Surveying the holographic displays in the office he has inherited from the previous leader, the newest leader of the Altairi shakes his head. That old bird is crazy, look at all the ships and transports going every which way around the galaxy. Still, the people have made very impressive gains in recent years. Perhaps there is method to the madness after all? Sorting out all the chaos is going to take a while....
Current priorities are the ongoing war with the lizards, and making sure our population is maximized for the upcoming council vote in 4 years. Pretty much everything else can wait, we have to avoid Dynalon getting enough votes to control the galaxy.
T171
The bugs ask for peace. They have only one planet left and we do not want a xenocide penalty, so I agree. We could have kept bombing them occasionally to improve diplo with the rocks, but I am hoping that will not be needed.
Our spies steal BC7 from the rocks.
Our spies report the Humans have developed Sub-Space Teleporters.
T172
Our forces capture Apophis from the lizards.
Our spies report that the humans have developed Ionic Pulsar.
Our scanner range now reveals the Nazlok world of Gunabad. It is a large terran artifacts planet, quite the gem. It gets flagged for future attention.
T173
Our forces capture Norruth from the lizards.
Our forces clear the ships and bases from Carinth, but the first wave of transports is not large enough. The lizards hold the planet for another year.
Our scanners reveal a couple of rock systems, one ultra-rich and one ultra-poor. Both are flagged appropriately for future status.
One of our Falcon Eye scanner ships checks out the Nazlok fleet. Missiles, lots and lots of missiles. And a couple of heavy ion cannon. Nothing all that scary.
Lots of pop shuffling has been going on, as incoming transports would have over-filled some worlds.. Transports have been sent all over the place, both for conquest and just to fill space. Some forced pop growth has also been bought, to top off planets before the upcoming council vote.
T174
The second wave of our forces easily captures Carinth from the lizards.
The lizards now have only a single world, where they can continue to exist. At least, we won't destroy them.
The galactic council meets. We and Dynalon of the brains are nominated:
The cats abstain, while everyone else votes for Dynalon. But we have enough votes to block, if only barely. We will need to make additional gains to make certain our rivals do not out-pace us with growth and improving terraforming tech.
I have run out of time for now, so I will pause and post this partial report. What does the team think we should focus on next? We can declare war on the rocks or the shifters to gain more systems. We could take 4 worlds from the shifters, including a very large artifacts planet. The rocks have more systems but would be a tougher fight. Our relations with the central alliance are not great (neutral and wary), but they do not seem likely to attack in the short term.
We have a fair bit of factory building that we could do if we want to catch up in total production, and there are a lot of defense upgrades we could build if we fear attack. The central alliance's tech is nasty. The humans in particular have ridiculous levels of shielding.
I should be able to play the rest of the turns later today or early tomorrow. Your thoughts on how to proceed would be appreciated.