OK, I have the save. Should be able to play later today or early tomorrow.
IRC5 for the Darloks? I guess the Alkari have at least IRC4 if not IRC5, given they are matching our production with fewer planets and pop.
A lack of longer rrange guns is a big problem with those repulsor beams. And our computers tree has been ugly the last couple tiers, just one jammer after another.
It looks like we should definitely spy on the Sakkra, they have poor computer tech and we could really use their planetology tech. And maybe fusion beams.
The most recent leader of the OSG39B surveys the situation of the Meklar people. The hostilities with the Alkari people have taken a harsh toll, with many millions of Meklar perishing in battle. Or worse, being killed by horrible bioweapons the merciless birds have used on Meklar worlds. For the safety and freedom of the Meklar people, the birds must be subdued or destroyed. But how to accomplish this? Especially with another meeting of the galactic council approaching? THe previous leader of the OSG39B had managed significant gains, especially in technology, and there were very promising projects being tested in the research labs. Perhaps one of these projects would prove to be the key? The Meklar would never again allow others to enslave them.
2440 (inherited turn)
I start our rich planets building huge ships, mostly as place holders for future designs. We need better tech to handle the birds, but if we can get it we will want new ships quickly.
I also send our huge at Nordia to check Escalon and see just what the birds have there.
Spying is initiated on the Sakkra.
2441
Megabolt Cannon completes.
I choose Pulson missiles to give our bases a big upgrade against big ships. Tachyon Beam would help against large numbers of smalls, but against repulsor beams might nnt be useful. Auto Blasters have similar problems.
Escalon has a lot of bases.
Also, the birds only have basic factory controls. How are they matching our production with less pop when we have 5 factories/pop to their 2? (Impossible difficulty, I guess?)
And fleet:
The foxbat stack could hurt our ARS huge with those ion cannon. And the warhawks can repulse us out of range and kill us with the heavy phasors. We need new designs of our own to match the birds in space, and upgraded defenses generally. At least their shields are weak enough for our bases to do some damage, and only the col ships are packing spores.
2442
That Alkari fleet from Escalon is heading to Friction. I reserve spend to get more bases, and bring up our fleet from Nordia to help.
2443
Atmospheric Terraforming completes.
I choose Terraforming+50 to grow our planets larger. Cloning is a possibility, but we are not ready for planetary invasions until we can solve the weapons issues.
We destroy the col ships, 250 foxbats, and 1 warhawk with no losses at Friction. The rest retreat.
Our hostile planets begin terraforming.
2444
Our former hostile worlds begin soil enrichment.
Another smaller Alkari fleet is heading for Friction. Our ships move to join the defense.
2445
Industrial Tech 5 completes. Only choice is Industrial Tech 4.
We inflict more casualties on the Alkari fleet before it retreats, with no losses for us.
Now fertile planets spend to grow pop and build factories to new limits. We will need every vote in 2450.
2446
Another incoming Alkari fleet at Friction, usual response.
2447
Inflict more casualties on the Alkari fleet at Friction with no losses for us. We are slowly wearing down the huge foxbat stack. The birds have a new medium design (Sky Hawk) with stinger missiles and shield 6 (immune to scatter pack V from our bases). It could be dangerous if they build a lot of them.
2448
Not much.
2449
Another round of fighting at Friction, as usual inflict some casualties on Alkari with no losses. The Sky Hawks are a bit of a pain, as the birds are building them. (Had about 20 this time.)
2450
The galactic coucil meets. 47 total votes, so 32 needed to win.
Alkari 12 votes for themselves
Darloks 3 votes for us
Klackons 4 votes for us
Bulrathi 8 votes for us
Sakkra 4 votes for Alkari
We have 16 votes, which leaves us 1 short. So close....
Notes for the next player:
We have an incoming Klackon fleet at Shieldless, but it is (estimated) 10 turns out. Beware of nebula surprises with arrival timing.
The Darloks just gave us a diplomatic warning about our expansion. Not sure why, as we have not claimed any planets lately? Maybe our pop/total power?
