Since the first attempt at this variant didn't work out, I was back the next week on Livestream for a fresh bite at the apple. This time I found myself starting in the southeast corner of the galaxy on another map packed with yellow stars. The three stars immediately west of homeworld's position were too close for an AI leader to spawn there (the minimum distance they can appear is 7 parsecs) but I was concerned that there was almost certainly at least one competitor in the group of four yellow stars beyond that initial trio. Two of those stars were within range of my scouts with their Extended Fuel Tanks and thus I made the decision to train some Scout2s on the very first tun of the game. That's extremely rare for me to do as I normally build factories until the initial colony ship lands and removes its maintenance costs. I thought it was worthwhile here though since it might let me keep an AI race off some of these disputed planets; I could only build three Scout2s on the initial turn, all of which I immediately sent off to the northwest.
The yellow star to the west was the obvious location to send the colony ship. The percentages worked out as it held an Arid 60 planet which was also an Artifacts world! The free tech that popped turned out to be Inertial Stabilizer which was a real oddity to have unlocked two turns into the game. On the one hand, it didn't do much to speed up my initial growth curve aside from slightly discounting the cost of a colony ship, which I think went from the normal 570 BC down to about 550 BC. On the other hand, this was the most expensive Propulsion tech that could be found at an Artifacts world at tech level 10. Having this tech would allow me to see the first THREE rungs of the Propulsion ladder and potentially skip ahead past stuff that I didn't want. Inertial Stabilizer is also a very useful tech for combat purposes and it would make any Laser fighters that I might build significantly harder to hit at minimal extra cost. Overall then, this was a solid tech to get even if it wasn't as helpful as pulling Improved Eco Restoration or Improved Industrial 8.
Sometimes it feels like I'm being paranoid when I make the effort to build unarmed scouts and send them to every planet in range. Other times though, it pays off bigtime:
My scout reached this yellow star and revealed that it held a very nice Terran 85 planet. On the very next turn, an unarmed Bulrathi colony ship appeared and was chased off by that same scout. Remember, I built those extra scouts on the first turn and then sent one of them to this yellow star, arriving just in the nick of time to turn the bears away. While I didn't know where their homeworld was located, it couldn't have been too far away since this star had to be within 3 parsecs of one of their planets. Given the distance from my starting planet of Superdirt, I was skeptical that I could actually get to this spot before the Bulrathi sent a military escort or simply armed their colony ships. At the very least though, I had slowed their early game down and denied the bears a very tasty prize.
The other scout reports were a bit of a mixed bag. There were two more habitable planets of medium size to the north and another two such planets to the south and southeast. All of those should be easily claimable although it was going to take Range 4 or Range 5 tech to reach several of them. Beyond those nearby worlds, there was a trio of Barren and Tundra planets to the northwest along with a Dead and an Inferno planet directly to the east. I followed my usual strategy of maxing population and factories on the homeworld, then grabbed the one Terran planet to the north which didn't require extra range. While that colony ship was in motion, I finished researching Range 5 which had been sped along by having an Artifacts planet carry the research load. The one annoyance was Range 5 taking an inordinately long time to pop, hitting something like 85% odds for the discovery before it finally appeared. Despite the delay, I was still able to grab the Steppe border planet in that direction at which time I was introduced to the Sakkra:
Oh no, not the Sakkra again! These lizards were a pale shadow of their cousins in the other game, however, with a mere two planets to their name thanks to being stymied by a wall of hostile planets. They would end up being one of the runts of this galaxy as they struggled to expand out of this hostile portion of the map. Since I couldn't interact with the Sakkra outside of checking their personality (they rolled another unusual setup and were Ruthless this time), I went back to cranking out colony ships for the remaining unclaimed planets. I did not expect that Terran planet in the far west to still be unclaimed, where my scouts had already chased away three different Bulrathi colony ships, and yet it was still somehow open at the time of this screenshot. Colony ships are fairly cheap in Master of Orion which made it worthwhile to send one lumbering over there even if the bears broke my scout blockade before it could arrive. That didn't end up happening though and amazingly I did plant my flag over this spot first:
We named it Pink Dot, of course, since what else could this place have been called? I did take the time to train a few dozen Laser fighters to provide minimal defense for this location, these little ships packing extra maneuverability since they could fit the Inertial Stabilizer on board. I knew that I could never hold this spot if the Bulrathi chose to attack in force, especially given that their homeworld of Ursa was right there only 3 parsecs away. How in the world did they allow me to colonize this spot first?!?
