...those transports couldn't land on glass. You can also see in the inset that I took measures to ensure that Alexander wouldn't bother me with an "attaboy" this year. Most emperors don't take kindly to seeing their homeworld bombed into the ground. We did burn down Hyboria as well, but not Proteus: I had over 200 transports arriving to purge the bugs from its surface! First, the Humans tried to land transports on Quayal and got burned to atoms for their trouble. Then the Darloks tried to land on Reticuli. 6 got through, and promptly died, killing a couple million lizards who will be replaced by our eager breeders by next year. Finally, my transports tried to land on Proteus.
They were a little more successful than the aliens' had been. 31 of my transports arriving at Jinga also managed to run the Klackon gauntlet there (I had sent them at warp 1 from long range, long before I knew when I'd be able to take the planet's orbit) and killed millions of bugs, always a good thing. Meanwhile, the always-persistent Bears had a colony ship due at Maretta in just a couple of turns. Unfortunately for them...
...they needed still-existant colonies for that ship or their species to survive!
While our troops were at Proteus, they stopped at the local mall and picked up Class IV Deflector Shields, Hyper-X Rockets, and Gatling Laser. Then, since my MerCobras were slow-moving and far from everything, I scrapped them for parts and a new design:
The Komodo 3.0 was a purely gratuitous Fusion Beam Cruiser to be built at Paranar and Tyr for the following simple (but excellent) reason, as expressed by the great Draco Sstarshine: "Because we can!"
In 2438, we achieved space superiority over the Darlok and Psilon homeworlds, losing a few dozen of the slow Bombards (mostly at Mentar) and nothing else. We also tried to take Lyae for the third time, closing with the planet and firing a single volley.
That was that. The small stack of Cutlasses burned under Gecko fire, and the Knight retreated. Our fleet of Newts at Misha tore incoming Human transports to pieces (these, like various other sets in previous years, were sent to reinforce what at the time of their departure had been a Human colony). Our transports at Exis of course came through without trouble, and though luck was not with them, I had sent enough - barely - to overcome ill fortune; outnumbering them 60 to 47, and with technological superiority, we took the planet with one million survivors! Still, a victory is a victory!
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Next: More Good Times
