Well ... this is it, everybody. I've promised the OSG-38 that if they implement my policies, we'll see the end of galactic conflict within the next five years, and the beginning of a new age of scientific discovery. They've reviewed my plans, reviewed my history, and given me my opportunity. If I fail, things could get ugly - not for our imperial power, of course; we've basically taken over the galaxy - but very much for me, so I'd better get
on this: Five years just isn't a whole lot of
time!
So first up is a move in what looks like the right direction, even if it's ultimately just a symbolic gesture: The Second Meklar-Psilon Non-Aggression Pact should hopefully help prevent M5-35 from getting bored with the increasingly-helpless Silicoids and sending another of its fleets in our direction instead - at least for a little while. We'll see how long it lasts, but I have a sneaking suspicion that most Psilons will be more interested in the
other diplomatic overtures I'm making to the Meklar here!
The pure joy and fulfilment of sharing scientific knowledge for its own sake, of discovering ever more of the universe's secrets, together, step by step and piece by piece, is a beautiful dream to reach toward in the distant, uncertain future. Right now, I'm afraid our rivals in the galaxy - to the extent they still deserve the name - take a rather more mercenary view of the whole thing. After a certain amount of what they called "haggling" however, leaders of the Meklar scientific community agreed to a simple exchange of techlogical know-how: We taught them to cut the costs of their future factory construction projects by a good 40% - a sort of down payment on the esoteric knowledge they'll share when we all are united in knowledge across the galaxy - in exchange for blueprints their weapons engineers developed in the meantime: Hyper-miniaturized versions of our own phasor weapons so compact that they can be carried by Psilon soldiers in battle, enabling them to readily assist Silicoid soldiers in making an extremely rapid transition from sedimentary or metamorphic to igneus states.
The 85 million Naturites on their way to Cryslon won't need the new weapons though - at least, not right away. It's going to take them two years to get there, and by the time they do, they'll just be helping to repopulate a world we already control: Our phasor-armed
soldiers are coming from Proteus and Maretta, well ahead of these transports from Nature.
The soldiers bound for
Cryslon, I mean. There are going to be a
lot of Psilon transports in space in a minute, from nearly everywhere. Many of them, like these Naturites, will come in peace though: Diligently though we may prosecute our war, we haven't and won't give up on our pursuit of peace.
Like the Meklar, the Klackons are making this easy. The irony of their peaceful attiutude toward us arising from our successful prosecution of our mutual war against the Silicoids is not lost on me, but I'll take peace where I can find it, and perhaps this new non-aggression pact will at least enable closer relations than we enjoyed before, and further overtures of peace. If nothing else, as with the Meklar, they're willing to exchange important technological discoveries!
Our cloaking device is a useful tactical device for deployment aboard certain ships - none of which we happen to have in use at the moment, but that might be coincidence: They're fun to use with torpedoes, and I like them on fighters and bombers too, depending on what kinds of ships and defenses they're facing. I'm sure the little Klackon empire will find something useful to do with them too, for some value of "useful" at least, and if I expected to have to fight them and to rely very heavily on our repulsor beams, I might be a little more worried about what the Klackons would do with them. As it stands though, I'm much more excited about what they're teaching us in exchange! With our industrial waste cut down to a quarter of what it used to be thanks to the bugs' new scrubber technology, we should be able to maintain our planetary ecosystems even with all factories running continuously with clean-up costs of just 20 million credits per factory! That might not sound too exciting at first glance, but when you consider the thousands of factories operating across Psilon space, this advance will save us hundreds of billions of credits annually - more than enough to pay for all our defensive bases and espionage activities combined!
It's not close to enough to pay for our starfleet though, so we'll have to take other measures to see that it pays for
itself! I'm leaving a small portion of our Cryslon fleet behind to hold the world, but sending most of it forward to Simius - selected because it's the only one the fleet can reach from Cryslon by next year. Like our transports, this is just an example.
Everything is moving forward! With ships already costing us a sixth of our total galactic budget though, and already likely overkill for what we need, I'm not about to build any
more. Some colonies are working on farms and fertility programs to boost the population they can support, but at this point most of our focus is on research: Our Psilon stock in trade!
