Two attempts at this variant thus far and two failures, ouch! The second game in particular really should have been a victory before that Bulrathi ship design put an end to all of my hopes and dreams. Not wanting to make a third attempt at the same scenario concept, I deciced that I would shift tactics before calling it quits. This third game would be designed for revenge: I would drop all variant restrictions and play with the sole focus on eliminating the Sakkra and the Bulrathi, the two tormentors from my respective failed games. Hopefully this would be a fun contrast to the first two Taciturn games, demonstrating the power of diplomacy after running two straight games with it effectively turned off, while also letting me lay the smack down on the lizards and the bears. I was delighted when the very first map that I rolled had both the Sakkra and Bulrathi present (you can't pick your opponents in Master of Orion) which meant that we were off and rolling.
I drew a northeastern corner start for this game. This was apparently a sparse portion of the galaxy with few stars nearby, and the yellow stars to the south and southwest were both unfortunately 7 parsecs distance away. This meant that AI empires could have them as their homeworlds and I was praying that this wouldn't be the case to have more breathing room. The starting colony ship obviously went to the yellow star next door which held another Terran planet with a size of 100! We named this Earth2 and essentially had double homeworlds to start the game, wow. The white star to the west held a small Dead planet while the white star to the northeast was a Minimal 40 world with the Artifacts bonus, excellent! That made three games in a row with an early Artifacts planet. The free tech was the Neutron Pellet Gun, great for early game fighting while not doing anything to speed up the initial growth curve. I would rate that a decent but not great pull on the freebie.
The bad news was that there simply weren't many more planets available in this corner of the map. Only three more stars were within 6 parsecs which meant that I didn't even need to build a full complement of scout ships. The blue star to the northwest had a medium sized Toxic planet, the red star to the southeast had no planet at all, and then the pictured green star had a Terran 120 planet (!!!) That wasn't a planet which had been boosted in size by drawing the Fertile tag, that was the real deal size 120 planet, the largest possible in Master of Orion. I think I've seen maybe half a dozen of these in the 50 past games of MOO that I've played, they are extremely rare to come across. Obviously I had to have that spot! The planet was 5 parsecs away so I had to cross my fingers that Range 5 tech would be available in the Propulsion tree.
Unfortunately there was further bad news: no sooner had my scouts arrived at the gigantic planet before they were chasing away a Bulrathi colony ship. Not chasing away Bulrathi scouts, chasing away Bulrathi colony ships that lacked Extended Fuel Tanks. This meant that the bears had to have started at the yellow star directly to the south and their homeworld was only 3 parsecs away. Could I research Range 5 tech and claim that spot before the bears were smart enough to send a military escort for one of their colony ships? I had to make the attempt given my lack of other expansion prospects. I designed a Long Range Medium ship with the extra fuel tanks on board, with this one having significantly more punch than normal because I was able to field two NPGs instead of the usual two Lasers. I built one immediately and sent it down to the Terran 120 planet, then went back to factory building since I needed to both research additional tech and construct a colony ship to claim that spot. The following turns were nerve-wracking as I chased away more Bulrathi colony ships as they kept returning every 4-5 turns, fortunately never with military escorts. When the homeworld finished maxing factories, I breathed a sigh of relief to find that Range 5 tech was present. Human researchers sped through it quickly with maximum tech spending (I didn't open any of the other fields!), then dispatched a colony ship as soon as it popped. Thus I did plant my flag first over the world that we named Bastion:
This didn't mean that I would be able to hold the planet but at least I had gotten there first. Snagging this away from the Bulrathi was a massive break and more or less made this game playable, as I was already in a dicey situation despite having such giant worlds under my control. Look at the sad state of that map above: outside of the Toxic and Dead planets to the northwest, there was already nowhere to go. The Bulrathi had me completely cut off from expanding further towards the galactic core along with the Darloks who were sporting the white flags nearby. It was obvious that I was going to be stuck on minimal worlds and would have to find some way out of this box by pretending to be the Meklars. I signed both the Bulrathi and the Darloks up to the maximum trade possible and hoped against hope that they would stay peaceful.
