So do I know what you're thinking? Tell me if I know what you're thinking here: It's all fine and sweet to make trades with aliens and just hope they vote with us, and make grandiose plans about a veto, but how is this veto thing going to ever get delivered to me? What's it going to take to get over the line here? Is that what it is? Because if you want to know what to do about it, have a look over here:
Yeah, that's Ixlu, where the bugs had a colony five years back. You might remember we had a little practice taking on their bases and fleets - and this one barely qualified, compared to what we'd been fighting in the past - and we were
still learning, getting better at predicting how many bombers we'd need to quickly handle each base, that kind of thing. So at this point, we're looking at twenty-two lost bombers and just twenty-three lost factories, but we can do better, and we will. But there's another difference here from all the other attacks we made before. See, this time we had
transports coming in right behind our ships, and that's the
reason we wanted to cut down some on all the blown-up factories. Only thing is? We had a problem! The bugs came up with a fusion rifle just before we landed - probably traded for it with somebody - and like I said,
our fusion rifles arrived just a little too late to get out there for the battle. Turned what should have been a walk-over into a burny, mushroom-cloudy kind of fight.
Good thing we sent enough birds down to make
sure! We outnumbered the bugs by more than two to one when we hit the ground, and still had only ten million survivors after the fight - less than 7% of our invasion force! We'd planned to turn the planet straight around into an ace world for us, and we were still going to do that, for sure, but talk about flying into a head-wind to get there!
Okay, so that said, let's hit the good news for a change: All those 297 factories were
building stuff, and they had designs loaded into their buffers and everywhere so they'd be able to handle all the bug technology, and we looted their data systems for all they were worth! Energy pulsar? Do not want, but hey, miniaturization, and it's a good thing they didn't put that on their fleets! (Bugs are dumb, FYI.) (Plus, we didn't give them a lot of time to react to our designs between declaring war and ... you know,
this happening.) Auto Blaster, argh, we should
not have wasted resources trying to research that for ourselves, now I don't even care about looting it here. Class V deflectors - is that our state of the art now? Should I care? I should not. Controlled Tundra, hurray for a smidgeon more production, I guess? I mean, actually, with our galaxy-leading population, a smidgeon adds up to a lot, but
please. And Class III deflectors, definitely
not state of anybody's art who matters to anything, we're getting all the bugs'
junk out of this planet, aren't we? Is there any other trash our birds can loot out of those factories? Maybe a jammer that only works against anti-missiles or something just to be doubly or triply useless, depending on how you count?
NOPE! That's their absorption shield we're getting,
finally! And that means, between those and our
own fusion rifles,
we were finally going to have the advantage when we invaded again - we'd be trying to push that advantage even farther too, looking at hand phasors as our next secret weapon project, at the same time as a cloak for our ships - and "when we invaded again" was coming up fast! We launched the last set of transports from Civiltuk, crammed with enough 'sorb shields to supply all the other troops going in, and...
Boom! Kaxuinic's the way a battle's supposed to
go! We lose 21 Raptor bombers (and, as usual, by the way,
absolutely nothing else) and drop just nineteen of their factories (we could have done better, but that's pretty good) to ice three more Tarantulas, another of their Viper cruisers, six bases, and their
colony, because we sent in just enough troops - by sheer luck,
exactly enough - to kill off all the bug troops who hadn't been splashed by our bombs, and replace the
former bug population, from
prior to our attack
exactly!
Oh, and was
that ever a year for technology!
The soldiers got first crack, and they helped, but, see, our
scientists finally came through around the same time with stuff they'd been promising for
years already, and
that was what split the skies: Robotic controls more advanced than anybody else's I know of got started right away at our best worlds, with Yonezu getting some help from the treasury since
research is
its thing, not production like the rest. None of the other planets could afford the delay right off, with all the cloning they needed to do and that kind of thing - get-out-the-vote stuff, you know? - and we'd be going for our only option after that, with a two-layer battle computer upgrade. But that wasn't even the
big news. No, the big news was
Ion drives! We're looking into Star Gates now so we'll be able to connect the two halves of our empire more effectively, but I'm glad we took these in the order we did: We just didn't have the production yet in our new holdings to
get any star gates in place, but with the new drives, we can get people and ships - and did I mention people, like in transports, as in troops? - across space
fast, and build
up the new holdings so they
will be able to build star gates! Anyway, the only way forward was with a high-energy focus thing that's hard to imagine doing any good on a little one-pilot ship.
