OSG 26 - The Bearperor Returns

[RefSteel]

Thanks, Psillycyber! ... Although lately I've felt more like a bear!

Actually, it would be kind of fun to build a bunch of megabolt fighters to take Orion, and then pummel the Alkari with death rays.

Hey, you can always give it a try from your last save after I (hopefully) put this thing to bed. Death Rays make poor pummelers though, unfortunately - they work, but there are reasons they're almost never used except as a last resort when there's no other way to bust enemy bases. The second ship I designed last night (only got to play one turn) actually qualifies as an Orion-killer, but I'm not planning to build the thousands that would be needed. Still, we'll see how my plan survives contact with the enemy!

[RefSteel]

Agreed on the really weird birdies as well. They seem to have poured most of their tech into force fields for most of the game - their weakest field in theory! I'd have loved to come up with answers to more-dangerous Alkari fleets ... but at this point, cracking their bases is going to be challenge enough, especially where they have those Dissipator fleets....

[RefSteel]

I should be able to post the report sometime tonight or tomorrow; sorry it's taking so long. If you'd like, you can guess the over/under on which turn will end the game....

(Hint: Unless the Alkari pull a miracle, it's going to be during my set.)

[Psillycyber]

Yes, I had a feeling that an elimination victory would be faster at this point than an election victory. Plus, there's something more satisfying to my mind about a domination victory in this situation. That's why I had already queued up the invasion of the last Meklar planets. Once the Bulrathi pain train gets a-rollin', ain't no slowin' it down.

With your masterful turn playing, and figuring in travel times...I'm guessing 2468 will be the year.

[Ianus]

I'm going to be negative and say that you won't be able to get it done on your turnset. Not that I doubt your abilities Ref, far from it, but unless you are using Spores I just don't see how you can crack them given where we were when you started. If you ARE using Death Spores (which I have mixed feelings about) you should be able to do it by 2465 +2.

That said, I hope that you aren't using bio weapons and that you eliminate them in 2469 on your last turn in office. I look forward to being wrong and to learning some new tricks!

[RefSteel]

Absolutely "bear-bones" report - I'll have a proper one up tonight:

- I did not use bioweapons.
- I did not redirect any retreating fleets.
- I did not use the Wait button.
- I made a handful of tactical mistakes - many early, from which I learned, and one critical one late, when I was overconfident and sloppy.
- Nevertheless, there will be no need for me to attach a save.

[Psillycyber]

Hehehe, nice! I knew you could do it! Looking forward to your final report.

And also, I want to thank you, Ref, and Ianus for indulging me (and your own sense of curiosity and mastery, I'm sure) by donating your time to continuing to play on even after we had the technical victory in the bag. I imagine this game became even more interesting for lurkers to read as a result.

[Ianus]

No problem Psilly! When I play I tend to ignore early diplomatic victories and go for domination or extermination wins. Just a personal preference. Plus it feels cheap to win when without that victory condition your opponents could be (and sometimes are in the process of) rolling you up. But then I also tend to capture Orion in most of my games whether I need to or not.
Anyway this game was a lot of fun! Extreme danger requiring careful maneuvering to avoid defeat produces a tension-filled and exciting game. I really think that Psillycyber's decision to dogpile on the Silicoids made the game much much easier. Granted we also got lucky with the Erratic Psilons staying peaceful but the diplomacy boost from that war carried us safely through until we could go on the offensive ourselves. Avoiding early defensive war in this game can be key to avoiding getting left behind.
Anyway, great game all! And Ref, I don't know how the game ended but could you try to attach some kind of endgame save so we can look over your winning fleets? Or at least highlight them in your report and explain in detail what you did to win? Thanks!

[RefSteel]

I really shouldn't be up this late, but confound it, I said I'd post the report! (And I always forget how long the images take. Every. Single. Time.)

Report: The Final Turns! 2460-????

