Part 3: Session 2: The Birth of Cupid

Colonial Support Initiative
The first planet which is found to be Class 7 or above will be colonized, and after a scout is built, a second colony ship will be built (and hurried if a second Class 7+ is found). The first colony will be named "Cupid", and the second "Bacchus."

Colonial Development Commission
The first building any and all colonies will build will be a factory.

Infrastructure Development Commission
The miner, to be named "Red Dwarf," will begin mining the Sol asteroid belt.

Trade and Loan Commission
Taxes will be set to 25%, spending to 60%, and between 2-5 bc/turn will be spent on training espionage agents.

Xeno Relations Board
We will not declare war upon first contact with an alien species.

Lewis and Clark Commission
A scout ship will be purchased as soon as possible.

Defense Commission
Our first combat-ready ship will be named the "TAS Alexander."

Scientific Grant Board
We will not declare war upon first contact with an alien species.


…I still don't think you should have acted without a mandate.


I ain't gonna wait on the side while these dicklickers can't figure out which way to go. And you know damn well I made the right call; even Miriam agrees with me, and she's a gigantic bitch!


I'm right here, you know.


How could I miss that? You sound like a pod of angry dolphins, and that's just your thighs slappin' together!


If we could please move on and give our reports to the other senators? Thank you.



My first act was to rename our mining vessel to "Red Dwarf," as recommended.



It was then sent to the Asteroid Belt, where it began setting up mining operations. As we speak, it is currently on the third such base, and it should be finished before we meet again for the third quarter. We will need to direct it elsewhere this session, and there are several fields it may travel to next, as I'm sure my colleague Svensgaard will explain.



That means I'm up, right? So the first thing we did was buy a scout ship, which was pretty damn cheap if I say so myself.



Then since I wasn't up for sticking my thumb up my ass for the next three months while you nutmunchers argued on which way to go, I did the smart thing and sent the Nautilus up and right to scout out all those stars. And what do you think happened? Our nearest neighbor, named Heinlein, turns out to have a life-bearing planet orbiting it. Hell fucking yeah.


Since the planet was above the minimum set by the senate, I directed our seed ship to colonize the planet immediately. It is smaller than earth, with around .8G, and there is even less land cover than on Earth. However, its moon is also able to support some minor industrial expansion.




For the first time, humanity may bask in the glory given by God to a different planet.



As the senate mandated, a traditional factory was ordered to begin construction immediately, and it should be done some time in the next quarter. Other spots surveyed seem to be excellent locations for research (the mountain symbol), influence (the broken column), and approval rating (the water drop). While we have research labs for research and entertainment networks for approval ratings, we will have to wait for Zakharov's Universal Translators to finish before we will have something suitable for the influence location. I recommend that we set the building queue to be filled immediately. We can always demolish or remove queued buildings later if that proves necessary.

You may also note that I have ordered Cupid to focus its production on social structures for the time being. This moved one unit from the military column (which isn't used since Cupid has no starport). The Development Commission can choose which area to focus on (if any), of course, but I will always do this with starting colonies unless otherwise ordered.



Right, with that settled, it's back to me. So the first thing I do with the new scout, naturally, is to send it down and left, to check out those isolated stars along the galactic rim.



Wasn't much there, sad enough, but we'll keep lookin' all the same. Hell, for that matter, we could do an awful lot more lookin' if someone were to commission a few more scouts. You know they're certainly cheap enough, plus if we got a version with less basic support, they'd be even cheaper. The standard model comes with two supports and two sensor modules, but we could deal with even less, right?

[side note: we've already explored most of the stars in a zero-support ship's range.]



Meanwhile, the Nautilus has been explorin' up a storm to the up-right! Just right a' Heinlein, we found another giant asteroid field, just waitin' for a decent miner to come on by.



Unfortunately, Vega was mostly a dud beyond that.



Bellatrix had another decent-sized asteroid field, but no usable planets.



However, the Nautilus located an anomaly just outside the system, so I ordered them in to investigate. No sense letting that survey set they got go to waste, right?



I mean, it's like a certain kind of achievement that we've even been able to get out here and find them!



And we made off with some decent shit!



So after that, the Nautilus found itself nearing the Hoth system. And whaddya know, an Earth-class planet right there for the taking! I marked Earth as green on the minimap so you know which way we're goin'.



Per the senate's orders, I ordered the immediate completion of the colony ship we were working on at the time. The ship is still underway for Hoth I, soon to be called Bacchus, and should arrive some weeks from now. Until then, I have allowed an additional colony ship to continue construction on Earth, and it is currently around a sixth finished.



The ship is, quite naturally, carrying the maximum possible population.



Oh yeah, and it gets even better. See, there's another life-bearing planet orbiting Hoth, and it looks to be even better than the first! Only problem is, all the good stuff is underwater, and we ain't got near enough experience with dropping living pods down into the drink.



So what else? Oh yeah, Weber was a complete dud.



Nautilus found another decent planet around Kryo, but it's so damn big we wouldn't be able to live there normally.



