opened it up, and... it was not my alarm!  In fact, it was my lady love.

Of course, I have no reception in my bunk.  It's a metal bunk in a concrete building, with two walls being the least seperating me from the outside of the building in any direction.

I noticed that the time was no 11:59, when I set my alarm for, but rather it was 9:35am.

My lady-love called again, and managed to tell me (over the horrible reception on--as I found later--both our ends) that I had class at 9:40am.

I wanted to burst out laughing, hug the lovely lady, and scream all at the same time.  Did not want to get up early, you know, but on the other hand she was so concerned about me not missing my class that she called me.  For a class I no longer have, but it was still a tremendously sweet gesture.

I love the dear Toshi.  And I feel very loved.

According to the Foreign Service

Mixed feelings post:

As you probably know, I've been relatively iffy about Obama.  Not so much that he's going to do a horrible job, but rather that people seem to think that now that Obama is in office, things will get better.  But I don't really see the change that much.  "Change you can believe in" was one of the slogans, and I guess I never believe.  I just watch and see.

Well, last Thursday in my Global Career Development class, we had a presentation by this Foreign Service lady.  Of of the questions we asked her at the end was: "How much does your job change between administrations?"

The answer was that generally speaking, foreign policy stays the same between administrations, with an exception recently.

The ways things have actually changed?

1) The Bad Bush Effect.  First she told us that during the Bush administration, things got harder.  Originally, people loved Americans.  As a diplomat, people would be like: "We think you're wrong, but we like you and your country because you're American."  That stopped during the Bush administration, particularly after the start of the Iraq war.  "We think you're wrong, and we don't like you or your country because you're American."

I can personally vouch for this one, on reflection.  As you probably know, I've been traveling since before I was 1.  My first birthday was in Australia, and that was on the return end of traveling through China, my dad teaching in Helsinki, etc.  Grew up all my life traveling.  And people liked Americans.  The soft power was there, and damnit, it helped.  Americans were cool, people wanted to be like Americans (I always had mixed feelings about that last one).

As I turned into a teenager, that sense faded.  I always assumed it was me, some sort of nostalgia, but maybe not?

Anyway, Bush made diplomacy difficult, and while the elites generally knew better than to assume most US folks were like Bush, the foreign service had to really drive the public publicity that they try at.  Stuff so that people get to know normal americans.

In the mean time, they probably wished they could wear shirts like this. (By the end of the talk, I got the feeling that the Foreign Service had pretty legitimate reasons to be pissed at Bush.)

2)  She also noted climate change policy problems.  The Bush administration's views on climate change were widely variant from the global norm.  It's kind of tricky to talk with people about anything that is affected by climate concerns when, to your goverment, climate concerns don't exist.  How do you make a treaty on industrial pollution standards when the US and the rest of the world are working from a different base of assumptions?  (Yet another reasons for them to think that US folks are stupid.)

3) Abortion too.  According to Bush administration policies, federal government institutions were not allowed to provide funding to any health organization, governmental or not, that includes abortion as a possibility in their their health-control schema.  Which seems like a nasty jab at abortion - good if you are anti-choice, bad if you are anti-life (because I like being negative).

The problem in practice is that most governments only have one department of health, and that does everything.  So instead of cutting out the programs that provide the option of abortion in favor of those who don't provide that as an option, the policy wound up cutting the health programs of entire developing countries out of US funding.  And gods do some developing countries need adequately funded health programs. (Another reason for them to think that US folks are dicks.)

So, now with the change to Obama, the US has a fresh new face abroad, is now on the same page as everyone else for climate change, and can fund the health programs of developing worlds.

I haven't travelled abroad since Obama was elected.  I hope to see some change.  At least the foreign service gal did.

Economics grade scores.

Yesterday was the first economics class after break.  The Thursday before break, we had an exam, which I figured I did so-so on.

Yesterday, while we were waiting for class to start (with me diligently working on my knit scarf), we were talking about grades we got, or would get when he passed back the exam.

