jack

I decided my best, easiest, hope was to take on one of the fallen empires before the awakened, having reached the fleet strength where they were likely to do so.

Unfortunately, it failed.

This development was very dramatic. A pop up described the fallen empire, saying having previous been moribund and uninvolved, their ships had been seen moving about the galaxy, and now they announced their return.

Their fleet power, previously two 50k fleets, went up to four 50k fleets, and then four 80k fleets. OK, um, that will be a challenge. My entire naval strength is only a bit better than one of those fleets.

I think my best tactics are:

* avoid engaging except when I have an advantage
* build up my fleet significantly over my fleet cap, the negative income from upkeep will go away when the fleet gets casualties
* wait for federation president, than massively build up the federation fleet (which may about equal my own strength)
* bait them with faster corvette fleets hitting their territory and if they pursue, try to keep their fleets busy chasing where they can't engage
* if I get a chance, get it and take their systems when their fleets aren't there

I don't have an open ascension perk left (I'd been saving one for terraforming). I don't know if it's worth taking the +30% against fallen empires perk, or if I'd be better taking one of the vanilla perks, or making sure I get the anti-end-game-crisis perk.

A very short, somewhat farcical war

So late last night I ran a little experiment. There are two relevant empires. One that used to be quite friendly, but every time I stopped buttering them up they immediately turned hostile and I eventually got fed up of babying them, who are now inferior to me (in military strength. And ethically. But I mean, not, like, as people.) I sometimes call them the Romulizards.

The other is the strongest unfederated empire, Seban Star Commonwealth, run by some kind of arthrobugs. Although I think they both have birds in their empires now, since they were conquered. Both empires are to the NE of me, but this one controls, via a wormhole, the middle two of a cluster of half a dozen planets down a long dead-end down the western side of the galaxy. I'd previously controlled the only way into these and relied on expanding into them later when I had enough spare influence to take the systems on the way there.

What I really wanted was to control the planets. But I'm a pacifist so I can't just claim them for myself. Second best was to demand their vassalisation. Apparently I *can* do that. But not from this empire -- I can only demand it if the empire is "weaker" officially, and this one isn't. If not, my best choice was liberation: carve out some planets as a new, friendly, empire, and keep them as an ally (either vassalising them later or pulling them into the federation as an ally).

Now they had two planets, and blocked my expansion to the bottom two. However they didn't have much military here. And the two empires I mentioned had a defensive pact, which is supposed to make things harder for the attacker, but can also work in your favour if you want to bait someone into a war.

What I wasn't sure of, if I demanded the weaker empire submit as my vassal (which almost everyone automatically refuses unless they're really weak AND they really like you, but the interface requires you to ask before declaring war), and the stronger empire entered the war on their behalf and I defeated both... would the stronger one also submit as a vassal? Or to be more precise, probably not ALL of their empire, but whatever I managed to conquer?

I decided to test it. I pulled off a perfect feint (after spending lots of time in the previous session setting my stronger fleets up in good staging areas on the relevant borders). My stronger fleet tore into their little-defended territory from my one natural border with them. Their fleet was drawn off. My other fleet, and armies, swept into the planets I actually wanted and conquered them easily.

Bam. Now I checked the status quo information on the war screen, and no, a status quo doesn't give those systems up at all. (IIRC, if I'd claimed them and then occupied them, I'd get them whoever the war was notionally actually against, but otherwise, you can only gain what you officially went to war for, in this case vassalisation of the *other* empire, or part thereof.)

I was actually incredibly relieved because I'd just spend several real-life hours and in-game years doing the same thing a harder way...

A somewhat short, very farcical war

OK, discounting the other experiment, I did much the same thing, except that I was figuring it out as I went along, so the carefully crafted feint was a lot more "blunder about until they started attacking where I was happy for them to attack".

Apparently "carefully crafted" was a bit unnecessary because they were really easy to bait -- I was able to keep both empires occupied bouncing between one end and the other by conquering another minor system at the opposite end, waiting until they'd nearly got there, then doing the same thing at the other end. They did show a prudent tendency to attack the strongest fleet I had that was weaker than their fleet, but by the time I'd figured that out, it was fairly easy to bait them into a position to trap them with my largest fleet.

I wanted to carve off enough territory that I might be closer to vassal-ising the larger empire next war, but not so much that the spin-off territory would be too independent (because the crisis is coming, and fleets I can control directly are a lot more valuable than allies who promptly rush to the wrong place and do the wrong thing). And I hadn't quite figured out everything I explained above so I wasted a bit of time conquering some territory then dancing back and forth. And trying to build up my armies even more -- I had some, but not enough, and not in the right place. Now I have at least some at most of the major borders, enough to conquer at least some planets in future wars.

Misc War Thoughts

There was a lot of interesting military science in the debris. I had my science ships cautiously following my main fleets picking it all up :) It feels like "beating people up and taking their military tech" shouldn't work out, but apparently it does.

I'd also like to commend my science ship who snuck into the wormhole system and figured out how to navigate it while I was bringing my military ships up.

And my construction ship which followed hot on their heels to grab the other planets they'd not colonised yet but I'd previously been blocked from.

OK, now my federation controls the systems of over 40% of potentially habitable worlds. I need 60% to 'win'. I'll gain about five from this operation. I have one ally, who used to be stronger than me, but now weaker, who's allied to the federation but still refusing to join as they have a grudge against my other allies. And having fought a war against the stronger two unallied empires, I think I can take a lot more of their territory if I only have time to do it. So that looks fairly good, although I don't know if we'll control the whole galaxy by the time the crisis hits.