We have a few megabolt cannon/repulsor beam/ARS huges built. Most of our fleet is at Friction, since that is where the fighting has been.
Overall this was a development-focused turnset, despite the regular fighting at Friction. We could go heavy on ship building and try to smash our way into another Alkari world, but it would probably be expensive. We could try to go after one of the other races. Or keep teching and spying and hope to get a tech edge. Our spy efforts were disappointing this turnset.
Good sets - it looks like we're in control of the situation here, and well positioned to improve it! (Also, I should have set up shallow_thought better: Not just the error I mentioned with the bombers, which was just a tactical mistake. I should have been much more aggressive about the invasion and completed it in my set instead of obsessing about keeping our factories worked. I knew we had a limited window before the Alkari started building ships with their new toys - I even said so in my lead-up to my set! - but didn't push hard enough in that window at the end.) The new bird ships are scary with their advanced technology, but nothing we won't be able to handle ... if I can put my BCs where my biomechanical speech apparatus is and prove it, at least!
It's been a bit of a rough week for me, except for one really great part that nevertheless took lots of time, and the weekend's going to be complicated too, though hopefully mostly in good ways! Nevertheless, I've got it! I'll do my best to get us accelerating toward the end game ... in (what I regard as) fun and interesting ways!
The birds being at war with much of the galaxy almost dropped a council victory into our laps. But even if they improve their diplo situation, we should be able to prevent a council loss unless everything goes against us.
Actually cracking their fleet and defenses to capture another world (and more of their tech) will be tricky, and probably expensive. But breaking the current stalemate would likely put us in a winning position very quickly.
Good luck, RefSteel! Don't worry about speed, take your time and have fun.
Yeah, definitely no rush. I'm away for the weekend myself and then have a family party early next week, so I won't be looking to grab a set for a few days at least.
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
Thanks, both of you! The weekend's actually gotten more complicated for me as it's gone along (and it's a long one for me, as for many here in the U.S....) but I'm nearly done with the turns and I at least have the first part of the report ready:
Diplomatic Report, 2450-2454:
- 2450 -
I've got a confession to make: The first thing I thought of doing to resolve the war Farseer declared on us decades ago - and that the Alkari have been prosecuting ever since with the likes of death spore runs, repeatedly decimating Furnace's civillian population by spreading horrible bio-engineered diseases when they couldn't crack its defenses - was to call and ask if they would consider making peace. The Ancient armed transport Karif-Katul whose shields and armament Alkari scientists managed to reverse-engineer so successfully was a mere derelict wreck when their military forces spotted it, irreparably gutted by its own core reactor explosion in some centuries-old - or millenia-old - accident, and they would never be able to build Karif-Katuls of their own, but everything they learned in the course of disassembling it contributed to their war industry, and the ships they have launched from the spaceyards in recent years have been orders of magnitude more dangerous to our ships than their previous starfleet. Between their stinger missiles, scatter pack rockets, planetary shields, repulsor cruisers, and swarms of fightercraft, their defenses seemed as impregnable to us as they've forced us to keep proving ours are to them again and again and again.
It's possible Farseer would have accepted had we made such a request; it's possible he would have scoffed at us and continued to seek our destruction as he has always done in the past. We'll never know, because after long consideration and longer examination of our opportunities, we decided as a people to leave Farseer to his wars and pursue other diplomatic possibilities.