That does mean dumping most of our reserve funds into Selia, the better to study its artifacts and learn more about the possibilities our past and future alike may contain, while mineral-rich colonies dig deep - quite literally - for more supplies to rebuild the reserve for next year. I've been charged with a diplomatic mission, after all, and right now, at least for Psilons like us, I think one of the best forms of diplomacy will be grown in the laboratory!
The Silicoids are down to just three unscouted worlds - plus, of course, the scouted ones where our fleets own the skies - and I had dispatched fleets to all of them, but either I neglected to send one of our hilariously-numerous dreads to Keeta or there weren't any in range. There was so much to do last year when I took over operations, I honestly just don't remember. Either way, the
Silicoid dreadnought wasn't interested in retreating from less than two hundred little bombers even when we'd punched through the missile bases, and I was well aware of the warning from my predecessor about energy pulsars and their impact on our smallcraft. So I ordered our bombers to circle around, staying out of close combat range with the enemy battleship, and swoop in for additional bombing runs on the planet at every opportunity: The most-isolated of the remaining Silicoid worlds. I didn't want to exterminate the rocks from the entire galaxy, and I figured as long as we destroyed enough of their ability to make war here, this would be as good a place to leave them in peace as any. So though we could have turned the surface to glass with our anti-matter bombs, leading the dreadnought a merry chase, I ordered a retreat as soon as there was danger that another bombing run might destroy the colony.
Meanwhile, the Meklar were making another contribution to the war effort, thanks to the Special Diplomats we'd established in their space. When our agent reported weapons as the only research field whose storage media she'd been able to crack, I was ready for the disappointment of anti-missile rockets - I asked M5-35 last year what it wanted for them just to get them out of the way, but it had insisted on actually-valuable technology which I wasn't willing to pay - so I was pleasantly surprised when she managed to pick up scatter-pack rockets instead.
We also had some invasion forces arrive. Just to look at it, you might think this one's a little lop-sided - and you'd be right. We lost about half of our forces conquering the planet, which is just about as expected, in spite of being outnumbered almost two to one initially: Literally every piece of military equipment our soldiers use outclasses the best the Silicoids can field - in most cases, severely! We also conquered Paranar this year at similar odds, with roughly half the numbers on each side of the fighting, prompting a special news report from GNN:
After making note of the Mrrshans' success at early expansion, these headlines have been all about the Silicoids for centuries - until now, with the last one directed our way. If other galactic leaders are indeed preparing to merge with our people, they're doing the right thing: We've officially crossed the threshold of galactic dominance, and - very much unlike the Silicoids - we're not looking back from here.
The best news, as always, is the advent of new technology. Cryslon's labs still held the secrets of the Silicoids' state-of-the-art terraforming techniques, and those are getting implemented right away across every planet we own - which is
many. Our own techniques to supercede and improve upon this research may be done soon though: Still researching for all we're worth, we have roughly a ten percent chance of completing the project this year!
This is what Xudax looked like before our transports arrived. Our Phasor 6.0 ripped their Polaris to shreds, and we bombed the planet for good measure because factories don't vote, the Silicoids have no new technology I want to learn, and softening the place up in advance means fewer Psilon deaths when our transports land. Once we conquered the place though, I scrapped the last of our old fusion bombers: They don't do us much good anymore, and by this point, we had way more bombers of every type than we'd ever need again. Much more importantly, the chance of a planetology breakthrough is now being reported as at least 22%!
Beautiful. Still more terraforming is in our future - and in the future of all the other peoples of the galaxy. My promise is pretty much fulfilled already, and it's just a matter of waiting out the next two years - of course while terraforming all our planets along the way! Well ... it
would be just a matter of waiting, but I do have one last special project to contemplate....
Oh, and also we conquered Crypto from the Silicoids. Simius too. Those are both rich worlds, by the way - so is Keeta, it turns out; I finally got a dreadnought down there to smash theirs to bits - but they're a little far away for that to matter too much to me - right now, at least.
Oh! And I should mention: When I took over, I noticed we were technically at peace with the Apes, so I moved the Ultimatum away from their last little world, and left it stationed nearby, basically waiting for this.
