Siriel

A lot happened since the previous blog. I discovered just about every other race, for one. The first mass discovery occurred when my flagship happened on a vortex that transported it to the other half of the galaxy. In order these guys are:

1 - The Drath Legion: I'm going to be honest, I have no clue what the Drath are about. They always seem to start off strong and then just kind of...vanish halfway through the game, never to be relevant again.
2 - Yor Collective: Your standard Skynet robots, want to kill all organics. They have an exponential research deal going on so if they start to get ahead of you in worlds you're almost guaranteed to not catch up technologically. Still, they tend to not snowball very hard - that might be just my experience though.
3 - Terran Alliance: The humans. Neutral, very good at diplomacy, tend to create a web of relationship even if their war machine isn't much to talk about. These are the guys I wanted to kill early, but alas they're out of my range.
4 - Krynn Consulate: Oh boy, these guys will be annoying to deal with. Their entire gimmick is having a lot of influence and thus making your planets rebel against you. Fortunately they're not my neighbor, so I don't have to worry about that happening immediately.

I forgot to screenshot it, but around this time the Altarians colonize New Orléans II and it immediately rebels against them because duh, you just colonized something next to my homeworld, whose influence did you expect to win out Altarians?
Also forgot to screenshot: I met the Korx, who're basically space mercenaries. From what I've seen the Korx tend to either get really big really fast, or become the weakest race around.

A colony ship I'd sent to the eastern corner of the map finally reaches the cluster of stars there aaand...Oh, hi Drengins. The Drengin are a chaotic evil military powerhouse all about conquering and enslaving, but unlike most examples they're actually pretty smart about not getting in over their heads. They're technically my rivals but as long as I stop them from getting into an alliance with anyone I can use them as a gun to shoot annoying people with while I build up. In terms of military power, the Drengin are almost always at the top of the rankings in every game I've played.

Finally I encounter the Torians...I'm not too sure how actually. The Torians are another race whose gimmick I'm not familiar with because they tend to lose relevance in the games I've played.

And in the middle of all these meetings, the most important research in the game for me is completed.



Beautifully simple flavor text. Spore Weapon is the special technology granted by my Super Annihilator ability, and it allows me to build defenseless, weaponless 1 HP ships.
And if that ship touches a planet, everything on it dies. And I automatically conquer it (with a population of 0).

This essentially means that as long as I'm willing to move population via transports, I can skip all forms of ground-based invasion technology, and if I can sneak past someone's defenses I can completely cripple them even if they reconquer the planet immediately after.

Now, here's a slight problem with my strategy: I don't, generally, bother making a ton of ships in the early game because they never do anything and just slow down the economy. Unfortunately the AI thinks those ships matter, so they usually try to bully me for money and threaten invasion when they haven't even researched any invasion technology yet. Plus, I wasn't able to expand that much due to my relative isolation at the start of the game so I couldn't get a headstart on the big guys in terms of production and influence.

All this adds up into the others being a chore to deal with, so I'll need something to get them off of me. A war would do.

The Yor nicely volunteer by being the first to bully me. I pay them the 200 b credits they ask for...and offer them two valuable technologies to attack the Terrans. Since the Yor are the second strongest empire in the galaxy at this point (second to the Drengin) and the Terrans are barely above me on the chart, they jump on the offer. Free conquest! No risk war!

They reaaallyyy should have read the fine print. Behold the Terrans' super negociator ability in action. Now that most of the galaxy is tied up in a pointless war where nobody can invade anyone, they'll be too busy to extort me for a while.

Well, not so much the Drengin and the Korx, so I took care of them too.

The Korx inexplicably declare war on me as part of the following powder keg explosion, but I can't even find them on the map so somehow I don't feel overly threatened.

A nice bonus is that the Yor, despite presumably being based somewhere deeper in the galaxy, had taken two planets right in front of my doorstep and their influence was threatening to flip the populace of Fafnir's Gold; my financial capital. Now that most of the planet had decided that it was an open Yor hunting season (and invited me to join in on the fun), they wouldn't call me a warmonger for taking those planets. And since the Yor were busy fighting approximately the entire galaxy, they didn't keep ships on our boundaries.

So I quickly produce a second Spore Ship on Fafnir's Gold by buying it outright and behold my magic trick.

And thus did I, the least militarily powerful civilization in the galaxy, take my first step into war: By killing 18 billions inhabitants (They were killer robots so it's PG!) and flooding two planets in deadly toxin.

I'm sure I'll be very popular with the other kids.