Once all of the habitable planets in my vicinity of space were colonized, it was time to build up all of these new fledgling planets with infusions of population while waiting for them to build their factories. The homeworld was eventually able to go back onto research after finishing the colony ships; the Artifacts planet of Hope had done a tremendous job keeping tech moving along thanks to its doubled research spending. I did have some annoying holes in my tech tree as the first two generations of waste cleanup tech were AGAIN missing, no Improved Eco Restoration or Reduced Waste 80% present for the second time. I did have Controlled Dead waiting at the second tier of Planetology though and that looked to be an incredibly useful tech in this portion of the galaxy. There were no fewer than seven planets available at Barren, Tundra, or Dead habitability rating and apparently the Bulrathi and Sakkra were both struggling to unlock the more hostile planet types. If I could reach that tech and deploy all of the necessary colony ships, I might be able to double in size overnight.
Unfortunately one of the other races present in this galaxy was the Silicoids, and it was immediately clear when I met them that they were going to become the other major AI power. The rocks could settle anywhere by virtue of their innate racial ability and I knew that I couldn't build enough military to keep them off all of these planets. They already had armed colony ships which began chasing my scouts off of some of these worlds which meant that the race was on to grab what I could. Controlled Dead was important enough that I gave it approximately 50% of all research spending and soon had the tech in hand, with Dead colony ships flying off towards their targets as fast as possible afterwards.
Deeper into the tech tree, I found that I had also missed out on the second tier of waste cleanup tech in Planetology where Enhanced Eco Restoration was gone. At least Reduced Industrial Waste 60% was present which I began researching with all speed. I was also missing Improved Robotic Controls III which was disappointing, followed by the dangerous exclusion of Planetary Shield V once again. That was two games in a row with poor waste cleanup and the initial planetary shield tech missing, ugh! I had to pray that Planetary Shield X would be available two tiers later on the Force Fields tree or else this was going to be a very nerve-wracking game. Fortunately the Humans are rated "Excellent" in Force Fields which would allow me to push through these techs quickly.
I was unable to affect diplomacy directly in this game so I spent most of my international efforts on tracking the bar graphs and running passive espionage to check what techs everyone had researched. My hope was that the Bulrathi and Silicoids would slow each other down in a big intergalactic war, unfortunately they continued to remain peaceful with one another. I only had the default scanner and couldn't see anything more than 3 parsecs away which is why I was totally blindsided when the Sakkra showed up with a fleet of Large ships packing Fusion Bombs. They attacked from out of the fog at the northern planet of Sulla's Luck and blasted it to piece:
Argh, were we literally speedrunning the same outcome from the previous game here? 
It's been a while since I can recall an AI empire hitting me completely unannounced from the fog of war like this. The Sakkra were so weak that I hadn't been expecting an attack from them at all, though with a Ruthless personality I should have realized that they were going to hit someone soon. And apparently they lacked the habitability tech to capture any of the planets held by the Silicoids which made lucky me the target. The lizards took the time to send population transports for an invasion and they were slow enough that I was able to regrow a considerable amount of pop to meet them. But then they bombarded the planet a second time on the turn of the invasion itself, removing every factory while also clearing out enough humans to make the capture a done deal. I did not want hot war with the Sakkra and therefore had to be content with losing this planet for the moment, though it would be an easy target to attack when I was ready to go on the offensive later.