So mewanwhile, we were cleaning up everything the bugs had, thanks to Kaxuinic's 341 surviving factories, which meant
another smidge of a production boost from inferno environmental controls, anti-missile rockets to point and laugh at and help miniaturize our actual
weapons a tiny bit, a warp dissipator device that'll never fit on our combat ships, plus the one bug tech we actually
wanted - and wanted a
lot: Terraforming technology that would make room for another ten million birds on every single world where we lived in the galaxy! Which,
also thanks to the bugs' helpful contributions, was up to
seventeen! And believe me, my fine-feathered friend, I mean seventeen
and counting, because we were not done - and I'd better just add that unless
you decide otherwise, we
are not done
yet!
Yeahhhhhhh when I saw what your predecessor had in mind here, first thing I said was, "Oh, no - the crazy old bird is doing it again!"
Most of these fleets and transports and everything have landed by now.
Most of them. But if you're having trouble following all the Jasana's-Cradle lines showing our planned attack and reinforcement vectors across interstellar space, I don't blame you. Not building any new ships yet in spite of the new design though: We didn't need 'em yet; we had a big enough fleet already! The only sad part is that our fun little exercise in insect electioneering was winding down: The bugs were running out of worlds for us to take! But even a quick glance at those battle lines I mentioned should give you some idea that we had a solution in mind for that already!
Oh, and speaking of which - you know, it's
related for certain reasons - our least-important tech contribution of the year was from Carinth, one of the liz... oh, wait, wait, hold on while I check ... okay, yeah, yeah, had to make sure: One of the
lizard worlds!
Our eager little buddy here didn't have much to choose from since we could already enrich our soil better than
they every could, but we figured at the time that a smidge more room to fit cool stuff onto our ships would be cooler than a smidge more production everywhere for what we were planning. Plus, there's this one actual use case for auto-repair on little one-pilot ships like ours: In case we start facing someone who
deploys stream projectors, we can make giant swarms of fighters and bombers that can actually stay in the fight! But that's for later-if-ever. Because, remember all those tangled lines on the attack plan from that year? Yeah, it was about to get worse.
See, so, okay, I had been thinking, right up until the year we finally took Kaxuinic and our ion drives came in, we'll conquer all the bugs except like one world, and then move straight on to the 'loks, because who even likes 'loks, am I right? But come to realize, those cloak-loving masked-up universal thieves are still far away from everything, and they don't
have all that many worlds, but they
do have a monster
fleet! And it's like I heard you were saying, I don't know, thirty, forty, fifty years ago? Way back when, about Ajoite, when sure our bombers could crack their bases, but would we even have enough firepower to bust up all the garbage they had floating around in space? Not to
mention the chance they'd have something
on their cruisers that - in big enough numbers - could actually kill our ships! And, okay, what your predecessor, the crazy old Sovereign with the cat's-cradle plans, what
that bird noticed was, the lizards had practically no fleet to
speak of - even smaller, even by GNN's clueless metric than
ours - and they had a bunch of big worlds with plenty of voting power, much closer
by! So ...
that started happening, and then in the meantime, we actually found another use case for that auto-repair stuff we got from those very same lizards already!