The first faction we approached was the Darloks', naturally: Dear as espionage is to the empty void at the core of every Darlok where another creature might keep its heart, and aware as they are of the vital role that computer technology plays in acquiring accurate information about unwitting subjects without giving anything away, they have managed to focus their energies so thoroughly on that one field of technology as to exceed even our knowledge in our favorite field. Having comparatively recently developed robotic controls equivalent - apart from the immense cost they must pay with the construction of each new factory - to our own, they were willing to share means of upgrading even our most-advanced battle computers, a significant step up over our own then-current knowledge of the field, if we would teach them some of our own most-valued technological secrets and save them the trouble of stealing them from our interstellar comm network anyway. We taught them to transform their hostile worlds into safely-habitable open-air colonies by terraforming the atmospheres themselves, drastically improving the quality of life for the least-fortunate Darlok citizens, and they taught us to improve our electronic targeting - both of incoming enemy ships and of potential espionage targets - through a fiendishly clever computational system that takes advantage of hyperspacial flux to process data from disparate sensors at speeds that in classical physics would have been considered impossible, appearing to require continuous signaling at many times the speed of light. The resulting improvement to our defensive base targeting algorithms and improvements-in-potential to those aboard future ship designs would be immensely valuable against our - and nearly everyone's - mutual enemies, the Alkari, whose agile pilots and swift-darting ships are nearly impossible to pin down without advanced targeting systems. The exchange was a pleasure to make, especially since Darlok scientists have the good sense - like so many others in Darlok society - to conceal their biological appearance, if any, presenting themselves to the world as we do: In our case, through the hard, protective plasteel carapace that shields us from the dangers of the world around us - and in their case, through enveloping cloaks and body wraps that conceal everything about their true appearance - if any - but their glowing red eyes. In spite of their reputation as deceptive and treacherous creatures, the Darloks seem to have a great deal of sense, and have been more helpful than dangerous - to the little best of my awareness - especially in comparison with the likes of the almost-universally-hated-and-feared Alkari. Nor are the 'loks alone.
Of course bugs are not as good at understanding computers as whatever fascinating mysteries of darkness are hidden inside Darlok cloaks; the battle computer they agreed to teach our electrical engineers to use is only half as powerful as the Darlok model we'd already acquired. A new computer is always useful though, both to help us to understand and crack alien data networks and to give us additional options for new fighter or destroyer designs where space is at a premium - and helping a tiny bit with miniaturization of battle scanners and the battle computers we do use. In exchange, we taught them to make a small, incremental improvement in their factory construction speed, but unlike the Darloks, they lack the advanced robotic controls they would need to make this improvement very useful, and their extraordinary skill in developing construction technology suggests that they were likely to supersede the design before long anyway. That was the best we felt we could do in trading for computer technology - but there were other reasons to seek new-to-us though widely-known technology.
The Sakkra had nothing to offer in the field of computer science, but excelling as they do in planetology, they were perfectly willing to share the means of survival in toxic planetary environments in exchange for the same factory-construction techniques we'd shared with the Klackons. This would improve our citizens' health and productivity on every one of our colonies, even if only by a tiny margin, and perhaps more importantly - like the Klackon battle computer - was already known to the Alkari, potentially creating opportunities for our spies or soldiers to find more-valuable technologies in their stead. If the primary advantages of such an exchange are not as yet apparent though, perhaps they soon will be! We still weren't finished trading in any event - only finished exchanging things that most of us are likely to think are useful for anything. The gatling laser arrays whose blueprints they graciously shared with us have about the same effect on shielded starships as a fluid-compression air conditioning unit on the surface of a star, but apart from some relatively trivial weapons miniaturization, they might even see use if we see the need at any time to build a specialized nebula gunship or something that can actually make a significant numerical dent in the endless-seeming Alkari fighter fleets. As for the anti-missile rockets we taught the Sakkra to install in exchange, they're welcome to the things. Their effect even on our scatter packs will be relatively slight, the pulsons we're developing would mostly laugh at them, and their only effect on the ships of our fleet will be to waste space that the Sakkra could otherwise have spent on more or better weapons and defensive systems. We would use what we learned far more productively.
- 2451 -
Some of the benefits of our 2450 technology exchange-a-ganza were put to use right away, but others took a year to set in: Our ship engineers needed time to really study the new blueprints before they could apply what they learned to the all-important practice of design miniaturization. By 2451 though, we fully understood all the technical implications, and we were ready to start putting the results into space.