For the moment, there wasn't much for me to do. I colonized the Artifacts planet in the backlines and then was stuck on my four planets, unable to expand further in any direction. Thus I built max factories everywhere and then switched over to heavy research. I actually punched well above my weight in terms of tech thanks to having planets of size 100, 100, 120, and an Artifacts planet which were all fantastic at pouring spending into research. This was the only thing salvaging my position since I could have been stuck with a bunch of size 20 or 30 planets which would have brought in a fraction of the research output. I hit 1000 RP/turn early on and had a rather nice selection of techs available:
I was helped by having most of the strong early game economic techs present, such as opening with Improved Eco Restoration and Reduced Waste 80% which together cut waste cleanup costs in half as compared to the default. Then I was able to jump to Improved Robotic Controls III and Terraforming +20 which led to some amazing early game factory counts. Even a mere four planets can produce a lot of production and research when they have 360, 360, and 420 factories on them not even 100 turns into the game. As if this wasn't dumb enough, I also landed the Fertile event at my second planet which increased its base size from 100 to 125 to allow even more factories. I guess we really were doing the Meklar cosplay in this game! The other notable tech field was Weapons where I was able to use the free Neutron Pellet Gun technology to skip the first two tiers of Weapons tech entirely and leap forwards to Scatter Pack V missiles. Those would give my missile bases some real punch if it came to fighting in the early game, which I continued to hope it wouldn't.
The other reason why my economy was so strong came from access to something that had been denied in my first two variant games: trade income. The Humans are of course the best race in the game at trade and I dialed everyone up to maximum trade income immediately on first contact. All of the other races take an initial penalty on trade while the Humans essentially start at the break-even point and only grow from there into more positive territory. I was able to get deals for roughly 200 BC with both the Bulrathi and Darloks, then double them a little later up to 450 BC agreements. This international trade soon made up a major chunk of my economy, adding as much as 25-30% to my total income from planets, and with no ship or defense costs worth mentioning at the moment, my planets were actually spending more BC per turn than their own production created! That's a rare situation and only happens when the player has a huge amount of trade income pouring in.
So I sat around in my corner building for the moment while researching at a rate roughly comparable to the AI empires. That's also exceptionally rare, as normally the player is way behind and has to play catch up, but my huge planets and major trade income were allowing me to keep pace for now. I did worry that I'd get outscaled with so few worlds under my control and knew that I had to be on the lookout for expansion opportunities. My next Planetology tech after Terraforming +20 was Controlled Inferno which allowed me to grab that Dead planet to the northwest. And then claiming that planet opened up the range to push further west where I found this Ultra Rich Inferno planet in a nebula - I had to have that! It required Extended Fuel Tanks to make it over there but fortunately I had enough miniaturization by now to fit them onto a Large hull along with an Inferno colony module. I managed to beat any of the AI empires over there and claim the planet first which we named Forge due to its Ultra Rich status.
Planting my flag over Forge brought me into contact with the Sakkra who had their homeworld a little bit further to the west. The lizards weren't doing especially well in this galaxy as they were limited to four planets; it appeared as though there was a three-way division between the Bulrathi, the Darloks, and the unmet Klackons for top status overall. This was good news since there was no runaway AI power putting pressure on me while access to the Sakkra gave me another potential target for expansion. It's almost always best to go after the weaker AI empires first in Master of Orion and the lizards clearly looked like a softer target than the bears or the shapeshifters. Now the million dollar question was whether I could hold my claim over Forge given that it was surrounded by competing powers. It would be able to stack up bases like nobody's business thanks to being Ultra Rich though that was somewhat countered by also being in a nebula where planetary shields wouldn't work - argh!