As I said, the Sakkra hadn't even been on my radar as most of my attention was occupied by the Bulrathi and the Silicoids. The bears had Controlled Barren tech by now and they soon chased away my scouts from the Barren planet southeast of Pink Dot to claim it themselves, though confusingly I would claim a Dead world further to its west as our frontiers overlapped with one another. Along the northern front, the Silicoids were having more success than I would have liked at claiming the belt of Barren/Tundra/Dead planets between Human space and Sakkra space. I was planning to grab the two easternnmost planets while leaving the western pair to the rocks; this narrowly failed to work out as the Silicoids chased away my scouts with an armed colony ship just before I could get one of the disputed planets. Thus they would take three of the four planets, though I did get the Rich Dead planet in the northeast. That was a small location at base size 25 but every Rich and Ultra Rich planet is worth having. I also picked up the uncontested Dead and Tundra planets in the far southeast corner, the latter of which was an Ultra Rich 30 gem of a world. Now I only needed some terraforming tech to increase the size of those babies.
The Sakkra sat and stewed for a while at Sulla's Luck, then made a new push against another planet of mine at Space Race. I only had one turn's worth of warning to react accordingly:
This was not the stack that I wanted to see; with 26 Large designs grouped together, it was clearly the core of the Sakkra fleet. Their designs were heavy on Fusion Bombs which would be devastating against my lightly-shielded planetary bases (the stack of 5 ships which I didn't capture in a screenshot also had Fusion Bombs as its only weapon). However, because these designs were all so overloaded on ground weapons, it made them surprisingly vulnerable in ship-to-ship combat. If I'd had more time to prepare, I could have put together a fleet with minimal weaponry and chased the attackers away without too much trouble. Instead, I was forced to rely on a ragtag band of misfits: 7 Small laser fighters, 4 Medium ships with Gatling Lasers, and a single unarmed scout. Could a force like this possibly defend the planet from attack?
There was a narrow path to victory here: do not let the Fusion Bombers ever get close enough to hit the planet's surface. The Sakkra had foolishly built all of their ships with a single movement point which greatly limited their possibilities here on the tactical combat screen. If I could hold my three ships together, they could form a "wall" and prevent those wallowing bombers from ever reaching the planet itself. I could only block one enemy ship stack at a time, however, which meant that I had to kill the smaller 5 stack of bombers first, then fire at the Titans to get them off the map screen ASAP, then blow up the colony ships, and do all of that while still keeping my own ships alive to maintain the blockade. If any of my ship stacks were wiped out, I would only have two blocking pieces left which wouldn't be sufficient to stop the invaders from reaching Space Race. This was going to require some tricky maneuvering.
The start of the combat saw my faster-moving ships race forward to meet the attackers in an attempt to bait out the missiles from the Titans. Once they were in the air, I would dance backwards to dodge the slow-moving Hyper Vs in an attempt to preserve my ships. The hardest part of this battle was avoiding the missiles while also still positioning each turn to block the Dragon stack from reaching the planet's surface. Full disclosure that anyone watching on Livestream already saw: I played this battle twice, the first time narrowly losing my Medium ship stack and allowing Space Race to get blasted by enemy bombs. I was so close to winning that I reloaded from a save taken before the combat and pulled everything off successfully with slightly better tactics the second time around:
This was the tail end of the battle with the other bomber stack shot down, the Titans retreating after shooting all of their missiles, and the Colony ships eliminated (which were actually a modest threat since they had Laser weapons). The Dragons were the only hostile ships remaining and it was impossible for them ever to reach Space Race, not with only 1 movement point available. I could shuffle my three ships around endlessly and they would never get any closer while the 8 missile bases blasted them apart. This ended up being a total victory with every Dragon destroyed since they never retreated from combat, with the AI not understanding that it was a hopeless situation. Amusingly the unarmed scout ship was what made this result possible, a ship that the AI could have removed with a single shot from pretty much any of the attackers. I had thus pulled off a minor miracle and saved this whole planet from destruction while thoroughly trashing the Sakkra fleet in the process. Not bad for a handful of Laser ships and an unarmed scout!
