Tale

And the Unbidden are gone. The game seems to have glitched, but at least it still ended. I jumped into their system with the full might of the alliance at my back. It was a tough fight and... we were losing. I'll admit that. It seemed like a lost cause. With my fleet down to a quarter of its starting strength, I retreated all of my units out of the system. And... for some reason, the enemy promptly self-destructed. I don't know how, I don't know why. But all of the Unbidden in the system blew up shortly after my retreat. Were my ships simply in the way of my allies shooting at them? Did I overestimate the enemy fleet when I retreated? Do they have some sort of siphon weapon that caused them to use my ships to replenish their own strength, so when my ships left, they were left sucking air? Or did the game simply glitch? I'm betting that last one. Because I regrouped my fleet quickly and re-entered the system with allies again. The... dimensional portal claimed to be unattackable. There were no anchors. Two more Unbidden fleets spawned, we killed them, and the game claimed the Unbidden were defeated. But the portal remained. Years later, the portal stayed inactive, but it remained. Like the start of some fantasy story where the ancient evil hadn't been heard from in a generation. The rest of the game did not seem to get the message. The last surviving Fallen Empire, the only Fallen Empire I deemed worthy of survival decided to awaken to fight the Unbidden menance that was already destroyed. And then they asked me to be their vassal before promptly realizing I could crush them in my sleep at this point. They didn't press the issue. So that's Awakened Empire number 3 in one game. This was followed by Machine Uprising numbers 4 and 5 in short order. Each crushed as swiftly as all that came before it. Geeze. At this point I savescummed to try and get The End, but I don't really want to wait 50 years for it to happen, with all but the island of a scared Awakened Empire under the banner of my Alliance. Heck, the War In Heaven alliance mechanic is still in effect. The glory of my wonderful star empire is so incredible, that my allies regularly see uprisings of rebels that want to join me. And the second they do, I get an automatic event popup about joining the alliance, complete with War In Heaven event graphic....

Geeze, that last update felt like a whole other war. We won that war against the Spiritualists, them giving back most of what they took in the first war. So I took my Alliance to finally finish off the Materialists. Apparently "total victory" means an empire-wide suicide and not just them giving me all their planets like I thought. Lesson learned, I really wanted those Awakened Empire buildings. So when the Spiritualists came knocking again in a few years, I did not make the same mistake. It seems to me that Decadence has passed this Empire over, they still have their fleet. But this time my Alliance had drives capable of keeping up with me, and I have two Shroud-class Avatars. The Spiritualists haven't been Total Victoried out of the game, but they're down to four measly planets and I'm sitting pretty on their two core worlds, replete with fantastic factories and power planets. Lesson also learned, Spiritualists don't do research, just minerals, energy, and food. No wonder they could field a fleet that large. Next time the war starts, the Spiritualist will be no stronger than a regular empire. And I'll be next door.

So a War in Heaven started. I paniced because I fully expected all my vassals to abandon me, all my enemies to split amongst the Awakened Empires, and me to be left with 6 planets. Instead, the whole galaxy rallied to my banner. We lost the initial engagements. The Awakened Spiritualists had a fleet of 300k. But at least at the time, they were the only one at war with us. Even the Awakened Materialists could best create a fleet of 150k at the time. I eventually gave the Spiritualists some planets, some from a vassal, some from myself, to stall for time. Then the Materialists declared war on us and... it did not go well for him. He lost too much to the Spiritualists, so my fleet was able to crush him. We ended that war pretty quickly with him surrendering planets to various members of the alliance and liberating the only vassal he had. Now the entire galaxy is on team ME. I took this period of peace as a good opportunity to destroy the Fallen Xenophobe Empire. They're encroaching close to my vassals. My Alliance rejected the idea of me taking all their worlds for myself, but seemed happy to accept me giving their worlds to a vassal I'm in the process of integrating. Idiots. Soon it will be mine. But the war with the Spiritualists is now back on. Barely had I time to return and repair before they declared war again. Last night I tried taking back lost territory only to find out the Spiritualists have miraculously maintained their 300k+ fleet. And here I am still suffering with too poor income to build up my fleet any further. I literally only have less than 10k minerals. But a 100k fleet. If I can rally the Alliance I bet we can take them, but they split to their own territory after the last war. Just need to get them back to me.

I'll just start this war to see what their fleet is like, then go to bed in 5 minutes... An hour later, I have a new vassal. It's fun kiting around superior forces until I can corner them between me and the vassals that have come to assist me. I think I'll make my next conquest a tributary, I need more income. Concerns: I'm not far from both the Isolationists and the Observers. If either awakens, they'll run right into my vassals and that could be trouble for me. But luckily I don't look very powerful since I only have 4 planets. If the Isolationist awakens, it'll run into my Tributary. It means I won't have to go to war to help, but it would also cripple my economy. More reason to start grabbing others for Tribute.

Knowing you, you'd probably try it very quickly indeed.

The movie opens with fighters and bombers taking out a capital ship with no cover from friendly capital ships. It's all very strange.

