2430: The Sakkra reach Vox for the first time, but the fleet they sent - no Dragons - is a joke ... in comparison with the ones that are to come, already detected and moving in at long range!
2431: Our Incedius fleet arrives as planned, fighters from Ajax in coordination with our southern bomber fleet, in spite of a scare with nebula delays. The Bolts and Talons kill most of the 19 Valkyries in orbit, the Divebombs take all 29 bases, and we only lose about 20 fighters. Our Star Wing Clan pilots can't be beaten in a nebula; we grew up here on Altair, after all! Better yet, we get a spy hit on the Psilons, with all fields available where we're not beating them already! Desperate for infrastructure help, I select Construction, knowing I'll get Improved Industrial Tech 7. Next up? A new colony to take advantage of the theft, at ultra-rich Herculis in the far west! And since the nebula and my warp 1 transports will make invading the place a nightmare, I deal with Incedius the easy (and diplomatically effective!) way:
By making glass! Note the approximate current state of the galaxy (it's hard to keep track of the Bulrathi/Darlok spuds in the east) including the fledgling acquisitions that are technically part of our empire but not fully functioning yet. Also note the huge difference three worlds makes, even in this large galaxy (Incedius, just glassed, plus Rotan and Selia, the two fledgling worlds nearest the Sakkra). Zygot is certainly pleased with these results - he thinks I now "realize the incredible threat the Sakkra empire poses to both our worlds" - as if I hadn't been struggling against the overwhelming Sakkra threat continuously for three decades! Oh, wait, wait, no; now I see what he means: Incedius was the Sakkra's closest world to "both" of the two Psilon colonies! He thought I was bombing the place out as a favor to him! It didn't even occur to him that - unlike him - I've been seeing actual Sakkra death fleets, and might have wanted to do something about them! Darquan also calls to congratulate me, in somewhat more sensible fashion - of course, unlike the Psilons, he's actually been fighting Sakkra, so this is unsurprising. Anyway, next up? Drakka! It's going to be a near-run thing to smash the not-quite-in-the-nebula ocean world and still make it up to Paranar in time for the invasion ... but it would have a dramatic effect on the Sakkra economy, and cut their fleets off from the north, allowing me to consolidate my defense fleets. I'm convinced that I can manage it ... and fortune favors the bold!
2432-3: The war goes well! Another spy in Psilon space nets me their Battle Computer Mark IV, which will help with even more spying, and the second battle of Vox goes a lot like the first. It's the third through fifth that are going to involve Dragons! Our main fleet also arrives early at Drakka due to nebula silliness, and discovers that the Sakkra have replaced their old juggernauts with a shiny new version: A heavy torpedo cruiser. My fleet elects to retreat for now, and rejoin the battle when its friends arrive for the party. Sauron takes advantage of the temporary reprieve to offer peace again, this time offering almost 4,000 BC as an extra incentive ... but our transports en route to Paranar can't turn around in mid-space! I could take the money and run, but that's not the way of honor, and I must protect Kestrel's good name! Sauron had his chance for peace - again and again and again, in fact - and now that he finally wants it, I'm in no position to agree.
2434: A fleet of 13 Colossus cruisers comes for Selia, but finds almost a hundred of my fighters waiting for it. The outcome is not in doubt. The enemy kills seven of my fighters but are screened from the planet and utterly destroyed. Then it's our turn.
With our attack fleet fully assembled at Drakka and Sauron's sub-par missile bases - still nuclear missiles, no ECM, and no planetary shields! - the planet is doomed from the start. We lose about three dozen total ships - mostly Divebombs - and the only Sakkra who survive are aboard the ships that retreat. Then, since our transports are still too hopelessly slow to make conquest realistic, I end Sakkra possession of Drakka the easy way. Its vast oceans are restored to their pristine, native beauty, and its few sandy island beaches become ... shiny. Meanwhile, with the tide of the war turning in our favor, another usurper agent does his best to sabotage us, starting a massive chain reaction among Rotan's factories that irradiates the entire planet ... the more fool he! Rotan is the one planet where a radiated world is actually of strategic value, as the Sakkra can no longer live on my frontier world nearest the heart of their empire! Kestrel does her best to help the victims of the "accident" recover, but in spite of all he's done to innocents - in which he and his ilk seem to take pleasure - I suspect the usurper's sleeper agent would be horrified at the results of what he's done ... if he ever emerged from his radiation-poisoning induced coma.
(OOC: Here's an interesting trick I discovered accidentally: It's actually possible to complete a stack's move after firing all its weapons, if you act quickly. Notice in the screenshot that the bases are being blown up by my Divebombs, but that my cursor - in "move stack" form - is visible three spaces south. By clicking there before the bomb animation was finished, I caused the bombers to move down there with their weapons already used up. This would be particularly effective for a large ship with four different slots of weapons, all of which have to go through their animations before the ship's turn ends, but it worked here too, obviously. Somehow, this seemed kind of appropriate for the Alkari, and I tried it intentionally a few times in this game - sometimes to good effect, sometimes resulting in a misclick, sometimes clicking too late - but in the end, it seems too reflex-based to really plan for and use in a strategy game, at least to me. Still, I thought I'd put it out there, to add to the store of knowledge in the community.)
