[Dragonlord]

OK, in a nutshell what happened:

My race is by far the strongest in this game because I had the luck of a central starting position which allowed me to trade with everybody and block players from establishing contact with each other. I've played as a peaceful merchant race from the beginning.

However, now there is not much for me to do anymore. I have all the tech I wanted, got some 80 planets, 200 ships, all built up and upgraded to the max. So I started looking at the victory conditions (400% of 2nd place player) and figured that if I could take out the fleets of No2. I would drop his score enough to win.

Problem was, I had to declare war to do this, which wasn't in the nature of my character. (this was before I became enlightened about roleplaying). I let my own human desires drive the action of my character and declared war with a pretty thin in-game justification. The player I went to war with was very pissed, believe me. I still feel guilty about that.

Another race, which I had been carefully grooming to help me in this war, decided that my sudden war was so out of sync with my peaceful char that he suddenly switched sides and started helping my intended victim.
He even convinced a small race which was under my protection to surrender to him, and now suddenly has a presence on my border.

In the east of my empire I am peacefully working with the Space Vikings to eradicate a rather strong AI race, though this will take time.
Meanwhile everybody's score is suddenly shooting up, while mine remains fairly constant (no more room to expand), so short of galactic domination I see no way to ensure victory for my Dragons.

And being a huge central empire with 2 and potentially 4 pretty large human empires attacking you from all sides is tough !

(edit: typos)

[This message has been edited by Dragonlord (edited 18 August 2001).]