That was where I ended one of my Livestreaming sessions feeling pretty good about how things were going. When I picked back up again the following week, I continued focusing on research as most of my core planets had finished up with their factories. There wasn't much point in building a lot of missile bases given that they were defended by nothing better than a Class IV Deflector Shield and could be punched through with ease by any contemporary weapons. I was relying on the strength of innate Human diplomacy which continued to grant me good relations with both the Bulrathi and the Silicoids; I had even been able to vote for the bears in a couple of the Council elections when they were nominated against the rocks. That said, there was little that I could do if either of them came after me in force. I had a gigantic scare when this massive Bulrathi fleet arrived at Pink Dot and proceded to reduce it to rubble via orbital bombardment. What the heck, was this the beginning of another death spiral like in the previous game? But no, the bears stopped after taking this one planet, at least for the moment. RIP poor Pink Dot.
I needed better defenses in the worst possible way. Thankfully I did have a lifeline in waiting: Planetary Shield X was available at the fifth tier of Force Field technology. I gave this an appropriate level of funding:
That was as much as I thought that I could spend without sabotaging the other five tech fields. It's always nerve-wracking stuff to sit there with all your planets on research while there are AI death fleets moving around in the area, even while knowing intellectually that pouring all that spending into further tech will do the most to make your planets safer. It was even worse in this game since I only had the default scanner tech and couldn't see much of what was going on out there or where the enemy ships were heading. Soon enough the shielding tech popped (luckily at roughly 5% odds shortly after the meter filled up) and I could construct the big planetary shields on every world. It takes a long time to go from no shielding at all to the Planetary Shield X, as long as half a dozen turns at my smaller planets, but I felt immeasurably safer once I had them deployed everywhere. For all of their gigantic fleets moving around, the Bulrathi had overloaded on gun techs and lacked any bombs or modern missiles. None of their weapons could penetrate 14 points of shielding so I was completely safe against everything that they could field - at least for the moment.
On the wider galactic map, the story of the last half-century or so had been the continued rise of the Silicoids. While the Bulrathi had done little to expand since the initial landgrab phase, the rocks had pushed eastwards and north while apparently grabbing every hostile world available to swell up to 15 total planets. This is a common sight for longtime Master of Orion players with the Silicoids being one of the most likely AI races to claim a whole bunch of planets. The good news is that they are the least dangerous race in the game to have a ton of worlds under their control, as they scale poorly into the lategame with all of their various racial penalties. I was reasonably confident that I could chase them down if this game stretched out for a while longer. The Bulrathi also tend to be one of the weaker opponents in long games due to being Poor in Computers tech, making them a juicy target for eventual espionage. It's a pain in the rear to invade their planets but hopefully I wouldn't have to do so.
The other three AI races were basically irrelevant in this galaxy. The Sakkra's Ruthless personality had gotten them into a bunch of wars and they were down to just their homeworld; the solitary green Bulrathi flag in the east was Sulla's Luck which had become a spud world that I might be able to grab. As for the Darloks and the Meklars, I finally had contact with them thanks to researching Range 8 technology. Both of them were stuck on two planets and had never gotten off the ground. I had little interaction with them aside from using espionage to check their techs and verifying that yes indeed, they were both way behind the Bulrathi and Silicoids.
I spent a lot of turns just doing this though, continuing to climb up the tech tree at the best available rate. I certainly was in no position to attack either of the galaxy's two major powers and the Sakkra had collapsed so quickly that there hadn't been time to put an offensive force together. Most of my planets were putting all of their spending into research while my Rich and Ultra Rich planets fed the Reserve which was then used to double spending at my Artifacts planet each turn. Rich planets can socket money into the Reserve at a 1:1 ratio while Ultra Rich planets actually get 1.5 BC for every 1 BC spent. Since Artifact planets double spending on research, you can turn 100 BC at an Ultra Rich world into 300 RP over at an Artifacts planet. I had been able to research Soil Enrichment which boosted the size of my non-hostile planets considerably, taking the pictured Hope up to size 90 where it could nearly reach 1000 RP with Reserve spending. Since I had no military to support and relatively few missile bases, my costs were low and I began advancing through the tech tree quickly.