The fellow to my forwards right got a 38/50, and was pleased.  He figured that the curve would help him out a lot.  The lady behind me got a 32/50 and was less pleased.  The guy on her left got a 39/50, and got some dirty looks.

I, of course, had not checked the online grade posting - for me, once the test is turned in, the grade is going to be the same, so I have no hurry to figure out what it is.

I was sort of worried, though - the test had been a lot harder than I expected - I had little to no trouble with the practice exam from the fall semester, but the exam this time had a lot of questions about elasticity, which I hadn't studied very well for.  (Actually, I hadn't studied much at all - only skimmed the textbook, etc.  But I didn't know it very well, at any rate.)

He started passing out exams.  The guy behind me got a 22/50.  I was worried.

I got a 44/50.  I was impressed.  I figured that I would get around a 39/50, being smart and all that.  I was sort of worried, though - the class is graded on a curve, after all, and so the higher my score, the more true reason people have to be unhappy/jealous.

And then once all the papers had been passed out, Dr. Wang was going to write the top and lowest scores on the board.

Wang: "Wilford, what did you get on the exam?"

Me: "44?"

Wang (to class): "The highest score was 44, the lowest was something like 16 or 18."

Me: *blushes*

So yeah.  Apparently I didn't just do okay, I actually set the curve.

First time I've ever done that.   Mixed feelings between pride and superiority, and embarassment and cringing.  The other students weren't that mad, but they did give me dirty looks occasionally.

We went over the exam in class, and they argued some of the questions.  I was pondering helping them argue for the questions - Lowering my grade to be more on par with the other high-scoring students would not hurt me at all, and would help everybody else.  Eventually I didn't, though - the professor's policy was that people could talk to him privately about it if they cared about points.

I missed two questions, each -2 points, and I got 3/5s credit on one of the essay questions.  I could have easily argued the essay question, but... what's the point.  Setting the curve is an odd situation to be in, apparently.

Anyway, this might lead to the first time I get a A+ in a college class.  I've always been a A-/B+ student, traditionally.

Go me?

Sins of A Solar Empire

Well, I up and bought it.  I don't have a computer that can run it, or really the time to play it, but I bought a license to play it via the Impulse digital content distribution system, and downloaded it onto my roommates compter (with permission).  It runs okay on his computer, though I can't max out the prettiness.  I do enough the prettiness.

According to the Impulse license FAQ, I get to download it from my Impulse account and play it on whatever computer I want, though only one downloaded version can exist at a time.

Need to play Tim.  He has it on his laptop.

While on the topic of Sins, I've played exactly one game on my roommate's computer.  It was a 1vs1 on Fertile Crescent (a slower map) against a Hard Computer (random personality).  I'm guessing it took about two and a half hours, over the course of two days.  Here's a brief summary of what happened:

I had been reading online about various capital ships.  I normally pick the Marza Dreadnought because of it's absurd DPS, planet bombing abilities, and it's amazing ultimate ability, which deals 150 damage 20 times to all enemy ships in the area (affected by shield mitigation, so effectively "only" about 1500).  It's pretty tough, too - the TEC builds ships like that.

However, the stuff that I was reading, while agreeing about the Marza's awesomeness, also reccomended the TEC's Kol Battleship.  Why?  Not because of its offensive power, but for it's balanced abilities and amazing defense.  Without abilites, it is statistically the toughest capital ship in the game.  It starts with a clean 3000 HP and enough armor to make it effectively 3750 HP... but better with regeneration.  Decent shields.  It has a a direct offensive ability, an anti-fighter-craft ability, and a defensive ability.  It's ultimate ability does not ravage fleets like the Marza's, but gives it good regeneration in HP and shields.  Gives its attacks splash damage, and decreases cooldown time on special abilities.  Lastly, it increases antimatter regeneration.  If you weren't spamming the special abilities during Finest Hour (its ultimate), you would not only generate antimatter to recoup the cost of using Finest Hour, you would also gain a net 150 antimatter.  It seemed pretty decent, though I felt I would miss blowing up everything with my Marza.

