Ugh, I lost 3 planets, Talas, Regulus and Darrian. I also settled 3 new ones (though for two of them, the ship was already on its way when I started). On the plus side, we still hold Bootis, and it's contributing a lot to our research, and I've got enough missile boats together to probably take out one Meklar ship if it doesn't hide behind an asteroid field
Year 2380:
I switched over some planets from shipbuilding to research to get to Hyper-X missiles faster. On the interturn, all Meklar transports attacking Bootis are destroyed. 27 surviving troop transports capture Talas.
Year 2381:
Our colony ship is almost at Helos, and I want some ships to keep away the Psilon colony ship. Therefore, I switch Zoctan over to Pebble fighters. The accumulated ship production gets converted to 21 fighters, without investing anything more, so Zoctan can continue teching. 21 is more than the "token amount" I had in mind, but that turned out to be a good thing. Hyper-X pops on the interturn.
I pick the Neutron Blaster so that we'll finally get a good beam weapon, and keep up spending on weapons research.
Helos is settled, and I get to bomb Talas now, killing 3 pop which cancels out their growth. Kind of pointless, but killing some Meklars might make it easier to get a peace treaty later.
Year 2382:
I design a missile boat with the rather grandiose name of Avalanche.
Unfortunately, I couldn't fit two launchers and Nuclear Engines on one ship. With the Meklar's Gatling Lasers, I'm thinking that shield might have been a good idea, in retrospect.
Meklars attack at Bootis with an Annihilator ship. That one has only Gatling Lasers. After retreating my fighters, the Meklar ship retreats from our missile base. I keep bombing Talas.
Year 2383:
The first wave of Avalanche missile boats launches from Cryslon and moves to Darrian. I seed Helos with some pop from Cryslon (should have done that last turn). Also, Cryslon builds another colship to settle Keeta, the last planet in our backline.
Another of our long-range colony ships arrives at Jinga, a rich inferno planet near human space. The bad news is that it encounters an armed Meklar colony ship. The good news is that they can't colonize inferno worlds yet, so our colship temporarily retreats to Darrian.
Year 2384:
Darrian maxes out industry and starts building Avalanche ships.
Year 2385:
The colship for Keeta is ready. I spot some interesting fleet movements:
The Meklars are going to pick a fight with someone else too! The selected transports seem to be going either to a human starsystem, or to the Psilon system Endoria - that's right, they also finally expanded from their homeworld!
Bootis is about to max out industry, and I start another missile base to keep it safe. On the interturn, a fusion-bomb equipped ship appears at Bootis:
I defeated it before it got into bombing range, but lost all fighters in the process.
Year 2386:
These two fleets were worrying me.
I haven't seen the Ajax ships before, but they seemed to be headed to Bootis. The other fleet was an Annihilator which seemed to be headed to Talas. I started a missile base on Stalaz to be safe and moved the fighters from Talas down to Bootis. However, the Annihilator design was scrapped shortly thereafter, and the Ajax are moving to Talas.
I look around for tech trade opportunities, but the humans offer nothing and the Psilons Hyper-V missiles...
On the interturn, Meklar spies blow up a missile base on Bootis, but I was almost done with a new one anyway...
I do like the look of the population bar on the status graphs; Silicoids with an advantage in population should be able to push through to victory given time. And with your advantage in planets, that pop lead should continue to grow. Good luck!
