Current LLM-in-coding trends keep bringing this post up in my head.

I see a lot of the mentioned "King David fetish" in companies trying to cut salary costs by using more AI tools.

Like, the idea that you can make something worthwhile without strong skill, by just adding enough mediocrity to make up for it.

I'm really amazed by the assault techniques in this episode. He manages to assault and eliminate 82% evolved biter bases using only minimally upgraded red ammo.

R U L E

Most of them can be solved with various applications of patience, so the trickiest one was the Express Delivery - winning Space Age in less than 40 hours.

Some tips for others who want to try it:

You can not reduce biter base sizes without invalidating the achievement, but you can turn down pollution, biter evolution and biter expansion. Turning the starting area size up to max means you can get all the way to Aquilo without seeing a single biter.

Resource patches can be turned up high and cliffs can be turned down low.

The scale needed is absurd and the main strategy should be on being able to scale hard and fast. My Nauvis base had 20 rocket silos going constantly, two 4-reactor nuclear plants, and it still felt a bit underscaled when I got to Aquilo.

Nauvis was the easiest to get to bigscale in this timeframe, as it already had a head start by the time the other planets were operational. Don't bother setting up blue chips on Vulcanus. Copy-paste the blue chip production on Nauvis and just ship them over with rockets.

What worked for me to scale:

• BOTS BOTS BOTS thousands of bots immediately and forever on all planets.
• Make sure to produce at least 2 per second of any science.
• Nauvis is the backbone. It can just ferry nuclear fuel, blue chips, rocket fuel, and low density structures to all other planets. (Fulgora gets trivially self-sufficient after a while though)
• Make production modular. Not necessary with perfectly symmetrical or cityblock, but enough that you can just zoom out, copy-and-paste "the area that turns iron ore, copper ore, and raw oil into blue chips", and just connect it to some new miners or a new oilfield.
• Inefficiency and waste are better than starved belts or constant tuning problems. Need 20 red chips per minute? Copy the thing that makes 20 red chips per second. Give it a separate set of miners, and don't care if it spends most of the game idling.
• On each planet, establish a bot network and stable power, then GTFO to the next one. Build the rest via remote.

My time was 36 hours, following these rough milestones:

• Logistic system before 10 hours
• Aquilo before 30 hours

Update on https://lemmy.world/post/26605581

Playing on modified Marathon setting: 100x science cost instead of 4x

I think I'm finally over the challenging part of the challenge. Until now it was extremely uncertain whether my base would both survive biter evolution on Nauvis and manage to claim enough resources to get to space and Vulcanus for "unlimited" iron and copper.

At some point the biters evolved past my tech: I can't assault behemoth biter bases with only low damage tech red bullets, effectively making any unclaimed resources unavailable until I could tech up (which would need resources).

I can, however, guard against behemoth biters with walls of red bullet turrets and flamethrowers.

Vulcanus also turned out to not be as straightforward as I hoped. While I do get a lot of resources in the starting area, the initial tugsten patches are guarded by small demolishers. Fortunately, 100 turrets of red ammo and spamming poison capsules proved enough to clear out a significant area and secure enough tungsten to get me far up the tech tree.

I feel like I "won" the challenge now that I can safely tech past any future hurdles, and the remaining tasks are just putting in the hours. Not sure if I'll keep playing past this, but it was a ton of fun. :)

For anyone who wants to see a true maniac attempt what I assumed to be impossible: Michael Hendriks may be able to win with 1000x science cost, exploiting deep knowledge of the biter expansion algorithm, spending tens of hours filling the map with pipes, and meticulous calculation of resource usage through the tech tree carefully adapting or not adapting quality, modules etc.

Some screenshos of the current state:

Going for the speed achievements. I had the great idea that fewer asteroids meant I could race to planets and Solar System Edge with lighter ships.

...turns out it also applies to asteroid chunks. My ships needed a full hour to refuel, and space science took several hours to get the research for getting to Vulcanus.

RESTART

Played it on Commodore 64. It was a space rocket/shuttle sim where you launched into space on a rocket amd progressed through some minigame-tasks.

(I am fairly certain it was not a good or widespread game.)

One of the tasks was about grabbing a satellite using an arm or a cable. You would try to extend it pixel by pixel to grab the satellite and it was super finicky. I only ever managed it by luck.

I try Google every few years and can't get anywhere. Tried stuff with spacey names in emulators and looking on youtube. List of close-ish games it was not:

• Project Space Station
• Space Shuttle - A Journey Into Space (but this has really close vibes)
• Space Shuttle Challenger
• Apollo 18 Mission To The Moon
• Samantha Fox Strip Poker (i mean it could have been - had to check)

Decided I wanted a run that forced me to scale up instead of just "winging it" because hey after a few research steps I will be able to make it better anyway.

Thought to play "marathon mode", which is vanilla except research cost is multiplied by 4, but ended up going for a multiplier of 100 instead.

To give an example of what this means: Researching solar panels costs 25000 red and green science.

I found this to be an interesting challenge! I not only have to build large and optimized builds with low-tier tech. I also need to be extremely careful with managing biter evolution and pollution. Just red ammo is locked behind several thousand science packs, and I have expanded to 8 ore patches and my perimeter is just tightly packed turrets, because I have not let myself afford researching walls yet.

They were stress-bored and were fidgeting by tapping their watch so much that it accidentally triggered the emergency mode and sent me this SMS.

Alert not intended but also in some way accurate.

From the comic "Girl Genius" by Phil and Kaja Foglio

Orbital Potato is one of my favorite channels to keep up on management/factory/strategy games. He usually covers one game at a time and tons more of them than I can keep up with, so I was happy to see which ones turned out to be favorites. :)

Cataclismo I have played, and its honking brilliant, but the others are new to me.

Rogue Command and Diplomacy is Not an Option look really interesting.