I don't need to show off the new anti-matter bombers, built into fighter-sized hulls: You all know what ships like those look like already, with fusion drives, our best maneuvering engines - stabilizers included - and the best battle computer we can manage, in this case just a mark-1, all built around a tiny cockpit and a single bay for anti-matter bombs. This ship, the Surge 4.0, is an entirely different - and far more unusual - story. Purpose-built to handle Alkari Warhawks, it should be able to take on a dozen or more and win without any special tactical maneuvering, without needing to worry about their swarms of tiny fighters thanks to its shields and maneuverability. Fast heavy battleships like this are such a rarity because of the enormous space that has to be devoted to their stabilizers and maneuvering thrusters to let them keep up with tiny fighter-class ships like the new bombers, to say nothing of their defensive and offensive systems: Though heavy ion cannons are generations out of date, the Surge has room on its massive hull for only 23. They are at least directed by the most powerful targeting computer in the galaxy, with battle scanner assistance, but even so it won't reliably hit very hard against the Alkari: Just enough to hit the Warhawks in spite of their repulsor beams without just hoping they run away or using complicated tactical shenanigans. Moreover, thanks to its superior initiative and tactical speed, it can take on even immense fleets of Warhawks should it encounter any, getting the first strike in before they can fire back, and then accelerating away to buy time for its auto-repair systems to catch up. It won't win very fast - very little is capable of destroying Alkari ships quickly - but unlike everything else in our fleet, it can do the job eventually without critical mistakes from the Alkari.
Of course, that ship was first designed in 2451, when our tech trades had finally paid their full dividends in miniaturization. Only one new ship, several times smaller, of another design entirely, was actually built by that year, having begun construction as soon as we learned - from the Sakkra - how to build its single-most-important component.
- 2452 -
At last, more than a century and a half after we first launched ships from Meklon, we were able to colonize every planet among its surrounding stars. The latest colony, built by a single cruiser-class colony ship designed to rapidly undertake that single mission, just before its design would have to be scrapped to make room for still more special-purpose combat fleets, was appropriately named for a valuable mineral, useful in the construction of a wide variety of electronic equipment, from switches to power storage devices, that also contributes to the extreme toxicity of the planet on which it was built. Mercury may be a small world now, but when its atmosphere has been terraformed, its toxins purged, its soil enriched, and its surface terraformed, it will be able to make important contributions to the future of our people - as our alien friends are well aware.
Kaxal in particular, shaking with such rage and indignation that her antennae flailed about, upbraided us for managing to expand our influence to another star - no matter that it lay at the very heart of our home space - and seemed likely to grow more upset as time went on unless we could make some kind of placatory gesture. Of course, since she was already sending an assault fleet through the nebula to attack our Shieldless colony, it was difficult to take her threats very seriously: "Expand any further," she seemed to say, "and I will continue to do the treacherous and violent things to you that I am already doing and would continue to do anyway!" I admit however that to "treacherous and violent" I should add "slow" and "ineffectual." Thanks to nebula interference, it wasn't even clear at that time whether the fleet would arrive by 2360. What was clear was that we would be able to handle it when it came. Our latest ship design then, replacing the one-shot design that founded Mercury, was intended not to meet Kaxal's threat, but to handle another of the many on offer from the Alkari.
The shield was very probably unnecessary - it would permit of a few more options for safe maneuvering among multiple enemy fighter fleets, but accomplish little else against Alkari armament except to encourage them to kill it with Stingers if they had the chance instead of wasting their time with slow Scatters - and leaving it off would have left room for more weaponry, but the Screen's primary purpose after all is maneuvering - itself and other ships. Its job is two-fold: First, since our only offensive answer to Warhawks takes a long time to actually destroy them, the Screen is needed to control the space around it, moving as fast as our bombers and reacting more quickly than Warhawks and enemy fighters alike, and deny bomber-approach vectors with its repulsor beam. The weapons it carries are just a bonus to let it contribute a little in other ways, including with minor "cutting-out" missions, trying to remove a few small enemy ships when they attempt to retreat, making it a slightly-useful defensive gunship when one is needed instead of a strictly one-dimensional bomber screen, and it would certainly see use on defense against the Alkari.