2435: The third battle for Vox is on, and this one will be decisive! We're up against one of each type of Sakkra dreadnought, two colony ships, and no less than 47 cruisers! For our part, we have 633 fighters, most of them Talons of one type or the other, with a few dozen Bolts mixed in.
Once again, our amazing Star Wing Clan pilots prevail, destroying the entire enemy fleet at the cost of less than 50 fighters! (We also kill almost 20 Colossus cruisers at Drakka, losing maybe half a dozen Talons in the exchange.) With Rotan's polution cleaned up and its surface still too radiated for the Sakkra to land there, I feel secure in the south, and almost as safe in the east as well, where the Meklar's wars with every other species have apparently kept them too busy to send fleets against their one friend in the galaxy. It appears that breaking our NAP was just INT-986's feeble way of asserting Meklar independence, kind of like a fledgling that chirps and squalks and flaps its useless wings because it doesn't like being too young to fly.
2436: The fourth battle for Vox is won handily as expected, though I lose about 50 fighters. There will be a fifth and last battle next year involving two Dragons ... but it won't be long before Sakkra lack the range reach the planet, if all goes well! Better yet, my spies come through in Sakkra space once more! They have nothing I don't in computers, and in spite of tempting options in every other field, we make another try at the lizards' propulsion labs, and...
...finally nab Sub-Light Drives! True, it's nowhere near their state of the art, but it finally means my transports will be moving above warp one! That's cause for celebration by itself!
2437: The first battle of Artemis sees four Colossus cruisers wiped out at the cost of a single fighter. I remember the beginning of this war, when we had to scramble to keep from losing a colony to a fleet like this. Thirty-odd years later, it's an outright joke fleet. The fifth and final battle of Vox pits our brave defense fleet against two Dragons, nine Colossus planet-busters, and 23 Valkyrie assault ships. Fortunately, the defense fleet in question now consists of over 650 fighters! We lose almost 100, but eliminate the enemy! A similar (in fact, even larger) fleet shows up at Drakka to escort a colony ship, so our much smaller fleet there is forced t retreat, but their new colony won't last long, believe me! Ultra-Rich Gion becomes an Alkari world, way off in the far southeast, and with no incoming Darlok fleets there, I sign emperor Darquan up for a NAP. Seeing that Krungo and Sauron have made peace, I also approach the crazy Bulrathi leader, and remind him of how the vile Sakkra glassed his Whynil and Dunatis spud-o-matic colonies. Furious, he declares that the Sakkra empire must fall before our combined might! Indeed they shall, Krungo - if I can conquer Paranar next year! The Meklar are also at peace with the evil lizards, but INT-986 still isn't talking to me.
2438: The decisive battle of the Sakkra war is upon us! If we can't take Paranar, we'll never stop the lizards ... but if we can take it, we'll be on our way to victory! We're facing a Dragon and 45 missile bases there ... and we expect to win! And in moments, the Dragon shows that it agrees: It retreats without harming our ships, and we lose only two bombers in the course of wiping out the planet's bases!
I may have gone a little overboard with my transports, especially as the Sakkra just sent half the world's population away to Drakka ... but better safe than sorry! Here you see the maximum number of forces that can reach any world alive; there's only so much room for massive transport ships to land on a planet's surface without crashing into each other - no matter how skilled their pilots! We'll lose almost as many people here to overpopulation as to Sakkra ion rifles, but there were a lot more Sakkra on this world when my 'sports started setting out literally 12 years ago, with no idea of whether the enemy's ground fighting tech would improve in the interim!
Naturally, our ground troops find plans for Death Spores among the 351 factories that survived our assault on the planet, since it's the lizards' most worthless technology, but we also pick up Atmospheric Terraforming, which will be terrific for our rich, hostile worlds. In Propulsion, we get Trilithium Crystals because why would we want warp 5 engines when we can have still more and more and more range than we will ever begin to even pretend to need? Personal Absorption Shield however, is another matter entirely, swinging the ground combat advantage back to me! Class IV Deflector Shields prove me wrong about the spores, as any planetology tech should at least improve my empire's producton slightly; that makes these the most worthless junk the Sakkra have! That brings us to Zortium Armor, our final find at Paranar, completing our construction research project for us, and notching up ground combat odds just a little bit more in our favor. Reduced Waste 40% will be our next project in the field, with no other choice (since I don't count backtracking for autorepair as a meaningful option). Also, it had been so long with such a small investment, and with so little interest in them, I had forgotten our scientists were working on the very class 4 shields I just called worthless wastes of space! I guess that means they're not so useless after all, as they pave the way toward Repulsor Beam. I could also have gone with class 6 shields, and will eventually have to work on class 7s if I can't get Kestrel elected empress before the repulsors come in, but the price tag on those projects is ridiculous considering their near-complete lack of utility.
With all that accomplished, I pause to take a call from Krungo, who wants to pledge his "eternal friendship and loyalty." With his erratic personality though, "eternal" means "for roughly the next ten minutes," and Kestrel would gain nothing from his in-name-only alliance, so I thank him for his friendship, and thank him for his loyalty, and tell him to go peddle his alliance to someone more gullible than me. We've just won the decisive battle of the Sakkra war - the war caused by the final murderous death throes of the usurper - and we're ready at last to restore Yreet Kree to her rightful place as ruler of the galaxy!
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Next: Rolling Thunder!
