Things are looking good, RefSteel! No worries on the time needed to finish; this game is in the final stages.
Some very useful tech gained, our dominance is pretty massive at this point. Actually wrapping things up will take some time if the turns are played carefully; there is a LOT going on in late game turns like these. The quick (in playing time) approach would be to just bomb out a bunch of enemy planets while ignoring bomber fleet losses, then win the next election. But after all the build up, I find it more satisfying to take the time to complete the conquest and grab all that enemy tech.
Thanks, haphazard! I've finished the turns but not the report (I'll really have to cut down on the pictures....) so I'll post what I've got for now, along with the save! The truth is, the quickest approach at this point would be to just build defenses, send space combat ships to threatened worlds where the defenses won't be up in time, and just end turn until we win the election. Bombing everything out of existence would be quick too, but honestly so is invading ... usually. The quick way in terms of playing time is just to take your time in terms of turns, taking and consolidating worlds at a reasonable pace, setting the colonies you already have to do reasonable things, and checking f8 (or f9) each turn just to be sure there's no emergency you can't handle. Buuuuuuuuut that's not what I did.
Report, part 3:
Though the advanced new weapons tech allowed yet another new Phract design, this one - the 5.3 - carrying twice as many the 5.2, there was one major problem with the Fifteenth Speaker's plan of attack: It involved invasions of developed worlds held by the Bulrathi. Sakkra could breed fast enough to overwhelm ursine ground-based tactics and physical resilience with sheer numbers, but in spite of their technological advantages, projected casualties favored the bears by nearly two to one - with even wilder possibilities in small-scale engagements like the last stand at Fierias. Sakkra materials engineers were working hard to develop combat exoskeletons for their troops that would even the odds completely, even taking Bulrathi fortifications into accounts on worlds they controlled, but in spite of heavy funding, they had estimated less than a thirty percent chance of making them production-ready by 2462, and then - having failed to do so - expected only about even odds of completing the program in time for the 2463 invasion of Nordia. Unwilling to throw tens of millions of lives away on a virtual coin flip, especially since it might mean delaying the conquest by a full year, Sakkra diplomats decided to hedge their bets.
Dynalon was willing to talk with them again, at least briefly, and though Psilon battle suit technology had barely half the effective combat utility of the armored exoskeletons the Sakkra were nearly ready to deploy themselves, their use in the field would reduce the projected invasion casualties do just under three to two - a substantial improvement for which the Fifteenth Speaker was prepared to exchange cloning technology: Immensely valuable to Sakkra who would be cloning an endless stream of invaders in the coming years, it would be of decidedly less use to Psilons with already-fully-populated worlds who, if the Sakkra had any say in the matter, would never again get a single invader to any important world.
It wouldn't be for lack of trying: Already, Psilon fleets were crossing the galaxy toward Sakkra worlds, en route to make probing attacks to look for good invasion opportunities - one of them is visible here amidst the general chaos around the center of the galaxy - but their slow-moving fleets didn't frighten the Sakkra, who were busily coordinating the development of their new worlds - Fierias included - with defenses against incoming fleets like the raft of Bulrathi transports, originally intended to reinforce their Fierias defenses, but about to arrive as a de-facto invasion force ... and all the while, the Sakkra never slowed down their own aggressive push into Bulrathi space, as their shipyards continued to assemble more offensive fleets. The Sakkra would win all four of the space battles of 2463 decisively before learning to their delight that their diplomats had wasted their time and expertise and technology.
Armored exoskeletons were immediately issued to every Sakkra marine on the eighty-four transports about to reach Nordia, while materials engineering labs started research on a new material known as "andrium" that might improve their armor's resilience even beyond that of Zortrium. Though another potential project could have cut their factory waste in half, they saw little value in increasing their effective factory efficiency by just two percentage points - from 96 to 98 percent! - and by the time a project to cut factory construction costs by almost 30% could be finished, the Sakkra people would - as far as the Fifteenth Speaker's plans at least - have long since finished building their last war-time factory. Though several of their planets still lacked a portion of their potential industrial infrastructure - in a few cases, a large fraction indeed - only Simius was still permitted to continue its own: The rest were focused on the war effort, whether through ship-building, research, or cloning. The war, begun just the year before with the heroic Bulrathi Last Stand at Fierias - heroic in spite of the Last Stand's inevitable defeat - was already heating up rapidly.