I know, I know, individual Mentaran ships are going to be harder to kill when they can regenerate, but I'm not scared. They'll probably put it on missile boats that have to retreat in short order anyway, or not
bother to put it on anything, and I'm hoping we never have to fight them
anyway - or if we do, we can always swarm them with enough fighters to kill off their ships before they can repair! Anyway, so apart from that, it was a quiet year - and so was the next one - because we were all preparing for the
big year:
This year, when the old Sovereign got to retire in style and you get to take over with
me for your election campaigner! Would have been crazier and fancier with more stuff planned right away if the loon wasn't planning to retire right this year already, but that's what you get. Anyway, here's what it looked like
last year: The year before the
fireworks:
That's
one of the fleets heading out that I highlighted. There are
lots. Did I mention your predecessor built zero armed ships throughout the entire decade - just a small number of scanner boats? Yeah, that's because our "little" starfleet was already more than enough. We didn't
need anything else. Now, though? Well, that's up to you. We've got some suggested designs lined up that I think you'll agree are pretty if you want to keep pushing attacks against stronger enemies than lizards, cats, and bugs, or you can just roll with what you've got and keep pushing funds into the reserve to help stand up our new worlds. Your call!
Now, what am I forgetting here? Oh - oh, right, right, the
apes! They warned us about stealing something from them, which we hadn't done (
that year) and of course we were framed. So that's something to keep an eye on: They like us okay, but apparently
someone is spying on them in spite of them being beloved monkeys, and trying to drive a wedge between us.
Oh, and there's this other thing:
The old sovereign was complaining about not being able to find an option to declare war! I don't know. The diplomatic corps is funny that way; sometimes they pretend not to know how or something? Or maybe they'd have made it an option in there somewhere; it's not like we spent much time looking. It wasn't like the lizards would take long to figure out we were at war anyway.
So here's the lizards' homeworld with its seventeen missile bases, moments before our bombers slagged them all in one shot. Talons went wide to leave space in the middle for the Raptor bombers, right up behind the rightmost asteroids on the screen. Then with not enough missiles from the ships to make us care, the Talons went right up to start slugging away with their out-of-date targeting computers and NPGs. The Swifts would help with that a little when they finally caught up. Then the bombers went "high" because the Dinosaurs seemed to be firing more rockets (I mean, there were more Dinosaurs) than the Pterodactyls, closing with the planet and eating whatever shots caught up, and then ran around trying to dodge more missiles for a while so the NPG fighters could clean up and nobody would have to retreat. We lost less than twenty bombers to their six Dinosaur cruisers, seventeen bases. The 'dactyls managed to retreat because our fighters are showing their age and couldn't slag them all before the enemy ran out of missiles to shoot. Similar stuff at Mersorth, and at Xelha against the bugs. Oh, and also we sent a spare fleet over to Ixil to blow up the last of the bugs' military equipment. They didn't bomb the place from orbit because we were afraid we'd kill off all the bugs, so we're sending most of them elsewhere now. But the
big electioneering push was still at the lizard homeworld!
I know it's unfortunate, really sad, but it always happens with these really nasty elections with all kinds of negative ads: The number who showed up at the polls shrank a lot in the course of the campaign. Still, thanks to a really effective force-field and construction-based advertising campaign of our own, after leading the polling just 191 million to 147 million at the outset, we're now solidly ahead in the planetary polls by a solid 98 million! It didn't go nearly that well at the bug world of Xelha - for a certain reason - but we sent so much, we still came out ahead by some 51 million, and even at Mersoth, where we were actually
outnumbered by the lizards before our fleet arrived, our technological edge brought us another electoral victory, with a 27-million vote lead! Oh, oh, and that certain reason I mentioned?
Yeah, the bugs just kept it up with their last-minute tech leaps, this time jumping all the way up to Tritanium armor for their troops just before ours hit their skies. Lucky for us, now
we have it, for all our
future conquests - plus, the cute, slightly crude techniques the lizards use to enrich their soil - which should make things a little easier for us ... meaning, my fine-feathered friend, for
you!
