First time I had played, I'd played a pretty benign if somewhat war happy race, as is my usual style, so I went with something a little more angry this time around, and played as a Decedent/Wasteful/Intelligent/Communal/Enduring species of Xenophobic/Militant/Authoritarian bug people. Named them the Urthlox and gave them the graphic of those slug like dudes with four arms. Default settings for things, with Ironman mode on. Obviously, the intent was the be a bit of a slaver type. Kind of wound up being a tremendous asshole. Whoops!! Guess I'm not a very good person when given a whole lot of ways to abuse and exploit a galaxy.

I won without really having a serious sense of possible long term failure. I don't know if that was just because normal difficulty is kind of easy, or if because I had the fortune of winding up on the winning side of an early game power bloc struggle; Hive Mind / Slaver Bug / Democratic Squids vs Militant Frogs / Nicer Bugs?? / Space Pigs. The frogs ended up becoming my slave race "buddies" since they had a compatible biome and the industrious perk. At the time I begun taking their worlds, I had already had a population of mollusk folk, but they didn't have a +15% mineral output trait so, I begun my path to being a huge asshole by giving them forced labor to get rid of some of them. I didn't really [i]want[/i] to be a genocidal prick, but man, shuffling around pops cost a lot of influence; its a lot more favorable to just slot in a new pop in an empty space rather than having to ship dudes offworld. I eventually stopped doing that once their numbers had dropped far enough that I didn't really care about them anymore. The new frog slaves, combined with their developed, biome compatible worlds, allowed me to develop a fleet far in excess of the size anyone else could field, except the squid pacifists, whom, being pacifistic, were content to let me swallow up the territory of the rival power bloc with no opposition. So really, its the egalitarian peaceful squids who are to blame, if you want to ask why a planet full of primitives was exterminated, to make room for frog labor camps.

The only really nasty hiccup was when I colonized a holy site gaia world without realizing it, and getting targeted by a fallen empire. I didn't even bother trying to fight against them; after I saw that their fleet was ~57k against my 30k, I went ahead and rolled over. They thanked me, by assassinating my most respected and adored high master in an act of unmitigated arrogance. So I kept them on a shit list, which really wasn't a list, so much as their names, carved into the bones of a dead king, and paraded around the capital world every year by a collection of literal toadies, in remembrance. I kept expanding, keeping myself busy with squandering my influence on shuffling pops around. I really, really wish chattel slaves had a discount to being moved, because [i]damn[/i]. I guess a better strategy would be just to swap 1 pop with a founder pop, just to clear off the decedent penalty and to make sure a PROPER RACE is sitting in the capital, then just revamp their world into a mineral/food output machine, but man, come on. Bug people have a right to abuse frogs by ripping away entire populations to be deposited in some hellhole mine, lightyears away, their culture and traditions stripped away, just to make their pop's dumb little expressions on the planet [i]that[/i] much more amusing.

To be fair to myself, I stopped being quite a dick after that. I was nicer to birds, another traditional enemy of bugs, by [i]only[/i] displacing a planets worth of population before forcing the rest to be a tributary nation. Around that time, I had also picked up terraforming techs, and the terraforming ascencion perk, so after I turned the bird people's planet into a giant lightbulb, I used the gobs of excess power credits to start terraforming half the galaxy into barren, desert planets, because that's how bugtopia likes it. Science kind of fell by the wayside, in favor of struggling to try to ever manage to reach my ever soaring fleet capacity, by filling more and more planets with power plants and mine shafts. I soared the cosmos, the vast, seemingly living wings of my terrifying armada destroying fleets that had taken millennia to construct in a manner of hours. There was probably cause to not have my entire armada collected in but a single fleet, but it was not a cause that seemed particularly relevant, even as the game engine begun to scream for mercy, chastising my arrogance in trying to maintain a 1:2:3:4 ratio between my ship types and thus forcing it to pathfind around 500 fucking corvettes every time I clicked the screen. I probably killed God at some point, too.  The fallen empire I had gnashed my teeth at for centuries woke up around then, too, and I decided to pick a fight with them, feeling confident in my 100k armada. They wandered out of their space with a 200k strength armada, and thrashed my forces a bit. I ran back home, and let them beat up squids for a while, until they got bored and white peaced out. I redoubled my colonization efforts in response, in an effort to further and further ramp up the amount of resources at my disposal. The fleet needed expanding.

Shortly after the second war with the holy gits, I went and said hello to the other fallen empire. I didn't even bother calling in the other races; the hive mind was busy fuming in its corner, now more a prison, only flashing its forced collective smiles every time a bored bug flicked open the viewscreen and dropped the "Can I call you Bob, too" joke at it.  The squids had some misgivings, but were equal enough in strength to not be that concerned about me, and were more than happy to just call my slaver genocider scum up on occasion to fight the other bird race, who also happened to be slaver, genocider scum. Taking over the fallen empire's ringworlds, and then pushing past that to seize much of the other race's worlds, was enough to push them past the point where their natural politeness was not enough to smooth over the rough patches. They made a defensive pact with the other slavers. I withdrew my pact with the hive mind, and made them rivals. But even their combined fleets were not enough to stand against me, alone. I had hit 250k strength at that point, and the ring world's ancient factories made my concerns about resources fall by the wayside quite a bit, to the point where I stopped bothering to micro the populations. This is where I kind of begun to wish I didn't have to manage as much shit, actually, since ring worlds have the awesome, gamebreaking ability to count as a single world for your core planet count, despite being four 25 size planets. I acquired the megastructure perk, and one that doubled my speed in the projects, so I could repair the long ruined parts of the ring worlds, really for shits at giggles at this point, since I had just hit the threshold for actually winning the game and thus felt obliged to stop.