Weaponized FTL seems like such an understood issue in both sci-fi and space opera that I think most people assume it to be impossible nowadays simply to avoid the consequences of everyone having easy access to stealth weapons of mass destruction. I can't believe they opened that can of worms. Like, the FTL asteroid idea. You launch it from a lightyear out or more and the first sign the target has that they're under attack will be when it hits them. TFA showed how accurate their FTL can be when you need it to be, so even accuracy isn't an issue anymore. No pulling into the system and charging up the weapon. No grand fleet battles. Just someone being obliterated without warning and some other people a distance away wondering what that bright light was in the sky. This is why either a defense against FTL weaponry (shields stop them outright) or infeasibility of FTL weaponry (FTL ships have no mass, therefore only hurt themselves in a collision or FTL ships travel through an alternate dimension and don't actually go that fast, but can be pulled back into ours) are so important.

I watched Pirates of the Carribean 5. Actually not terrible. It was a decent addition to the original trilogy as a fan. Better than 4 at least, which was pointless.

My AI game with democratic geckos is getting boring. I was expecting a crisis to show up, but it never did. The most excitement going on is it seems like half the galaxy are federation builders now, building their own federations. It's starting to create a very awkward balkanization where the two major federations go to war, liberate some planets from each other, creating federation builders. Then those federation builders team up and create their own federation... If federations could be merged, I imagine they would have done that. But since they can't, it's wars of pointless liberation all the way down. In the game I'm actually playing, I had a hard fight against my nearest neighbor to make them a vassal. And only won through savescumming and lucky timing. My main problem is I made my race slow breeders. Everyone else is at four or five planets and I've not even filled up my starter. Anyway, the victory clench came when I was about to start taking out the enemy's warp gates to prevent pursuit, only for them to slip in and attack my vassal. Between me, my vassal, and the local station, we finally beat them, gaining a whopping 37% warscore, putting us just shy of a victory for my demand. Then four days later weariness incremented and they surrendered. Now I have two strong vassals and more fleet cap than I can reasonably build ships right now.

In my AI only game, my democratic geckos and their alliance beat off the Awakened Empire! YAY. But the AE still managed to get the Rogue Servitors I was rooting for. Took some of his planets and turned him into a sattelite. That's bad. I'm still waiting for that galaxy wide war to happen. But we're about 50 years short of a crisis appearing so that may happen first. I also started my own Feudal Society game. Spawned right next to a nuclear age level primitive! So living the dream already. Wanted to try a 1-planet strat with it, but after finding a planet much nicer than my crappy homeworld also next door, that's been changed to 2-planet. I might even go 3 to match my core systems cap!

I finished Muv-Luv Alternative. Quite a ride through the series, even though it was horribly boring at parts. I'm dying for Altered Fable's eventual release so I can expand on that epilogue. I've officially started Utawarerumono: Mask of Truth. The sequel to my second favorite game of 2017. And I'm doing an AI only game in Stellaris on the side because why not. I'm rooting for the democratic geckos. They have the strongest fleet of the default empires, are the only outsiders to the Travesty of Teal (5 teal empires in the game, 4 of whom decided to create 2 federations. The older federation invited my geckos.) But they've just been wardecced by the materialist Awakened Empire. They don't have the fleet power to compete, but I've seen plenty of otherwise hopeless wars fail due to an attacker that refuses to get off his butt.

I solved the first one after the intro basically by accident.

I'm all over the place. Setting Stellaris and Endless Space 2 aside, I started up The Sexy Brutale last night. It's pretty excellent so far.

I probably like it more than any prequel.

I don't think I like Endless Space 2. Its politics are kind of lame. All the AI seems to care about is border friction and score. Like, why are they attacking me when my fleet crushed them in the last three wars? Oh right, because I have a low score and we have border friction. I'm also in an alliance, but literally anyone in the alliance can declare war at any time and I have no idea who did it. And it drags us all in. We almost beat the game, crushed the last opposition to us, we're sieging the last planet, when that planetbusting-for-no-reason Horatio accepted a truce. I declared war the next round. Nothing stopped me. And we won. There's no nuance. No memory. Nobody hates you for your race or past actions. If you spend the entire beginning kidnapping their population for food, so long as you get enough score, they'll gladly join an alliance with you later on. And once you have an alliance, they'll still constantly threaten you over border friction, but they'll never do anything about it. There's no defense treaties, no alliance voting, just lots of complaining that I should come and help when I'm busy fighting a war on another front you %#@##@^#^$#$&$#!#@$*&^%. The main draw I got the game for was the stories. But... they're pretty lame too. I played the Vodyani. Really cool flavor, a spacebound race of holy pirates. They go around kidnapping people for food. The main character of the metaplot is the leader of the Vodyani's brother! She hates him, calls him the heretic! And the religious option in the metaplot is, of course, to help him? wat I could not tell what was going on. At one point you're practically reforming the Vodyani government to not be religious anymore, then you're blowing up planets out of spite against the Endless? And it ends with you taking over the academy? And no word about what'll be done to the brother, just that someone more trustworthy should run it. This is a race that worships the endless and is looking to ascend! But it ends with them deciding to run a school. I also think heroes are kind of cool, but the ones you get are random and the chances of you getting one that can be on your senate end up being slim. Then the metaplot stops you from being able to get any new ones practically the moment midgame starts.