It isn't the only reason their attack on Friction was a mistake. With their target just a little too far away for them to reach it in a single year, their largest known fleet was trapped in hyperspace en route to a well-protected world just as we were gathering our forces to launch an attack. This meant we had a two year window after spotting the incoming fleet when they would be making their doomed attack run or retreating back through hyperspace and couldn't intercept us at Escalon - and two years were all we needed to gather our fleet at Nordia and strike.
- 2453 -
This is what the doomed attack run looked like in person. Our scatter bases concentrated on the Warhawks because, slight though their damage output against those cruisers' shields might be, they were the only things in the system that could get past the repulsor beams. Ultimately, we took out three of the Warhawks - the majority - before the enemy realized they were accomplishing nothing and retreated. We were confident that our counter-attack, while they remained in hyperspace, would not end in such abject ignominy.
Our fleet was in place and moving forward already - and not alone! Further off across Alkari space, it appeared that the Bulrathi were also taking their war with Farseer seriously! Alkari ships move quickly, but with our attack at Escalon and the Bulrathi attack at Rigel - with three full-sized battleships apiece - together with their own attack at our Friction colony, they would have to be in three places at once, and even they fall short of that agility. Of course the Bulrathi had eight Claw cruisers to join their Grizzly and twin Punisher dreadnoughts, where we had only one Screen, but our anti-matter bombers - fighter-sized only, but over four hundred in number - were more than enough to compensate ... or so we believed.
- 2454 -
The plan went well: Our Screen helped clear a path for our bombers while the Surge went after their Warhawk cruiser - after first joining everything else with a beam in blasting a WarEagle cruiser we had never previously seen. Our bombers did have to take a slightly roundabout route to avoid the Warhawk repulsors and the incoming scatters at the same time, but they arrived after just a few losses, mostly from Skyhawk stingers or Warhawk or WarEagle heavy phasor beams, made their first bombing pass ... and had only a fraction of the effect they anticipated on the enemy missile bases.
The WarEagle isn't visible in this image, hidden behind the display information for Escalon itself - which also, had our pilots been paying closer attention to their displays, would have warned him of their danger: The Alkari had shored up one of their critical vulnerabilities. Within just a year or two, they had quintupled the strength of their electronic counter-measures with a jammer that rendered our bombers' targeting algorithms completely ineffective. A full volley of bombs - one of the ten each bomber carried - destroyed barely more than an eighth of the planet's missile bases in spite of our hopes of taking them all out within at most two volleys. The bombers therefore had to fly in circles - or rather in wild, chaotic shapes around the incoming rockets - making bombing runs only when they were convinced it was safe, ignoring the enemy fleet while our repulsor ships kept them at bay, until the point shown in the inset, taken shortly before the final volley destroyed the last two bases, after our dreadnoughts had destroyed all the defending ships apart from the fighters and few missile boats that fled into hyperspace.
Their latest design, the duralloy WarEagle cruiser, was dangerously fast and accurate, fairly well shielded, and the one ship in their fleet that could actually react faster than our Screens and Surges. Had it mounted actual weapons instead of two over-stuffed racks of stinger missiles - significantly slower than the other stingers in the fight to make room for all those spares - and anti-missile rockets, or if like the Warhawk it carried a repulsor beam, it might have been incredibly dangerous - but with nothing to worry about from it apart from its twin heavy phasors and only one of it in the battle, especially since it flew out so far ahead of the rest of its fleet, it went down easily. The other designs are all well-known by now, and we were ready for them - all but the missile bases. Those didn't focus on our bombers exclusively, which on the one hand made it a little easier for us to get hits in on them quickly, but on the other hand made their stinger missiles a real threat to our ships. The Screen was actually destroyed this way, living a little too dangerously, but fortunately they didn't start targeting our battleships until it was too late: We had taken out enough of the bases - with the MEGA even contributing slightly with its lone but well-targeted anti-matter bomb rack - the massive zortium hulls could absorb the impact without coming apart entirely. The targeted dread then needed only to accelerate away from the planet to be positioned, in case it was targeted again too soon, to safely escape in retreat - which in the event none were compelled to do during the course of the battle - or to advance again when its auto-repair and the fall of still more missile bases allowed it to approach the planet again in safety.Then, after the battle was finally won, we got more unexpected good news:
Though our weapon reserach teams were dilligently reporting the odds of a breakthrough, we assumed it would be years yet before pulson missiles were ready to deploy at our missile bases. Had we known the project would complete so soon, we would likely have delayed our fleet-building frenzy until they - and their attendant miniaturization improvements - became available. Since there was no way to know, I do believe we did the right thing: As the sudden advent of advanced Alkari jammers shows, alien technology may advance as ours does too - and as the results at Escalon show, a good-enough ship design built now is better than an even-better one that never sees the light of day. We would indeed end up deploying new ships to benefit from what we learned in the course of pulson design, but they hadn't been available in time for our first offensive, and we had decided not to wait.