Inexplicably, in spite of spy reports indicating that they had the necessary technology, the Bulrathi appeared to have neglected to build planetary shields, with the result that the attack on Nordia was something of a cakewalk. It was at Argus, under attack the same year, with bombers less than half as numerous as the Nordia fleet's, facing time and a half as many bases, that Sakkra pilots had a real opportunity to show what they could do: First moving into direct allignment with the planet, flying right in toward it, directly toward the oncoming merculite missiles until it appeared certain they would impact without a change of course, then swerving to continue toward the planet just out of line with the missiles at the last moment, they established engagement vectors where the missiles would have to chase them instead of angling toward them from the planet's direction. After the second volley was fired, the bombers continued on the same vector, then leveled out parallel to their original vector to trick the second volley into making a wider turn and end up chasing them as well, and finally passing by both sets of missiles, swept in toward the planet; there, from low orbit, they would be able to drop two sets of bombs before the missiles could strike, and since those bombs were enough to destroy all the missile bases on the ground, and with them, all the missiles' remote guidance systems, the merculites lost tracking and were unable to hit the Phracts at all. As for the Tooth cruiser in orbit, it could safely be ignored, designed as it was by Bulrathi who obviously didn't understand starships. Its missiles were all too slow to accomplish anything, its lone heavy ion cannon couldn't hit the bombers except by sheer and rare dumb luck, firing blindly, and the Dragon in the system was more than a match for any number of Tooth cruisers the Bulrathi could build or even name.
Overestimating Bulrathi shielding had other consequences at Nordia as well, making the unnecessary battle suit purchase look even sillier than previously since by the time the mushroom clouds from over six hundred fusion bombs cleared above the craters that had been Bulrathi defensive bases, little more than half of the planet's Bulrathi population was still alive, and they had lost nearly all of their factories. Sakkra forces took the place in a walk-over, outnumbering their victims by more than three to one at the outset of the fight, but the only technological secrets they were able to claim from the decimated labs and factories that remained were plans for a horrible biological weapon known to Grunk as a "doom virus" that no Sakkra would ever consider deploying even against their most-hated enemies. Then more bad news came in: The Dragon and small assembly of Fer-de-Lances held back at Fierias to shoot down Bulrathi transports took out less than two thirds of them, leaving fifteen million to bear down on the colonists there. It was a suicide mission of course, since the Sakkra outnumbered them by more than eight to one and had both their defensive fortifications and an immense technological edge, but millions still perished because the Fifteenth Speaker failed to take the threat sufficiently seriously. That wasn't about to change either, as transports set out for Argus from all over Sakkra space and the Sakkra science budget began to focus on weapons engineering as heavily as it had on exoskeleton construction previously.
Alkari attacks on Fierias and Reticuli in 2463 and 2464 revealed the weaknesses of their fleet, which - while not quite up to Bulrathi standards of hilarity - were certainly bad enough to warrant firing all their ship designers and starting from scratch with parakeets. They did make use of their stabilizers, and in the case of the Warbird, even basic maneuverability, and because of their Alkari pilots, they wouldn't be easy to hit - though Sakkra planetary Stingers didn't need things to be easy, and would still rarely miss - but in spite of all that, and in spite of the multiple heavy blast cannons on the Condors and the Warbird's heavy fusion beam, it would do them very little good, because they couldn't hit anything! With slow five-racks of stinger missiles on the Warbirds no faster than Sakkra doom drive ships and their smallcraft missiles incapable of penetrating modern Sakkra shields, the Alkari ships encountered to that point by the Sakkra had nothing that constituted an actual threat. The Warbirds' automated repairs wouldn't do them much good against heavy firepower - or even just a large volume of fire from basically anything, since they only mounted class-2 shields - but it was still possible that the usefulness of that important technology would be revealed before long...
(The Alkari also had IIT9, but past events had already led me to suspect that 1oom doesn't let you steal, conquer, or trade for entirely-obsolete technology, in spite of the miniaturization benefit, and this has proven true.)