So I started with the Kol, and scouted out the three unknown planets from my start.  Immediately sent the Kol at the astroid, and it ripped appart the native defenders there.  Colonized that, sent the Kol (again, by itself) to the next planet over, which happened to be moderately defended.  Turns out?  Kol doesn't kill things fast.  It just sat there, dealt damage, and got hit a bunch.  I had chosen the defensive ability early, so periodically it would take 15% less damage.  I had heard good things about it, but 15% before mitigation doesn't seem that amazing.

Well, apparently it does work.  The Kol nearly single-handedly cleared the system of it's defenders, and I went and colonized that planet.  I then checked the damage on the Kol...  It still had about 1700 HP left.  The thing is like a friggen rock.  I sent it to the next planet, now with back-up, and I cleared that as well, then colonized it.

I was happy - my initial push had seized two out of the three planets on the crescent, and so now I had enconomic superiority.

Then the oppnent arrived at the central star system, and started the battle that lasted, on and off, for nearly 2 hours.

My Kol was still pretty hurt from defeating the planet's defenders, and the planetary defenses were in the process of being built when they arrived.  And by they, I mean bunches.  I had about 3 missile frigates and my Kol.  They had a Vulkoras Desolator, 7 of the Varsari's version of the missile frigate (which is more expensive, but better), and 10 or so light frigates.  My LRM (long range missile frigates) do great damage against the light frigates, but my main concern was beating down their LRMs to slow the offensive power of their army until the planetary defenses were online, and the rest of my fleet returned (I had sent them to conquer a planet while the three LRMs and the Kol sat on the central planet, backed up by the planetary defenses).

Unfortunately for me, they soon warped in planet bombers, and started trying to destroy my colony on the central planet.  With no colony, the constrution of planetary defenses would halt, and my delaying tactics would be for naught.  I focused my remaining LRMs (which were going down fast) on the Karrastra Destructors and took them down.  Unfortunately for me, my Kol was going down in health, and they were destroying the defense structures as they were being built.  Eventually, though, I did manage to get a repair bay online, and that repaired my Kol  (the LRMs were long dead at this point).  Now faced with a 2000 or so HP Kol, two gauss gun defense platforms (admitedly at half health) and a repair bay, they decided to flee.  I suddenly realized that their capital ship, despite arriving with more health than mine, was down to about 1000 HP.  I didn't have enough offense to focus on finishing it, but it ran away anyway.  My holdings were safe.

And then they came back.

Joining their damaged Desolator was another capital ship, the Jarrasul Evacutor - their colony ship.  They now had about 10 of the Vasari LRM, and 10 of the light frigates.  I fought for a bit, but once the repair platform was gone, I had to flee with my Kol.  The Egg (as it is called) poses as a colony capital ship, but it has two insanely offensive-based abilities.  One-on-one Cap versus Cap battles have the Egg (starting with the offensive ability) win every single time.  In my case, it was a new ship, a level 1 ship compare to my level 3 Kol, but the nano-disassembler reduces my armor by two and deals 30 non-mitigated damage every second for 20 seconds.  That's 600 damage, no ifs or buts.  If my ship was at two low HP and got hit by that, it wouldn't matter if it ran.

So I ran a bit early, when I was at 1500 HP.  By the time I got out of the gravity well to the next planet (which I had built defenses on), it had been hit by the nano-disassembler and focus fire by most other ships during the armor decrease.  It phase-jumped to safety with literally only 45 HP left.

I sent it to the repair bay in the planet there while my LRM fleet got over to meet up with it.  My LRM fleet, plus the new LRMs I had built at my factory, was about 15 ships, plus my newly-repaired Kol.

Meanwhile, their fleet was ripping appart my defenses, and starting to bomb the planet via the two capital ships.  The Desolator is specialized into planetary bombardment like the Marza is, and so it was going a bit faster than I would like.