The waste cleanup problem from earlier in the game had largely been solved at this point, thanks to needing to research Reduced Industrial Waste 60% to advance the Construction tree. This left me with two remaining economic issues: Robotic Controls and terraforming. I had missed out on Improved Robotics III but did find that Improved Robotics IV was available. That tech made a huge difference when it arrived, allowing me to double the factory count on every planet. The homeworld of Superdirt went from 270 to 540 factories and that definitely made a difference, even if it did take seven or eight turns for each planet to build all those factories. Now I was being held back only by a lack of terraforming tech: I started out with the basic Terrforming +10 only to lack +20, +30, and +40 from my Planetology tree! This was needlessly stunting my small Rich and Ultra Rich planets which would be unleashed if I could ever find some better terraforming.
Things continued to look up as I began expanding again, much to my own surprise. The Silicoids were at war with the Sakkra and bombed out their colony at Sulla's Luck, then did the same thing at the other Sakka colony at Selia. In both cases, the rocks were slow to send their own colony ship replacement and I was able to grab the spots for myself. These places had been thoroughly trashed by the Silicoids and were listing a max size of 10 which may have caused the AI to ignore them. That was a deceptive number however; once they had been cleaned up with terraforming, they returned to their original size. I had to do the Soil Enrichment terraforming first, which costs 150 BC and took about 8 turns to complete even with Reserve spending to double production, then afterwards I could do the normal terraforming to restore these worlds. Sure enough though, they eventually returned to their former sizes and I could speed them along with population infusions and more Reserve funds. Somehow I was gaining valuable new planets at barely any cost.
Those worlds had been essentially poached from the Sakkra even though I never faced them in combat after that earlier defense of Space Race. The Sakkra were helping me out in another way though: by serving as a source of tech thefts. They were well behind me in Computers tech, and with everyone hating them, there was little to fear if they would catch my spies and declare war. I assigned several ticks of espionage spending and cut my spies loose against the lizards. I was trying to get either Terraforming +30 or Terraforming +40, both of which the Sakkra had discovered earlier. I did pick up Improved Eco Restoration in a successful theft, followed by Deep Space Scanner when Planetology wasn't a steal option. Eventually the Sakkra caught me and declared war but they had bigger problems on their hands:
The Silicoid main fleet was heading for their last remaining planet at the homeworld of Sssla. This looked like certain doom for the lizards but before it could arrive my spies landed one final successful tech theft. Oooh, all six fields were available for steals which meant that this had to be a higher-tier spying penetration. There were only three techs in the Sakkra Planetology tree available, the two terraforming techs and the useless Death Spores. I went for the steal and... argh, Death Spores it was! 
That was an unlucky swing and a miss to get the completely pointless tech at 1 in 3 odds. Well, the lizards were dead two turns later at the hands of the Silicoids as they paid for their over-aggressive Ruthless ways. At least I managed to swipe two useful techs from them before their demise.
Even though I had been a bit unfortunate when it came to espionage with the Sakkra, my overall position in the game continued to grow stronger and stronger. My failure to collect a terraforming tech from the Sakkra didn't end up being more than a speed bump because Terraforming +50 was finally present at the next tier of Planetology tech and I began heading there with a few extra ticks of research spending from the other five fields. I was essentially just waiting on that terraforming tech to arrive before I could engage in offensive warfare; with no ability to influence diplomacy, I was very hesitant to attack anyone knowing that wars have a habit of spreading in Master of Orion. If I were to attack the weak Meklars or Darloks, for example, they could easily pull in the Silicoids to their side, and then I'd be staring at a Council loss in the next vote with no way to do anything diplomatically. Better to be patient and continue getting more powerful than make any risky moves.
Once Terraforming +50 had added an additional 40 million population and 160 factories to every planet, I found myself absolutely tearing through the tech tree. I could use Reserve spending from the Rich / Ultra Rich duo to double the research on my Artifacts planet every turn, with Hope now pumping out roughly 2000 RP all by itself. The empire-wide total was approaching 7000 BC per turn and those little light bulb icons were filling up at record speed. I had a couple of key techs that I was waiting to discover before getting into the ship building business in earnest. The most important of these from a military perspective was the highlighted Omega-V Bomb, which wouldn't be necessary to run over the Meklars or Darloks but would be needed if I found myself facing either of the galaxy's two major powers. I also had Star Gates nearly finished in the Propulsion tree which popped immediately after this screenshot and would be super helpful for logistics purposes, along with a non-military Construction tech (I think it was Reduced Waste 40%) to add some more hull space. I even had the Advanced Space Scanner which would allow me to launch invasions without needing to gain planetary supremacy ahead of time. My one biggest weakness was lacking any armor techs, as my ships would still be stuck on Titanium armor way later than I would have liked. I kept missing out on those techs and couldn't trade for them in this game.