...since a Sakkra spy, ignoring a weapons lab in the hope of just such a coup, infiltrated Altair's main construction research facility, stole the blueprints for the system, and sent them home by secure burst transmission. In the meantime, the Sakkra fleet that had overwhelmed Nordia's defenses the previous year was taking the skies of Herculis, so that yet more transports could be dispatched from all over Sakkra space to take advantage right away. Thanks to their breeders and cloning vats on incredible gaian worlds, it didn't even slow down their research efforts, and weapons engineers were estimating nearly one chance in eight of a breakthrough by the following year.
(I thought nothing of it at the time, being unaware that the Bulrathi had just researched Pulsons, but why are the bases at their homeworld still firing mercs? And why do they still have no planetary shield? Did they just get the tech five years ago and devote almost no production to it since? At Nordia in 2463, I can understand, but at their homeworld two years later? And that doesn't explain the missiles, which should be upgraded automatically and immediately, for free! Later attacks on the Bulrathi did face Pulson bases, but still no planetary shields. Is there some kind of change in 1oom that I'm missing?)
In 2465, an entirely new attack fleet converged on the Bulrathi homeworld, with half of the fusion bombs carried by the new Phract 5.3s. The planetary bases understandably fired on these, but their pilots had the liesure to fly extremely conservatively, avoiding any risk of contact with the incoming missiles while also leading them through asteroid fields far from the planet's surface since there were enough Phract 5.2s in the system to wreck Ursa's defenses on their own if nothing was done about them - especially since the Dragon's heavy fusion beams could contribute too. Again the bases were completely destroyed without the loss of a single ship, and transports would soon start setting out to take the massive prize.
Bulrathi agents, at around the same time, were claiming their own prize from the Psilons. Very few worlds would actually bother upgrading their planetary shields to class X during the the Fifteenth Speaker's reign - just as the agent escaped the force field lab without bothering to frame anyone - but only because the Speaker had other plans for how to defend.
As revealed by this Sakkra report from later in the year, the Psilons - in spite of highly-advanced construction technology - were hardly a threat offensively. No fully-shielded world - though the Sakkra would have had to admit they as yet had few or none of these - could be penetrated by any weapon the Psilon people yet possessed. The Klackons, with their ongoing non-aggression pact, were grateful just to be permitted to go on living in their one-planet empire, and as for the other races in the galaxy ... well, the Sakkra were demonstrating their "best defense" at Argus that same year. Outnumbering the defenders by more than two to one, their soldiers easily swept the world clean, claiming all its remaining factories and all the remaining technology possessed by the Bulrathi for which the Sakkra themselves did not have an equivalent or strictly superior version already.
The tachyon beam they acquired that way might never be added to any Sakkra ship, and the same might be said of Merculite missiles - especially since, in addition to their already-superior Stingers, the same reverse-engineers had just picked up plans for the far-superior Pulson design the Bulrathi had just devised - but a circumstance could at least have been imagined when a Mark-V computer could be used in lieu of a Mark-VI just to save a very little space for more weaponry, and in any case the miniaturization offered by all of it was welcome - especially with plans in train to expand the war even further, arranging "the best defense" across ever more of the galaxy.
The above probably doesn't seem crazy. That's because it basically isn't, although a certain amount of coordination was required to make everything line up nicely. The crazy part is to come! But for now...
Notes for the next Speaker:
- I haven't sent any transports, given orders to any ships, or spent any reserves this turn. (We have a little over 2,000 in the treasury.) I would definitely do all three of those things if I were playing on!
- There are a number of ways to handle the Bulrathi fleets incoming to our worlds:
1) Any planet with a single missile base (even if it only has planetary 5 and not yet 10) is immune to everything they've got, so for those, you can ignore them.
2) Our ships are at least as fast as their missiles, so basically one Dragon or Fer-de-Lance is enough to force a Bulrathi fleet of any size to retreat if piloted carefully.
3) The Bulrathi ambassador just returned this year. It's possible that - under the circumstances - Grunk will be willing to take peace.
4) When you see the save, you'll probably notice another way to avoid any further problems with Bulrathi fleets.
- The Alkari are a broadly similar story. Technically, the Condors and Warbirds can scratch our bases if they only have Planetary 5s, but they don't have either in enough numbers to be a serious threat. It is true that the 4th option would take a little more effort with the birds than with the bears. ... A little more. But on the other hand, the necessary tools are sitting right there!