2460: Twenty years after he left the throneworld of the Bulrathi on a galaxy-spanning Impulse-Drive parade, the name of Argagref "Steelclaws" Bjornsgrrr again filled Ursan news headlines as he returned to the heart of the empire. Many political observers wrung their paws over the ruthless Bearperor's return to power: Due to an oversight in the term limit law, though incumbants could only be elected for two consecutive terms, nothing prevented a previous bearperor from returning to the throne, as departing repeat-bearperor Psillycyber knew well. It had been hoped that a new, fresh face of Bulrathi leadership would emerge after Psillycyber's latest terms in office ... but it was not to be. With the massacres at Helos and Rhilus, the Bulrathi on the street craved a return to the tried and true: To the Bearperor who had brought them the Impulse Drives that led to their domination of the galaxy.

The new Bearperor did not disappoint: His first act in office was to meet in closed session with the empire's greatest starship engineers and prepare a new design that he intended to make the mainstay of his fleet.



Named in memory of long-time spymaster Stralian Drop, the Drop Bear 5 was designed to carry twice the payload of the decades-old existing bombers, with a superior battle computer and the capacity not only to baffle enemy targeting systems as it approached a planet, but even to avoid their repulsor beams where necessary. "Our old bombers were excellent in their time," he growled. "Absolutely state of the art twenty years ago. But the thing you have to understand is ... it's been twenty years!"

His next act in office was to review the footage of the Helos catastrophe. Alkari warriors in massive armored exosuits fitted with shield generators three times as powerful as anything even Bulrathi could carry had set whole ursine battallions alight with portable fusion weaponry while Bulrathi soldiers in their standard uniforms and belt-mounted light shields fired back ineffectually with their ancient lasers. With a grunt, he finished his assessment. "We got lucky," he told his unbelieving advisors. "We're just bears! Those things aren't Alkari anymore; they're war-mechs with shoulder-mounted fusion cannons. Our expected casualties for invading those monsters would be on the order of four to one! All the transports in space on the way to Alkari worlds are on suicide missions, whether they know it or not." He paused. "Wait a minute."

His next act as Bearperor was to cancel every one, without exception, of the transports ordered by his predecessor that had not yet departed their homes.



He did order transports from Bruno to fully staff the industrial colony of Balloo, and when he noticed that so many transports were already inbound to Reticuli that many of them would die for lack of space, he sent a few on to Thrax to make room, but that was all. He didn't want to hear about transports in space, factory construction outside of Balloo, Tyr, and the California Republic, childbirth subsidies, defensive shields, or research outside a single virtually mineral-free colony; as he growled to his cabinet on his first day back in office, "I want as many of our people as possible in the factories and spaceports getting our war machine off the ground."

Which made it a rather curious decision to scrap a significant fraction of his existing starfleet: All the old Neutrino fighters he had designed himself many years before - nearly 150 still survived until his return to office - and both Care Bears that had done such excellent work for him during his first two terms. Certainly they were a drain on the imperial resources and decades out of date, and certainly the resulting scrap proved extremely useful to the completion of factories at Tyr, Balloo, and the California Republic, but the reason may have been simpler, as Steelclaws himself put it: "I don't want any ships in my fleet crawling around at warp 2!" Both designs, with their ancient engines, were useful - if at all - essentially just as defensive ships ... and Steelclaws wasn't interested in defense.

2461: Attacks at Ursa and Porridge seemed to prove the Bearperor's point, as Alkari fleets were forced to flee from the tiny handful of missile bases guarding each without the benefit of a fleet. At Helos however, the massacre of the year before was followed by another, even worse.



The Alkari had a fleet in orbit, and when it refused to retreat from a pair of Bearfang 5s and hundreds of old bombers, the Bulrathi had no chance in the battle that ensued. To be sure, the Bearfangs were all but immune to the Alkari starfleet, but their tiny assortment of heavy fusion beams - effectively though they destroyed Alkari cruisers eventually - simply couldn't fire fast enough to destroy the enormous clouds of Alkari fighters before - their energy stores depleted after almost fifty exchanges - the Bulrathi cruisers were finally dragged out of the system by their automatic return-override protocols. The surviving Alkari ships, for their part, simply returned to their hangars to recharge at the colony itself, and were back in space in time to shoot down a third of the incoming transports - not that Bulrathi transports had a ghost of a chance against the Alkari warmechs on the ground anyway. It would have been a dark beginning to the new bearperor's reign ... had Helos been the only world to which the Bulrathi had sent a fleet.