It feels very like an epic fantasy novel, knowing some unspecified apocalypse is coming and we need to prepare to fight, but not being sure what or when.

The war was over quickly enough my allies barely got there. But they did turn up, so I need to remember that in a longer war, I will have *some* help. And I had the federation fleet for some of it which was useful, although it was sadly reduced: if I have enough minerals I need to build it up a lot more next time. And a couple of the allied fleet FINALLY did what I'd previously hoped and followed my ship which was set to encourage them to do that. That really wasn't that helpful here, but it was good to know.

Weird stuff

In the Romulizard territory, I found a toxic world, which usually means a planetary body handled like asteroids, entirely separate to habitable planets that have a surface grid layout etc. But somehow it listed it as having minerals on the surface, and an FTL inhibitor? How on earth? A glitch?

In the Arthobug territory, I found ANOTHER form of space life. Seemingly neutral to me? Looked like starships with glowy purple drives, about 10k strength. Labelled "nun aliens" (as-yet unidentified aliens get labelled my a greek, hebrew, or other letter codename). I was cautious about driving my ships near them but apparently that was ok. But didn't tell me anything about them. I was supposed to be able to initiate a research project to investigate them, but one didn't appear. I'm not sure if they're actually something I discovered before and forgot.

Misc

Apparently withdrawing chemical bliss living standards DOES give withdrawal symptoms for a time. But I managed to integrate the reaver planet, over some time, but without any rebellions or anything.

I wish "exit to menu" didn't say "resign and exit to menu". That's not resignation!

Some of my factions are finally happy! My xenophile faction, despite not officially being part of my government, is very very happy and very big, due to all the different races in my empire, which is probably what I'm happiest about. And my egalitarians are almost as big and almost as happy[1].

My spiritualists are STILL not happy. Messing around with tomb worlds made things worse. And not much made it better. My militarists ARE now happy, since I took one of the supremacy traditions, and keep rivalling people, and they're fourth biggest. The rest are fairly small now, including the fascists and the other fascists (um, authoritarians and xenophobes, I think)?

My scientists aren't happy -- they want more AI, and I want to keep playing my empire without it -- I don't even really need robots as my populace are so happy and fast breeding they staff most of my buildings quite quickly. And my pacifists who I love and want to bring back into the fold, aren't happy -- everything is good, except I KEEP getting in wars. But I don't have a lot of room to improve things OTHER than by wars -- fairly limited wars, but still wars.

Now I look at the expansion planner, showing planets I'm aware of but haven't colonised yet, and see it's getting empty again -- there's not a lot left uncolonised now after my last push.

[1] Like me! :)

Biology!

I got lots of biology options! Hopefully that makes Liv happy :)

I modded several of my population to gain some beneficial traits (less upkeep, more strength).

I gained the ability to change their planetary preference, although that doesn't make that much difference as I have so many different races and planets available, they've reasonable opportunity to live somewhere they like. But I can easily make some desert-platypuses or tropical-funguses or whatever, if it would help. I *can't* mod my Morlocks to live anywhere but Gaia worlds, though, sadly.

Some of my population couldn't wait and genetically modified themselves. That seems fair enough although I suspect it may get out of hand in future.

I have various sorts of terraforming available, although unfortunately not the ones I want the most. I can't quite remember the various different combinations (I think it's slightly different if you have Utopia DLC too). I can change the atmosphere of habitable worlds, now including ones already inhabited. But I don't need to that much, as I already have a lot of perks to habitability. What I WANT is to terraform uninhabitable but candidate worlds, and to transform worlds to Gaia worlds (which gives a bonus on top of 100% habitability). I think I need uninhabitable-to-habitable tech first, to unlock the ascension perk which grants the Gaia terraforming.

I'm not sure all of this is the *most* efficient way, but it's very appropriate to my empire.

I had several sessions which ended up a bit muddled.

Session 1: Reavers

The first was the end of the war against the reavers. In a war with no claims, just "if you take over a system, it's just immediately transferred to you", I wasn't quite sure how that worked with allies. It turns out (I think), that if there's only on adjacent allied empire, they get the system whoever conquered it. And if one of us conquers a system not adjacent to any allied empire, the one who conquered it gets it. I'm not quite sure what happens in edge cases like multiple adjacent empires (the one who conquers the new system? the earliest adjacency?) or in planetary systems if it matters who takes the planet.

I'd meant to test those things out and then run the war for real but I ended up building a bunch of other infrastructure along the way, and then didn't want to restart. So my allies ended up getting most of the planets. Although I got one large planet, and I claimed almost half of the systems, including the border to several dead-ends with planets in, and a border to one the friendly empires affiliated with but not a member of the federation.

I did replay the second half of the war twice to get my priorities right, the first time the war ended without the last planet and most of the systems being conquered because I'd tried to rush the planet but ended up moving my ships and armies around inefficiently.

I'd recently unlocked "chemical bliss" living standards, which seems to mean "free cocaine". OK, actually it's more sinister than that, but my version is going to be the less sinister version. It gives lots of plus happiness, at the expense of lots of minus productivity. I was like, "when am I going to use that"? Since the mid-game I've jacked everyone's living standards up to utopian (go egalitarianism!) which takes more minerals, but gives a big boost to... everything due to happiness.

