Shattered Hopes - Nova Storm War

[Glyn]

I am posting this to share the epic struggle that’s been going on in the final seven game years of the Shattered Hopes game.

The players are:
Irideans – Played by Douglas
Yor!rek – Played by Fuzzie
Atlantean – Played by Glyn

First this is my first PBW game and it’s been going on for about a year real time. I am the only one who was an original player from the start, and I have enjoyed the game immensely. I would like to thank all the other players!

Douglas has done a great job with the Irideans. When he took them over they were in last place. He managed to take his empire to first place just before unleashing his 30 nova ships on the unsuspecting players. He has made this game especially challenging!

Fuzzie took over the Yor!rek empire just a few turns before the Irideans’ Nova Storm. After having the empire destroyed, Fuzzie stayed in the game apparently having a shipyard ship hidden in a nebula system. Eking out an existence while trying to stay hidden from the remaining empires.


The action report is mostly from my memory so there maybe inconstancies in the timeline and/or omissions. The other players are welcome to post corrections.

[Glyn]

The seven year struggle to rid the Galactic of the Irideans started suddenly when they covertly deployed thirty star nova weapons through the known galaxy abusing the long standing diplomatic treaties between the empires that allowed general trade and free movement through systems. Within months it was confirmed that all contact was lost with four of the seven galactic empires. Few actually knew at the time but Irideans only were responsible for fall of three empires the forth empire, a worm like race, fall was due to an ongoing effort by the Atlanteans to annexed the remains of their one time ally whose empire had fallen into anarchy. The Atlantean empire lost a third of its colonies and ships to the Irideans’ nova storm, leaving it struggling to regain its economical footing while facing the traitorous Irideans Empire and their ally empire. The Irideans are a cybernetic enhanced humanoid race and their allies were a large insect race that looked like large green ants. Luckily the Ant Empire was frozen in inaction possibly due to fear of their more powerful ally who had just destroyed three races without blinking a visual sensor.

[Glyn]

With the Atlanteans being behind the Irideans in technology, first year of the war was devoted to protecting and exploiting what was left of Atlantean space. Such as taking small mineral rich colonies and converting them into space based strip mines. Being unable to effectively reach the Irideans, the Atlanteans turned their attention to the petrified Ant Empire. The Atlanteans used their covert operations to infiltrate the Ants Empire primarily to disrupt their partnership with the Irideans and secondary to convince as many of their planets and ships to join the Atlanteans side of the conflict. Until the Atlantean could disrupt the Ants partnership with the Irideans, they darn not send any fleets into the Ant’s space due to the Irideans ability to open warp points anywhere and counter attack any fleet fleet. The Atlanteans best defense was keeping the Irideans in the dark.

During this time the Atlanteans leaned the technical secrets of opening and closing warp points and built ships to do so. The Irideans besides building a dozen ring-worlds deploy a new more destructive weapon against the Atlanteans during this time that enabled them to collapse a sun into a black hole without warning just by placing their ship in our system. Luckily, due to our system shields and a few well placed ships we only lost one newly colonized system to the dreaded weapon.

[Glyn]

Within two years the Atlantean’ intelligence work with the Ants was paying off, they had forced them into declaring war on the Irideans, gathered star charts on all of the Irideans Empire and convinced a few ships and planets to join the Atlantean Empire.

The Atlantean discovered the ships of one of the fallen empires hiding in a nebula, tediously holding on by placing remote mining satellites among the asteroid remains of planets. The Yor!rek race resembled giant flowers and are highly religious. Due to the mystical ability of this empire to target ships in battle it was to Atlanteans advantage to help reestablish this empire by allowing them to capture one of our colonies. Before the Nova Storm, the Atlanteans had acquired members of several races the Yor!rek being one such race. So the Atlanteans were able to arrange for the Yor!reks to capture a colony of their own race. It was a risk to bring back a race and to give them a hand full of colonies through the Atlantean space, but the Atlanteans counted on the Yor!reks near extermination by the Irideans and our helpfulness in reestablishing their empire as a strong force in securing a lasting partnership with them.