Rhilus burned. Anraq burned. Transports that were already doomed from the moment they launched died on the icy surface of Rhilus amid the shattered remains of what once had been a colony dome instead of dying in the blaze of fusion rifle fire, but it made precious little difference to the dead which way they perished, and the Alkari had lost two key colonies in their empire. The enormous colony of Collassa, almost entirely free of mineral wealth, survived bombardment by local Bulrathi forces, but only barely: It was remotely possible, even if the fleet did no more, that a lucky and skilled Bulrathi general on the ground might live to claim the world with one or two survivors among the sixty-odd loaded transports of troops already on the way. Of course, the Bulrathi starfleet had no intention of leaving Collassa as it stood....

Back at Helos, when the fighting was finally over, all 18 batallions of Bulrathi that had managed to reach the surface had perished - cremated rather than buried, not quite intentionally but as a side effect of the intense fusion blasts that tore their ranks apart. They managed to take five batallions of Alkari with them, leaving six times that many on the world - which meant that their generals, by luck or by skill, were still beating the odds for the moment.



When Bearperor Steelclaws saw the shipbuilding reports for his first year in office, he roared with anger. True, the Drop Bears his shipyards had built in a single year could do more than half as much damage to the Alkari as could the entire starfleet he had inherited combined, but he'd known that; he wasn't even looking at them. "I missed one!" he growled in frustration. "One of those planets - a good one probably - is still building out-of-date bombers! And now that I think about it..." he checked the planetary reports and roared again. While first getting his bearings in office, before he settled on a definite plan, he had advised several of the empire's planetary governors on how to conduct advanced soil enrichment and terraforming projects effectively - and then had never gotten around to reviewing and changing his orders to them. One glance around confirmed it: "The fools really did waste their efforts on pointless ecology!" He growled deep in his throat. "Well, that won't happen again."

2462: Alkari and Meklar fleets, crawling slowly across space, made their blind and stumbling way to Bulrathi worlds. The Alkari fighters didn't even bother to attack before they took to their wings and fled Bulrathi missile bases, heading back home at equally miserable speeds, but the Meklar, spotting three Bearfang cruisers in orbit at Tyr, where their own cruisers outnumbered them by more than four to one, made the mistake of sticking around and testing their designs against the bears.



Perhaps a too-aggressive stance would have cost the Bulrathi a ship, or even more - the Meklar certainly had some firepower in their fleet - but as their ships crawled toward the planet, its Merculite bases and the Bearclaws' careful piloting and directed fire whittled them down until the last and only surviving Meklar cruiser, having accomplished precisely nothing at the cost of a dozen war ships, was forced to retreat.

That was right around the time Bulrathi forces arrived at Darrian. The Drop Bears saw their first action there, but with only 32 in the reinforcing fleet, they couldn't be decisive, and the loss of hundreds of old-model bombers in the previous year's fighting at Anraq had left the fleet, reinforcements and all, just short of the forces needed to clean up Darrian's bases. Retreating in shame, they left its icy steppes behind, vowing to return and finish the job they had begun there once they had refueled and resupplied back at Mobas. Unlike the Alkari and Meklar fleets, their turn-around time would be no more than two years.

Of course, it wasn't the only planet the Bulrathi attacked that year.



Most of the Bulrathi bombers over Collassa had been dispatched to other systems, preparing for an assault on Xengara the following year. They left just enough in orbit to free the Alkari colony below of nearly all its warmech-equipped population. Some 23 million Bulrathi would nevertheless perish before they brought down the four million Alkari survivors, but at least they didn't share the fate of the Nordia-bound transports that met 31 missile bases and the main Meklar battle fleet. When he learned of the carnage in Nordia's skies - carnage he surely could have prevented had he committed forces to the Meklar war instead of focusing exclusively on the Alkari - the Bearperor nodded sadly. "I couldn't bear to do it though," he confided in private. There shall be no xenocide on my watch..." But then his eyes gleamed as he added, "...until I'm ready!"

The other assaults on Meklar worlds went nearly as expected, in spite of a dreadnought in Meklon orbit that shot down more than twenty transports and allowed the Meklar homeworld to remain in CB-715's possession - just barely - for the time being.