But I realised, I could give the free cocaine to the recently conquered ex-genocidists, which means they stop running around smashing stuff in frustration and instead sit around grinning. Which on average means they produce slightly more output, mostly because they don't produce lots of unrest. That lasted ten years, then I switched them back to normal well-balanced happiness along with everyone else. (Can you specify living conditions per-planet or only per-species?)

Session 2: Cold War

Then I spent quite a long time building up my economy and military. It was a bit of a mess because I started off with a fairly nice mineral income, and a military far short of my fleet cap. Indeed, I kept building resource silos because I wasn't sure what best to invest my minerals in.

But then in preparation of a likely war, I built up my military, but overdid it -- I hadn't expected to reach my fleet cap so quickly. Then the overhead penalty for exceeding the cap tanked my income, and I spent ages building up anchorages and anchorage boosting buildings to increase my fleet cap up to where it needed to be, and frantically rebuilding energy and mineral income.

If I'd done things in the right order it would have been a lot easier, but I wasn't interested in replaying it.

I ended up with a fleet cap of 300 (iirc 300 small ships, half as many medium ships, etc) full up, and still getting a mineral income of 100-300 depending on circumstances. If I'd built more economy *first* then built fleets that would have been better. But I feel ok-ly placed for the next war.

Session 3: pointless war

My theocratic Foxbsters allies wanted to declare war on one of the weaker non-federation empires, the ones I called klingons because they were stand-offish but honourable.

All my allies seem very happy to go to war -- the internet warned me that if you got into a federation that didn't like going to war, you could just be stuck unable to do anything. I guess that's because the other empires are all quite unpleasant, and often have rivalries against one or more federation members.

And I thought, "oh, why not", which may not have been the best decision. I was intending to just let my allies get on with it. It would have been better if I'd declared war myself, because then I could have insisted on a vassalisation or liberation war, which would have given us all the systems we took, not only the ones my allies claimed.

But I hadn't realised or forgotten there were a bunch of diplomatic options I couldn't have while at war, or I wouldn't have been so cavalier. So I ended up basically just waiting the war out which was very tedious, as the defensive war exhaustion shot up to 100% fairly quickly, but then there was a long time when my ally was neither taking systems very effectively, nor willing to give up and just take a status quo for what they already had. And I didn't want to fly my ships all round the galaxy to do it for them -- and I wasn't even sure how to tell which systems they'd claimed.

But the war did end and my ally got two or three planets, which reduced that empire's strength to "pathetic" relative to me, so hopefully we can mop them up in due course. And for some reason that made them xenophilic and they immediately formed defensive pacts with the other two empires. The extra allies is mildly inconvenient but hopefully ok. Hopefully being xenophilic will make diplomacy easier at some point in the future.

During this time I was building up my economy a bit more -- I've lost count of my planets, 20+, mostly built up by me and then handed off to a sector for upgrading.

And gearing up for a war with one of the other two empires. I kept spending my influence to expand throughout a long dead-end in the north west, which had half a dozen promising planets at the end. I'd hoped that would be all for me, but the other empire figured out wormholes and snuck in there! So I hoped to capture that little bit of territory from them.

But even after all that, I wasn't strong enough to demand vassalisation, so I went for a liberation war (which will make a friendly empire, which is convenient, but doesn't help my empire directly as much). But I probably could have done that earlier anyway, whoops.

Midgame

I take back what I said about the mid-game. I'd thought there'd be more building-up and fewer wars, but I'd discounted the fact that empires would get far enough ahead of each other, they could sensibly wage decisive wars against long-standing empires, so the galactic territory has been reasonably shaken up after all, the number of empires being simplified, and empires still expanding one way or another.

Everything took longer than I thought though, probably because I hadn't always made the best decisions (hi! welcome to humanity! and apparently duckbuilledplatypusanity too). So ideally I'd absorb as much of the other empires as possible *quickly* before the end game hits.

War

One of my allies declared war against the ominous, but now not as threatening, Banthurian Reavers (who look like meek mild-mannered reptile geeks, except genocidal). Apparently they're a rogue state and the usual war rules don't apply, they just attack people any old how, and you can attack them any-how in return.

If I'd realised that, I probably would have declared war myself. I don't *think* you need a border but I'm not sure.

So I was a bit far away when the war started. And further, I didn't quite know how the war worked. In the total war against a rogue state, if you conquer a system, you just gain it immediately. Except apparently, as an alliance, if you border a conquered system, *you* get it, not the ally who conquered it.

I guessed it was a bit like that, but by the time I figured it out, I didn't want to revert to a save and try and do it over a bit more effectively.

In convenient news, I'd just become president of the federation, and the federation fleet was stronger than the minimal anti-pirate fleet I'd been supporting, and a lot closer to reaver territory as well. So I split it into three parts that could each take on an enemy starbase and rushed to conquer as many systems as possible.

I *did* manage to conquer systems that were the only gate deeper into reaver territory, to ensure me a majority of the further territory whoever conquered it. But if I'd been cannier about conquering in the right order I might have got some of the planets, whereas my allies ended up getting almost all of them.

Oh well, it's still more of the galaxy for the good guys. We're controlling a lot more of the galaxy between us now. The worst empires, the reavers and parrocists are nearly done for. That leaves four more, the Romulizards, the Klingobsters (who I've been both been trading or feuding with for ages), and two other empires I haven't interacted with much. But now I'm slowly drawing equal or ahead on tech. And two of them rivalled me, but I'm happy to take the influence bonus. I don't know what I'll do if it comes to war, I don't yet have the influence to claim many more systems from them. But we can play "turn them into pacifist egalitarian spiritualists" or possibly "turn them into vassals".