Okay, okay, I hear you say, but what does this have to do with your election campaign? Yeah, well, it's just a piece of the bigger picture that covers
everything:
Remember how big the bugs' fleet was before ours blew it to pieces? Yeah. It's currently sitting at 0.0% of the military strength of the galaxy. The lizards aren't looking too hot either, and we've barely
started with them. We can take on the others too when and if we ever have to, no matter
what the numbers say right now - we've got some ace shipyard worlds that just finished maxing out their infrastructure ready to build us a whole new and
better warp-
6 fleet if necessary ... or when we
feel like it! Our production numbers have been scratching and clawing their way toward the top for ages, and we have a
ton of new factories we can still produce, including the ones we just have to cheaply refit to work with us instead of bugs of lizards at our newly-captured colonies. We're even starting to threaten to break into the big three in technology if we concentrate on that for a bit ... and planets ... well, we have an even
twenty - which is more than the entire Central Alliance
combined. But you don't want to hear about that. You want to hear your
poll numbers - and, well,
check out that population count! We've
almost got a veto
already, with room to grow on most of our worlds and transports still in space - mostly for Sssla, Kholdan, and Mersorth, all arriving within the next three years. We might be able to veto the Council with just the worlds we have ... but there's no
reason, unless you
want to, to stop
here!
Oh, and if the election were held today? We'd be up against Dynalon, who - critically - isn't a monkey, so not everybody
loves him. But you know who's
third in population right now?
Carnax is funny. We've been fighting the bugs for
years, and
now it shows up to egg us on?
Now it's like, "Hey go prove yourself on the battlefield against the disgusting insects"? I mean, look, that war is
donezo. They're in a
zoo with no bases or starfleet and a fair amount of mineral
poverty! We've already
won! But hey, we've got an
election to win - you know? If Carnax isn't going to be nominated (and who knows at this point; it's a close race for second right now) we might as well leave a token force to drop some anti-matter bombs into the Klackon zoo for a while. And the best part is, if it's close enough we think Carnax
might be nominated, we can make
peace with the bugs at the last minute and get their
vote - as long as they stay at war with the C'oids, but y'know. I'm sure they
want to make peace, but Carnax will take one look at their relative fleet strengths and
"NO!" will just say, even faster than I can lead up to the open-quotes,
Okay, okay, enough joking about dumb aliens. What if they turn out to be smart? Like, I mentioned adding auto-repair if we expect long fights with stream projectors, but what about, I don't know, repulsor beams? Or anything else we need to engage
fast or at long range? Well, even in spite of their adoration for ECM, if we have to, here's a suggestion somebody left in the "Prototype" box:
Now,
this is a missile boat! 22 billion credits to get a pair of Stinger missiles with class-9 total targeting into space is a pretty good deal. It's just that for ship-to-ship if we can take our time a little more and close to point-blank range, I'd rather have something like the Surgeon 6, with our best computer, best maneuver including a stabilizer, and
a mass driver! Twin NPGs would be better if we were facing a bunch of
little ships, but as someone observed before we set off on this crazy quest, the aliens all seem to be too dumb to ever
use little fighters, so we might as well show them the error of their ways!
Oh - oh, and those Terminal V(elocity)s? Best computer. Best speed. Stabilizer. And
two anti-matter bombs apiece! None of this has been built yet, so it's totally up to you what you actually use - you could go a whole different way, or build
nothing yet since we already
have enough fleet to take on the lizards
at least - but this should give you an idea of what's available if you want it. And - heh - especially since, as a kind of extra gift, the last Sovereign
did leave a pretty good amount of "ship reserve" stores on each of our three main shipyard worlds ready to contribute toward whatever you want to build next. Just saying.
So okay, that's just speculation, so let's go ahead and speculate some
more. When you get into office, things are going to look
comparatively clean, with just those 'sports I mentioned coming in. But if the old Sovereign got roped into taking another term? Here's the way things might look starting out the new term
then!
No worries if
you don't want to play it that way; just offering it for your consideration. That, and noting the two ships that
did get built with warp six: A pair of up-to-date Falcon's Eye scan ships, one at Mersorth (potentially heading to Sssla to rendezvous with more of the fleet, or available to redirect to anywhere you find interesting) and one on its way to Adachi, partly as a waypoint, and partly just to see what kinds of alien ships might be hanging out there, so it can post them to the Alien Military screens. Should be there next year, ready to send along to whatever you're curious about next ... on your way first to a veto and later to rule over the galaxy!