Alexander probably thought this was some kind of surprise. Anyway, the Ultimatum's going back to play with him again, so you know what that means.
They've managed, in the meantime, to build up three missile bases and a Warship: The all-four-hands-down worst-designed twenty-sixth-century cruiser I've ever seen. What do they think a warship with a total payload of five Stinger missiles is going to accomplish at any time or under any circumstances? Here, of course, it retreated and destroyed itself in hyperspace while our Ultimatum blew up their bases. They needed at least twice this many bases if they wanted to make the old flagship flinch. Anyway, so that's the war - but I've said already that I'm here to bring
peace.
Like I said, when aliens - even Granid - actually agree to be peaceful with me, I'm happy to move our fleets out of their skies and honor our peace treaties - at least until they inevitably and attempted-suicidally tear up the treaties again.
Seriously though, in this situation, if you're Human or Silicoid (and also, incidentally, at war with the Klackons and Mrrshans) - or really if you're
anybody, would you want war with the
Psilons? Or peace?
So here's what the galaxy looks like just before we close the book on this era of galactic history. Remember that at one time, the Silicoids controlled all six rich worlds, the Humans owned the Artifacts world, and we had to make do with the one that was poor. This map isn't quite the last word, but it's the closest we'll see before the election. And we've built the last combat ship that will ever see use in our fleet.
I admit that does include some 776 starships than hadn't been built yet four years ago, but I did scrap a lot more than that. And we'll never need any of the fifteen-hundred-plus bombers that still remain. It's time to end these wars, for good and all.
I could have tried to draw out the suspense, but if you've been paying any attention, you know there wasn't any. The Silicoids, now at peace with us, abstained from casting their single irrelevant vote. The Meklar and Klackons, still at war with the Mrrshans, both voted against Mirana, casting their ballots for us. With nearly enough votes of our own to win without anyone else's help - we could have gotten there by conquering the last Human and Silicoid world or by attacking whoever else we chose, but we have no interest in committing xenocide, nor in starting wars like those - our 38th Order of Scientific Genius has been chosen to lead the whole of the galaxy.
From now on, we'll
all be researching together, granting no area of knowledge precedence over the others, because
all knowledge is precious, and all is necessary for any to proceed.
...
...
...just one more thing.
There was this little sequence that GNN showed just before the acceptance speech:
Orion, huh? Throne world of the Ancients? Isn't that the star system we've been
avoiding for two centuries?
Not anymore. Like I said, I built 776 extra ships. Also sent as many of our dreads as I could gather up over the past two years.
And only 775 of those were Artemis fighters.
One was a colony ship.
And so we found a whole new way of discovering new secrets of the galaxy!
The pick of that lot - otherwise just a bunch of weapons - is the new terraforming technology of course: Twice as powerful as what briefly was our own state of the art after capturing the Silicoids' latest and before developing slight improvements of our own.
I do have one more comment on the technology we found though: We weren't able to reverse-engineer the Guardian's Advanced Damage Control. There are various reasons for that - another one being that all the bits of it were blasted to atoms by megabolt cannons - but one is that it didn't appear to
work, and records on Orion itself indicate that at least since what they called "v1.3," it never did. We couldn't have destroyed the Guardian with such a small fleet if it had - we'd have needed something like three times as many fighters - but we
were able to do so, in spite of all the Guardian's other advantages.
Meanwhile, down at Maalor, the oldest, slowest surving starship in our fleet is sitting in orbit above what for the last few decades before the New Republic began was the only Human world. With every micrometeorite impact, creaking old automated repair systems still crawl out over the duralloy hull, patching the damage, extracting material from the micrometeorite itself to help with the repairs, before the eyes of hundreds of visitors to the Ultimatum Orbital Spaceflight Museum.
.
. 
It was a tough game and whether we could manage a victory was in serious doubt for quite a while. But we managed to hold on through those difficult times and reach a point where we could start taking rock planets. Once we got the conquest going, we just got stronger and stronger. It was fun to see some of the late game techs get some use. And taking Orion was a nice way to end things.
So I would be interested in a Meklar SG if others like the idea.