Here we see my strategic advantage already in play. The Psilons may have chosen their techs well, but they still made serious mistakes: I had noticed that their ships were all moving around at warp 1 in spite of their superior engine technology! They had crammed all kinds of weapons aboard their ships - their fighters were soon found to carry 2-racks of Mercs! - but at the expense of fast engines. This meant I could confidently strike wherever I didn't see a fleet already present or about to arrive ... because every one of my ships (once I scrapped my last Warp 2 scouts) was fitted with Impulse Engines! The little Fuse 5.0 bombers that had glassed Altair destroyed the Psilon's Esper colony as a shot across their bow on the first turn of the war, just because the bombers couldn't help defend, and the place could be reached from Altair in a single year! The Fuses continued to hop from world to world while I built more advanced bombers - medium hulls with Computer 5, Battle Scanner, and 7 Fusion Bombs apiece - named for what they were meant to do to the Psilons' stock markets: Crash 5.0s. My reach colonies meanwhile kept building their factories; they would have to just think invisible thoughts, as there was nothing I could do to save them if the Psilons sent a fleet. Altair however struggled to put up a shield though its factories were far from ready. Its position was too strategically important for me to concede it ... which, knowing the MoO AI, would mean it would soon see an incoming fleet! This game's fifteen-year-old AI is surprisingly robust, no matter what I might say about my superior strategy!
Fortunately, I can play the same game. You can see here that the Psilons are now down to "only" 14 systems. My first fleet of Crashes has just burned down the lynchpin world of Stalaz, to which my cursor is pointing. With this world as a refueling base, the Psilons could reach my entire (still defenseless!) northeast core. Without it, they must fight the war at their core worlds, peripheral colonies of my choosing, and the point worlds I've most heavily defended. ... Oh. And Altair. At the former Alkari homeworld though, I have two huge advantages: Its central location (the reason I feel I must hold it in the first place in spite of its immaturity) and my warp 5 strategic speed, together with the advance warning provided by the Psilon slowpokes, all mean I can divert huge numbers of fighters and other space superiority ships there whenever it is threatened, without pulling them back too far from other critical fronts. The Brains' hundreds and hundreds of missile boats are certainly dangerous, but now that my battle scanners have told me what I'm up against, I can devise effective counter-strategies. I believe Zed once said that in Orion, there's an answer to every fleet: No design will beat the AI every time, and no AI design is invincible against you, as long as you have the tech and economy you need to pull together a response.
Oh. Except, I think he said there was an exception: If you can build good enough, fast enough bombers in sufficient numbers, you've won the game.
Take another look at that map (further up the page) from 2453. This one is from the following year. I had split my fleet of little Fuses in 2452 after clearing Obaca's bases, leaving just a few behind to finish off the world, and again in 2453 after cleaning up the Denubius bases as well. In 2454, the main fleet glassed Draconis, while the Fuses I left behind did the same to their respective worlds. The northern fleet took out distant Imra, and a fleet of Crashes fresh off the assembly line did the same at Arietis, the south-sector Psilon world nearest to my core. The Psilons' core worlds of Mentar, Kailis, and Maretta will be tougher nuts to crack, as will Tyr and Whynil in the south, but I'm accomplishing my main objective: Defending my own worlds while removing the peripheral colonies that give the Psilons access to my worlds and contribute to their fleet maintenance and research efforts. By 2457, the Psilons are down to six worlds, and I've turned the galaxy around.
The Brains still have a massive lead in fleet strength and a significant one in tech, still just edging me out in total power, but their apparent advantages are now very misleading: Their fleet is actually a good thing for me, as lots of warp 1 ships draining their planetary resources mean they won't surge ahead in tech ... and the tech lead they have already is largely due to planetology. Yes, those techs are important, but mostly for economic development. Even with all their worlds maxed out with Soil Enrichment and Terra +40, they're now well behind in population, and even with the planetology bonuses to their workers on top of their Hard AI bonuses, I now lead them in production. I've accomplished my war objectives, even retaining my reach colonies, and in spite of the Psilon death fleets still (slowly!) cruising the stars, I am going to win this game.
The year 2463 finds the Psilons down to their three-planet core, and my first two colonies at formerly-Psilon worlds (in the west, near Uxmai). I waited to start building these until I was sure I could defend them adequately. I take Kailis in 2465 and allow the Psilons to recolonize Imra so I can glass and re-establish Mentar and Maretta as well without committing actual genocide. Mentar falls in '66, and Maretta three years later. And in 2472, with the game already won, in the same interturn in which Phasors are discovered....
What is it with my luck on this map? At least it wasn't Kakata that went rich this time! (And at least it happened to little Berel almost a hundred years later in the game!)
Anyway, from 2469, I simply cruised to victory. The Bulrathi broke their alliance with me at some point in spite of Harmonious relations, and I wrapped up and re-founded all their habitable colonies with about as much trouble as it took to write this sentence. Seriously, I was paying so little attention that I was surprised when glassing (I think it was) Ursa led them to declare on me: Knowing an attack was inevitable after the breach of alliance, I'd forgotten that we weren't at war already!
I wanted to win an election victory this time through, but I'd glassed too many hostile worlds in the critical early years of the Psilon war for the Council to actually meet, and the AIs refused to go back and rebuild them. So, not long after the Bulrathi war, I finally got tired of hitting next turn, and took the extermination victory.
I had a terrific time with the replay, with lots of tension and excitement surrounding the two intense bursts of concentrated planning and action in the Klackon and Psilon wars. I'm almost sorry I didn't play this one first! Even so, I think I got too lucky in this game! Still no bad events, still a couple of good ones (though they had little effect on the outcome) ... and can you imagine what would have happened if the Psilons expanded the way they did here, but built ships like they did in my original game? Now that would have been a challenge!
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