Our second Surge, just completed and en route to Furnace, would be assigned to help guard Escalon from Warhawks when our transports were due to arrive from star systems all around our space in just three years. It would be the last we intended to build, with better designs already possible, but like the rest of our existing fleet, it still had plenty of time to help significantly. The main fleet already at Escalon, of course, couldn't handle the problem on its own: It was needed elsewhere, shown here already en route, though without any detail. That fleet wasn't moving to a defensive position though; it was moving forward, to the next Alkari star nearest to its own.
No, not that one. Its target's not pictured, down below the bottom of the screen. It's not planning to take on their actual homeworld ... yet.
To be continued....
(Hopefully sometime tomorrow, probably this late if so; otherwise, I should at least have it ready by the next day. Thanks again for being patient with me!)
If our invasion at Escalon goes well and we can capture some Alkari tech, maybe we can finally break this deadlock. Grabbing the toxic world will also help, as we need every planet and council vote we can get.
Good luck with more turns and the second portion of the report.
Nice to see those Ion Cannons getting some use! Creative set of ship builds - just a small shame the Birds upped their defense so much. Just going to have to punch through with raw production, pull what techs we can and see what can be fitted in after another round of miniaturization. We'll get ahead of the curve eventually.
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
(September 4th, 2023, 03:05)haphazard1 Wrote: If our invasion at Escalon goes well and we can capture some Alkari tech, maybe we can finally break this deadlock.
Perhaps, but I think it's more a matter of...
(September 4th, 2023, 04:46)shallow_thought Wrote: Just going to have to punch through with raw production, pull what techs we can and see what can be fitted in after another round of miniaturization. We'll get ahead of the curve eventually.
...what shallow_thought said. Assuming, of course, that you're prepared for a slightly-unusual use of "eventually..."
Outgoing Meklar Diplomat's report, part 2:
- 2455 -
Our counter-attack fleet in Alkari space didn't waste any time at Escalon: As soon as the defenses there were handled, it was moving forward again, and the following year, it reached the neighboring system of Lyae.
This time, our pilots knew what they were up against, and were facing fewer bases, so they took their time circling around the scatter packs, taking advantage of any opportunity to go on a bombing run, absorbing a few missile hits while the dreadnoughts dealt with the defending fleet - for the brief period when it stuck around - and occasionally accelerating away after a stinger volley came their way, to give their autorepair functions time to restore their armor, until the planetary defenses were so shattered, as shown in the inset, that the bombers could wipe out the rest, including the targeting systems for all the huge cloud of missiles still flying around, with one last volley. I took pride in our pilots' care and skill - to say nothing of their bravery and calm in the face of the overwhelming numbers of rockets chasing them - not only for forcing the Alkari to fight us over their own worlds instead of ours, but for the tremendous help they offered me in my own work of interstellar diplomacy!
Grunk's valiant attempt to do something against what he called "the Alkari menace" at Rigel does not appear to have fared as well as ours at Escalon - still less its continuation to Lyae. At a guess, his ship designers, admirals, and captains didn't specialize or coordinate their efforts as ours did, and he ran against the sheer strength of Alkari defenses and couldn't break through. He was thus perhaps all the more eager to compliment us for the material damage we were already doing to the Alkari military - especially since, though our transports weren't en route, we hadn't as yet gained anything from the experience. I had a friendly conversation with the old bear in the wake of our attacks, and had high hopes for future cooperation between our peoples - high hopes, but also, I must admit, extremely low expectations: It just didn't seem like Grunk could do much of anything to help us, honestly.
