Part 58: Silence

Silence

No major changes occurred between the start of the last update and this one in the balance of power. With one of the Meklar planets captured, I was no longer working on breeding Klackons. We have enough of those - I'll want a number of Meklar incubators set up as soon as we start getting some of them assimilated. The main timing issue here was simply that we didn't have any developed systems close enough - other than Arkab of course - to get transports to Meklon in a timely fashion. I couldn't really get it any help, so I just had to wait, one per turn.




We're get kicked out of pretty much everywhere by the Gnolams still, but they've left our outpost alone for whatever reason and we managed to reach Pegasus here. That's a space dragon defending the system, but there is a good planet here. Yet more natives. So we'll want to grab that eventually, but our combat fleet is of course otherwhise occupied at the moment.




We lost one of our Scorpions in the process, but after the Meklar built another Starbase we knocked it down and managed to seize the final enemy battleship.




Yeah, we'll take that. Ship survivability is now doubled from our current Tritanium. Also, our captured Meklar on the other planet are no longer blockaded, and our ground troops should fare better.




Traversing the galaxy is no longer quite as painful.




Continuing to knock out cheap projects.




The Meklar keep building Starbases every year, and Auto leads to me losing ships when I shouldn't so I get to fight them manually. In any case, this should make Guava happy.

SD 3520.6

The Gnolams struck at Arkab ...

Arkab Battle (1:45)


They didn't attack our fortified planet, but after noting they had no shields and very limited defenses, I decided to see what damage we could do to their fleet. I then thought better of it, noting their beam defense was making it very difficult to hit them. We lose another planet, and one that was starting to get built up.

After some pondering, I make a deal with the Alkari; Autolab for their Battle Scanners. That'll give us another +50 to our beam attack, which we need to go toe-to-toe with these jerks. To make that work, I had to take a couple of each size mass drivers off our current designs, but I still think it's a good trade-off. Can we get the new ones out before the Gnolams rampage further?

A couple of points are clear here. One, I made a greedyish miscalculation in trying to eliminate the Meklar first. The other is, we're going to trade for a better battle computer as soon as one becomes available or we're going to be in a world of hurt. All attempts at making peace with the Gnolams have been rebuffed, which makes sense; right now they are kicking our arse.




Logical, as it was without defenses. And now one of our sources of labor is also history. That's a lot more valuable than the territory.




I stay in construction for the time being, but right now research efforts are being suspended in order to throw whatever we have to into the military to combat the Gnolam threat.




They finally split up the fleet, having seemingly run out of places to attack. I saw a potential opportunity to hit them back at Malec, and seized it.

Malec Battle (2:12)


They took the bait ... for a bit. One destroyer was more than I was hoping for there. And now, thanks to GNN's latest pronouncement, we're stuck here. This is one of the events that I think is just plain dumb.




At some point I'm going to want to plow my way up to the Plasma Cannon, but right now I'm still doing a broad-based increase.




The galactic map announces in a blinking ... whatever ... in the upper-right that we have a hyperspace flux. With both sides having a fleet stuck in Malec, I decide to attack again. The other planet is more fortified, enough to handle our attackers I'm sure, but we can keep building more ships while the flux is on and hopefully eliminate some of theirs.

Malec Battle 2 (4:22)


That was useful. Two facts are clear; we now have the upper hand against the Gnolams in ship-to-ship exchanges. Also, our weaponry against their interceptors/missiles is hideously lacking. These two facts seem to argue in favor of slapping as many standard-mount mass drivers as possible on our designs. Another fun fact; all of our retreating ships were destroyed, presumably by the hyperspace flux.




Our latest upgrade, the Scorpion M3. It focuses entirely on standard auto-firing mounts to hopefully give us increased anti-small crap lethality. A few bombs just in case we do well enough to eventually attack planetary fortifications, and the Reinforced Hull was swapped out for the somewhat smaller ECM Jammer. Won't help against strike craft obviously, but since enemy beam weapons aren't hitting us much that seemed a more effective use of the space.

Unfortunately two of our four ships are in Ecu, which has only one tiny planet. So they are stuck, but Arkab gets back to work refitting the other pair and will then pump out more, so we are ready when the galactic hissy-fit ends. Elsewhere, the few planets - even rich ones - that don't have something else that needs building switch to research efforts.




Jump Gate is up next after this. I'm wondering just now if that allows travel with the flux in place? I'm guessing no.




This'll be good in the future. For now, our movement ability has increased from 'none' to 'still none'.

SD 3521.6 - I notice that almost all Gnolam warships have disappeared; they have a couple battleships on the opposite side of the galaxy that we can see and that's it. So I invest in getting more transports up, to finish off the Meklar as soon as the galaxy stops doing it's Gandalf imitation.

The unaffected Trilarians and Alkari can go suck an egg, by the way.




In this state of mutual paralysis, the council convenes once more. We get the Trilarians (7 votes), Dolgran gets the Meklar (2 votes) and their own seven. We have 18, still a veto bloc even after all the systems we lost. Spose I should be getting some colony ships ready as well. Anyway, we vote Dolgran and try for peace. Didn't even move the needle.




We're only two techs away from the Point-And-Eradicate Device. Might as well.

SD 3522.2 - Gnolam spy steals Ground Batteries. Perhaps. Either way, that kind of sucks. I decide to throw a few more spies up just for fun. Oh, and a dozen turns of this crap. The Meklar built a ship and destroyed Meklon III again. NOthing we could do about. Alkari attacked them, good thing they only brought a single battleship b/c we couldn't do anything about that either.

This is so stupid.




Go fly a kite. Then Multi-Phased Shields came in, allowing us to increase the strength of all the shields we don't have by 50%. Quick now, what's 150% of absolutely nothing on ships that can't go anywhere anyway? Also ...

"Darlok spy steals Assault Shuttles".




Looks quality.




See ya Sparky. You sat there on your arse well during your time here, but you've been surpassed.




Now to redesign our ships again. Of course, an entire generation of Klackons has now been born and raised in an age where hyperspace is offlimits. Some are even saying investing in ships at all is a worthless boondoggle, and questioning whether FTL travel itself is just an elaborate myth.

The entire galaxy is asking one question: when do we get to start moving around and slaughtering each other again. So far, there is no answer in sight.