Imperium Ten: Return to Glory


Here was the new galaxy map in the wake of the Psilon defeat:

Even with the loss of Crius, I was out to 20 planets and controlled nearly half the galaxy. The center of the map and the southeast corner are all flying the green flag of the lizards. In the above picture, the cursor is pointing to Orion (thus the lack of a colony!) There are also three more stars (two reds and a white) where my scouts are parked, holding in the vacuum of space where no planets were to be found. Everything else has been snapped up by one of the races.

The Darloks and Humans both declared war immediately on the following turn (2428). Guess they didn't like my extermination of the Psilons very much! I would pretty much be in Always War for the rest of the game, given my gigantic runaway size. That's the one feature of this game that can create real danger: get too big, and the races will start declaring war and voting against you in the Council. Thus, even though there's no corruption or maintenance costs in MOO, there are still pitfalls in place to reign in runaway empires. This works for the AIs too, not just the player (something that can't be said for Civ4, where the AIs pay pennies on the dollar in maintenance costs!)

A few turns later, Sakkra scientists broke through on a major tech:

Robotics IV discovered, yay! This would kick my economy into high gear, doubly so since Robotics III was missing from the tree in this game. Every planet started cranking the factories, which would take a while (~10 turns) to remax. Even better, the next option was also useful: Advanced Space Scanner. Still using the default scanner at this point, ouch! I might not have lost Crius if I had had earlier warning on the attack. And on the very next turn, I steal Robotics III from the Klackons. How's that for irony? I also discovered Repulsor Beam, and took Planetary Shield X as the next option (over Personal Absorbtion Shield). More shielding may or may not be necessary, but better not to take any chances.

On the 2433 turn I got the tech I was after: Automated Repair Special, lifted from the bugs. That would go into the Huge design I was working on. Poor bugs, they had been my one friend, and I was really being mean to them. It wouldn't stop here either, since I wanted their Improved Space Scanner too! I would get that tech shortly thereafter, in 2438. That caused the bugs to declare war - such is life. In Master of Orion, might makes right, and by now I was far more powerful than anyone else.

With a mixture of recent tech discoveries and espionage thefts, I now had enough pieces to put together some real warships. I drew up plans for my standard Autorepair Huge gunship, packing 30 Fusion Beams and 10 Fusion Bombs. Because I still only had warp 3 engines, I had to pack on the Inertial Stabilizer as well to achieve combat speed 3, as desired. Together with the swarms of small Fusion Bombers I had drawn up earlier, I could now start prosecuting the war against my arch-enemy: the Humans. Once my core worlds remaxed with double the factories, post-Robotics IV, the military buildup was on in earnest.

Crius made a good first aquisition, important for both symbolic and strategic purposes. The Human defense there was pathetic. No missile bases?! (Wow, I really am not used to Average difficulty.) Even better, one of the tech prizes looted was Soil Enrichment. Sweet! That meant a lot of micromanagement on each planet, growing to new size and remaxing factories, but worth the investment.

The next planet in line was the Human homeworld:

Despite an impressive-looking fleet, I managed to kill off all of the Human ships with the loss of about 25 bombers. And yeah, I was attacking with only a single Fusion gunship. Shows what I thought of that Human fleet. Most of the time the AI ships simply ran away from my navy, not even bothering to engage in a futile combat.

Now the issue was sending transports to capture Sol. No, I wasn't going to bomb it into oblivion. The Humans still had some techs to loot, plus I wanted to flip it around into a stronghold of mine, not create a spud world that had to be rebuilt from scratch. Well, transports moving at warp 2 are a heck of a lot faster than those at warp 1 - but still not all that fast. It took six turns to get them all there and take the planet in a two-part invasion, with Sol finally falling in 2450. (The first turn 150 attackers landed and died, second turn 60 attackers took out the remaining 25 defenders. I had no edge in gropo combat.) I picked up five different junk techs, which would help with miniaturization, if nothing else.

In the Galactic Council for 2450, everyone voted against me; I had 21 votes out of 37 (57%). The next election should seal my victory.