Speaking of planetary shields, I found that I had missed out on the Planetary Shield V tech for the third game in a row. This had been a dire problem in my first two games that left my worlds minimally protected against harassment from AI ships. It was little more than an inconvenience in this game, however, as I was able to trade the Bulrathi one of my techs (I think it was Improved Robotics III?) and pick up the critical tech anyway. The ability to trade techs and fill in major gaps in the player's own tech tree has to be one of the biggest advantages from conducting diplomacy. I really, really felt the lack of this ability when playing the first two games and the trades that I made in this game allowed me to stay in peaceful researcher mode rather than stressing out over how I would defend my planets.
I was hoping to claim the Toxic planet to the northeast of Forge as well though I lacked the hostile environmental tech to settle there for the moment. I kept working the diplomatic rounds though and eventually spotten an opportunity to trade something for Controlled Toxic which I happily snapped up. This would allow me to colonize Tao... except that the Sakkra were already heading there with a colony ship and I couldn't chase them away by virtue of having signed a Non Aggression Pact with the lizards. That could have been a "whoops" moment, however the Sakkra also had a nasty fleet heading to Forge which would have wiped it out if I hadn't signed an NAP with them ahead of time. Thus I essentially traded Tao to them in exchange for holding Forge, a great deal since the Ultra Rich planet was far more valuable. I could also grab Tao whenever I went to war with the Sakkra as they would never be able to defend it.
It's also worth mentioning that everyone loved me in this game thanks to being the Humans and having trade deals across the board. My non-threatening size and diplomatic bonuses had relations with everyone else sitting at the "Peaceful" setting for the whole early game. No one ever made any attempt to attack my planets either, though I think that was also partly due to occupying an out of the way portion of the galatic map that the AI was ignoring. This bought me plenty of time and once I thought that I was strong enough to start switching over to the offensive, I singled out the Sakkra as the weakest opponent and ripe pickings for invasion. I started out by working the diplomatic channels, getting the Bulrathi to declare war on them which quickly exploded the whole galaxy into warfare. Those spectator wars are pretty cheesy and the AI shouldn't be willing to go to war that easily but this game was all about showcasing the power of unfettered diplomacy so why not.
Once I diplomatically isolated the Sakkra and had them tied up in wars against three other opponents, I launched my own offensive. The first blow fell as Tao which had no ships to defend it and only a handful of bases. The lizards were working with Hyper-X missiles and only Class V shields, with no planetary shields, which allowed me to attack them with a Huge autorepair design that had nothing more than Mass Drivers on it for weapons. I lacked the first few bombs in my tech tree and thus these weapons that dealt 5-8 damage per shot (not halved against bases) would have to do the trick. They were more than sufficient to run over Tao, followed by a larger attack that I made against Jinga. This was a bigger planet with more factories present and I spent several turns wearing down its population with my marines. Then on the final turn that I was about to capture Jinga, this took place:
The Darloks showed up at the last second and glassed the planet out of existence, what the heck! 
I wasn't able to chase them away due to having a Non Aggression Pact with the shapeshifters, who had just ruined the previous half a dozen turns of preparation and careful invasion. Thus I gained no techs from the lizards, there were no factories to capture, and I'd have to build this world back up from scratch again which would take far longer. This prompted me to make a snap decision: that's it, everyone dies in this galaxy. I was already pledged to wiping out the Sakkra and the Bulrathi, and with the Darloks now getting added to the list as well, I might as well wipe them all out. I had never played out a full Extermination ending on Livestream before so there was some novelty to the concept as well. As for Jinga, I refounded the planet which allowed us to name it "Darlok Ender" though the need to start its development from zero definitely slowed my war progress by a good bit. Blasted shapeshifters!
Even with that annoyance, the war against the Sakkra continued to go well. One of the other AI races fighting against the lizards had destroyed their planet to the south of Darlok Ender which allowed me to refound it with the name of Lucky and built it up as well. Once the two of them were in good shape with maxed factories and a few missile bases, I struck out for the Sakkra homeworld at Sssla which was captured with 298 factories intact - only to deliver over a single outdated technology! What the heck?! As best we could tell, this was simply a poor dice roll on the capture result; each factory present has 2% odds for a tech discovery in Master of Orion, with a maximum of six techs that can be looted. Getting only a single tech from 298 factories was a very unlucky (roughly 1% odds) result but it has happened to me before, and I've certainly had the opposite as well where I took four or five techs off a planet with only 50 factories present. It was annoying that I wasn't able to get more out of this capture but another AI homeworld with a base size of 100 was probably reward enough.