Kakata was given no such reprieve, and though many Bulrathi died to bring the world into their empire, the numbers in which they did so paled in comparison to the Meklar defenders'.

Of course, CB-715, previously peaceful toward the Bulrathi, was none too pleased with Bearperor Steelclaws for the irreversible actions - to be fair to the Bearperor himself - of his predecessor, but the Meklar declaration of open war was of little concern to the Bulrathi. Steelclaws reportedly advised CB-715 in an open letter that it and all its people were welcome to continue sending their snail-like fleets off to attack Bulrathi worlds as for years they had already been doing.

2463: The second battle for Xengara (following a softening-up attack in 2461) was the first that featured the new Drop Bear bombers in significant numbers. It was also the first attack led by newly-appointed Admiral Grissa Ursavi, following the resignation in shame of the previous Admiral of the offensive fleet. Grissa had acquited herself well in directing the defense of Tyr, and Steelclaws felt the time was right for her to show what she could do with a full combat fleet.



The Bearperor did not regret his decision. Grissa's decisive leadership in the field of battle and skilled use of her repulsor screens certainly spoke in her favor - she lost only 47 ships among over 1500 committed to the battle, and though two of the casualties were old Birdshot cruisers, the Bearperor didn't seem to care. By holocomm, when she expressed her regrets about their loss, he told her, "We have dozens more repulsor cruisers in oure empire than we're ever possibly going to need. The cruisers don't matter. Just help us keep building up our bomber fleet."

That wasn't the reason Steelclaws was most pleased with her however. What really impressed him was the way she learned from both her mistakes and her success, and worked to incorporate the lessons of the battle for Xengara into her plan for the Alkari campaign. The Bearperor took note and put her in charge of the main assault fleet, ordering all available forces to muster at her next intended destination. And then he settled in to watch the fireworks display.



The Alkari had set up floating colony domes all across Xengara's seas, and their people were preparing entrenched defenses against the inevitable Bulrathi attack , massive shielded avian war mechs with heavy fusion cannons building barricades with ease. They looked all but invincible ... until the first fusion bombs hit, their fires turning the oceans red as they burned the Alkari colony down to the waterline, and watched its component pieces crumble and sink to the ocean floor. The softening fleet had sacrificed hundreds of bombers to bring down the first Alkari defense bases two years before, and sacrifices like those wouldn't make for a rapid war ... but that fleet had included no Drop Bear bombers, and it had not been led by Grissa Ursavi.

Light-years away, the Meklar forces were making a bid to take their war to the Bulrathi already. The assault transports had been in space since long before war was officially declared, but the Bulrathi people who had launched unprovoked assaults on virtually helpless Meklar worlds years before were in no position to complain. Over 40 million cybernetic soldiers, unopposed in the dusky skies of the Thrax colony, landed together on the surface, just outnumbering the Bulrathi inhabitants. Entrenched Bulrathi defenders behind zortrium-reinforced blast ports cut through Meklar duralloy shields at long range as shields on both sides glowed and blinked and failed under heavy laser fire. Charging through the killing fields, the Meklar finally closed to the Bulrathi positions and engaged the enemy at hand-to-hand ... where they found, having apparently forgotten, they were dealing with enormous, combat-hardened masses of ursine muscle and sinew.



Sergeant Grouf Morgraar surveyed the battlefield when all was quiet once more, examining the sparking, smoking masses of electromechanical servoes that littered the battlefield. Extracting a piece of cogwheel that had gotten stuck in his teeth during the heaviest close-range fighting, he murmured, "This must be what the Alkari feel like when we try to go up against their war mechs on the ground."

2464: The Alkari pulled no punches. They had a nearly insurmountable advantage on the ground, but they knew their war mechs would have to get through Bulrathi defensive fleets in order to land and do their deadly work. True, the Bulrathi had precious little in the way of defensive fleets - some seventy repulsor cruisers with only three working beam weapons apiece, spread all around Bulrathi and Alkari space, could hardly shoot down anything at all - and true, Bearperor Steelclaws regarded Collassa with such disdain, completely free of useful minerals as it was, that he hadn't even bothered to defend it with even a single cruisers, but perhaps the Alkari were making a similar calculation: It would be a waste, even with their tremendous odds in combat, to send transports away, on purpose, from one of their highly-developed worlds, leaving factories and mines idle on planets whoe mineral abundance was everything Altair's had ever been, just to caputure Collassa's pretty, fertile, lush, but utterly undeveloped, nearly-undevelopable landscape.