After this round of techs all finished their research, I designed one of my standard Huge gunships to take advantage of the new goodies. I lacked the Autorepair special this time around, and it wouldn't have been that great with only Titanium armor providing a max of 600 HP, however I was still able to make a thoroughly tanky design by slapping Class VII deflectors on it. I only had Mass Drivers for guns but at least they're one of the best early game weapons for holding their value into the mid and late game. This design also featured the Repulsor Beam special and I would get a kick out of shoving some enemy ships around with it. I built a grand total of one of these ships before sending it after the Darloks:
I had been one vote short of a veto block at the most recent Council election and taking the Darlok homeworld would be enough to leapfrog me into safety (assuming that nothing significant happened elsewhere in the galaxy). The poor shapeshifters had a mere 2 points of shielding and were still stuck firing Hyper-V missiles from their bases. This meant that their defenses couldn't hurt my new design at all, though the 8 Large ships that they had present did inflict a fair amount of damage before I was able to shoot them down. It was kind of ridiculous that a single ship could show up and take over the Darlok homeworld but that's the power of technology in Master of Orion. I had timed my population transports to arrive on the same turn as the warship which immediately overran the defenses. I looted only two techs despite 300 factories being present, a bad roll on the tech capture, and yet I did manage to get Duralloy armor here which was a real boost. I redesigned my Huge gunship to take advantage of the extra health on that armor and would only wind up building a single ship of the original design. That one ship had captured Nazin though so it certainly wasn't a waste.
I would have taken more Darlok planets but they only had one other world remaining and I wanted to avoid the genocide penalty in diplomacy. I followed the usual lategame pattern of flooding Nazin with more population (easy to grow with Cloning tech in hand) and Reserve spending to double factory construction which quickly turned it into one of my best worlds. 175 population and 700 factories, yes please. Next on the table was a military campaign against the Silicoids who were clearly weaker than the Bulrathi while still having a lot of juicy tech to loot. I've played innumerable Master of Orion games over the years, I know when a game is reaching its final stages, and this one was just about done. I only needed to polish things off and run over a bunch of Silicoid worlds before I could cash in with my deserved victory in the Council.
But then the Bulrathi declared war out of nowhere. My population must have grown large enough to tank relations with the bears now that I had passed the 1/3 veto block threshhold (with the Bulrathi also holding their own veto block in the Council at the moment). That made for a change of plans: now I would try to enlist the Silicoids as an ally and capture Bulrathi planets though the casualties in ground combat were going to be horrendous given my lack of ground weapons. I might have to raze and replace planets, which wouldn't be my preferred course of action but I did have Omega-V bombs if necessary. The bears had a fleet incoming at Space Race which didn't look to be anything too scary. I had about 40 missile bases ready to meet the incoming threat:
Earlier the Bulrathi had been researching a lot of gun techs and indeed all of their various guns were completely useless here. I had 17 points of shielding from a Class X Planetary Shield plus Class VII deflectors which easily negated their Auto Blasters and Gauss Autocannons. Even Heavy Fusion Beams only deal 4-30 damage which gets halved against planetary surfaces. More recently, the bears had gone into torpedo techs and that was a bit more problematic. The Hellfire Torpedo deals 25 damage and gets cut in half against shields so that weapon was also no threat, however the Proton Torpedo deals 60 damage and even when reduced to 30 damage that was still sufficient to punch through my defenses. Therefore I had to kill the Punisher design and could safely ignore everything else. It was only a single ship of that design, how dangerous could it be?
