Part 41: Episode IV: 2425 - 2449

I think you and others are unfortunately going to be disappointed after my last play session.

Episode IV: 2425-2449

As noted, if the High Council votes against you and you reject the ruling, the resulting state of things is known as Final War. The New Republic and the Silicioids will be in a state of war until one side or the other is destroyed.




Note the technology bars here. In Final War the New Republic empires share technology with each other. So they are all ridiculously advanced now compared to us. There is a bit of 'grace period' here; they will need to build ships with the new toys and it'll be a while before we see them. But the gap is big enough that obviously we are in serious trouble.




Everyone hates us and will continue to hate us. There is no possibility of peace -- the Audience button is even disabled. I've upped internal security to help combat any sabotage efforts that are almost certain to come our way. Keeping just a bit of spying effort on the Sakkra so we can see what they've researched if need be. Right now that's kind of pointless.




Realistically speaking, we have almost no chance of surviving this. Winning a Final War is not impossible, but when the galaxy unites against you the odds aren't good. When they were more advanced to begin with, they're worse.

The only possible chance I see here is to fortify the borders and hold out until we get enough tech in to make a play for Orion. I'm going to up the normal number of missile bases I'd have by about half, while steamrolling research as much as possible. Building combat ships is absolutely pointless with this kind of tech deficit. Our pathetic state of missile research makes things even more dire, and there isn't a single possible advance in the next tier of Weapons, so we need at least [b]two[b] before improving. If we can't accomplish that before they start aggressively attacking, it's going to get very bad, very quickly.

Current standard of Hyper-V Rockets is a TL-4 advance. We missed out on Hyper-X(TL8), Scatter Pack V(11), Merculite Missiles(14), and Stinger Missiles(18). Four in a row. Two tiers from now, there are two possibilities: Scatter Pack VII and Pulson. Any substantial defense from our bases depends on getting one of those. Without them, I think our chances drop from small to absolute nil.




Accordingly, I've shifted tech efforts to make Weapons a much more significant priority. Our current level there is TL-13, and the advances I'm talking about are upper-20s. It really is quite a desperate situation. Meanwhile at present the overhead for bases is 8% -- that's going to go up considerably, and we'll have a period where research will suffer. There is little choice in the matter. If our bases don't scare them away, we might as well raise the white flag of surrender immediately.

The very next year, the Psilons took over Gienah, our just-founded colony. This was no surprise, but I thought they might wait a bit. 24 planets left. We're going to lose more, you can mark it down. Our colony ships are pointless, so those got scrapped as well. That's a measly 25 BC a year saved, or less than 1% of our annual production. But every little bit ...

I also start pumping reserve spending into our artifact system at Quayal. Sooner we can get bases built up there and back on research, better off we'll be. I also funnel funds similarly into Volantis, the largest of our border systems. Can't overfund everyone, as the reserve would quickly be drained in that event.




2427, another year later. Let the games begin. In 2430, they blow up another 15 on Whynil, one of the poor nebula planets. I honestly could almost care less about that. They haven't attacked further, even though one colony(Drakka) has no defenses yet. We also just got in Class IV Deflector shields, with an upgrade to V the only further option. That'll help our bases a bit, but they really need the planetary shields that we still don't have. And Volantis also switched over to research, up to it's current allotment of 19 bases. It was a busy year.

Within a couple of years, other systems started switching back from base construction to research.




Yeah, we get the point. We're just going to rebuild them anyway. Probably costs them more to do the spying here, but right now it's just an annoyance more than anything. Also a bug here; keeps listing planetary pop as 20M max on these reports, even though it's bigger than that. Dunno why, and it only happens some of the time.

Another action-packed year as ECM Jammer V(yawn) and Automated Repair(also irrelevant atm) come in.




Finally improved Robotics! This would more than double productivity for us. An obvious big priority. On the Construction front, Zortrium Armor was the only choice. By 2434, Quayal and most other worlds were back into the tech business full-time. The cost of our bases was up to over 13% though, so that was taking more of a bite out of the economy.

The year is 2437, and after what's mostly been a decade-plus of cold war, we get our first attack against an established world.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aejM-PmMVU0


122 strike craft with ion cannons. Their shields proved of little use in this case. If we still had nuclear missiles, they would have done better ... but they were slow enough that we could pick them off easily, and they didn't have the firepower to get through our shielding anyway. Thank you for letting us clear out some stone-age ships for you.

And screw you lizards for that bit at the end. Mobas only had 9 bases to start, so 6 is most of them ... and on a poor planet it'll take a good while to rebuild them. That's one of our better research worlds. Jerks.

Also, our newest colony Drakka is starting to build it's first missile base, so it won't be defenseless unless they hit it soon.

Two years later, and the Klackons were back with another 72 Sabres. The result was identical. They'd literally have been better off scrapping them.




Another couple of cycles and it's 2441. Two long-awaited advances come in late in the prototype phase: +30M Terraforming and the Graviton Beam. These are both important for different reasons. Terraforming will obviously give our economy a boost. The other just moves forward the Weapons tree.

Here we'll go for the Antidote, not because I particularly want it, but it is cheaper. On the weapons side, we had two options and the Omega-V bomb was slightly cheaper than a torpedo offering.

We've got a number of crappy planets in the 20-30M range. When this is done they'll eventually grow to 40-50M, doubling or close to it. They're about to become considerably less inadequate, and our size will matter a little more. Just because I can, I ran the numbers and this will bump our imperial population maximum to just over 1.9 billion, an increase of almost exactly a third over the current level.

The bugs eventually returned to Reticuli ... but they were a little more serious about things this time.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCUGMbODj1M



Well, that was a little depressing. They soon bombed the colony into dust, but we did at least get a first stolen tech from them. Pretty clear they are going to roll us up though unless we can get improved shields or missiles, or both. We've got Robotics V coming before long, but now we can expand the economy with IV right away, which is still an eventual 80% boost in output.




2448 now, and we basically don't care about this. AT least we now we'll have good range when we need it. If ever. More range(Reajax II cells, up to 9 parsecs) was the only option for the next tier.



They hit Phyco again, knocking out nine bases. More ships are massing at Reticuli, but this is another border world where I'm not thrilled to see almost all of our defenses goes up in smoke. Not that it really matters of course until we improve their capabilities, which is why I'm focused on the industry buildup and not adding more paperweight missile silos.

Looks like they are really stepping up the sabotage campaign. 27 factories on Tao are incinerated the next year, bringing us to 2450. The New Republic has only taken two systems in it's first-gen, Gienah and Reticuli. They aren't coming as aggressively as I expected, but it's painfully obvious that if they do there's not a damn thing we can do to stop them. If I get another chance, I will probably take a weapons tech on the espionage front, on the off chance we get a helpful missile upgrade.

If not ... we probably continue to shrink at whatever pace they feel like shrinking us.