Instead, when one of their main fleets took the planet's orbit unopposed, they bombed the colony into oblivion from space. The Bulrathi of course had to retaliate, and were fortunately well positioned to do so: The muster point selected by Grissa Ursavi was not a Bulrathi or neutral star, but Darrian, which up until the recent arrival of thousands of fusion bombs across the surface of its fourth world, had supported an Alkari colony. "Seems like as good a place to start as any," Grissa growled cheerfully. "Now, let's see about deployment. We can already outproduce these birds, outfight them in the skies, and eventually - with enough force - handle their missile bases. The only thing that would slow us down is if they developed new technology - shields or jammers or scatter-pack missiles more advanced than the ones they have already. Lucky for us, that takes time, and I don't plan to give them any!"

Redeployment and relocation orders went out across the entire empire, with nearly all worlds actually closing down ship production, as many of those most distant from the front had done the year before, in favor of factories, research, or planetary reserves. Grissa had a plan, and the bearperor trusted her judgment, and such planets as could not contribute at least could help the empire prepare in case the Alkari did manage a miracle somehow.



As for CB-715, who lost its homeworld that year to yet another overwhelming Bulrathi invasion, it would take more than a miracle for it and its Meklar people to escape their rich but increasingly cramped prison world of Nordia 4. "About a dozen miracles might do it," Steelclaws admitted in one interview. "A dozen or maybe two. But I'd have to see it; your run-of-the-mill everyday kinds of miracles wouldn't do."

Grissa, on the Alkari front, wasn't in a jesting mood though. She had seen the footage of Collassa's fall, and she knew that even at the crawl at which Alkari crossed the galaxy, defenseless Thrax was still in immediate striking range of the guilty fleet. "I know it has the look of just a useless little spud," she growled in a secret transmission to Steelclaws himself, "but that isn't some mineral-free wasteland we took on a lark instead of destroying it. It's been in our paws for years now, and I don't want to lose that star.

The bearperor frowned at the new High Admiral of his fleet, and asked, "What do you propose?"



"Our existing cruisers aren't war ships," she explained. "All they can really do is push other ships around. The bearclaws can practically never die unless a bunch of Stinger bases get involved, but they're not killing anything either - especially not Alkari fighters - with all those redundant repulsor beams taking up so much space. We have them - barrels of them - okay, and we'll use them as best we can to meet the needs we have, but if we want to shoot down Alkari, I want my ships carrying weapons! Besides, it's not like the Alkari fighters can penetrate our shields."

Bearperor Steelclaws frowned a little. "That's an expensive design though. We can't get them to Thrax or anywhere else in numbers right away - just one, except on the Meklar front, where Tyr can do the work. And what are they supposed to do about Alkari Dissipator ships with heavy beams?"

"Oh, I have a plan for that," Grissa assured him. ."Both halves of that. We'll need some more resources to finish the ships in time, but I know just where to get them."



With the Bulrathi enemies essentially contained, with plenty of advance warning of their destinations when they launched, and with their total inability to penetrate Bulrathi shielding, there was no need to keep so many missile bases maintained across the empire - and the bearperor, trusting his Admiral, scrapped all but three. The salvage was put to immediate use at Trax and its vicinity to assemble three Yogi cruisers ... and nearly 20 of Grissa's solutions to the problem of repulsor beams.



The Artemis destroyers would be vulnerable when out of cloak, but if their targets didn't survive their attack, that wouldn't be a problem. Thanks to their cloaking device, they could fly right up to Alkari repulsor cruisers and blow them out of the sky before the enemy could react and deflect or destroy them. They would hit harder and faster than any previous design in the known galaxy, and in case of desperation, if for some reason the bears forgot how to do technological research or didn't realize they still had to, a large enough Artemis fleet could even take on the Guardian of Orion. With its hyper-accurate megabolt cannons directed by combat scanners and the state of the art battle computer in the known galaxy as well, an Artemis - like a Yogi - would nearly always strike true even against Alkari fleets.