- Psilon shielding is ridiculous; you'd need a lot of bombers to destroy all their bases. A lot! Like ... even more than we already have. Which is ... well, you'll see if you open the save. On the other hand, if they don't get any better missiles in the meantime, large or huge shielded bombers could bomb them with impunity as long as we sent something to deal with their fleets. I don't reccomend this course though. If you want to win by extermination, I'm not sure if we can manage it on your turns (it would be tough...) but one thing that might help: We're researching Neutronium bombs right now. We're a little ways along already, but we could certainly speed progress more. Their fleets are probably the most dangerous too.
- It's been a lot of fun playing with you! Thanks especially for your patience with these most-recent turns!
- The save is attached.
Roster:
- DaveV (Finally UP!) (Unless you want to wait for me to finish my report tomorrow.)
- jez9999 (skipped)
- haphazard1 ("on deck," I guess ... in case DaveV decides to refuse the victory in five turns and then fails to clean the galaxy in ten or something.)
- RefSteel (just (finally) played)
More tech than we can actually put into use, lots and lots of worlds, and all kinds of options for ships (if we actually build any more at this point). Nice work, everyone. Unless something unexpected happens, the council meeting should bring victory.
The Bulrathi missile bases firing out of date missiles is odd. I have never been entirely certain how tech upgrades work with bases, and how much spending is required to get new tech applied to them. But the AIs usually (in base game) always seem to have the latest of everything within a couple turns of attaining the tech.
(April 20th, 2022, 02:45)RefSteel Wrote: Looks good, Haphazard! I'm sorry to hear the less-fun stuff has gotten busy again (same is true on my end, sadly) but I'm glad you got to play some more turns of the game!
jez9999, I'm glad you're having fun with FTL! It definitely seems like a cool game - I've never played it myself - though comparing it to MoO is definitely an apples-to-oranges thing: One will be to some people's taste, the other to other peoples', even though many people do enjoy both (like Haphazard and Sulla to name just two!) - because though the setting for each involves space combat, that's about where the similiarity ends! (And for that matter, it's possible to win a game of MoO without ever firing on an enemy ship ... if the circumstances allign that way and that serves the strategy you choose!) I'd love to read about your FTL games if you feel moved to write about them over in the Gaming Table subforum; it's been a while since we had a good FTL report over there. It sounds like you're saying strategy games like MoO aren't really your flavor, but I'm glad you gave this one a shot, even if I do feel like I/we have done an inadequate job describing how to go about choosing a strategy (it's admitedly complex because you won't play quite the same way in any two galaxies with any two different tech trees!) Contributing to that of course is the way that the first turn in a set as the game goes on can be especially daunting in a succession game unless the previous players' report gives you a much better sense for the flow of the situation than I feel we managed here Sorry about that! And of course, this being a good strategy game, there's no such thing as a comprehensive "walk-through." And, unfortunately, though an SG like this can be a great way to learn, I think it works better if the players all have time to report, discuss and comment a lot more extensively than any of us did here. (Definitely including me: My excessively-long in-character stuff doesn't count as "extensive" for learning-the-game purposes, I suspect, even though it's fun for me to write!) Thanks for playing with us in spite of these shortcomings, and for bowing out instead of trying to keep it like a chore when you found you couldn't really get into the game! I've definitely enjoyed this one, and I hope you enjoyed the parts you took part in (and the parts you read about) too!
On the part where we actually Finish This Game: I haven't checked the save yet, but I'll try to familiarize myself with the situation and post at least a pre-flight report sometime tomorrow! With jez9999 skipped, I no longer expect the game to end before we get back to DaveV, but I intend to try to ensure his is the last set of the game at least!
Hey there, just to say I've posted a couple of FTL run summaries now in this thread if you're interested in reading. I'd recommend you try it out actually, you might like it. Didn't think I'd like it as much as I did! Haven't tried their other game yet, Into The Breach, though I'm planning to when I eventually get play fatigue with FTL, lol! No offence to MOO1 but FTL has so much more of an intuitive pull factor for me for some reason, keeping me coming back for more and not feeling too overwhelming whilst still having a very good tactical learning curve.