Soon enough the entire Sakkra core was under Human control to give me a second hub area over in the west. The lizards still clung to life with a rogue planet in the extreme south although I fell out of contact with them at this point. They technically remained at war with me and continued trying to stir up trouble in diplomatic circles, though by now I was in a strong enough position that it wasn't a big deal. The other AI powers were still on good terms with me since I had dialed them all into conflict with the Sakkra, my bombing of lizard planets being received with international approval from the Bulrathi and Darloks and Klackons. The only thing that I had to be concerned about was the presence of Omega-V bombs in the hands of the Darloks; I was avoiding any conflict with them since I didn't want to face that weapon. My own missile bases received a major upgrade at this point in the form of Scatter Pack VII missiles which looked poised to shred anything that the AI empires could throw at me. I also had Planetary Shield XV in my tech tree, and as soon as I had the shields finished and the new scatter pack missiles in hand, I would be ready to start my next offensive push.
This was another one of those standard Autorepair Huge designs that have won me innumerable games and looked poised to do the same here. Although I still hadn't been able to upgrade beyond Mass Drivers for my core gun tech, I was able to upgrade every other aspect of this ship as compared with my previous design. I had better shielding, upgraded armor to Zortrium, upgraded engines to warp 5, and most importantly packed on 20 Omega-V bombs for dealing with planetary defenses. I might have been able to shoot my way past the weak Sakkra shielding with Mass Drivers alone but that was unlikely to work against anyone else. I even threw in the Energy Pulsar special since it didn't require much space, then failed to get much use out of it since everyone else was fielding Large and Huge designs. Still, this new Omega warship had everything that I needed to start conquering more planets and it would be the mainstay of my fleet for a long time.
In a nonvariant game I also could have simply won here: the Klackons had grown large enough to be my opponent in the Council and I could have outright won the 2500 vote with a Diplomatic victory. The Humans are the best race in the game for landing these easy Council wins and it didn't take much effort on my part since all of the other powers were engaged in a bunch of wars against one another. I had to decline since I was playing for an Extermination ending, though I did go ahead and trade for Soil Enrichment from the Klackons since I lacked both it and Advanced Soil Enrichment in my tech tree. I had to give them something good for it but it was worthwhile since I already had Atmospheric Terraforming and every planet was eligible for Soil Enrichment. I also had Improved Robotics V about to pop and my economy was simply accelerating past everyone else by now. That was on top of more than 2000 BC in trade income which still continued to pour in thanks to the other major races all loving me - it's good to be the Humans when you can talk to people!
I was pondering over who to attack next when the Klackons made that a moot issue by declaring war out of the blue. They were not Erratic in this game, simply a race making a very poor decision. The Klackons had much better weapons tech on their bases since they were fielding Stingers, however they also had forgotten to bring a planetary shield and only had 5 total points of protection. This made their worlds sitting ducks for the Omega-V bombs on my newest design; it was hilarious to watch an Omega stack roll up to one of their planets and annihilate 30 missile bases in a single bombing run. In the screenshot above, I had already overrun the defenses at Drakka and was slowly feeding my population into the meat grinder of a planetary invasion, a painful process with the bugs having a big edge in ground technology. I would later make some trades to pick up Armored Exoskeleton and Personal Absorption Shield techs to stem the bleeding a bit. (I already had Battle Suits and Personal Deflector Shield or else this would have been even worse!)
