Stellaris Diary Part 3: Attack on the Empire

When I last stopped, things were going well for my Space Penguins. I was a member of a strong alliance that had just soundly curb-stomped a powerful neighbour, I was starting to catch up with my research and tech levels, and I was finally in a position to deal with my long time arsey rivals to the north. All was indeed good in the hood.

After the recent war with the large southern empire I took a few years to further develop the infrastructure on my colonies – upgrading buildings where possible and replacing a few that were no longer necessary. I also invested some time and money into my fleet, boosting its numbers and upgrading my ships with the newest in space death guns. It wasn’t long before I felt comfortable enough to declare war and spread a little Penguin justice to those floating gas bags. That was until I hit a slight speed bump.

My allies had always been a little softer than me. They weren’t the biggest fans of the unilateral death and enslavement that came so naturally to my Penguins. This had already been evident when I’d been forced to drop my resettlement and slavery policies in order to improve relations. Now they had a problem with the way my Penguins fought their wars. Essentially, I couldn’t declare wars of conquest, only wars of liberation. Conquest would turn over ownership of any enemy planets to the control of my empire while liberation establishes a new empire on these planets that is more in line with my own. Gone were my dreams of Arse annihilation. On the bright side, at least any empire that replaced them wouldn’t be as uppity.

I declared war and, despite their decades of big talk, they were defeated without any real resistance. Every planet along our border was liberated and replaced with the worryingly snobbish sounding “Ul-Tur Principality” and the original Arse empire was forced into a small corner of territory at the very edge of the galaxy. Complete annihilation would have made me happier but this would have to do for now.

This trend of interstellar warfare continued when my alliance declared war on the large southern empire again. Our first war may have weakened them but they still held an impressive amount of territory and it wouldn’t be long before they became a serious threat again. This war would hopefully shrink their territory and power by enough that their other neighbours would follow suit, declare war, and pile in for a piece of the pie.

A number of battles were fought over one border system that had been liberated in the last war. An almost-endless stream of ships flowed into the system to fire their various pew-pew sounding guns. Eventually we managed to break through and went straight for their capital, only stopping occasionally to occupy a planet or destroy a space station. Along the way I made an interesting discovery – it turned out that this empire included a familiar planet and species.

Despite discovering that humanity was alive and well in the future, aside from being ruled by an evil space empire, the war continued without much drama and it wasn’t long before the southern empire had surrendered and given up large amounts of territory, including their home world. Interestingly, they chose to move their capital to Earth, although their days looked numbered when an absolutely huge empire to their west declared war. It looked like humanity’s future had grown a little darker.

Meanwhile, in Penguinland, I had a growing alien population that was a little upset at my policy to only allow Penguins in leadership positions. Typically, these aliens were on my least-developed planets and were already more likely to be unhappy without a racist policy rubbing them up the wrong way. My relationship with my allies was also taking a hit from our differing war policies and it didn’t seem unlikely that they may vote me out of the alliance. I had no choice but to change all my policies to make both my alien populations and allies happier. Yet again I was forced to give up some Penguin values in order to appease the other species of the galaxy. It didn’t seem long before there would be nothing left of the slow learning, slaving, warlike, evangelising Penguins of the good old days.

Despite my successes in warfare, I was still trailing far behind in research. That was until a dangerous opportunity presented itself with the option to research sentient AI. This sentient AI would give me a 10% boost to my research rate that I sorely needed.Unfortunately, it would also start me down a path that could eventually end in a robot uprising. In the end I decided that the boost I’d get to my research was worth the risk of robots murdering my penguins and all other squishy life in the galaxy. A fallen empire to the north of the galaxy was not particularly happy that I’d possibly doomed them to a terminatoresque apocalypse and sent me a message telling me to stop being naughty, or else. Naturally, I told them to get stuffed. Somehow that didn’t make them any happier.

Despite their grumblings, they didn’t immediately declare war on me and I decided to just ignore them for the time being. I spent the next few years turning the friendly Arse empire to my north into my vassal and eventually I integrated them into my empire, taking control of their territory. Typically an independence faction began to gain influence in my formal vassal. Why could it never be easy when these gas bags were involved? Luckily, after developing the infrastructure on their planet and bringing in an army of Jedi Penguins as a garrison just in case, the independence faction disappeared and was replaced by those loyal to the Space Penguin cause.

Unfortunately there were still two hostile Arse empires to my north and they had both become increasingly uppity. Alongside my allies, I simultaneously declared war on both of these remaining empires and, after a brief series of battles and invasions, they surrendered. The original empire that had pressed up against my borders and spammed me with threats for so long now no longer existed. It had been fragmented into smaller friendly empires that posed absolutely no threat and could hopefully eventually be vassalised and integrated into my Penguin Empire. Success!

It was all going swimmingly. My alliance had won every war it had fought, I was no longer boxed-in and my research rate was finally not terrible. Then the Unbidden turned up.




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One Comment

  1. Ste Ste says:

    Bloody cliffhanger!

    Loving this, keep it up.

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