Thanks again for your patience! Here, at last is my...
Fifteenth Speaker's Report, Conclusion:
Upon realizing that the Alkari no longer held any technological secrets that were of any particular use to the Sakkra - a marginal improvement in factory construction costs would be of very little value even if the Fifteenth Speaker hadn't created a virtual moratorium on new factories - agents in Alkari space ceased their efforts to hack into laboratory databases in favor of more-destructive activities. They could hardly expect to have much of an impact that way on Alkari production or defenses - not in the big picture at least - but that wasn't the real purpose of their activities.
The first stage in their operation was to gather reports on the population, factory count, and number of surface-to-space missile defense bases on each Alkari world - especially the latter. This information was easy to come by; any fleet just entering orbit could see it at a glance, and the Sakkra spies compiled all of it while deciding on a first target. Xudax, alone near the Central Nebula, where the Alkari had conquered it from the Psilons decades before, had already been explored by Sakkra fleets, and was well within scanner range, so Sakkra Strategic Command was already aware of its fifteen missile bases, but the rest of the report was new: Forty eight bases protected the avians' homeworld in the Altair system, but they had defended Xendalla, the red star nearest what once had been Mrrshan space, almost as heavily, with forty six. Their next-largest base count, at the blue star of Nyarl, was only thirty seven, and then it dropped off rapidly to the remaining red stars: Twenty five and twenty one respectively at their back-lines stars of Omicron and Guradas: The former lay at the galactic rim beyond Altair, and the latter in its own isolated corner of the galaxy. Of course, as we are aware from our long-range observation techniques, the Alkari had no concept of "back lines" and based their defensive spending entirely on their planets' maximum population, but in this case, it seemed to be working out for them that way. The one outlier was Talas, their nearest red star to Sakkra space: With a population of one hundred and thirty million birds, it matched Xendalla and nearly even Altair, and the colony was more than a century old, as the Sakkra were well aware - yet in all that time, its population had only managed to assemble some hundred and sixty eight factories and eleven missile bases. The Fifteenth Speaker concluded as a result that the planet must have no more mineral content than even Kulthos III, and likely even less - and with Alkari technology so limited that claiming it was no longer a priority, neither was the Talas colony.
The Speaker's priority, as it turned out, pointed in the opposite direction: At the most heavily-defended world the Alkari controlled. Destroying four missile bases barely made a dent in Altair's overall defenses - it was also the staging base for their largest fleet - but the sabotage was incidental in any case: Spies that they were, the Sakkra agents were secretly after information, beginning with a complete survey of the Alkari homeworld, completed in the course of their sabotage preparations. With this survey information in claw, the Sakkra would be able to track the planet's status via long-range scanners ... and most importantly, to plan landing sites for invading transport fleets.
At Maretta, a Bulrathi star at the edge of the Central Nebula, the Sakkra had no such luxury: They had to wait to launch their transport fleets until their fleets had actually taken control of the planet's orbit, and so - eager as they were for speed - the troops in their first assault wave had outnumbered the bears on the ground by just fifteen percent.
The result was a complete fiasco for the over-confident invaders. On paper, the result was projected as a moderately-narrow Sakkra victory, but thebattle wasfought not on paper but among the thick jungle vines of the Marettan surface, where a freak thunderstorm deluged the Sakkra landing zones with rain and lightning, shorting out electronics and creating a quagmire from which Bulrathi snipers could pick them off with impunity. By the time the battle ended, there were more Bulrathi soldiers still alive in control of the battlefield than the projected Sakkra margin of victory, and reinforcements were being dispatched from other worlds by both sides. By failing to spend the time to bring decisive numbers to the battle, the Sakkra had opened the way for am unforeseen accident to cause enormous new complexities. Their strategic command made note of this, but it wasn't enough to make them slow their offensive across the galaxy.
The Sakkra fleet hadn't slowed down, sweeping across Bulrathi space with a series of jumps, each of five parsecs or less between their target worlds, ending at Endoria on the far rim of the galaxy in 2467. By this time, the Bulrathi had figured out how to actually install Pulson missiles - but not, as has already been observed, planetary shields - at their defensive bases, and the Phract 5.3 bombers were slowly being whittled down as a result in spite of the advantage they took of asteroid fields on the way in, but they simply didn't have enough missiles to deal with the incoming fleets. The bases soon were lost, and the orbiting Tooth cruiser was helpless against the Dragon escorting the bombers in.