With the territory I've already taken and some other power-ups, I'm up to about 550 mineral income. And higher, except some of it is being drawn down by ship income. And when I stopped paying attention, my saved minerals soared up to nearly 30k.

More planets

Got another habitability perk! All together that brings tomb worlds up from 0% to 20% and I decided that now it was worth the risk of venturing onto one... :)

I forgot that would make the spiritualists just never happy. Well, we'll see if I can muddle through. We'll see what horrors bubble up.

And I nearly qualified for the super-terraforming ascension perk, except I need a few more sorts of terraforming technology. I hope those come through shortly, I haven't actually been able to terraform anything yet.

I thought I had both terraforming liquids and gases, but now I can't find one of them. I don't know if I just didn't notice it and it's waiting for me to harvest it, or if I got confused and I had two copies of one of them.

I've got enough new planets I'm losing track. I start by building a visitor centre (from one of the diplomacy traditions) to draw migration, then load up with all the individual unity buildings and planet uniques. Then I wait to move and upgrade the ship centre and build any buildings I couldn't before. Then fill in with research buildings and energy/mineral sources, although at that point I'm happy if the sector AI handles it.

And I found another primitive civilisation, these are really ostentatious avians. I'm repeating the uplift trick.

Wormholes

I finally unlocked wormholes! I was so busy with the war I almost forgot to explore them. One goes into the heart of the Klingobsters territory, which isn't perfect, I'd been avoiding border with them. But I guess it doesn't hurt now. I need to remember to take the system before they do.

The other hilariously connects my core worlds to the little output I managed to build on the other side of the Romulizards when they were friendly (to have territory closer to other empires, and claim a habitable planet). Which is sort of handy as otherwise I need to drive 10 years all round the galaxy to get there. But OTOH isn't super useful as I already have territory in both places.

But it was *very* handy when I was a year late claiming a dead-end and pirates spawned there and I needed to quickly send the bits and pieces of fleet I had left at home there to sort it out.

Now pirates are much less of a problem, when I can afford to lose the mining from a few systems.

Misc

I think a few Theocratic Star Lobster Foxes did immigrate to one of my planets! Somewhere! But I've no idea where, I can't remember if there's a search.

No-one ever proactively traded with me at all. Now they all want my strategic resources. Except for some reason they always offer a lump some not a per-month income in trade, instead?

I didn't trust the AI much, but I realised it was filling in mining and research stations I'd missed when that was possible. Not in the most sensible order. But I'm grateful it is helping, not just sitting on a resource cache it's not using.

The 10s

After the war, I gained four new planets. I spun off my most-developed planets into an AI controlled sector so I didn't go over the core planet cap, although that's another mechanic they keep changing.

My energy income tanked into the negatives here. All of new the planets were seriously unhappy: there's a 10-year recently-conquered -40 happiness modifier, which makes sense. But all the new planets had buildings that consumed energy, but didn't produce much because the people working them were very dissatisfied. I could have temporarily disabled the buildings, but I didn't.

A more ruthless empire would have eliminated or deported the conquered populace and replaced them with new workers. Which has its own costs but gets things running quickly. But obviously my empire didn't want to do that!

I also was a bit worried by unrest. Which led to 100% unrest. It's possible for them to revolt and break away from my empire if it goes unchecked. And I couldn't build enough strongholds to suppress it.

However, I jacked up the funguses living standards from "decent" to "utopian" which helped their happiness somewhat. I got several events with unrest causing new political movements, mostly militaristic ones I wasn't super pleased to get, but one pro-egalitarian one I was pleased by (they've always been happiest).

I redeveloped the planets a bit and reorganised other things like disbanding starbases and building others in different positions.

Very sadly, the funguses had a tile with an "alien pets" supply, on which you can build an alien zoo building which gets various bonuses -- but they'd not done that, they'd built a heritage monument to the early days of their civilisation and I really really didn't want to knock that down! I can't build it elsewhere, it's not a building I can build, even though the zoo is better. I can't remember if I have the tech for the zoo or not.

I was also very pleased to see funguses popping up as scientists and governers in my leader screen. Empire is getting properly diverse!

Two 20s

After ten years the unhappiness wore off and everything was good for a bit. My energy and minerals were positive, sufficiently positive I was able to build all the mining and research stations in my territory even the ones on only 2 resources I'd previously left till later.

I was able to build up my science research a lot instead. And I'd been really behind in unity, I hadn't quite realised, I had quite a few good options I'd neglected because to start with I'd been so focused on basic energy and mineral economy.

It was really hard to overrule my tendency to micromanage. I basically needed to let the clock run for quite a while to build up resources and develop new things, but I kept falling prey to my tendency to "must build new things as soon as possible, so pause clock until I'm done".

Which left me with a nicer income, and a surplus of energy and minerals enough to hit my current resource cap. And now I'm limited by influence how many new systems I can expand to.

I colonised two new planets, with reasonably good size and habitability, but need to get some more inside my borders. One was a bit hilarious, the colony ship needed to fly all round the galaxy to get there because when I started the war was still going on. But both populated pretty rapidly with a mix of breeding and immigration.

Although if I'm honest, I'm in glut compared to where I used to be, but probably not ready to field a 50k combat power fleet to take on fallen empires, so I do have a lot more to build up. I'm used to playing catch-up with other empire fleets, I need to adjust my perspective to see if I can get ahead.

Misc

I absorbed the broken ringworld system to my empire, we'll see if the technology to repair it eventually appears.