Slepur was a real find, though! A Class 8 with a moon, plus another Class 10! Too bad the second one uses carbon dioxide and methane where a decent atmosphere oughta be.



We haven't finished surveying Bullwinkle yet, but I highly suspect that there'll be another high-value toxic planet there, just waitin' for us to figure out how to get at it.



And that's my report! We got one decent planet plus Mars to colonize in the immediate future, while two toxics, one high-gravity, and one oceanic planet are just sittin' laughin' in our faces.



Oh, right, plus we found this one freaky substance in the Kuiper belt around Slepur. I ain't sure what it was, but the Nautilus' crew says it made them happy as clams. I'm sure Yang could tell you more.


Indeed. This substance appears to be significantly rare, and seems to produce feelings of happiness and wellbeing in most test subjects, with few unmanageable side effects. If we send a constructor to this site to build a mining starbase, we will be able to distribute this substance to our entire population, wherever they may be.



Perhaps I should give my report now. At the start of the quarter, things were looking up very significantly. Taxes went down, spending went down, espionage was up, and we were still running a big surplus.



However, even with the increase in budget our Earth backers have given us, along with the actual taxes some Cupidians are starting to pay, maintaining our colony and building as much as possible has driven us into a deficit. With our standing balance, that should not be a problem for some time, but as we build more structures on Earth and Cupid, maintenance will go up.

Now, the easy solution would be to raise taxes, but as you all know, I am not a very big fan of such an action. Fortunately, we have alternatives. If we focused on military or social spending without building anything, ships or improvements, then the money they use would be refunded to the treasury. Something the Trade and Loan can do themselves is to reduce spending further.


We should not resort to that. Our backers are willing to pay a much higher rate than we currently demand.


But why should they? We will get more backers and more citizens if we entice them with low tax rates. We'll just have to deal with building less for the time being.





On that…note…it is time to discuss our latest findings. First, the nearly limitless power and portability of the hyperfusion engines has given us enough to spare to influence gravitons and simulate a near-Earth gravity field. This allows us to go into space without dealing with the critical loss of muscle and bone density or the problems inherent in bulky, spinning centrifuge designs.



Meanwhile, some sociologists have been considering the problem of dealing with sophonts with an entirely different evolutionary background. So far, they've managed to produce a few pamphlets which have been handed around to diplomats and ship pilots.



I should also express my gratitude to the United States, whose new Innovation Complex has greatly helped our research endeavors.



While they've been doing that, real scientists have been working on adapting our Universal Translator technology to hypothetical alien ways of communicating. They work perfectly well on human languages, as you all know, but we have to plan ahead for extremely high or low sound registers, as well as alternate frequency bands like radio or light wave communication. We should have the new software online in just over a month.

Looking further ahead, there's nothing that will take a short amount of time, thanks to Trade and Loan's budget cuts. Still, I feel I must advocate for Planetary Improvements. With that in hand, not only will we have access to further research and development buildings, but we may also look into Improved Colonization, which will eventually allow us to utilize all those very good planets we saw earlier. It may be costly and time-consuming to devote ourselves to this sort of project, even to the better part of a year or two, but I'm certain additional colonies will only pay additional dividends in the long run.


Now that's the first thing you've said that makes sense.


Ho-ly shit! You guys all saw that, right? Someone had better call Satan quick, because it looks like he's gonna need some heated blankets right about now!



I suppose I should speak about the current espionage efforts, since I have little else to do for the time being. We are a little over halfway done in training our first interstellar agent, along with the extensive backup he will need to perform such a mission.

And while we have not seen any alien races yet, I have a really good feeling that we will meet some very soon, perhaps even ones with friendly faces. They may even have technologies we do not, like Interstellar Warfare and New Propulsion Techniques. And so I feel that the Xeno Relations Board would be well served to authorize what, if anything, we will be willing to give in trade. Money is always an option, since the use of energy (which credits represent) is universal in space-faring races. We might also give away our own technologies which the aliens would not have, such as the Universal Translators themselves.


Arright, was that everyone?


Just a second. I would like to give one final status report on our planets.



First, Cupid is in much the same state as when we left them. The population of Stellar citizens has risen by 70 million people (most of the rest are still citizens of their former home countries, and do not pay us taxes). The factory is moving right along, and will be finished before we meet again.



The effective population of Earth has moved up as well, by 750 million. They, too, are working on a factory at the moment.


That's the end of it, then. So get to it, ya traipsin' tunas!



Some notes:

• Ordering a single planet's buildings, including which ones to hurry or build outright, counts as a single proposition. You can also order no buildings built to go along with Morgan's idea.
  
• Bear in mind that the class of a planet equals the number of buildings that can exist there. Also, the colonial capital counts as one building.
  
• For diplomatic trades, the game automatically gets you the best deal possible, at least with paying out money. Since we're the humans, it'll always be ridiculously cheap, so all I need from you is authorization on whether to spend money, tech, or both on getting a good deal from our…hypothetical trading partners.