For sheer, direct destructive power, Sakkra spies couldn't even approach their bombers' efficacy, but that had never been their main goal in the first place, which is why they made no further effort to sabotage Altair...
...and shifted their efforts to Xendalla, the next-most-defended Alkari world, instead. The accompanying map of the galaxy hints at the complex Sakkra logistics as they coordinated multiple invasions simultaneously, with transports rushing out across space to back-fill more-forward worlds to enable them to launch larger invasions on consecutive years, while transports from many directions, launched at different times from different stars, were converging on Ursa as other transports, at other Bulrathi stars, were coming together, about to arrive, and newly-built bombers raced across the galaxy to staging stars. Incredibly, transports were also already in space, one year into a four-year journey, bound for Altair itself, soon to be joined by others, converging with them on three year journeys from slightly closer by, while still other colonies launched invasion forces on three-year journeys to newly-mapped Xendalla. And even as present wars were being prosecuted, the Sakkra were developing the means of fighting future ones as well.
Megabolt-equipped gunships would be especially effective at getting rid of agile Alkari fleets, but the Sakkra largely had control of that front already. The future to which their weapons engineers were looking forward - in spite of the power of what they passed up in pulse phasors, plasma cannons, Hercular missiles, and the comparatively-simple auto blasters - was one in which their bomber fleets could mount neutronium bombs powerful enough to blast their way through any planetary shield. And perhaps more significantly to you and me, such an advance, together with others in computer, construction, and propulsion technology, might allow for the combination of "doom drives," an advanced targeting computer, and a megabolt cannon on a fighter-class ship design: A design for a ship that in sufficient numbers would be able to destroy even our jailer-Guardian, enabling the Sakkra to own the skies over every world in the galaxy, even including our own! And as they were already demonstrating, owning the skies, for the swift-breeding Sakkra, also means swiftly coming to own the ground.
The second wave at Maretta, just one year after the first, arrived simultaneously with fleets of assault transports at Neptunus and Herculis, leaving Grunk in charge of just a three-planet empire - including numerous essentially-worthless ships and zero surviving missile bases. Seven years had passed since the Sakkra first launched transports to Fierias, setting in motion the beginning of their Bulrathi war. The war was not yet over, but it might as well have been. Of course, the Sakkra were still effortlessly fending off ill-equipped Bulrathi and Alkari fleets at the same time, though the Alkari weren't technically at war with them ... yet, at least. And other fronts were opening as well.
In 2468, a Psilon fleet reached the Escalon system on a colonial attack vector. It was the first time the Fifteenth Speaker had ever faced a Psilon fleet, and Escalon had finished a class-X planetary shield just in time to meet them. It turned out not to be needed. Slow, powerful, and with execrable targeting, the Coraona cruisers represented a serious threat to precisely nothing, and the colony ships weren't really cut out for combat, so the entire fleet retreated immediately. Any concerns the Sakkra had about Psilon fleets would be centered on the uncertainty of their other ship designs, which might conceivably carry heavy fusion beams and better targeting computers ... in which case the new planetary shields might be needed to render Sakkra planets completely immune to them, instead of being an extra luxury. At the same time, apparently in an attempt to imitate Sakkra activities in Alkari space, one of their rivals - most likely the remnants of the Bulrathi - had smuggled saboteurs to a Sakkra world. They chose the wrong planet and the wrong activity if they wanted to make any meaningful difference, but there wasn't really a right choice for the purpose by then. The twelve factories a secret agent blew up at the Misha colony wouldn't be rebuilt during the Fifteenth Speaker's term, and wouldn't be missed.