[Glyn]

The Irideans quickly used there influence to force the Ant’s to declare war on the Atlanteans, and somehow forced the Ant’s to hand over colony after colony to them. In an effort to stop the whole sell absorption the Ants by the Irideans, Atlanteans were forced to use troops to capture as many colonies as possible.

Atlanteans attempted several attacks against the Irideans space, mostly in the systems acquired from the Ants, due to the fact that the Irideans were working to build a cocoon of warp points through their space in order to protect it from sudden attacks. Atlantean usually managed to glass a hand full of colonies before the Irideans would counter attack with a larger fleet. The Atlanteans were reluctant to use more than a third of our ships due to the need to prevent a counter attack on the Irideans part into Atlantean space.

The most successful of these hit and run tactics were when the Atlanteans attacked with two fleets of thirty ships having modified the support ships to lay mines. They attacked as usually but dropped mines at the end of the first attack run. Instead of making a second attack run they stayed in position and dropped more mines. The Irideans predictably counter attacked with double the ships against both the invading fleets losing 120 ships to the mines. The Atlantean invading fleets then split into four smaller fleets each with their own attack run. The Irideans lost a month in positioning mine sweepers with there next counter attack fleets. Next month the Atlantean fleets split into even smaller fleets of six ships each for their attack run. The Irideans counter attack fleets with mine sweeper only stopped half the attacking ships, and had to break down into small fleets themselves to intercept the rest of the Atlantean ships raiding their space. All told that attack had glassed about half of the Irideans planets and ring-worlds. Unfortunately the Irideans had finished cocooning his systems preventing the Atlanteans from making more raid attacks.

[Glyn]

The Irideans glassed one system using conventional fleets then retreated when the Atlanteans fleet gained control of the Irideans front door warp point.

Finaly got the Yor!reks restablished with a world of their own. We agreed on a plan.
The idea was simple; the Atlanteans would build the ships and place them at a retrofit base where the Yor!reks would add the talisman device before returning them back to Atlanteans control. Due to the minimum resources available to the Yor!rek the ships had to be transferred in mothballed state. Once returned the ships would be reactivated and trained before being used against the Irideans. This was a slow process.

Atlanteans started their first ring-world project. The Irideans had already finished more than a dozen of their ring-worlds.

[douglas]

Turn 2416.7, seven years and one month after the Irideans unleashed their massive wave of star destruction, Emperor Douglas of the Irideans concedes defeat after the vast majority of his navy was annihilated by a nebula destroyer. With the destruction of the 138 ships of Alpha Fleet, which were on their way back to defend Iridean space through a newly opened warp point, the Iridean navy no longer has the force necessary to stop the rampaging Atlantean fleet.

This was a very fun and incredibly close game. There are so many things that could have made it go the other way, but I managed to miss all of them. If I had waited just one more turn to launch my massive raid, or sent only small forces, Glyn's attack force would have met total destruction at the hands of about 160 combat ships of generally superior quality the instant it entered my space. One nebula creator on sentry/create nebula orders would also have prevented his attack from achieving much. Leaving a guard on the warp point while Alpha Fleet cleared out the system it was attacking would have caught the nebula destroyer before it could go off, and Alpha Fleet would have caught up to and destroyed by far the biggest chunk of Glyn's fleet this turn.

The fact that Glyn was even able to stand up to me at all was due entirely to the limit of 300 ships per empire in this game, and the maximum of 12 intelligence projects in the queue. I had the resources to support around 2000 ships, while some of the intel reports I got indicate that Glyn was nearing the limits of his budget. When he finally got enough counter-intel to block the full 11 projects per turn (keeping one for my own defense), I still had a LOT more intelligence facilities to be built, but it would have been literally impossible to use those extra points.

[DeKaye]

Great game guys. I am just thrilled to have survived. I encourage others to continue in games they have little hope in winning, because you never know how the game will turn out. I am going to share a little of my story.