2465: The first test of Grissa's grand strategy would come at Helos, where the Alkari had managed to rebuild several of their missile bases. Fortunately, the new Admiral had anticipated this, and had sent plenty of the new Drop Bears to take care of the problem.



The bombers lost were more or less in line with expectations, given the ion fighter fleet that had to be dealt with as well ... but Grissa noticed something in the course of the battle that led her to adjust those expectations severely. As a new fleet arrived in the Herculis system, the second-largest yet assembled in Bulrathi history, and the one that she was accompanying personally, she sent an urgent message to all her bomber pilots:

"They're firing scatters! All this time, we've been assuming those were Stingers they were launching, but they're going with Scatter Packs to maximize the damage output against our bomber fleets!"

The head of the enormous Drop Bear wing answered, "Roger that, Admiral Ursavi! Thanks for the warning, but it's not like this is a new strategy. Your calculations took that into account, didn't they?"

Shaking her head in frustration, Grissa answered, "That's not the point; it's not a warning - it's an opportunity! We had a plan for Stingers, but it meant absorbing damage. These are Scatters! They fly about as fast as a turkey on a plate! If you're patient, you can just fly circles around the things!"

The squadron leader gaped, and many of his fellow pilots did the same, seeing exactly what their Admiral meant. They may not have been much for tactical or strategic planning, but when someone who knew what she was doing told them what to do, they certainly could execute.

So they did.



Enormous clouds of rockets, round after round from the planet's scatter bases, flew in futile pursuit of the bombers, overlapping one another, crowding together through space, trying futilely to keep up with the stabilized impulse Doom Drives of the Bulrathi bomber fleets. As the Drop Bears made their final attack run on the planet, blasting bits and pieces of the last missile bases into the planetary atmosphere, the missiles pursuing them were actually closer to the older Bulrathi bomber fleet, the rockets locked on to which were in turn closer to the Drop Bears, the two clouds of missiles on a collision course as the bombers nimbly danced around them. Sixty missile bases, nearly as many ion fighters, and nearly twice as many cloaked nuclear missile boats burned under heavy fusion fire and thousands of fusion bombs, while the Bulrathi starfleet lost precisely nothing. Again and again, their Admiral had directed their flight, reminding them of her watch-words, and as they followed through, everything went exactly as she predicted: "Be patient. Just fly around them. They'll launch more, but you can fly around those too. Take your shots when they're open, but don't try to force them. Time is on your side."

The equation wasn't quite the same at Firma, where eleven dissipator-mounted cruisers supported the missile bases: Four of the repulsor-equipped Warhawks and seven of the newer, faster, regenerating Condors. The bombers had to follow a far more intricate dance, and most of the older model ships were lost, but no less than 20 Bulrathi cruisers were there to even the odds, and though four Birdshots were destroyed in the course of the battle, they seemed a small price to pay to take out ten Alkari cruisers - the last retreated with its armor in shreds - and all 45 of the planet's bases.

The Alkari - or imaginably Meklar, but that seemed doubtful in the extreme - did the best they could to retaliate, sending saboteurs to destroy Bulrathi infrastructure at their homeworld. Fortunately for the Bulrathi however, their homeworld was no longer the heart of their imperial power. The symbolic actions of a few Alkari agents couldn't make up for the far-more-practical actions of Grissa Ursavi's fleets.




For those keeping score, the Alkari destroyed fifty-one Bulrathi factories that year. The Bulrathi, counting only factories, without taking Alkari lives, fleets, missile bases, and colony domes into account, destroyed one thousand, four hundred and eighty four.

The Bulrathi could have afforded to lose numbers like that and shrug them off. It would have been painful, to be sure, but would hardly have dented their war effort. For the Alkari, it represented more than a third of their remaining infrastructure, and even counting just-completed microcolonies, nearly a third of their worlds.