In the same year, the galactic map revealed the chaos of starships and transports crossing space in all directions to accomplish the OSG-37's changing goals. Three years previously, the plan had been to eliminate Altair's defenses, and perhaps another Alkari world's as well, with ships in place to move on from there, at the same time that Xudax was taken. The agents sent to sabotage Alkari worlds had been an afterthought, merely in the hope that they might luck into an opportunity to do more than take Altair's skies. When that hope played out the following year, Sakkra plans and priorities shifted dramatically, and the Fifteenth Speaker spent virtually the entire year modifying and confirming plans, arranging for the invasion of Altair to happen simultaneously with the arrival of the fleet. When the spies scouted Xendalla the following year, everything was thrown into chaos again as the Speaker tried to adjust the empire's plans on the fly to enable two attack fleets and two invasions to strike at the Alkari core simultaneously.
Then, in 2468, just before someone uselessly blew up a few Misha factories, another zealous Sakkra agent in Alkari space managed to scout out the third-best-defended Alkari world, blowing up two of its missile bases in the process. Arranging yet another invasion in the two remaining years of the Fifteenth Speaker's term would surely be impossible with so many ships and transports already spoken for ..... but the Laan's shipyards, fed by its incalculable mineral riches, was within one year's Impulse jump of Nyarl, and hundreds of the new Phract 5.4 bombers, with still-more-advanced battle computers than any previous version, had reached the waypoint of Crypto, just a two-year jump away, en route to join the attack on Altair ... and many ships planned for Xendalla could still be redirected to Altair instead, and the Selia shipyard, as rich in minerals as Laan, had just finally finished its factories, and could get a replacement fleet to Xendalla in time by way of Rana, and transports could ... and backfilled from, and ... another year was filled with rearranging and replanning, changing everything around again for the third year in a row to take advantage of new opportunities.
Of course, the Speaker wasn't the only Sakkra having a busy year. Just for instance, there were the hundred and forty two million who arrived at the Bulrathi homeworld to take over. From their landing site, the most obvious Sakkra line of attack led over a high mountain pass, and the Sakkra generals, not being Bulrathi, were perfectly happy with the obvious course. Bulrathi generals on the other hand anticipated the action perfectly, and arranged a devastating ambush from the mountain shoulders that would have resulted in equal casualties on both sides in spite of the Sakkra combat exoskeletons, with their superior shielding, that let them practically just wade through enemy fire. In our projected outcome, less than a third of the Sakkra invaders would be left alive by the time the planet was conquered completely.
It never happened. Just as the Sakkra transports were landing, before they approached the mountain pass, while the Bulrathi were dug in, waiting, all over the shoulders of the peaks, an enormous earthquake was followed by rockslides and avalanches that crushed the Bulrathi mountaineers almost to the last bear. By a stroke of luck as wild as the one that had preserved Marretta in Bulrathi claws for an extra year, the Bulrathi were defeated almost before the battle began, and more than half of the Sakkra invaders survived to claim the world. As the Sakkra Imperial Army Chief of Staff remarked about the two battles, "Sometimes you get all the luck - and sometimes, the luck gets you."
The Sakkra were leaving as little to luck as they could though - while still stretching their resources to the breaking point just to squeeze a little extra time out of their plans to complete everything during the Fifteenth Speaker's term and leave the Sixteenth with a more-or-less clean slate. The ninety million troops bound for Endoria, for instance, were about to be joined by some forty-five million more sent directly from Simius, nearby, all of them due to arrive simultaneously in 2470. The Sakkra had so many targets at the time that a glance at the map still appeared to show chaos, but actually it was being resolved, finally: If one could only see it, the transports in space were all either back-filling worlds that had contributed large numbers of troops to the wars, or converging on the sites of all the upcoming invasions - and the same was true, with the exception of the few Dragons and Fer-de-Lances staying back to protect defenseless, newly-conquered worlds from enemy attack ships, of the entire, enormous Sakkra combat fleet.
All the left-behind space superiority ships were spread a little thin, what with all the newly-acquired colonies, and the Bulrathi had sent reinforcements to Marretta back when a portion of its population had lucked into surviving the first wave of the Sakkra invasion. The Sakkra had reinforced faster though, and did have a fleet in orbit to shoot down nearly all the Bulrathi transports. The five that got through couldn't make any headway against the hundred million Sakkra then controlling the colony. As for the main attack though?
