Part 122: Episode X: 2800 - 2825

Episode X: 2800-2825




It's been half a millenium. Five centuries. And finally matters are drawing to a close. I hope.




Here's something new. MAX means that we can't research anything more in Construction. 99 is the highest level you can get. The other five fields can still offer cost reductions. It's quite slow at this level, most of the Advanced research things we've gotten were just stolen.

Six Silicoid systems remain, and they know we are coming for them soon.




2801. Maretta is taken and the Alkari finally eliminated. We lost nobody in the attack. I think we had about at 150% chance of winning each mini-battle or something, their tech was pathetic as you'd expect. Sidelined for a few centuries, their story finally ends.

Bulrathi relations are down to neutral, but they'll change their tune as we continue to press our Silicoid attack.




2805. Granid holds only three systems. One is a radiated world recently colonized, another an unimpressive Toxic where most of the fleet is for some reason. Those are the two blue stars to the left and slightly below this. So it's time to go for the jugular at Cryslon.


https://youtu.be/8J1KlAM3KVw



The new Dragons aren't as fast as I would like, due to no Inertial Stabilizer/Nullifier. That doesn't matter a ton, but it does make them somewhat vulnerable. Either way, they had almost no ships at their homeworld which made this easy.

I had intended to show the ground takeover of Cryslon as an example of an epic ground battle. It wasn't though, much of the population had been killed or shipped out. I had other invasions with close to 200M defenders during this war. But still, it's a capital/homeworld, so here it is:


https://youtu.be/bvI-s69QmIo



The next year we took Ryoun, the only available for capture. I may let the Silicoids keep Darrian, or I may destroy it, but in any case that's the best we can do in terms of territory without more genocide or attacking the Bulrathi. 20 planets for them, 40 for us. Almost two decades to max them out which should be plenty of time.

It's going to be close, so I decide to pull out all the stops. That means letting the Silicods live(the Council disbands if there are only two empires left) and taking out Misha, the final Mrrshan world. That small bit of population may be all that matters. I'll probably also design an intentionally weak ship to bomb the Silicoids, just to keep the population of Darrian, their last colony, down.




Misha falls in 2809. 16 years of joyful micromanagement to squeeze every last ounce out of our 40 systems, and have the fleet prepared to go to war if that's not enough. We give the absurdly obsolete Cloning and Industrial Tech 7 to the Bulrathi to ensure they don't even think about cancelling our Alliance.

My impression is that we are going to come up just short.

2809 Census: I miscounted the first time: we have 41 systems, not 40. Well that's something. 26 are at full capacity, 15 are still growing to some extent. We clearly don't have enough people now: the total is 8.117 billion Sakkra. Many of the planets that are short were fully-developed or close to it; they simply had to transfer out troops for the conquests. That's over now, and it's time to see how big we can get.




Well, this sucks. I thought our fleet was deployed well enough to make us invulnerable, and we destroyed most of the attacking Silicoid ships. But not all of them. We've got plenty of firepower, just not enough to concentrate it everywhere. Going to be tough to get Cryslon resettled and back up to maximum population in a decade. Only a handful of systems remain to get their shields up and this was one of them, being one of the most recent conquests.

Piffle.

2815 Census: 10 years to the vote. In the past six years we're now up to 31 maxed-out planets(five more finished), but the loss of Cryslon which should be resettled next year puts a big damper on that. Total population is 8.712 billion, still a 7.3% increase however. Tick-tock ...

2820 Census: 34 of 41 planets done(+3) with five years to go. The rest are close, including Cryslon. Total population is now at 9.032 billion, another 3.7% increase over the past five years.




That is so close. Again I think we come up just a hair short, probably a single vote, but it's close. Assuming the Bulrathi don't start anything over the last few years, the goal is to invest in ecology for cloning purposes starting two years beforehand, and make sure we get all the way to our max. Then the year before I'll bribe the crap out of the Silicoids to get them to cast their one vote our way hopefully. We can only add another 43 million citizens, which less than half a percent more than we already have. We'll do that, but it's going to basically not matter.




GRRRRR. 2823. No spying problems for decades. Sigh. Everyone else is maxed aside from Cryslon(268 out of 270). So I can still do this. Need to transport enough to Nyarl the first year to take it back, and spread out the commitment enough to clone my way back to full population in the year afterwards.

\


Naturally, out of the 41 systems, this is literally the hardest one to do that at because of the nebula. Only the stargates save me. Don't ask me why the stargates still operate on a planet with a rebellion, but they do. Although i suppose it could be worse. If this happened a year later there'd be no chance to re-max.




What the heck. I sent 150M. Should have won 45% of the battles. 97M defenders. That means the estimated amount needed is 118M. What crap luck. And now I'm basically screwed. So ... I don't know if this will work, but I'm going to send 5M from every planet and then do a bit of eco on each one to ensure they re-max. Bloody micromanagement hell just because of what I think was just a stupid random event at the wrong stinking time.

Of course some of the troops will die of exposure, but this is the last year before the vote. I can't afford to have mistakes, and I need a bunch of them to survive to max out Nyarl as well, so ... good luck. Last few dozen(million) to get to the airlock, die!

And not to forget, a few tech bribes get me a peace deal with the Silicoids. Watch it not matter one damn bit. Naturally the second wave of troops eliminated the rebels at a 2:1 rate. Because of course they did. I didn't need them to. Argh. The last 15 years or so worth of effort came down to one thing: Smurch's vote total ...




Let it be known in the year 2825, it was decided that nothing was decided yet. By a single stinking vote. 93-48 is the distribution, 91 for us, 48 for the Bulrathi, 2 from Granid who voted in our favor. We've got to fight the bastards anyway.

THIS.WILL.NOT.END.

There's nothing else for it though. It's time for Sauron and Smurch to throw down.

** Note: I'd already decided that I wasn't going to take the victory even if it presented itself. But you just knew I had to fail by a single vote. There's some obscene late-game stuff I want to show.

The next few updates will change format a bit, because I'm going to end this game in a special way.