Twitch Livestream Playthrough: Snakes On A Spaceship

This is the short summary of a game that I played on Livestream in August 2022 as part of my ongoing Civ Fridays series. This was a companion game to the "Cyberpunk 2377" game that I played with the Meklars at the same time; the Meklar game ended so quickly that I wanted to run some more Master of Orion before moving on to another project. There was a suggestion from the Livestream viewers to showcase the Sakkra since I hadn't used them previously and thus the concept for "Snakes On A Spaceship" was born. The Sakkra have double population growth as their racial ability (they effectively treat all planets as being Fertile) along with being rated "Excellent" in Planetology while having no research penalties. This would seemingly be enough to make them one of the game's strongest races, however they grade out as middle-of-the-pack thanks to having one of the game's worst diplomatic situations. The lizards have subpar relations with the Klackons, Meklars, Darloks, and Alkari along with truly horrible enmity with the Mrrshans. This makes the Sakkra much more likely to get dragged into early game wars that sap away their otherwise strong economic advantages.

I rolled a Medium map with standard settings and found myself located in the south-central portion of the galaxy. There were three planets within 3 parsec range of the homeworld and for the second game in a row I guessed incorrectly with the starting colony ship, sending it first to a Tundra world followed by a Barren planet before finally setting up shop at an Arid 60 planet which was the only habitable location available. The second colony wasn't established until 2313 and this was a major setback to the growth curve, paying the maintenance costs on the colony ship for a full dozen turns while it was stuck in the void of space. At least I didn't have to worry about population growth on the homeworld of Eden which filled up at a preposterous rate as alway when playing the Sakkra. All of those love-happy lizards basically offset the penalty of flubbing around with the colony ship instead of giving me an economic edge as they normally would have done.

At first it appeared as though the critical planet on this map was going to be a Minimal world off to the northwest. That spot was 5 parsecs distance from the homeworld and I had already chased away some Meklar scouts in that direction which meant that they had to be located at the only yellow star up in the northwest corner. However, as more scout reports continued to trickle in from the south and east, it became clear that I had lucked my way into an exceptionally fertile galaxy. Eight of the first twelve planets that I explored were habitable and better yet the hostile worlds were mostly at the low end of the hostile scale, with only Controlled Dead needed to unlock three of the four. Most of these planets to the southeast were close enough that I wouldn't even need to research extended range to colonize them as I could skip from one to the next in succession. In other words, this galaxy was the polar opposite of the radioactive wasteland that I had seen in the Cyberpunk game, with almost everything lush and inviting for my lizards. This was a perfect setup for the Sakkra to do what they do best and swarm like a plague.

I followed my usual opening by maxing factories on the homeworld and then opening research with one turn of full spending. The Planetology field lacked Improved Eco Restoration but I was able to open with Terraforming +10 (at an insanely cheap 90 RP cost) and then proceed onto Controlled Tundra afterwards. Propulsion only had Range 4 as an option, which would make it tougher to reach that Minimal planet at 5 parsecs distance but would be helpful elsewhere in the southeast. Soon enough the colony ships started rolling out at 4 turn intervals from Eden and grabbing those uncontested planets. The Livestream chat came up with lots of amusing snake-related names for these colonies and the second planet Asp Hole kept filling them up with population transports. The Sakkra innate growth bonus was hugely helpful here again as otherwise I wouldn't have been able to supply all of these new worlds with a starting infusion of population.

Surprisingly it was not the Meklars who first entered into formal contact with my lizards. Instead it was the Psilons who unpleasantly popped up at Celtsi in the southeast with this ridiculous colonization effort. The brains had obviously signed one of those early game cheese alliances with one of the other races and used it to hop forward into my portion of the galaxy. This is one of the few parts of the MOO gameplay that really annoys me as the Psilons obviously had no business claiming this planet for themselves. Celtsi would be a blight on the map for ages yet to come as I did not want to engage in warfare with the brains to take it away from them. The Psilons were emerging as by far the strongest AI race in the galaxy and I did not want them coming after me with their technologically advanced toys. As usual for me, I stalled for time while continuing to colonize all of the other worlds in this highly fertile universe.