I think now I have *all* the factions. Including, sadly, an isolationist fascist-y faction :(

Also a scientific faction, I think inspired by the funguses (who were materialistic). I was very pleased, but unfortunately some of the things they want most is to build robots, allow AI, and cyborg themselves, all things I'd previously forbidden because my spiritualist faction didn't like them. I think things will naturally revert to a status quo with more spiritualists so I temporarily adjusted some of those so members of the scientist faction weren't down at 15% happiness, but I'll probably put them back again.

Several exciting things. The kind of horrible bird empire was in trouble, but refugees from them arrived in my empire and I accepted them, and they were immediately helpful.

Also I mentored the industrial reptile civilisation until they gained spaceflight and they became my vassal, so yay them.

And I discovered some form of void clouds which were super spooky, but gave me +15% physics output!

From the citizens point of view

I wish I'd been doing this all along. I couldn't really make it interesting to describe the rise and fall of my *empire* but from the point of view of my core worlds...

Rejoice! The threat of the fungus empire is over. A golden renaissance has appeared.

Our society has bloomed with diversity. Political factions represent literally all possible political viewpoints. Our scientific and philosophical progress have blossomed. A glut of resources grants citizens of all species utopian living standards.

Several of our beloved leaders who led our central political and scientific institutions through the war have died, but now, many species are represented even at the highest levels in our empire.

Several new worlds, including one a third of the way round the galaxy near the territory of our spiritual federation allies, have been settled. We honour the settlers who braved the years long journey through space to get there, and encourage immigration.

We sadly acknowledge the loss of the brave science ship, who exploring in the territory of our tranquil federation allies, suffered a miscommunication about route, and came too close to Sanctuary, a ring world populated with pre-ftl species endlessly guarded, or imprisoned, by violent defence platforms. We remember previous losses -- the civilian ships despoiled by pirates, ravaged by space amoeba before we learned how to modulate our ships' drive to avoid them, and one lost in a mysterious catastrophe after investigating a derelict ship from a long-lost unknown empire.

And our thoughts go out to the incorporeal Baldarack civilisation, who we helped relocate to their home planet in the Wum Jiam system and a new colony world on the border of our empire, who are undergoing a factional split and potential civil war. Our thoughts are with all Balderack people at this time.

I don't know why I have the urge to write this up so thoroughly. How many people are still reading?

New colonies

I expanded a bit too quickly to start with, and took some time to catch up with myself. But about now I said, it would be worth having another world or two. It's a significant step, so I said to myself "...and go!" before I pushed the button :)

That builds a ship from one of your planets, which then drives to a new planet and establishes a colony there. In theory you have a choice of species, except that my morlocks won't leave their home world, so only my original Duckbills will go to a new world.

I do have one bonus from, um, one of my starting empire bonuses, that I can send out *private* colony ships that cost energy instead of minerals. And by now, I'm doing well on energy but still need minerals to expand... everything. So I'm not usually limited in building ships (even though by now the mineral cost wouldn't be a big hurdle anyway).

Exciting to have a whole new (big) world. And my various habitability perks make most worlds very attractive.

Also, a few of my pops migrated to the new world! They hadn't ever done that before even when I thought the new world was better than the other ones, I'm not sure if I'd forgotten a setting or got a perk more recently or something else. But now I'm pleased, because it builds up a new world faster and the old world was mostly full so the pop can be replaced by population growth quickly.

The migration is marked with an icon of the pop carrying a classic folded-bag-on-a-stick bindle over their shoulder!

No-one has yet migrated INTO my empire, despite me having some attractive worlds. Hopefully they will eventually.

Some pacifist pops emigrated away when the war happened, but hopefully now the war's over pacifism will take over again.

And after a long fallow period when my science was growing too slowly, I got a rush of "clear blocking terrain to open new tiles on planets for building" techs, which let me expand my existing planets better too.

Those two new planets brought me up to my new max core planets of seven. The base is three, but I got +2 for being pacifist, and +2 for something else, so I went quite a long time without having too many.

Like many things, it's a "soft" cap, but this soft cap is quite hard -- you lose 30% energy and 30% influence, which is quite a lot, so you can't usually bull through it.

After that, you need to delegate some planets to a sector, part of your empire, but under AI control.

Consolidation

As previously mentioned, I need to integrate the new fungus planets into my empire, probably by delegating them to a sector (or maybe delegating my already-developed worlds to a sector where there's not much to do, and hand-managing the newer larger worlds).

There's a few systems I want to make sure to absorb[1]. The one with the ringworld! One with a gateway and maybe another with a wormhole. Any pirate-friendly dead-ends. One or two off to the east side of the galactic spiral to treat with empires there more easily.

[1] I'm not sure what word to use for "add a new system to my empire by building an outpost station in it". "Claim", "conquer" etc all mean something else.

After the war, I got an isolationist faction. Ok, maybe I have too many factions :) I was quite happy with the first few, the pacifists, the faith, and the egalitarians. The military faction were understandable, what with three decade long wars in 100 years. But now it's getting out of hand :)

But I think I can just accept I won't get any benefit from some of them, I can still enjoy the diversity. Even though a more game-y tactic might be to have fewer factions I can actually please simultaneously :)

The game often has a mid-game crisis where, once the empires have mostly reached some sort of status quo in the second century, something big-ish happens to shake things up. But I think that's only in the expansions, not the base game? So I have a century to expand slowly and build my science and economy, before an end game crisis eats the entire galaxy :)

Misc

One of the fallen empire's fleet is called "punitive response flotilla" yes ok fallen empire I can take a hint ok I can't.