The bases at Space Race began targeting the Punisher and were hitting for roughly 350-400 damage per volley at the start of combat. I had Stinger missiles which dealt 15 damage per shot, cut down to 8 damage per shot against the 7 points of shielding on the Punisher. With 40 missile bases that was 120 Stingers each round so clearly a good portion of them were missing against the 8 points of missile defense on the Punisher. I definitely needed a weapon upgrade to better missiles or a superior battle computer since I was still working with Battle Computer III. Nevertheless, this would normally be sufficient to kill the Punisher design after roughly half a dozen rounds of combat. Torpedos only fire every other round and therefore under normal circumstances I would take a little chip damage on my bases, then wipe out the intruding ship and move on. Easy peazy.
Except... the Punisher design had brought the Autorepair special to the fight. And the bears had researched all the way up to Adamantium armor with their Construction prowess; that's the second-best armor in the game and gave the Punisher design a whopping 2100 HP to play around with. The Autorepair special heals back 15% of max HP each round of combat, which would be 315 health on the Punisher. That's per-round, mind you, and my bases were only dealing 350-400 HP with each volley. Within a few rounds of combat, I could see that this was a gigantic problem: I could not deal enough damage to get through the Autorepair healing of the Punisher design! The combat started out with my planetary defenses out-damaging the healing, however I would slowly lose bases over the course of the fighting and then drop below the damage necessary to make progress. I could get the Punisher down to about 1000 health remaining but that was it, I would eventually lose too many bases and the ship would start gaining health back again. Round after round after round, the enemy ship whittled down my planetary bases until nothing was left. And because torpedoes never run out of ammo, unlike missiles, the Punisher design could take all the time in the world to wear me down until achieving victory.
Ummm... help? 
I couldn't recall ever being in a situation like this where a single ship design completely neutered my entire defenses. Oh sure, there are plenty of games where the AI has some huge invincible death fleet that can run over your planets with ease, but a SINGLE ship by itself being this strong? That can happen to some extent if the AI comes up with a design overloaded with bombs that target planetary surfaces, however that opens up the possibility to do what I did against the Sakkra earlier and punish them for their lack of ship-to-ship weapons. Unfortunately, this Punisher setup was also really strong in direct combat too! Proton and Hellfire torpedoes would shred anything that I could try to throw at them in terms of ships, and anything that I designed would be stuck wielding, err, Mass Drivers. That didn't seem like a viable option - it was going to have to be planetary defenses to meet this threat. We ran the math and realized in horror that it would take roughly 50 missile bases to shoot down a single Punisher, then something like 80 bases to handle a pair of them. In the meantime, a random Punisher showed up at Salmon and casually wiped it off the galaxy map. I was starting to take critical damage here, I needed an answer right now!
There were basically two ways to solve this problem: either negate the damage completely from the Proton torpedoes with more shielding, or increase the damage from my missiles to overcome their Autorepair healing. The better option would be to get more shielding and I poured half of my research spending into Force Fields in the hope that Planetary Shield XX would be present. I had missed out on Planetary Shield XV (which would have nearly negated the damage by taking me up to 26 points of shielding once added to the Class XI shield that I was currently researching) and I had to hope that the final planetary shield tech would be there for 31 points of shielding and safety. I was also researching a better ECM tech in the Computers tree which would help but not solve this problem; I needed the higher shielding for safety.
The other alternative was adding to my damage by getting a better missile tech. I was working with Stingers (15 damage) and had missed out on both Pulsons (20 damage) and Scatter Pack VII (10 x 7 damage). I think that Scatter Pack VII would have been better than Stingers here though it would have been close. I really needed Hercular missiles (25 damage) which would increase the effective damage per shot from my current 15 - 7 = 8 up to 25 - 7 = 18, more than doubling the actual output. That would reduce the number of missile bases needed per-Punisher down to something like 15 per ship which was probably survivable.