Two key techs quickly followed the election. First, Impulse Drives (warp 5) finally came in! Now I could resign my Huge gunship with additional speed, and even more importantly, double my transport speed once again! Warp 4 invasions would be vastly, vastly easier to conduct. I picked Star Gates as the next option, not really expecting I would ever use them. The second tech was Advanced Soil Enrichment, coming in two turns later. This stacked even more population and factories on every world; if the game wasn't already over, it was now. My Huge gunships were completely invulnerable to the feeble weaponry of the AI, and transports were flying around everywhere conducting invasions. When planets remaxed at the new totals in 2455, it was time to go back on the offensive once more.

The bar graphs more or less tell the story. And it's only going to get worse for the AIs from here on out.

Because the AI navies were completely incapable of hurting my fleet, I could strike anywhere and everywhere with impunity. So that's what I did: first sending ships to take out the defenses and scout each world, then calling in the transports. And I do mean transports! I had close to a dozen planets sending off a quarter of their population (the max that can be regrown in one turn) to some location on the map, over and over again, every turn. The galactic map screen was nothing but a swarm of green transports flying around. I used my original core to grind down the Human worlds, while the old southern cluster initiated the task of invading the Klackon holdings. Here's the process halfway complete, in 2460:

I had taken my first Klackon planet (Lyae) a couple turns earlier, and the second one has just fallen. The only tech prize worth mentioning from the bugs was Zortrium Armor, not bad. I'm kind of glossing over the details of invading and conquering each planet, but the Human core had been thoroughly eviscerated by this point, and the Klackons were rapidly moving towards the same fate. There's not much to say. When you have a dominant navy and tech superiority, you can swarm the AIs in rapid fashion. As Sirian once said, the game just... ends.

Here's humanity's final stand, in the extreme northwest corner at Kailis. I've got about 150 marines on five transports, invading a world with some 50 population. (Playing on Impossible gets you in the habit of doing overkill invasions!) Sol didn't fall until 2450, and I discovered warp 5 engines in 2451. This picture is from 2462, and the Humans will be gone on the next turn. Barely a dozen turns to wipe out the galaxy's most powerful race. There's virtually no mopup in MOO once you've established superiority.

2363 saw the Humans disappear, the Darloks and Klackons down to 2 planets remaining, both with invasions heading to their homeworlds. The Bulrathi had 5 planets left, but I decided I would take them out with orbital bombardment everywhere except Yarrow, the planet that had originally been mine. I had enough range to reach each of their worlds, and ground combat with the bears is just too much of a pain. Their first planet went poof in 2465:

Nazin and Kholdan were captured simultaneously on opposite sides of the galaxy on the same turn. Advanced Space Scanner and Armored Exoskeleton finally popped the next turn. A little late on both of them, could have used that gropo boost earlier. Darloks and Klackons eliminated in 2466. As GNN put it: "The Darlok empire has been completely destroyed by the Sakkra. Also in the news... The Klackon empire has been completely destroyed by the Sakkra." Poor bugs! Don't even make the front page of the news!

I thought that I would finish the game off in 2467, but nope, turned out I didn't have enough bombing power to completely destroy one of the Bulrathi planets. So here was the final map from that same date:

And so the game came to an end in 2468, with an Extermination victory. RIP other races. I ended up with 39 of the 48 planets (wow), which is even more impressive when you consider the four dead stars and Orion (only 43 possible normal planets, all of which were Bulrathi ones I bombed out). Among my most dominant performances in a long time, although of course the difficulty level was lower than usual. I don't often play to Extermination wins, preferring normally to take the first one that comes up. Well in this game, that meant going for the galactic genocide, because I didn't want to sit and wait for 2475 to roll around!

The final ship list. Not all that impressive, huh? It's all about having the right weapons in the right place at the right time. The Bombers alone were enough to eliminate the Psilons, bombing out the missile bases at Mentar and then allowing the transport marines to do the rest. (I did have about 50 Small laser ships helping out a bit. Not exactly the most fearsome combo there!) Then nothing more than two versions of my Fusion gunship, which had enough shielding and healing (from Autorepair) to negate all damage from the AIs. Chalk up another victory for the Fusion Beam, my favorite gun in the game! Many players like to sit around on their fannies and wait for all of the endgame tech toys. Me, I'll take the Fusion Beam and Megabolt Cannon (my second-favorite gun) over those Mauler Devices and Black Hole Generators any day.

As the first RB Orion Imperium, this should only be a first taste of many more things to come. I hope everyone who played had a good time, and that we'll see more of you in the future. Thanks for reading.