On the defensive side, the Klackons certainly did their best to attack my planets with their main fleet. To put it bluntly, their efforts failed: their main fleet hit at the pictured Sssla where close to 60 bases packing Scatter Pack VII missles ripped them to pieces. Nor were these particularly close battles either, with a single volley of scatter packs wiping out entire enemy stacks at once. It's pretty amusing to watch this on the Livestream clips where the missiles would hit and my reaction was "uh, OK" followed by laughter since this was going better than I'd been expecting. In any case, I took Drakka at a brutal cost in marine lives and planned to continue on to Denubius further south, only to receive this message:
The next Klackon planet wasn't in range! 
Yes, somehow I still only had Range 5 tech and this planet was 6 parsecs away. There hadn't been a single range tech in my Propulsion tree after Range 5; I might not have researched them anyway since range techs have a low priority but I didn't even have the option. Then I also somehow managed to avoid capturing any range techs as well in my various successful invasions to leave me at this temporary impasse. I literally lacked the range to reach any of the Klackon worlds to the south! I would eventually get Range 7 tech from someone else in a trade but this lack of range actually did stop me from pushing further ahead at the moment.
Well, if I couldn't attack more Klackon worlds for the moment, it was time to hit someone else. Relations had been cooling with the Bulrathi for some time and they had lots of planets located right along my borders along with some juicy Construction techs to loot. I was planning to declare war against them only for the bears to start the fighting themselves instead with a lunge at one of my backline planets. That was easily shot down and then it was my turn to begin pushing south into Bulrathi territory. I had Star Gates built at all of my high production worlds which allowed my main fleet to move instantly back from the Klackon front. First up was a successful invasion of the lightly-defended world Reticuli which had Improved Industrial 3 tech as a reward. That's the second best Improved Industrial tech in the game and it would make standing up new factories much, much faster everywhere. The Bulrathi didn't have anything better than Scatter Pack V missiles on their bases which made it easy to attack them along with more Omega V bombs to punch through their planetary shields (which they at least did have). The ground invasions were a lot tougher though:
The Bulrathi weren't as advanced as the Klackons in terms of ground combat, however the fighting was another bloodbath anyway by virtue of them being giant space bears with +20 to all of their ground rolls. It's never fun wrestling planets away from the bears but I had the production and population available to do it, might as well make the effort and clean out their tech tree in the process. Over the next two dozen turns, I systematically captured all of the Bulrathi border worlds and began pushing deep into their core since they lacked anything that could have stopped me. I was suffering somewhere between 2:1 and 3:1 casualties in the ground fighting, with things slowly getting better as my technology improved. We had all of the same ground weapons except that I had Personal Absorption Shield to their Personal Deflector Shield, which worked out to them having a +15 total advantage thanks to their defender advantage and their innate Bulrathi abilities. By the time that I captured Ursa, I had picked clean the entire Bulrathi tech tree and there was nothing further to loot. This crippled them as a viable galactic power though my offensive still continued as I rolled onwards to smaller bear planets in the southeast corner.
All of those captured Bulrathi techs along with some recent discoveries of my own allowed me to create a new ship design to replace the aging Omega. This newer ship was another Autorepair Huge that largely looked the same aside from two big upgrades: I replaced the unnecessary Energy Pulsar with the High Energy Focus and dropped the venerable Mass Drivers for the Gauss Autocannon. The Gauss is one of the best weapons in the whole game, firing four times at 7-10 damage per shot and halving enemy shields in the process. When paired with the High Energy Focus, I could chase down rival ships before they were even able to retreat from the battlefield. While my older Omega designs continued the process of grinding down Bulrathi worlds in the southeast, I gathered together the newer Gausses in preparation for a new offensive against the Klackons in the west. They had continued their hostility while the Darloks remained on good terms for the moment; my plan was to sweep up the two sides of the map and then crush the shapeshifters from every angle once I had finished dealing with the bears and the bugs. I had already reached the 3/8 GNN warning message at 18 planets and the Human empire was continuing to advance.
