Early in 2013 me and my friends played a closed game of Neptune’s Pride 2: Triton, before even the glorious saga that was the war of the Space Bears. During the surprisingly brief, two-week-long, game I once again kept a journal of the exploits of my Empire in a rise and fall of epic proportions. Despite it now being two years later, I kept all my materials and have finally decided that the time is ripe to post the story. This journal log is part three of four, but you can read the previous entries here and here.
Emperor of Eleryo, His Royal Highness Snekenj the Magnificent- Journal Log 3
Stardate: 23/04/20013 (Galactic Cycle 7)
We are now certain that CJ can be trusted as an ally of our people, at least for the foreseeable future. Instead of striking at us like we foresaw Tim opted to split his second Dreadfleet to attack three of CJ’s different systems. In that moment all would have been lost for CJ except we gave him a weapons upgrade, putting him on par with Tim and allowing him to hold his homeworld. This very simple trade has literally saved the life of CJ’s Empire and simultaneously put Tim’s on a massive back-foot. 60 of our ships in the noble Sheliak-II along with a whole 140 of CJ’s are now going to push into Tim’s territory. And following a defensive victory for CJ in a few hours Tim will literally have 80 ships remaining. It is looking very much like right now we are going to put him out of the game. Permanently. A fitting end to a peoples such as his.
We have spoken with Tim and he seems resigned to his fate already and bears us no ill will. After all, in the Game of Stars you win or you die. However, he also shares our view that Docco will probably crush all of us fairly soon. While we, Tim, CJ, Ali and Kendo have been bickering over in this sector the Galaxy, Docco had been expanding without interruption or contest and has a lead now that is so vast (especially in economy) that there is little even our strength could do against his.
Tim also tried to get us to betray CJ, insisting it was the wisest move open to me, but that would just be a bad move at this time and we are fairly sure he knew he couldn’t convince the Council. No, we mean to see this through. We just have to make sure that our people get the best systems… We can’t afford letting CJ out-expand us here.
That said, some of our Admirals are insisting that the Council’s lack of cut-throat attitude against either the weakened CJ (or indeed the early weakness of Ford) is repeatedly putting us on the back foot when we could have gained in size and strength. We have ignored their warnings thus far though in order to focus on Tim, a species well known for their tricky and underhand ways.
While we hold a comfortable lead in the war against Tim, elsewhere in the cluster, things are going less than splendidly. Docco has finally launched an offensive against Ali, thanks to his upgraded hyperdrive tech allowing him to cross their space border, meaning Ali is now desperately rushing to his own defence while CJ focuses on Tim.
This leaves Kendo completely unmolested down the bottom of the cluster. And so, in turn, he is molesting us. His people can’t fight wars, build ships or research science but we have to admire their ability to hold a grudge. Small attacking forces are constantly sent to each of my systems to try and take them off me and we are desperately rushing back and forth between them to keep them. And worse he did succeed in taking some of the systems as we defended others. It will only be for a short time, but it cost us in infrastructure, and worse, time. His attacks are niggling and easy enough to fight off, but due to the sheer number of them we find ourselves on a rather frustrating back-foot.
In short. Kendo is a right fucker.
Even more concerning, but possibly beneficial, is the fact that Ford has literally 160 ships in my territory right now. While it is true that he spent the first 7 cycles as one of the weakest races in the cluster, he also benefited from the fact that the only immediate threat to his colonies (i.e. us) have completely ignored him as we fought against both Kendo and the Herbians (fulfilling our earlier predictions of a war on several fronts). Whilst he is still far behind in all infrastructure, ships and even colonies, and we believe we could destroy him in a 1 on 1 war, due to the length of time his space has remained peaceful he has succeeded in building up no small amount of ships.
Now, for some reason, he still seems determined to uphold our alliance (the same one we have seriously considered breaking at least half a dozen times) and is going to attack Kendo. He is taking a route through my systems we planned out for his Captain and will result in the loss of one solitary economy on our part. He even offered to reimburse us for it! Then, as both Tim and Kendo send us messages crowing over what they see as a successful invasion of my outer worlds, a fleet that took 7 full cycles to build up will smash into the Kendorians like a hammer into an anvil. We don’t truly expect him to do any lasting damage to Kendo, but there is no way that the yellow scum can simply shrug off such an attack. In short, it will provide us a breathing space.
And this is where our species lack of killer instinct will have to be overcome. Because when Ford exhausts his mighty Armada, which he will, we need to attack his home planets. Crippling him whilst simultaneously gaining more systems will only benefit our Empire at this time when we need all the aid we can get.
I guess I’ll just have to suffer through the incriminating stares the next time we meet… This game is hell…
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