By contrast, Tyranid of the Sakkra gave me no reason for hope at all: Already allied with the Alkari, he refused to part ways with him at my request or to offer any technology exchanges worth considering. And as for the Klackons, notionally delighted with all the damage we were doing to their powerful Alkari enemies...
...they felt that their best way forward in the galaxy was to throw their ships away attacking us at about the same speed at which beads of glue migrate down a rough surface on a mid-sized asteroid without artificial gravity. We weren't really preparing for their far-away attacks; our rich shipyards were busy with other things.
One of the biggest problems our weapons engineers had to address in developing pulson missiles was the anti-matter warhead: The containment systems we used for any appreciable volume of antimatter had been miniaturized repeatedly over the years, but were still too bulky to be carried by the proposed pulson delivery systems. The critical breakthrough back in 2454 came with the unexpected success of QB17-M345 anti-plutonium ion fabrication, allowing a far greater mass of antimatter to be contained in the same volume as had been possible with antimatter in any other form. These anti-plutonium ions are also notable for the sheer variety of different ways they can and will kill anyone who makes contact with them, but really once you're dealing with antimatter, it doesn't really matter how many different ways it happens; if you manage to touch any relevant quantity, you and your neighborhood - at a very conservative minimum - are already gone. Apart from the new missiles, the new ion fabrication plants allowed for much smaller antimatter bombs with the same total yield, which meant the whole new line of bombers that came off the assembly lines in time to reach Furnace and Friction by 2455 had room for targeting computers four times as powerful as the version that had just won the battle above Lyae.
- 2456 -
When I said I had low expectations for our relationship with the Bulrathi, this was not exactly what I meant. That they would be useless, unreliable, and potentially-counterproductive allies, I understood; that's the nature of dealing with people with Grunk's ... unique mental processes. That he would cancel our non-aggression pact and start planning an attack the very year after expressing his overflowing gratitude at our help in stopping the Alkari just seemed a little much to me. I suppose I should have expected it though: While waiting for the new bombers to arrive at the front - Window bombers, which we hoped would have a similar effect on the Alkari to that which other transparent windows have on other avians - we were consolidating our existing fleets to maintain control of the skies of Escalon and Lyae, without knowing if those would build bases or starfleets, and prepare our next attack run simultaneously. Owning the skies was important to us because as long as we did, they couldn't use those worlds as staging points from which to launch attacks against our worlds - but of course Grunk didn't care about our welfare, and would have preferred to see Alkari fleets attacking us in our homes, since they would then be out of position for attack or defense against him. In spite of all my diplomatic efforts, the Bulrathi continue to regard us, at best, as tools for their use, it would seem.
We were doing our best to prove otherwise. Hundreds of transports were already on their way, crossing space in all directions, many of them already en route to Escalon and Lyae, others moving to staging points in star systems along the way in preparation for the next wave, and almost three dozen more transports were just setting out from Nordia for Escalon. Production of electromechanical chasses for new citizens were at an all-time high, together with the ecological development necessary to support, encourage, and sustain a rapidly-growing population. We had our fleet - the Window bombers were already en route themselves, and their support ships were setting out already - and what we needed, more than anything else, was more ground troops.
- 2457 -
That was the year when everything happened at once. For starters, that was when our forward fleet met all the new bombers ... at Altair.