Fortunately the game continued to develop in exactly the direction that I wanted: a long period of peaceful coexistence. The Psilons were Honorable Ecologists for their personality this time around and they seemed content to leave me alone so long as I left them alone. The Sakkra colonies filled up with population and worked on constructing their factories without me having to build ships or missile bases to defend them. I was able to reach Controlled Tundra tech without issue and started picking up even more planets; when the GNN message popped up with the first to 12 planets, it was my Sakkra that the news anchor was talking about. That's very rare on Impossible difficulty and a sign that things are going great. There were multiple times where I mentioned on Livestream that this was a pleasant, relaxing game to play. If only the Psilons weren't 20 tech levels ahead and expanding nearly as well on the northern side of the galaxy.

Because I prioritized colonizing the south, I wouldn't end up claiming that Minimal world which went over to the Meklars. Knowing which planets to contest and which ones are better off left to the AI is one of those areas that only comes with experience, and this was a situation where I was better off focusing on easier targets. Sakkra expertise in Planetology tech did get me the Tundra world on the northern border though and then it turned out that there was another Tundra world even further to the northwest which I was also able to grab. The Meklars lacked the tech needed to colonize there and left the world open for me to secure. I signed up the borgs to trade and hoped that they would also leave me alone. Soon enough I was able to discover Controlled Toxic and pick up the Dead world in my backlines along with the Toxic planet on the northeastern frontier another Inferno world in the center of the map. The Psilons didn't seem to have any hostile environmental techs beyond Controlled Dead and this allowed me to clean up several worlds that I really shouldn't have been able to get. Controlled Radiated was also in my Planetology tree and it was worth researching too since there was a pair of Radiated worlds to the east of Celtsi that all of the non-Silicoid races were ignoring. Sakkra expertise in Planetology combined with the ongoing peaceful galaxy would eventually allow me to settle there as well.

The end result was a truly incredible landgrab for Impossible difficulty: SIXTEEN planets colonized completely peacefully without firing a shot:

I secured the entire southwest corner of the map in a big green blob, with serpentile tendrils extending further outward at the various hostile planets that the AI was unable to colonize. I would actually pick up two more planets beyond what's pictured here, getting one of the two planets on the eastern edge of the map where the cursor is pointing along with another Radiated planet in the far northwest beyond Meklar space. The other unexplored planet in the north was Fierias, home to the One Planet Empire Mrrshans, and the last planet at the bottom of the map was Orion. This was a shockingly effective colonization effort and it was a great showcase for continuing to push scouting deeper into the game. You never know when there's going to be a Radiated planet somewhere deep in enemy space that you can sneak in and pick up without being challenged. (Thankfully the AI usually ignores planets that it lacks the technology to colonize.)

By this point I was in contact with all of the AI empires outside of the irrelevant Mrrshans. The Psilons were clearly the top AI power with the Silicoids and Bulrathi in distant trailing positions. The Meklars had done their usual thing of turtling on a small number of planets and I was able to induce them into a war against the brains eventually which kept the two of them at one another's throats and ensured that I wouldn't risk losing a Council vote. So long as the Meklars were clashing with the Psilons, I would always pull their vote and lock down the 1/3 veto block. Naturally it didn't take too long for me to climb to a third of galactic population myself, especially with Terraforming +40 following Controlled Radiated in the Planetology tree, and afterwards I felt secure enough to start looking to make my first offensive push.

The Silicoids were the first AI race to declare war on me, something that I'd honestly been expecting much earlier due to the massive Sakkra population sinking diplomatic relations with everyone else. The rocks were not a threat on their own but I did worry that they would pull the Psilons into their conflict; this was the incentive to start building missile bases for the first time after running a total Farmer's Gambit for the first 100 or so turns. Sure enough, the Psilons and Bulrathi were eventually drawn into the fighting via their network of alliances leaving my lizards joined together with the Meklars against the rest of the field. The Psilons were much too advanced technologically for me to make any progress against them at the moment and therefore I spent some time simply building mass bases everywhere across my empire. I needed to lock down my own defenses before I could think about attacking someone else, plus I was waiting on Omega-V Bombs and faster engine techs to make attacking more practical. The Psilons probed around my borders with some of their ships, using designs that mostly featured the Megabolt Cannon, but they seemed more interested in continuing their pummeling of the Meklars. They offered me a surprising peace treaty after a little while which I was more than happy to take.