As Human researchers frantically pushed deeper into the theoretical realms of thought, the bears were running over the western half of my empire:
Here they were seizing control of my homeworld of Superdirt, argh! It wasn't a frontline world so I only had about a dozen missile bases prepared ahead of time. Then I was given two turns of warning against an incoming fleet with a pair of Punishers which was completely hopeless. I would need something like 70 more bases, at minimum, to shoot them down which could never be constructed in time. (The fact that the bears were fielding ships that all moved at warp 5 speed made them vastly more effective than the usual lumbering warp 1 duds that the AI likes to build.) So the Bulrathi blasted right through the missile bases that I did have, blew up most of the factories, then invaded and had the nerve to find Omega-V bomb in the ruins! The ground combat was truly frightening with the bears having an advantage of +60 from equipment and another +20 by virtue of being the Bulrathi. This might actually be the worst ground combat situation that I've ever been in, with the 25 Human defenders killing zero Bulrathi marines. Yes, that's right, it was 25 to 0 in terms of the fighting which is just unreal. Bears with toys, scary stuff.
There was little that I could do other than push tech as fast as possible on every surviving planet. Missile bases weren't going to do much, I needed a tech solution to have any chance to survive. Amusingly, I was able to slip over to Superdirt after the Bulrathi fleet left and bomb it out of existence, annihilating my own homeworld from orbit, heh. Normally that would have been a golden opportunity to swarm the captured planet with invasion transports and capture some Bulrathi technology. However, with that recent ground combat in mind, it simply wasn't possible to pull it off. I think I would have needed something like 1500 population to kill the 40 Bulrathi defenders which was never going to happen.
The AI doesn't have a killer instinct in Master of Orion and I did have enough time to advance the tech tree in the Force Fields and Weapons fields. I finished researching Auto Blaster first and prayed that Hercular missiles would be there at the next tier... only to have my hopes dashed. Not there at the 50% odds, no improved missiles for me. That left all of my eggs in the Force Fields basket, I completed research on Class XI Deflectors and...
Yet another swing and a miss. 
I think the expression on that scientist's face in the screenshot covers the situation pretty well. I had missed Pulsons, Scatter Pack VII, Herculars, Planetary Shield XV, and Planetary Shield XX techs along the way. I think almost any combination of those techs would have been sufficient to salvage the situation but there wasn't much that I could do having missed out on all five of them. Clearly I did not have enough time to reach Zeon or Scatter Pack XV missiles, which would have required researching two more tiers of weapons tech, followed by the improved missiles themselves. And although I also could have done more damage by upgrading my battle computer, going from my outdated Battle Computer III to Battle Computer VII wasn't going to be enough to survive. The Bulrathi were already starting to show up with stacks that had 5-8 of the Punisher design inside which would easily overwhelm bases with merely more accurate targeting.
Thus I was left with no choice but to write this game off as a loss as well. My empire was in the middle of a full-on collapse as I had already lost four planets and there were more Punisher ships incoming to several of my other worlds. My current technology was completely unable to stop that one ship design and my scientists completely struck out on every future option that might have been able to save me. There was absolutely nothing that I could see that would get me out of this hole, no miracle salvation to turn around this game. It was completely insane how a game that was smoothly advancing to a seemingly certain victory was flipped around by a single really well-designed enemy ship. The irony is that I've followed this exact playbook so many times over the years; I had even done so in this very game against the Darloks when I invaded their homeworld with a single Huge gunship! I'll repeat the same sentence I typed above: "It was kind of ridiculous that a single ship could show up and take over the Darlok Human homeworld but that's the power of technology in Master of Orion." Hoisted by my own petard, ouch!
Kudos to the Bulrathi who had played a very strong game from start to finish here. They already had Advanced Soil Enrichment and Atmospheric Terraforming, and had just completed Terraforming +100 so I suspect that they would have simply voted themselves the winner at the next Council election anyway. It was wild to me that they had never ended up fighting with the Silicoids across the whole game, only minor border skirmishing without a formal war declaration ever taking place between the two. I would have certainly stirred up some trouble between them in a typical game, if only that had been an option here.
Well. Clearly this taciturn variant was proving to be harder than I had anticipated even though I do think that I was pretty unlucky at the tail end of this game. I had one more followup idea still in mind: it was time to set aside the taciturn variant for the moment and look for some revenge. 