This time, it went by the book: Screen moves up to keep the path clear and get some early hits in on the WarEagle, Surge moves up with more hits from its heavy ion beams en route to hammering at the Warhawk from range, MEGA moves up and pounds the WarEagle to within an inch of its life with the old dread right behind, trying to keep up. Then the Window bombers move in, taking their cleared path toward the planet, janking around the scatters when they start getting close, with the older bombers playing the same game - at first. This time though, we got to see what the new fleet could do, and the result was entirely satisfactory: More than half the bases went down in a single volley, thanks to fully 450 Window bombers with their advanced targeting systems, and when the old bombers' pilots saw that, they just took off away from the scatters, not bothering to get even slightly fancy since they knew it was all over. The enemy ships tried to maneuver around, but it was too late to matter, and the Screen was still there stopping them from doing anything that would hurt, so again the Window fleet did nothing fancy: They just dropped their payload and evaporated the rest of the bases and their missile-targeting systems. That left just time enough for the Surge to ice off the Warhawk. The bombers got out so the giant cloud of laser fighters would realize they couldn't actually damage anything, and with that, the remaining Alkari ships retreated. Textbook moves, though the old bombers weren't needed after all, even as insurance, and that with all those Alkari weapons set on fire, we had our first diplomatic coup of the year. The second followed almost on its heels.
This one came from a different branch of the diplomatic corps. Enhancing our means of restoring factory-damaged ecologies was great, a nice little economic benefit on every world, but maybe the most-important part was the trail we left behind at the Sakkra homeworld, implying the Alkari were the ones who had stolen the plans. Tyranid wasn't willing to break off his alliance with Farseer at my request, in spite of the Alkari war crimes perpetrated at our Furnace colony. Perhaps, I thought, he might reconsider if he learned of Alkari spies operating in his laboratories.
I'm leaving out the other space battles that happened early that year: Escalon and Lyae saw each saw small Alkari forces - each with a single WarEagle and a squadron of Sky Hawk stinger missile boats - retreat from the dreadnoughts we'd stationed there to keep them away. Only at Escalon was the battle urgent, of course: We didn't want them shooting down any of the transports coming in!
They didn't, obviously. The military analysts said we were fairly unlucky on the ground, losing several million more troops than expected, but we had enough to do the job anyway - and to go through over a hundred and eighty factories for everything we could reverse-engineer of Alkari technology.
Some of that - their waste-reduction technology - was garbage we had far surpassed already, but not all! Their old energy pulsar, superseded for them by the ionic upgrade, was entirely new to us, and while dangerous to friends as well as enemies if used incorrectly, it would offer one way of wiping out their gigantic fleet of over three thousand laser fighters if we ever decided we cared enough to do that instead of just handling them with shields or repulsor beams. The real scores, such as they were, were the state-of-the-art shields - a slight improvement over our then-existing ones, but strong enough to shrug off class-V scatter packs entirely - and another advancement to our ecology restoration techniques, doubling - and immediately obsoleting - the efficacy of what our spies had picked up so recently.
In the wake of all that, Ssithra was as complimentary as Grunk had been so recently - we could only hope its moods and decisions were a little more stable than his.
All in all, a spectacular year - in spite of the fact that the techs we acquired included none of the ones we wanted most - with more transports setting out from practically everywhere to keep us moving forward ... but the Alkari still had a surprise in store for us!
Apart from a hundred-odd of their pointless laser fighters, they had three of their latest heavy-phasor WarEagles, a pair of death-spore colony ships, and thirteen Sky Hawk stinger missile destroyers en route to, of all places, our Dusty colony at the very edge of the galaxy! Even with their impressive strategic speed, the journey would take four years. How they could get there seemed dumbfounding at first, but we got our explanation - from the same branch of the diplomatic service that had helped build tensions between the Sakkra and Alkari!
Yes, on top of their (many) other examples of advanced technology, they had developed Thorium fuel cells. No matter how much we reduced their empire, so long as it existed, they would be able to strike anywhere in the galaxy. The point would only be emphasized in the following years.
I guess the Alkari have at least IRC4 if not IRC5, given they are matching our production with fewer planets and pop.
And our computers tree has been ugly the last couple tiers, just one jammer after another. 
![[Image: 2441-weapons.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/GmP7fCzR/2441-weapons.png)
![[Image: 2441-escalon.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/MGWP2FrQ/2441-escalon.png)
![[Image: 2441-alkari-fleet.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/YqWy1gWh/2441-alkari-fleet.png)
![[Image: 2443-planetology.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/P5nVKxWK/2443-planetology.png)
The rest retreat.