When my Kol was nearly repaired, I sent it and the fleet over to the planet.  I ordered the LRMs to destroy their LRMs, and I had my Kol focus on the damaged Desolator.  Meanwhile, while my fleet distracted theirs, I tried to built a repair bay.  Three of them were destroyed before one of them got built.  Meanwhile, my LRMs all died and my Kol stubornly sat there, soaking up damage while chipping away at their much more fragile Desolator.  Their Egg was apparently out of antimatter, as it only hit me with the Nano every now and then, rather than each time the 12 second cool-down finished... which is shorter than the 20 second effect, by the way.

The Kol eventually destroyed the Desolator, and the enemy fled against, giving me a brief respite to build a few more repair bays, and reinforce with a few LRMs.  Then they came back with the Egg and their own main battleship, their equivalent of the Kol.  My Kol was at level 4 now, compared to their level 2 egg and level main battleship.  I sat on my repair bays and destroyed their Egg while my LRMs fought their LRMs.  My Kol leveled up to 5 just in time before they sent a number of carrier cruisers into the gravity well under contention.  Meanwhile, I used my resource advantage (I controlled one more planet than them, plus being the TEC) to research my own carriers, and send them out as well, outfited with air superiority craft.  Vasari air is better than TEC air, but mine were cheaper.  More importantly, my last level-up with the Kol had me investing in its Flak Burst, an anti-strikecraft measure.  Unfortunately, while the flak burst rips apparet opposing TEC and Advent strikecraft, both of which are fragile, the Varsari craft had about 85 HP, and could weather the Flak Burst better than most.

Combat went on, with the enemy sending in periodic reinforcements and me sending in the same.  I always had less of an army than my foe, but I had multiple repair bays to repair my ships and each other.

Eventually I researched into repair ships and eventually heavy cruisers, and the repair ships started making life easier.  A bit easier.  My Kol got to level six, and then it started using Finest hour, which, given its negative antimatter cost, was on one third of the time.  (60/180 seconds.  It's actually more like a finest minute).  Very helpful.  After the Kol got to level six, I built a second capital ship, a Marza, and sent that in.  The Marza did it's thing, and I kept my strategy focused on destroying any capital ships they sent at me, using the fact that my capital ships kept getting stronger to provide me with an advantage.   I dealt with their frigates as I could.

My strategy paid off when I got to level six with my Marza, and unleashed its Missile Barrage.  This nearly killed all of their amassed frigates and some of their cruisers, and suddenly the battle was in my favor.  I routed them, and the remains fled to the next system.  Using the momentum of the minute, I sent scouts over to the next planet, and made sure they had no huge fleet of reinforcements there.  They didn't.

About this time, I realized their plan - while the battle was taking forever, they were building broadcasting units on their planet and building up culture.  Defend it as I might, the central planet would have revolted against me if the culture had converted the population.

I attacked their planet, and destroyed everything I could.  Their fleet fled, but I was fine with that.  I destroyed their colony and their orbital structures, including a broadcasting structure.  I figured out that most of them were in their home planet, where their fleet had to be re-massing for a final defense.

I waited in that planet until my ships were ready to fight again.  Specifically, the repair cruisers had repaired my capital ships, and the four minute cooldown on the Missile Barrage finished.  I then invaded their planet.

Again, they had a larger fleet than me, but once I sent the Marza into the middle of their fleet and used the missile barrage, I was in a much better spot than them.  I destroyed their latest capital ship, destroyed their fleet, and set to work on the orbital structures and the planet.

From there, it went smoothly.  My economy was much better than the two remaining planets they had, and all that was left was wiping out the remains.

Victory was mine.

So that was the first game I played on my roommate's computer.  Sort of a warm-up game, getting used to his mouse and keyboard and such.

Some real Sins of A Solar Empire will be played later.

I should play against Tim...

I managed to blow up the Desolator, and the rest of their fleet fled back to one of their planets.