The collapse of the Bulrathi empire proceeded at a steady pace, with a new planet falling every three or four turns only to be flipped around into a Human fortress before proceeding on to the next target. I was using my old stack of Beamer designs for static defense over the captured worlds, since they had plenty of beam weapons but lacked any bombs, which freed up the Omega stack to keep hitting new Bulrathi planets. I chased down the bears into the southeast corner of the galaxy and continued seizing their worlds via ground invasions even though there were no longer any new techs to be captured. I had reached a point where I wasn't losing too badly to the bears in ground combat and I preferred to capture the existing factories over fiddling around with colony ships and having to start over again from scratch. I was researching Advancd Cloning tech and when that eventually arrived a bit later, it became incredibly cheap to regrow the population that I sent off for invasions. The bears were soon left with only a single planet remaining over in the southwest corner of the map, a haven of sorts where the Mrrshans and Sakkra were also lingering in the remnants of their territory.
The main action had shifted over to the western side of the galaxy, however, where my new Gauss design was leading the charge through Klackon territory. The cursor in the screenshot above was pointing to Kholdan which had become my latest offensive focus despite getting hit with the mineral depletion event earlier to become a Poor world. Invading the bugs was tough because they still had a lot of advanced ground tech, though by now I had captured enough prizes to knock their advantage down to roughly +10 as opposed to the +30 they'd been enjoying earlier. I wore down the huge poplation at Kholdan with some truly massive population transfers from my nearby planets... only to discover a bunch of outdated junk techs, argh! Fortunately my luck was much better at Firma, the next planet to the southeast, which yielded up two incredible Construction techs in Industrial Waste Elimination and Improved Industrial 2. This combination removed all waste entirely from my factories and allowed me to construct them at the cheapest possible rate in the game. Along with an endless amount of Reserve spending to fling around, I could now stand up captured planets in no time at all.
I was one vote shy of being able to vote myself the winner in the 2550 Council election, with 34/52 votes for 65% of the total. I pulled another 3 votes from the Sakkra and Mrrshans and therefore could have cashed out with a Domination victory by Realms Beyond nomenclature, only to abstain so that I could keep pushing onwards for an Extermination ending. The cats lost their mind and declared war a few turns later so I snagged their one planet in the extreme northwest without the larger offensive missing a beat. The heart of my fleet was the new Gauss design pictured above, a ship that absolutely steamrolled everything that the Klackons tried to throw at me. They were using a lot of Medium ships with older weapons, and the faster movement plus extreme range on the Gauss design simply shredded them in every combat. I shot down literally hundreds of the Klackon Large design under attack in the picture above, with a stack of 10 Gausses able to take out close to a dozen of them per volley. My latest design was so powerful that I would deliberately send less than the full stack to attack new planets, as otherwise the full Omega-V Bomb payload would simply destroy the whole colony on the tactical combat screen.
One planet after another continued to fall as I kept advancing into the southwest reaches of the galaxy. I finally managed to capture Tritanium Armor from about the sixth Klackon planet and achieve parity in ground combat. Research had also completed in several other fields: Advanced Cloning (opening the path to Complete Terraforming at Planetology tech level 50), the Advanced Damage Control special, and warp 7 engines for faster movement speed. These new toys allowed me to design a final Huge ship with the intention of polishing off the game:
The Vindicator design had 11 points of shielding and the Advanced Damage Control special; this is the big brother of the Auto Repair special which heals 30% of max HP every round. With that much shielding and 540 HP regenerated every round, there was virtually nothing that the other empires could do to damage this ship. The one flaw in the design is that I should have dropped a handful of the guns for the ECM VII tech that I had recently discovered, which would have taken missile defense up to 10 and made the ship almost unhittable against missiles. That probably would have been better than the Advanced Damage Control, to be honest, which was taking up a lot of space and was likely unnecessary overkill. The older Auto Repair would have been nearly as good at a fraction of the space requirement.