Bearperor Steelclaws believed in a strong economy, independent of war, and most of the planets in his empire were by this time developing their infrastructure or working on research projects, looking toward their future as undisputed rulers of the galaxy at large. Transports crossed space to reinforce underpopulated worlds; the planets richest in neutronium, energy crystals, and all forms of extraordinary mineral wealth mined and exported their riches all across the galaxy; computer science labs went up at world after world across Bulrathi space. And Grissa's fleet set out across the stars once more.



The Alkari and Meklar were not yet gone, but it was only a matter of time.

2466: The fateful year had come. At Zoctan, fifteen hundred Drop Bears flew circles around fifty-three missile bases and destroyed them. The cruiser supports ships kept the enemy fighters away, but destroyed less than fifty before the Alkari pilots fled into hyperspace. At Xengara, newly re-established, a far larger fleet than was needed chased the defending Alkari fighters away without any fight to speak of. Anraq featured over three hundred Alkari ion fighters, and without a Yogi cruiser in that part of space, it seemed doubtful that the Bulrathi could destroy them all without running out of combat energy stores and being forced to retreat. Fortunately, the Anraq colony was very new, and even with just 34 Drop Bears arriving from Altair next door, with repulsor cruisers to keep the fighters away...



...they didn't have to actually defeat the enemy fleet. Once it was screened off from the bombers, the planet could be bombed out of existence with impunity. The Alkari did attack Bulrathi worlds as well - or empty worlds protected against recolonization by small Bulrathi fleets - but those of Redwing's attack forces that survived did so only because they were wise enough to retreat.

At Kulthos, forty-eight missile bases were supported by a single Condor against almost the entire Herculis fleet. Thanks to Grissa's masterful leadership, they calmly disposed of both cruiser and bases without the loss of a single ship.



The same could not be said of Guradas. The fleet that Grissa sent was more than adequate, and had she had the ability, along with her tactical genius, to be present in two places at once, the most distant Alkari world would have gone down as surely as the nearer ones had done. Yet it was not to be. The Admiral preached patience, careful flying, making sure of the bombers' safety before even target acquisition, and at the beginning of the battle, the pilots followed her advice perfectly. Then the leader of the Drop Bear wing decided to hot-dog it, and rather than making sure of dodging the enormous cloud of incoming missiles and re-activating the wing's cloaking devices, he decided to hot-dog it, swooping around behind the planet to get off two consecutive bombings without cloaking in between. He thought he could just sneak past the incoming warheads instead of flying away and around them ... and found too late that he was wrong, as first one rocket, then a dozen, then a hundred, then the whole barrage that his pilots had been dodging so successfully crashed into his shocked, decloaked, and unprepared battle fleet. He lost more than half of his ships on that single pass - hundreds and hundreds of pilots - and with them, the firepower needed to destroy the planet's bases. Screaming, moaning, slamming the dashboard of his bomber with his enormous furry paw, he grew erratic, leading the slim remainder of his fighters on wild, desperate bombing runs that could never be enough, failing to attend to the enemy missiles and ultimately losing his life, along with the rest of the bombers in his fleet. The accompanying Bulrathi cruisers, having destroyed the planet's Warhawk defenders, fled before the planet's Stinger missiles could destroy them too, but they would have a long journey back to Bulrathi space. The hot-dogging bomber wing had cost the Bulrathi years in their plan to take the galaxy.



Meanwhile, out at their mineral-rich zoo of Nordia 4, the Meklar were granted a moment of triumph. Their new Devastator dreadnought, though way too heavy on semi-to-completely-worthless missile racks, wasn't completely terrible for such a low-tech battleship, and its captain crowed and jeered when the local Bulrathi fleet scanned it in the skies above their thirty-one missile bases and retreated. The celebrations on Nordia lasted all through the night and on through the following day, when they destroyed yet more undefended Bulrathi assault transports in space. They could hardly know the reason that the enemy fleet had retreated: The Bearperor's strict injunction that "We shall not end the Meklar until the Alkari have been defeated ... just in case!"