Save scumming the war a couple of times showed me which random events came up fairly repeatably and which didn't. I'm glad I didn't reload too often or the temptation to keep re-rolling the die would be a lot greater. (Also, it's useful for game design decide if random events should be predetermined so they always happen the same way in the same game as much as possible, or be as random as possible so if you play out a saved game twice you can't rely on the prior knowledge much.)

Prior to the big 2.0 rework, instead of the current system of hyperlanes connecting nearby systems (but not all of them) in the equivalent of a road network, each empire started with one of three different FTL techs: hyperlanes; jumps (jump to star proportional to straight-line distance regardless of layout of hyperlanes or anything else); or wormholes (each system connects to random systems all over the map).

That was really great flavour that each empire was *really different* and ended up colonising systems in a completely different pattern.

But it didn't really work for war, because geography made little sense when everyone travelled in a completely different way, so there was no notion of import systems, or of fortifying frontiers, etc, there was just "have one giant fleet, hit opposing fleet with it".

So they switched to hyperlanes by default, with the others as something that could come up sometimes but wasn't any empire's primary locomotion.

But I wonder if there'd be some compromise, maybe everyone uses hyperlanes, but some systems have wormholes available right from the start, connecting random different parts on the map, so the topology is more wacky and less flat. So you're more likely to encounter different empires in different ways, and not just "these ones are near me and these ones aren't".

Also, liv started playing stellaris (she has a lot of experience playing civ), and I'm really excited to see how her empire goes. We both really love the duckbill pacifists, but she chose quite a different race to experience a different sort of game and I'm really excited to see how it turns out. I realised how many little things with the interface had bothered me and how nice it was to be able to share that with someone else. And the excitement of finding unexpected space things!

The first 100 years, once we encountered each other, had a lot of back-and-forth war between me and the neighbouring militaristic fungusoid empire. The first war, I didn't know what I was doing and barely got out without worse losses. The second war, they declared on me and stomped over my home planets, but I managed to gain several key systems at the back of their empire, and issue diplomatic claims on their homeworld.

This time I wanted to do it right. I copied the save file so I could experiment before committing myself (may only work with non-cloud saves, not sure). I chose ironman with no saves because I didn't want the temptation to ALWAYS replay until I got a perfect result, and I think that helped because I do have that weakness. But with the war I felt like it wasn't so much that I wanted to save-scum the situation, as that I didn't really understand the mechanics of war.

Which, ok, is realistic, but I didn't want to lose several wars to just learn the mechanics, so I had a few goes at it.

First I made sure I COULD declare war, but apparently my federation allies agreed with my opinion of the fungusoids even though they weren't on their border. I almost chose "claims" war goal to try to claim the planets I'd already laid claims on, but that still leaves the funguses with their most-recently-colonised-planet, so I chose liberation, where if I get my claims leaves the rump of their empire politically converted to egalitarian pacifists, who I can then hopefully draw into federation membership or vassel-hood.

The first time I ignored winning and just bulled into their core systems even if I lost my fleet to check that their military strength was about what I expected. It turned out it was, they'd combined their two smaller fleets into one with 3k or 4k compbat power, and possibly had some small fleets too. And starbases about the same strength as mine, vulnerable to any serious fleet but enough to stand off a couple of isolated ships.

In fact, it seemed that 4k was about the fleet strength of my allies too, and also the federation fleet (currently controlled by my less-overwhelming ally).

I also discovered they tended to (understandably) start by attacking my systems I took from them last war. Or ones I'd already invaded this war, if there were. But because I was exploring a bit randomly, it took a few tries to understand exactly what they were prioritising, cos often they'd change their mind if I attacked from the other side at the same time.

But eventually I decided a simple strategy. Spend most of my minerals building up my fleet to exceed the biggest strength I'd seen from them. At the same time, slowly fill in other bits of empire construction and research I was overdue for if I had excess resources.

I actually hit my current max fleet size here, which I'd always struggled to do before as I had so many competing demands for resources. That's why I wasn't as militarily formidable as the AI empires, presumably :)

Then park myself on my starbase closest to them, where they would probably attack. First attack the system behind that to make sure to draw them out (and to hopefully cause my allies to start joining in). Ambush their fleet with my larger fleet and starbase.

Do I win? I tried this as one of my experiments and my fleet wasn't quite big enough, but I only did it "for real" once. I carefully saved the game every month during the war in case of disaster but didn't need any of them.

For real, I defeated their fleet, then flew into their core systems, taking each system as I passed through, with the aim of capturing their starbases and re-engaging their fleet before it could be repaired.

I forgot that I needed to attack their planets in order to progress further (if they have ftl inhibitor technology and build a stronghold on it). But fortunately, I was able to bombard the planet (using the "destroy military buildings, minimum damage to everything else" option) and destroy that fairly easily. My armies were too far behind -- I wanted to keep them out of ship combat but then I needed to wait too long before they took the planet, but fortunately bombardment worked ok.

Then I was able to roll through their core systems, and mustered some smaller fleets but none enough to challenge me.

I wasn't quite sure how the end of the war worked. I thought I needed to occupy all their planets in order to be able to keep them -- that's how it usually works in wars that end in armistice rather than surrender.

But when I conquered their last planetary system they straight-up surrendered, which makes sense, but I wasn't sure. I *think* they then automatically ceded all claims to me whether I occupied them or not, PLUS reformed their government to be fluffy rather than malicious.