I left my game, and begun to work on a new race, thinking of a new strategy. But something remained. The bug people hadn't won yet. Those fucking arrogant holy punks, who had so rudely decided, probably centuries ago, to not let me actually do whatever I wanted, were still at large. It felt like a pointless victory lap. But fuck it. Fuck them. They had killed my high leader, uhhh, King Bug Person?, and that was where I drew the line in terms of dickery. At least, dickery directed at me. I trotted out my fleet, now 250k large. My processor groaned. It tilted itself, wrapping around entire solar systems, to the edge of the holy git's lands. I had only come to blows with them once before, and from that fight, only my corvettes had survived mostly intact, my battleships being swarmed down by their drones or blown to smithereens by their flagship's laser. So I had responded by going harder and harder in building corvettes. A full 600 of them were joined by a fleet of 200 destroyers, 150 cruisers, and 100 battleships. They were only only around 250k strength, I was sure. I declared war, again, on the awakened empire, confident now, that they'd be a manageable foe. This time, I waited to see what they brought.  A fleet now 370k in power wandered out of their space. I retreated again, this time without giving battle. And I begun to build. More, and more, and more ships. I had a fleet cap now of over 3000, and I struggled to reach it. The bugs themsevles found themselves the victims of a bug; the 100 influence cost bug for getting resources from sectors. 200 influence was wasted the effort was called off; the governors, it was decided, were being punks about this whole effort. Still, the fleet grew. It instantly threw my galaxy wide empire into deficit whenever it drifted out of orbit. It grew so large, that the interface for the game finally gave way, and broke. I could no longer see the ships in my fleet when selected. Starports balked when asked to upgrade it, instead taking holidays and refusing to tinker with a single vessel. There would be no reassigning admirals. No dividing the fleets. No retreat. And it was only 330k strong.

A new tactic was called for. Sure, the upcoming battle against the Uri, as they were called, would probably be the last, for the eternally victorious fleet. Sure, the rest of the galaxy might spring upon such weakness, and try to wrest control of their fates which had been so cruelly stolen away by their slug bug neighbors and masters. And sure, the holy dudes were calling for a white peace like every fucking month and its not like they had actually [i]done[/i] anything since awakening except call me names. But two points won out; one, was that since I controlled the logistical capacity of an entire galaxy, including the other fallen empire's ridiculous ring world facilities, and they controlled but eight planets, the possibility was there that if they were hurt badly enough, that I could rebuild faster than they could. And the second point was, fuck the Uri. The Urthlox were not a good people. Or a proud people. But they had a long, proud history of petty, vindictive brutality, and right now, the only thing that was standing between them and their hubris filled dreams of meaningless revenge, was the threat of certain annihilation. And that had not stopped them before.

The fleets met above a world on the edge of it all; the edge of the empires, the edge of obscurity, the edge of history. The battle was legendary, staggering in its scale. The collective might of an ever victorious empire, whose only constant was pushing the thresholds, against a theocratic enclave fighting furiously to turn back the clock. The game could barely render a frame every two seconds. Lasers shot at obscure, insane angles, sometimes out of the planet itself, as the algorithms provided with the problem involved in visualizing the constant, churning insanity, curved inwards upon themselves and spat out blasphemies in response. The two fleets fought on, neither side gaining an advantage, instead grinding upon one another, the two, massive gears of incompatible systems shattering dramatically against one another, until, at last, they begun to disintegrate to ether and silence. The Urthlox fleet, reduced to but 250 corvettes at 30k strength, at long last, withdrew. The Uri had been reduced a quarter of their power in return. They too, withdrew; they had won a glorious victory, but it was not enough. They were now too weak to risk leaving their system; the squids fleets were close and they had now become a danger. The Urlthox remained unchallenged by the other races. The galaxy shuffled quietly onward, signaling with its new silence the end of an era.

There was never again to be a battle of that scale. The Uri were eventually met in battle a second time, decades later, for a final time. The second part of the prediction had held true; although they had recovered surprisingly well despite their small amount of territory, the bug fleet had repaired faster, and were now equipped with salvaged technology. But they were still just a shadow of their former power; they never again breached a fleet strength of 300k. Even when the beings from afar invaded, even when they threatened the ring worlds and were forced back at the doorstep of bug space, at the cost of millennia of resources, collected by slave worlds and stashed away in the vaults of the provinces, the fury of that war was simply whispers compared to the echoes of the fateful battle near Uri space. And although the bugs were acknowledged as heroes for their singlehanded defense of all life, none in the galaxy would speak any praise for them. For although their slavery and conquests could be justified retroactively as the only thing that had granted them the behemoth military engine that was their empire and the fuel to feed it, what they had done in petty revenge to the holy gits was not to be forgiven. After the Uri had been laid low, their territory went mostly to the Urthlox. And I was not gracious in my victory. Actually, I was a huge asshole. Perhaps, even, History's Greatest Space Monster, the only thing that made interdemensional soul eaters look almost like good guys. 150 pops had been taken in, and they were 150 pops that were better replaced by both the bug founder race, and the now genetically engineered frog slaves. And, there was still the matter of petty revenge. And thus, they were exterminated. Of their number, but a couple managed to elude the death squads and flee to squid space. The empire, however, was still untouchable. Even with a fleet that failed to reach half its naval cap, none of the other states could hope to match it, even all against one. And so, the Urlthox contented themselves in bringing the powers of creation itself under their amoral yoke. And a -1000 malus for, you know, committing genocide on an intergalactic scale.

So yeah. Next time, I think I might try being something other than Space Asshole Extraordinaire.