Being young and naive, the new Yor!rek ruler inherited an empire that was going broke fast. The last ruler, AI, had over extended it's resources, created inefficient ships, and left the empire wide open to enemy advances. Luckily, Fuzzie, the Empire's new ruler took quick action and started regaining financial stability. A couple years later, new treaties were formed. Things were looking hopeful. Then disaster struck. The Yor!rek people no longer existed. No planets, no people. Fuzzie was devastated and honestly a bit upset about the turn of events, but she got over it as the survival instinct kicked in. The Yor!rek people did not even know if anyone else existed after the attack. Our hopes were very bleak. Later it was learned that the Irrideans had masterfully executed their plan "Nova Storm".
Through grace of the God they worshipped, the Yor!rek Emperor had been attending a celebration of an opening of a museum on a very ancient ship yard base. One of the three bases had little function, but it was decided it would make a great museum. In the end, all that was left of the Yor!rek people were three ship yard bases. They did have some resources in storage.
After much prayer, fasting, and worship, the Yor!rek ruler came up with a plan on how to continue their existence. They started making mining satellites and built a satellite carrier. Luckily, they had the technology to capture the sun's rays for energy. After many turns of preparation, the new satellite carrier set off to find rich deposits of resources in the vast debris left by the attack of the Irrideans. Our hopes were to build our resources so we could build empty colony ships and invading ships so we could re establish our people. Just as our ship reached the warp point to leave the system, they were destroyed. An unknown empire had placed mines at the warp point. Devastation! We lost hope. Our resources were about gone.
More fasting, praying, and worshiping. The Yor!rek emperor made a very difficult choice, she scrapped two of the three ship yards. This provided enough resources to build a supply ship, a satellite carrier, a mine sweeper, and mining satellites. After much praying and many years later, the small fleet was once again ready to take is voyage to the unknown. The Yor!rek people had no idea what was going on outside of their nebula. They couldn't even tell if ships were going through the nebula!

They cautiously sent the Mine sweeper out first to clear the way. The path was clear. It appeared the mines were left long time ago by a race that was long gone. Off went the small fleet named "Hope". Our excitement built as we entered the next system. Argh, the system was empty. Can we hold on? Are there enough resources? We must continue on.
Again, after much prayer and fasting, we finally launched our satellites and made it back to the base. We were eking out our existence in this way, when we were surprised to find a lone ship in one of the systems we were launching satellites in - the Alanteans (unknownst to us, we were very blessed by our God in that they were friendly and didn't decide to obliviate us).
Very gratefully the Alanteans formed a partnership with us. Together we came up with a plan to help establish the Yor!rek's existence. The rest of our story is pretty much stated in the previous posts. The Yor!rek people wished they could have been of more help to the Alanteans. The Yor!rek people congratulate the Alanteans in their great victory!

Fuzzie

[Glyn]

Director Glyn of the Atlantean Empire truly relaxes for what maybe the first time in more than seven years. Alone in his office, he sips a strong drink and watches the wall vid of yet another Galactic news special report with some news person stating the news of Emperor Douglas of the Irideans conceding defeat is being greeted with euphoric celebration through out the remains of the Atlantean Empire. “Remains!” Glyn echoes, as he looks around at his makeshift office that doesn’t even compare to the lest of the director’s offices on the three now smoldering Atlantean home worlds.

Raising his glass, “To our partner and ally Fuzzie of Yor!rek's well done and may the new peace out live us all!” Glyn drinks to the toast.

Then raising his glass again, “To Douglas of the Irideans, if he hadn’t blown up half the galaxy, the Atlantean’s would never have had a chance at rising to the top. Well Played!” Glyn drinks the rest and smashes the glass.


My thanks to both Fuzzie and Douglas for such an excellent game of SEIV.

[inigma]

So defeat is conceeded by the Irideans?

Ok, what happened next? Genocide of the Irideans? A new peace? A partnership effort to heal the galaxy of black holes?

Is it possible to close a black hole, create new stars, and build ringworlds, spheres, and planets?