Then I paused and saved the game and took a break. It also gave me some achievements, "win a war" and "conquer another empire's homeworld".

Next time I need to consolidate my gains -- see if I can vassalize the remnant of their empire, incorporate the conquered worlds into mine, make the populace happier, spin of a sector because that jumped me up by 50% more inhabited planets. Then conquer some of the interesting systems I see, and some of the empty space I've been saving.

Pirates

My first priority, alongside building up my resource income again, was to get rid of the pirates who'd had a bit too much of a free hand while I'd been pursuing Fungus War II.

At first this was ok -- there was a fairly weak fleet I took care of immediately with my existing strength.

Then I spent some time building up a stronger fleet to be able to take on the stronger pirate fleets head on (which sort of a minimum to be a serious force against my neighbours).

And then a lot of panic happened. Another fleet, either the original one I'd just defeated repaired, or another one spawned from the same base, appeared heading for my homeworld.

I rushed my fleet over there, but spaceflight doesn't really do "rush". And built some more ships near there too. And I wasn't in time to stop them fly past, but they aimed for one of my systems down a dead end.

Fortunately I'd only rebuilt a small part of the mining stations there. The pirates fortunately don't seem to try to attack my planets, and if they attack my starbases they self-repair, but they totally destroy all the mining/research stations they fly past.

However, I *was* able to assemble a decent fleet on my home starbase and ambush them as they flew home. It was a bit touch and go -- my fleet was disabled when they still had a couple of ships left, but they then flew into one of my reinforcements and minor starbases on the way out. Problem solved, kapow.

Unfortunately, during the same time, I detached a couple of laggardly ships to deal with the *other* pirate base. One that sadly spawned right next to a primitive world I was trying to establish an orbital watch on[1] and destroyed that a few times in the inter-war period.

[1] Apparently talking to them is MORE unethical than secretly spying on them, who knew?

The bases are fairly ramshackle, so that was ok, but as soon as it was destroyed, another base spawned from the ashes! Along with another, larger fleet that totally stomped my few ships and started flying for the frontier end of my empire near the front of the fungus war.

Then as soon as the first battle was complete, I needed to heal all my ships, build reinforcements, and fly them all *back* again to try to head off the pirates.

I ended up with two major fleets and a variety of stragglers absorbed into one or the other. One was there in time but not strong enough to take on the pirates by themselves. But they blocked their approach at a starbase and fought valiantly, and incredibly fortunately, the other fleet arrived just in the nick of time before the battle was over and handily wiped out the remnants.

And then I *was* able to divert the healthy part of the fleet to mop up the pirate bases. I sent enough that if another fleet spawned I wouldn't just lose. Which leaves me with little defences, but just *having* the ships puts off the AI empires from attacking quite a bit.

That took quite a while because it meant flying the long way round twice, but while I was doing other stuff, they did get there eventually.

Territory

I'd made some bold territorial grabs to claim systems up against other empires to keep the systems between for my future expansion, and to claim any particularly interesting systems near my borders.

That left me with an original blob near my home world and a few adjacent systems with habitable planets. A small blob with my Gaia world about half way between that and the following. A forward base up against the funguses, along with an adjacent system or two for additional buffer and good resources, plus the three tasty systems I claimed in the war.

Also, two further single-system buffers up against the Romulizards who used to like me but changed their mind when they found that out.

And a blob in the middle, just about contiguous with my home systems where there were several interesting systems including a world with a pre-space civilisation. Particularly badly, that ended up with one unclaimed system in the middle completely surrounded, which is apparently a super-double piracy lure.

Whereas the single-system forward bases, while very expensive in influence to build and increasing the risk of pirate spawns, are themselves fairly pirate-proof, as they usually just have a starbase and no mining stations.

The first territorial expansion I made after the war was to build a forward base up near the Fox Tapir Theocracy, which staked a few more systems for my future expansion but more importantly increased my diplomatic options with them in several ways.

But after that, I filled in my earlier patchwork mess a lot, claiming the systems inbetween a few gaps, which even though (unlike the AI) I still had several separate blobs, reduced the piracy risk quite a bit once the bigger blobs were more self-contained and less swiss cheese.

At the same time, I made an effort to claim several systems with interesting things I'd wanted to claim earlier but hadn't got round to. Rare resources. A wormhole gateway (I'm hoping that gives me a chance to research the tech necessary to traverse it.)

And most notably, a ruined ringworld!

Only about 8 times bigger than a planet, rather than 3 million, but still very attractive if it could be repaired. The first fallen empire, the one who I haven't really interacted with at all, had two systems, the something of something, and a neighbouring system was named the same way. I hadn't even thought to look, but apparently their systems have ringworlds in, and so does this one!

I think what happened is, the map generator reduces their territory a bit so it doesn't completely block off anti-clockwise expansion through the galaxy. It nearly does already, and if they'd has both systems, I think there would have been only a single connection between clockwise and anticlockwise of them. But didn't remove the ringworld.

Building ringworlds is one of the expansion packs; I'm not sure if repairing one is possible without that or not.

Lots of the things I wished were possible turned out to actually be possible but it just hadn't immediately been obvious what the interface was.

I got a bit frustrated with sending science ships to research research projects before I realised that if you selected the science ship, you could right-click the orange box to order the ship to do the research (or shift-right-click to queue the research to do as soon as the ship completes its current order).

Probably at least one of the following are also already possible and I just don't know how.