That was the signal to move on the weaker AI powers in earnest, starting with the Bulrathi. The bear homeworlds were in the east near my two Radiated colonies and I focused my initial attacks in that direction. I designed two ships for my offensive, a Huge Autorepair gunship packing Hard Beams and then a Medium bomber with Omega-Vs. I started out by conquering the isolated Silicoid planet of Draconis in the southeast corner of the galaxy, then began rolling up the Bulrathi planets in the same cluster. My two Radiated planets in the region, Snake Oil and Pythia, were both tiny worlds that were sending a quarter of their population off in invasion every turn. Fortunately I had Cloning tech plus Sakkra fertility to make population growth incredibly cheap, plus the poor bears were so far behind in technology that I actually had an advantage in ground combat. They had some strong planets to their name as well, with Drakka and their homeworld Ursa both having a base size of 100. I was able to loot Planetary Shield X from the Bulrathi which was the tech that I most cared about and which would be very useful against the Psilons elsewhere.

I'd been hoping to keep steamrolling effortlessly through the weak fries of the galaxy but it was not to be. The Psilons came back again for a second round of combat and this time they came with the full force of their main fleet, having completely eliminated the Meklars by this time. The Psilons were building entirely Large and Huge designs now and came up with two different nasty threats. The first was a Large hull packing four Hercular missiles; they would show up with several dozens of these ships, blast my missile bases with two volleys of Herculars, and then retreat to safety. I had 15 points of shielding on my bases which wasn't enough to stop their hit-and-run tactics. More problematic was a Huge design holding eight Bio Terminators which was enough to kill off the population of any world if they showed up in large numbers. I didn't have any protection against bio weapons at the moment although the Silicoids did have the Antidote tech which I was hoping to get from them via theft or conqest.

I therefore ended up in an odd situation where the Psilons were pounding on my front door defenses in the north even as my ships were rolling through the Bulrathi off in the east. I had an improved gunship design sporting Tachyon Beams that I planned to use to counter the Psilons (their ships lacked guns because they were so heavy on missiles/bombs) but it would take some time to roll them out in decent numbers. While I was working on them, the Psilons battered through the defenses of my frontline planet Venom and surprisingly did not blast away all the factories. That allowed their invasion to loot a treasure trove of my technologies:

Yikes, what a disaster! They picked up Controlled Radiated to open up access to all of my worlds along with Advanced Soil Enrichment for additional population everywhere. It's so rare for the AI to avoid bombing out all the factories at a planet that they almost never capture technology like this. And why yes, that was indeed Neutronium Powered Armor on their ground troops to my Duralloy, thanks for noticing. I badly needed an improved armor tech since everything the Psilons was fielding had a billion HP on it.

This was a pretty bad situation but I made sure to avoid panicking. I've noted many times that the AI doesn't have a killer instinct in Master of Orion; even when it has a big edge, it struggles to push its advantage in the way that a human opponent would do. Lategame scenarios very commonly boil down to rebuilding worlds faster than the AI can burn them down and I've gotten a ton of practice in doing that over the years. I was gaining some powerful new worlds in former Bulrathi space to offset the damage that I was taking on the Psilon front lines while also researching better shielding tech to negate the threat of their Hercular missiles. We clashed repeatedly but I managed to hold the brains off from taking any additional planets for the moment. I also spotted an opportunity: when the Psilons moved their fleet away from Venom, I was able to swoop in and recapture the planet with a surge of population transports, lookting six techs in the process! The findings were somewhat disappointing compared to what I could have gotten but I did pick up Auto Blaster and the High Energy Focus which would make for some excellent gunships. (Deliberately losing one of your own planets to recapture it and gain techs in the process is pretty exploitative of the AI but that's not what I was doing here - I tried to hold Venom and simply couldn't! Also the Psilons gaining Controlled Radiated and Advanced Soil Enrichment definitely wasn't worth what I landed in the counter-invasion.)

