The entire galaxy had been at war with the bears not long before, but maybe all the non-Psilons flipped to alliances instead in the last few years of the game or something. It could happen.
I wound up taking out the Guardian with a fleet of Mass Driver(!) fighters. I wanted at least 4 combat speed so I could reliably outrun the Scatter X volleys, which left out higher-end weapons at that stage of the game, especially since I also needed Mark 8 computers. (Even just the jump from Mark 7 to Mark 8 increases damage by a third against the Guardian, and fitting a bigger weapon with Fusion engines or better would have meant cutting chances to hit to 1/8 of what the Mark 8s provided.) Thanks to their shield-halving, MDs always damage the Guardian if they hit, and though they do only 1-4 damage apiece, 1500 was plenty to take it down once I dodged the Scatters (only because it lacks Auto-Repair though; it took about ten combat rounds to wear it down, and my Artemis fighters took heavy attrition of course; I lost about a third of the fleet before the Guardian went down). Another reason I went with this design (including the Impulse Drives, which weren't strictly necessary) is that I like my Orion killing fleet to be able to act as actual combat ships for non-Guardian purposes once it's defeated. Yes, even though the game is already won. When I reloaded my last save and abstained in the vote, I sent the survivors up to Firma, where they toasted the Space Crystal handily.
Taking advantage of the Battle Scanner bonus, the End Run colony ship actually has higher initiative than the Guardian. (Its armament was added strictly on a "because I can" basis.) This means it can hit the retreat button before the Guardian moves, and actually get out of there before the old death ship can bring its Stellar Converters to bear, allowing me to colonize Orion the same year I defeat the Guardian. In this case, it was just for style points - but it's worthwhile at other times too if you do go after Orion, since if the AI ever sees the planet without your colony in place or the Guardian in orbit, it might send a colony fleet, which could be slightly annoying, depending. The other ships were using Mass Drivers only because it happened to be the best beam I had at the time I designed them. If the other races in the game had been fielding small ships with beam weapons, I'd have built a Repulsor ship with lots of NPGs instead. The Perimeters were old and never really saw effective use since enemy fleets didn't really challenge me at the worlds I invaded and my defenses were handled fine by missile bases. They'd have been scrapped shortly if the game were to continue, since the Artemis fighters are better in pretty much every way.
Here's my empire at game's end:
Not many bases are needed with twenty-whatever layers of shielding. Draconis was just far enough away from alien worlds that it would have at least a turn's notice before any attack could arrive, and the rate at which it could crash up new bases was obscene. (You saw what non-rich Collassa was doing earlier in the game, right?) Ultra-Poor Denubius was so far in the back lines and so slow to build bases that it mostly just did research; I put a token base up just to have something behind the shields, but planned to defend it mostly with ships if it ever became necessary. Dunatis was also in the back lines and could crash bases up even faster than Draconis for a need. Poor Firma was a little like Denubius, but I actually gave it some factories before Robotic Controls came in, and not being ultra poor, it was worth more than just a token defense, I thought. Not worth spending forever building bases that would never be needed, but worth something. Kholdan had a star gate just because it was isolated - reinforcements would go to Tau Cygni from there or from Vox if needed. In general though, I built a lot more missile bases this game than I needed. It was just a lot easier than my usual practice of sending Scanner ships out and ensuring I had just enough (and the right) defenses to cream the aliens' actual fleets. 1472 reserve is a very low figures for this game, by the way; it was only that low because I'd recently dumped everything into Artemis-building worlds and had the rich and UR worlds building ships instead of reserves. Also, I threw a lot at Crypto in one big pile. I think its production's going to be doubled for the next dozen turns or so here.
Here's a look at the tech situation, with some of my planetology toys. Yes, Terraforming +100 is in the percentages. The computer tech that's also in percentages is Robotic Controls 6. And yes, these are already my two most advanced fields (the Guardian's weapons horde would change that of course). I like infrastructure. I even just like the word.
Oh, and you might enjoy this one I put together just for fun. Here's the galactic map - the FULL galactic map - from this period in the game. It's probably a bit hard to read at this size, but (as with any of the pictures in this report) you can click on it to see it at full size. (It's just that in this case, full size is pretty big.
I hope everyone who played enjoyed the game as much as I did! I'll try to post more notes later this week on this game's unique design and setup, in my report thread at at Realms Beyond.
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