I have no idea if I'm doing good or not in Endless Space 2. It's like a freaking game of leapfrog. Everyone tries attacking me and I hold them off. Then I go on the offensive and find they're using bigger ships! I upgrade to bigger ships and start crushing them. Then they get bigger ships and I don't crush them so hard. Then they get MORE SHIPS and I don't crush them hard at all. Then they keep sending waves at me until I'm sick of fighting, my alliance is begging for help, and I find out I've overexpanded and am taking serious happiness penalties. It feels like "politics" in my current game consisted of expanding until you get border friction, then start fighting. Then when someone creates an alliance, everyone else alliances up until it's two halves of the galaxy slugging each other eternally.

Endless Space 2. I like it, but it has the same problem I had with Endless Legend. There's not enough to do with your territory. There's quite a few buildings, but most of them simply don't seem worth the upkeep costs. I'm not going to pay 16 gold per round to improve my Industry when all that does is help me build up more buildings that cost 16 gold per round I don't need. Make your capital into your industrial area, build up your money making, maybe some food production, build up some research stuff when you have enough pop for the upkeep to be worth it, and then just let all your construction be idle when you're not building military. Unless you're rushing wonders, it doesn't seem worth it otherwise. Even then you only need one city, the one with the most pop, to do it. It'd be better if we could destroy improvements later, but I see no way to do it. If I'm spending upkeep on Industry and Agriculture, but want to refocus to science or money, I can't do it. Edit: I make that complaint, then google around and apparently there are ways to destroy buildings. I'll have to look into it. Some people are saying upkeep is trivial too, but I'm not seeing that.

Jupiter Ascending had the most boring action I've seen in a film. I somehow enjoyed the movie by the end, but I couldn't tell you why or how. The only thing that stuck with me is feeling like the action scenes went way too long and how all the tension was sucked out of them.

So Bright wasn't as good as I wanted it to be, but I still enjoyed it and will be watching the sequel they greenlit. Hopefully the second is a lot more focused. There's a point in Bright where it became clear it was subject to last minute changes.

I'm sneaking in a viewing of Bright at work. The reviews were pretty poor, but since it doesn't open with the protagonist prank calling the antagonist, I can already say it's better than The Last Jedi.

When the Contingency was finally destroyed, I got a victory screen for having 40% of habitable worlds. I'm not sure why. Did the final Contingency planet count and destroying it brought me to 40% of the total? Can you not get a victory during a crisis so it waited until it was over? I played a bit more after that, conquering another one of the big remaining empires and making them my vassal. But then I stopped. I think I'm done for now. Maybe Endless Space 2 will be next. Their factions look very interesting and I love the way they handle quests. Edit: Also, does anyone want a NA PS4 holiday theme? I got sent one by PSN and I'm not even going to bother redeeming it.

Never played Elex, but I love Dragon's Dogma so much. It's a game I've bought three times at this point.

I see lots that I want. I see absolutely nothing I'm likely to play before the Summer sale, however. Maybe Endless Space 2.

Jean-Claude Van Johnson An Amazon Prime original series about Jean-Claude Van Damme moonlighting as a secret agent, while still being a washed up action star. It's only 6 30 minute episodes, but it's hilarious.

Well that was anti-climactic. First off, in preperation for the coming of the Contingency, I decided to fight the Awakened Empire for my independence. Barely after I started, the Contingency arrived. I noped out and reloaded a save. Then on the reloaded save, all of the other vassals of the Awakened Empire decided to wage war for independence and asked me to join. I thought I'd give it a try. Then the Contingency arrived and I realized their first hub was smack in the middle of my territory, wiping out my stuff while I was on the complete opposite side of the galaxy. NOPE. Reload. This time nobody bothers trying to start that war. So I focus on defending my planets and taking out the hub. The number 2 hub appears, even deeper into my territory. Then number 3 hub appears, in my territory, but at the border with an enemy, splitting its attack between me and my neighbor. Then hub 4, finally good luck, it's not in my territory! I destroy the 1st hub, then the 2nd, recover some of my worlds. Then I recover worlds over by hub 3 and contemplate letting it devour my neighbor, but it's more attacking the machines in the middle of the neighbor and I'd like to keep the only friendly empire in the game for a while. So I take it out. Hub 4 takes a lot of territory from my other neighbor and I use that time to get my independence from the Awakened Empire and steal its Sentry Array. I use my independence to get some vassals, and then when hub 4 starts getting onto my border do I finally attack and take it out. The Contingency homeworld has now been revealed, but it's not doing anything. I've made massive gains in territory conquering what it had from hub 4 and I have like 5 vassals of my own who only have single worlds. With three more in the process being technologically enlightened. They're useless beyond providing me with unity bonuses and the fact that I'm getting tired of conquering and building up every single world. I'd rather vassalize and maybe eventually integrate. I'm still undecided if I'll vassalize the rest of the galaxy before finishing the Contingency off or not.