I wish, if you'd previously visited a system, information like "number of potentially habitable planets and climate" or "number of celestial bodies" or "roughly what was on a settled planet" were available as "what you last saw" even if not in real time.

I wish the map showed you not just total resources, but showed the largest clump so you can prioritise building mining stations that gain 3 or more resources.

There's an alert that says when pirates settle in a system, can I please have a list of where that's happened? Usually it's obvious because I have eyes on a giant fleet coming towards me, but sometimes I want to make sure I know where all the original nests were and that I've got them all.

In fact, just a list of all the pop-ups and alerts I've dismissed would be good.

I wish it was easier to edit the action queue for a ship. (I was pleased to discover if you give a ship a new order, it cancels the pending actions but not the current action. IIRC "stop" cancels everything, and "shift-click" adds a new action at the end of a queue.)

It'd also be nice to be able to tell a ship "go here, wait till I have enough minerals, then build", but I understand why that's not as easy.

I wish it was easier to build a ship and designate it for a particular fleet. You can use the fleet "reinforce" option, but then I don't think you don't get to specify which ship is built or where.

These are all annoying but fairly small, since they're still developing, I think it's likely they will fix these eventually. I just felt better for writing it out :)

So now I'm less talking about every new experience I have and more talking about the SECOND dragged out war against the fungus people, this is less entertaining :)

War

My God, this isn't good from my planets' populations point of view though. First war, they declared war out of idealism, and I screwed up the economy and got food shortages, and pirates ravaged most of the outer systems, including a pre-spaceflight world in my territory. Second war, the funguses saw I hadn't rebuilt fast enough out of the first war, made claims on a few of my border systems -- and then instead flew a giant fleet straight to my home worlds and bombarded them from orbit.

Even the Centauri baulked at that!

They occupied my homeworld for about ten years. Imagine that in a novel. Earth has multiple successful colonies -- but earth itself is occupied by an alien race.

But fortunately they suck at tactics. If they'd used their two giant fleets smartly they could have easily brought a lot more armies through to actually occupy my planets. But actually they just flew them there in a straight line, and as long as I attacked them -- even if they were in the middle of a convoy -- they couldn't take any planets.

If they'd used their fleet more proactively to protect their supply lines I'd have been screwed.

And they dramatically occupied my homeworld -- but never actually staked a political claim to it, so after the war, it just reverted to me. Whereas I claimed the systems from the rear of their empire I actually managed to take over, while their massive fleets were busy elsewhere.

Indeed, when I took the territory from their rear, they reversed one of their big fleets to fly all the way home to deal with it, so I could have snuck in to liberate my homeworld then if I'd wanted to.

Which teaches me some things about tactics I should have been more on top of. Decide whether to concentrate your force enough it's worth attacking an enemy fleet head on. If so, do. If not, avoid them. Defeat their ships in smaller packets if you can. Conquer territory you want, ideally while their ships are elsewhere.

But I'm still pretty vague about military stuff -- probably I should be tooling my ships with rock-guns to counter their scissor-beams or similar, but I haven't got that worked out.

Science

My scientists asked me to collect seven or eight specimens of particular species -- usually dangerous ones -- from planets all across the galaxy. Fortuitously, once I got my ships past the fungus mass, enough empires had open borders I was able to fly one science ship all round the galaxy, collecting the angry dangerous macguffins and cataloguing various other space creatures like crystalline entities at the same time. I mean, the fauna ate some of the science crew, but too few to have a mechanical effect.

Even some of the conquer-everyone empires were sufficiently friendly to me to have open borders, so I'm wary of them, but grateful for their cooperation.

I also found a "make all the planets glow orange and you can't see where to turn it off again" button :) I figured it out eventually.

Diplomacy

As my fleet builds up, or gets lost in space, the other empires' military strength bobs up and down between "equivalent" and "superior". Once one non-fallen empire was "overwhelming" and almost everyone was superior which was dispiriting. But apparently the Racist Space Parrots got such a kicking in the last war they're back down to equivalent, when they were almost always superior before. I should pick a fight with them quick to endear me to their neighbours while I still can.

The Reavers, who I was worried about because they looked super-expansionist, have actually lost ground, and maybe some territory to neighbouring empires. The names are cool. I don't know how it works, but fleet names, planet names, etc usually sound vaguely appropriate to the different empires. Banthurian Reavers is their actual name they call themself, not my gloss :)

Alas, I built up diplomacy as much as I could, but didn't have the timing right, because several of the most friendly empires already made defensive pacts with other empires and aren't that interested in another one. And I can't grow their trust further without a more intimate deal of some sort. I'm not sure if there's a path to improve relations I'm missing, or if I need more of the diplomacy path to increase the max trust cap, or if I need to be closer to them, or all of the above.

I screwed up slightly with the Anteater Napoleons. I was guaranteeing their independence, partly to increase their opinion of me, partly so I could join in a war against the Racist Space Parrots if it happened. But during the other war, I wasn't sure if I could turn that off without penalty, and got confused, and ended up breaking it, and they closed borders against me. But I re-guaranteed, and then they liked me again.

Meta

I started playing ironman, partly because I wasn't sure if I'd care about achievements or not, partly because I wanted an excuse to keep playing, not to keep reverting until I do everything perfectly. But in the war, I was much more worried about screwing things up from not quite understanding how various mechanics worked, and I discovered I could copy the save file if I wanted to (at least in non-cloud mode). And I *think* I can replace the current version with those if I want to, although I haven't actually done it yet.