A glance at central Alkari space and its surroundings at the time made clear what had been taking all the Fifteenth Speaker's time. One of the transport fleets visible on this screen was bound to back-fill Fierias, which was about to send enormous numbers of transports of its own to Altair. All the rest, including all the Sakkra fleets, together with more of both approaching Nyarl from beyond the left side of the screen, and including all seven hundred plus Phract 5.4s just completed in 2469 alone, were all, without exception, bound for Altair, Xendalla, or Nyarl. Only one of them: A single Dragon dreadnought that couldn't arrive in time for the attack, would arrive after 2470, and it would still reach Nyarl in time to protect it the following year, once - if all went as their Speaker planned - the Sakkra had the colony in their teeth.
Xudax, near the nebula, turned out not to be actually in it, so the Sakkra were glad they hadn't planned for shieldless bases there. More than fifty bombers of different designs were lost, but they had more than enough ships on hand to wipe out the planetary bases. The same was true at Nyarl. Then, at Altair...
...the main Sakkra attack fleet met the main Alkari defenders. The latter, sadly for their people, had fewer ships, all of them badly designed, and missile bases that couldn't stand up to literally twelve hundred fusion bombers, most of them carrying two bomb racks apiece. Xendalla, with nothing to defend it but its bases and a few small missile boats, was an afterthought, though most of the Alkari fleet at Altair did live long enough to retreat ... by doing so very quickly.
Then the transports arrived at Xudax, claiming the entire Central Nebula for lizard kind. Then at Endoria, reducing the Bulrathi to a one-planet empire at Gienah, their smallest, weakest colony, its defenses already bombed out. The Sakkra could actually have conquered it too the same year, but the Fifteenth Speaker had mercy on the bears and refused to commit genocide ... or at least to leave the question of whether to do so up to the next Speaker!
And then Nyarl. And then Altair. Xendalla fell, and the Sakkra had conquered five stars in a single year, for an even dozen in the ten years of the Fifteenth Speaker's reign.
Also, they recovered some new industrial technology from Xudax, about which they didn't bother pretending to care. Also on the list of things they didn't care about was Ariel's inevitable and frankly redundant declaration of war.
The Sakkra now have the most powerful starfleet in the galaxy by any measure - and by far the most powerful if judged by quality.
In case that's not enough to accomplish what they need, they can build more and better ships faster than anyone else in the galaxy. All that remains to be seen is whether they will choose to win a diplomatic election and come to free us of our long imprisonment that way, whether they will choose to exerminate every other living creature in the galaxy ... or whether they will choose to research and build a fleet capable of beating the Guardian itself and conquering us directly. I wouldn't put it past them now to accomplish some wild combination of the three. After all, at this point, in addition to that starfleet and the capacity to build still more...
They have, for all intents and purposes, the whole of the galaxy. May they use their power over it more wisely than did we.
One more note to the next Speaker that I forgot: There's a Dragon about to reach Nyarl next turn, so it isn't as undefended as it looks (not that it's under threat that I can remember either).
- DaveV (UP to finish this!)
- jez9999 (skipped)
- haphazard1 ("on deck," I guess ... in case DaveV decides to refuse the victory in five turns and then needs more than another five to finish off the Psilons.)
- RefSteel (just (finally) played)
Looks like great turns, RefSteel! Managing all the various fleets and transports and back-filling worlds and protecting newly taken worlds and such is very time-consuming at these late game stages. I am thinking that the galactic map was very, very busy with ships going everywhere during the inter-turns.
Sorry, it's been a busier week than expected. I'll make time this weekend to play; I don't want to just click "Next Turn" five times to win the election after Ref spent all that effort setting up attacks.
(April 28th, 2022, 05:47)DaveV Wrote: Sorry, it's been a busier week than expected. I'll make time this weekend to play; I don't want to just click "Next Turn" five times to win the election after Ref spent all that effort setting up attacks.
No worries - after that last set, I'm the last person who could complain about delays; it seems like our real life situations have gotten even more complicated lately than what I was doing on my turns in the game! Besides, as haphazard says, it's not like we're waiting eagerly for our next turns to come around since the only way we don't win during your set is if you intentionally decide not to. I tried to set things up so you'd have a lot of options during your turns (though as I mentioned, I don't know if it's possible to win by extermination in just ten) - to do as much or as little as you like and whatever you'll most enjoy with the end of the game. I'll look forward to seeing what you decide to do!
No worries on the time needed to finish; this game is in the final stages.