I couldn't hold Venom this second time either and it was taken back by the Psilons again, with them looting even more of my techs in the process. At least they didn't get anything as important the second time around. Godzilla became the next target where I fought off the Psilon ships themselves but was unable to stop them from killing the planet's entire population with their Bio Terminator weapons. I would refound the colony immediately thereafter and flood in population with Sakkra transports to take advantage of the factories which were still there. We would repeat this dance a couple of times and I was content to let the Psilons concentrate their efforts on razing Godzilla rather than going after another target. You just have to keep rebuilding the damage that they do while making progress elsewhere on the map.

While all of this was going on in the west, I was finishing up with the conquest of the Bulrathi core in the east which contained both a Rich and an Ultra Rich planet. Once they were fully terraformed and outfitted with factories, they became major shipbuilding worlds in their own right. I now had two main cores in both the west and the east; the older planets focused on defending against the Psilon fleet while the new core built ships for my first real effort to take a Psilon planet at Celtsi. That purple blight deep in my territory had been an eyesore for decades and now it was finally time to take it for myself. My latest Huge ship sporting Auto Blaster guns fought through the missile bases at Celtsi and the Sakkra marines touched down on the planet's surface... only to find that they were facing a penalty of -45 to their dice rolls, yikes! The Psilons were, uh, a little bit ahead in ground pounder technology. That led to scenes like this:

25 Psilons killed 170 of the invaders, sheesh! There was one battle where 15 of their soliders held against 89 of my lizards, we're talking almost 7:1 casualties in their favor. I was throwing hundreds of population at them every turn using the combination of Cloning + Advanced Soil Enrichment + Sakkra fertility to grow them all back at dirt cheap cost. It was incredible how cheaply I could regrow population in this game and therefore I leveraged that to the hilt in sending an awful lot of poor Sakkra to their deaths in invasions. If you're new to Master of Orion, the recording of the last session from this game is a great tutorial on how effectively population can be moved around in endgame situations. Anyway, eventually I managed to zerg my way through to a capture of Celtsi and a recapture of Venom, this time hopefully for good. Unfortunately I failed to pick up any ground technologies in these successive invasions which still left my poor lizards invading at horrendous odds whenever I tried to take a Psilon planet. My gunships had gained space superiority along the main front line and I spent the waning turns of the game slowly grinding down the population of the Psilon planet of Arietis. I was landing 200 Sakkra each turn and killing maybe 25 of the defenders in each wave. The brains certainly weren't making things easy for me.

Back at home, I had researched Terraforming +80 to go along with Advanced Soil Enrichment and all of my planets were simply huge. I did lack Atmospheric Terraforming for my hostile worlds and I was hoping to get it from one of the Psilon invasions. I knew that it was going to be close in the 2525 Council election and it turned out that I had exactly enough population to vote myself the winner, 38/56 votes (68%), with no one else casting a vote in my favor. I would have been just short if I hadn't kept stuffing the battered wasteland of Godzilla full of population each turn, thank goodness for obsessive micromangement.

This wound up being a pretty easy game for Impossible difficulty, Psilon runaway technology notwithstanding. The Sakkra are an excellent economic race on the rare occasions where they're allowed to develop in peace and fortunately that's exactly what I was able to experience in this game. I can only recall one other game on Impossible where I was able to colonize this many worlds unopposed, an unreported game which also turned into a huge stomp. It was amusing how this was the polar opposite of the Cyberpunk 2377 game that I had played the week before on Livestream, with everything seemingly rolling habitable instead of hostile this time around. I certainly wasn't complaining! While this one wasn't exactly a nailbiter, it was fun to relax with a mostly peaceful game of Master of Orion. Thanks as always for following along.