That the birds would be defeated was looking inevitable by then though. Two Condors and fourteen new Heavy Ion destroyers, easily the most maneuverable ships in the entire Alkari fleet, were able to cost the Bulrathi a Birdshot, six Drop Bears, and - with the help of the planet's bases once a Dissipator shot hit them - over a hundred of the old-style bombers before they and all the rest of Laan's defenses were dismantled by the Bulrathi fleet, but that was all: The cold steppes of Gorra, as empty as Collassa's lush hills, lakes, and plains of minerals or usable energy, were defended essentially by a large sign reading, "Please put us out of our misery."




By the end of the year, Guradas, site of the hot-dogger's folly, was the only remaining Alkari colony.

After that, there was little enough to do before the end. The fleet at Gorra wasn't large enough to take on the remaining Guradas bases alone, so Grissa redefined overkill by ordering everything within ten parsecs to gather over Guradas in two years. The Alkari had exactly that much time left to put their affairs in order, to of course continue to pointlessly and ineffectually harass the Bulrathi around the galaxy, and to go on breathing.

As for the Meklar, they had sent a raft of transports down to Meklon, which they Bearperor had ignored, and they arrived, splattering themselves against the entrenched Bulrathi defenses; more than three of the machine-people died for every bear they killed, and Steelclaws just went right on ignoring them.

2467: Nearly thirty years before, Bearperor Steelclaws had noticed a ridiculous Alkari transport fleet bound clear across the galactic core, from one corner to the other, then due to arrive at Omicron in some twenty-eight years. His successor, Bearperor Ianus, had called attention to the ridiculous fleet as well. In the decades they spent in transit, the colonists aboard had been fitted with armored exoskeletons and personal barrier shields, and armed with deadly fusion rifles ... and Omicron had become a Bulrathi colony. And incredibly, at long last, they were finally due to arrive at their destination!



Unfortunately for the Alkari, Bearperor Steelclaws had not chosen to ignore [/b]them[/b]. Like another flotilla of their brethren preparing to invade the Phyco colony, they met a fleet of swift, deadly Artemis destroyers - almost fifty built that very year in order to interdict them. None of the invaders survived the gauntlet of space to land and test out their shiny new toys.

At the same time, the fleet that had retreated from Nordia arrived at the nearest Bulrathi world - and was sent right back, with reinforcements that frankly would be grossly unnecessary.

2468: A fleet arrived at Guradas.



No tricky maneuvering was required. The bombers just went in and killed everything immediately.



Shortly thereafter, they also killed the bodies.

Meanwhile, a fleet also arrived at Nordia. It met an Annihilator dreadnought that was nearly identical to the Devastator that had wandered off someplace at warp one, but superior in essentially every respect.



The one important exception was its capacity to impress the Bulrathi fleet. It ended up retreating just in time to avoid being slagged by Yogi cruisers, having accomplished - like the planet's merculite bases - precisely nothing.

Then, because they were Bulrathi, there was really only one way for the galaxy's new rulers to end their war.



The struggle for the galaxy was over. The bears had won. The 26th Open Serial Government of the Bulrathi had triumphed.



And in case Bearperor Steelclaws got any notions about canceling the next election and ruling as a ruthless tyrant as long as he lived, there was the little matter of the starfleet's loyalties.



Of course Steelclaws had no such plans - and if Grissa Ursavi led the galaxy the way she led the starfleet, the Bulrathi were in for a golden age following her projected landslide election victory.

Thanks to both of you (and our lurkers!) for a terrific game! We should totally do another one of these soon....

Ianus, if the report above doesn't explain what I did in enough detail (or if it's too flowery to be sure of what was really going on) I can upload the start-of-turn autosaves (yay, kyrub's patch!) so you can see what I was doing and/or try to explain my plan more specifically. But ... tomorrow.

[Psillycyber]

Oooooh, nice ship designs! That's a really clever trick with cloaking, that you can ignore repulsor beams when cloaked and get a volley off. Knowing that will make me much more likely to build ships with only 1-range weapons in the future if I can also fit a cloaking device on them. I'm always paranoid about not putting at least some 2-range weapons on ships just in case they get stopped cold by 1 measly unforeseen ship design with a repulsor beam in the enemy fleet.

And it was somehow appropriate that we ended up just bombing the Alkari worlds into the dust. Retired Bearperor Psillycyber is pleased.