In any case, there was little that the AI empires could do as these new ships began rolling off the assembly lines only to be routed through Star Gates to the front lines. I kept munching and munching down the sides of the map, still capturing instead of razing each planet, until reaching the point where the Sakkra and Bulrathi and Mrrshans all had only a single planet remaining. That's when I hardened my heart and began implementing my dark plans for revenge. First the Sakkra were eliminated, followed by the Bulrathi, and then the Mrrshans and Klackons. This left only the Darloks remaining who I had now encircled on every side of the galactic map. I had been deliberately avoiding them and managed to avoid a declaration of war from the shapeshifters until I started genociding the other races and they saw the writing on the wall. It was too late for them at this point though:
Human planets surrounded Darlok territory from all directions and I had Star Gates positioned to move my fleet anywhere that I wanted. With warp 7 technology, every planet within 12 parsecs could send off population and invade Darlok worlds within two turns. Note the awesome power of Advanced Cloning in the screenshot above: Sssla could send off 42m population and regrow it instantly with barely a third of its total spending for the turn. All of this made it trivial to attack the unfortunate Darloks as I hammered them from multiple directions at once. They did have some new techs that I lacked to make things a bit trickier, notably Zeon missles (best in the game) which could punch through the shielding on the Vindicator design thanks to dealing 30 damage per shot, and then the Hand Phasor ground tech to give them a slight advantage in the invasion combats. I planned to loot the Hand Phasor tech and then start bombing out the remaining Darlok planets, only to miss that particular tech again and again. I would end up capturing most of the Darlok core until I finally discovered Hand Phasor on something like the fifth succession invasion, sheesh!
We were late enough in the game that I actually discovered Complete Terraforming for only about the fifth time ever. That one adds 120 population to every planet and I could have had some utterly insane worlds when combining that together with the Improved Robotics VI tech that had also recently popped, though I skipped over doing the terraforming or building the factories since this game was about to end. While I was bombing out the last few shapeshifter planets, I decided to gather my Vindicator stack together and use it to defeat the Guardian since Orion was conveniently nearby. I attacked with about 15 of the Vindicators and, uhhh, the Guardian beat them. Whoops. 
Master of Orion's Guardian is no joke and I didn't have quite enough damage to get through its own Advanced Damage Control healing. Obviously I could have come back with a bigger stack to get the job done (and I think about 25 Vindicators would have been enough to land the kill) but instead I ended this game with a little bit of egg on my face.
The final map had nothing but Human flags flying everywhere; I really did not have to capture this many worlds but I can't stop myself from being a perfectionist. At least it looked cool in the screenshot. One more bombing run from my remaining Vindicators and it was all over:
There's a different ending message for the Extermination finish and the GNN robot brands you a ruthless tyrant afterwards to ensure that the player feels bad about themselves for wiping everyone else out. I almost never play things out to an Extermination ending because there's little point in taking the extra time to do so; if you have enough population to vote yourself the winner in the Council, the game is clearly over. This was a bit of a special case because we were trying to get revenge on the Sakkra and Bulrathi for the first two attempts at this variant, and then I figured that I might as well showcase the Extermination ending on Livestream for the first time. The final Livestreaming session was little more than mopup work though and I definitely could have won much earlier.
Overall, this third game was a great contrast to the first two played under the Taciturn variant. This was objectively a weaker starting position than the previous game and it was looking pretty dicey even with all of those large planets because I was stuck in such a small corner of the map. However, in practice it played out much easier than either of the first two games thanks to the power of diplomacy. Having access to trade route income was a massive boost during the earlier stages of the game, at times making up close to a third of all income, and I never felt much in the way of military pressure thanks to everyone loving my Humans. I was able to plug the gaps in my tech tree with a series of trades (especially for Planetary Shield V) and then pick and choose the right moment for aggression. When I did move against the Sakkra, I smoothly lined up everyone else against the lizards to ensure that there was no risk of losing a Council vote or getting dogpiled from the other races. All in all, it felt as though I'd been playing the previous games with one hand tied behind my back and then this third game left me completely unencumbered. Like I said, it was a great contrast to showcase the strength of diplomacy.
I certainly did not plan to play three games of Master of Orion in succession when I started this venture and it turned into quite a journey. I'm glad that I was writing up each part as I went along as otherwise I doubt I would have had the time or willpower to put these lengthy reports together. Thanks to all of you who stuck around for the full thing!
