Phoenix Rising

[CBR JGWRR]

In 2285, after more than two decades of war, Kienzorud Industries finally accepted terms of surrender; although militarily stronger thanks to mercenary companies, the simple fact was that everyone was fed up with the war on both sides, and terms were agreed.

From the Defender's perspective, the Fatahid gained nothing in the treaty, the Falleen lost a colonised planet and a black hole, but Humanity gained three star systems, one of which was a Dark Matter source black hole.

The Attackers of course gained a colony and swapped black holes, but their main gain was the ability to conduct diplomatic actions freely again with the war over.

Namely, making the Raptors their subsidiary.

 

[HistoryDude]

Humanity seems to be recovering... that's very good.

 

[CBR JGWRR]

The decade of peace that followed the end of the war saw Humanity strike up; Jupiter's atmospherioforming completed and colonised, with Saturn's begun, a project to turn Luna into a ecumenopolis begun, Pallas and Vesta encased within harvesting structures, Mars shaped by a planetary dockyard, while beyond the Sol system Humanity were among the founding members of the first Federation with the Fatahid Consciousness and their ally the Aiari Nation. Humanity was even in contention for a Galactic Council seat. They were even the third race to begin a Science Nexus, using it's computing power to design the first ringworlds.

Prosperity had become the norm, limited only by Alloys production needed to turn ideas into reality.

But, just as things were looking up for Humanity, at the end of the 23rd century, the Unbidden arrived.

These aliens, consistent with seeing the galaxy as prey, had begun attacking. Their initial invasion site was in Sadaphorian space, a subsidiary of Kienzorud Industries. As a result, there was a lot of reluctance to stop the crisis within the Republic; the prospect of an enemy being defeated was attractive.

But, with the resources that would mean leaving the Unbidden, that was too dangerous a strategy. The fleet was ordered to the Jasila black hole, the border of Fatahid space closest to the Unbidden. Objective - find out exactly how dangerous the threat was, and if possible, engage.

_______


I had completely forgotten the endgame year was set to 2300... This could be interesting.

 

[steptioit08]

Wow that’s quick. We’ll have fun with the crises

 

[Nikolai]

Ouch. That will be a tough fight. Perhaps too tough.

 

[HistoryDude]

The Unbidden are a grave threat. Hopefully, the galaxy can put aside their differences for just a short while and fight them off. Is that too much to hope for?

 

[CBR JGWRR]

The Unbidden were found to have arrived with an initial force of estimated equivalence to more than a million fleet power, with four main fleets and two supporting fleets.

The first engagement went abysmally, when the dispatched task force attempted to engage an Unbidden base; immense self-healing capability was discovered, capable of out-healing the task force's ability to cause damage.

In the post-battle analysis, it was realised that the Unbidden were dependent on shielding, and effectively hard-countered the Neutron Launcher based Human fleets. This led to two quick decisions.

The first was a total overhaul of the entire fleet to use modern hyper-velocity kinetic batteries.

The second was the realisation that torpedoes and missiles capable of bypassing the shields would deal their damage directly to the hull, and so the return of the missile cruiser followed for the first time since the deployment of super-velocity railguns and laser point defence obsoleted missile cruisers in Earth's old ocean vessels.

More ambitious projects were developed. It was quickly realised that the civilian megastructural engineering focus had to be stopped to rededicate Alloy production to the war, but equally with these new capabilities and new objectives came new ideas.

The new war called for long range missile and bomber operations, mixed with hyper-velocity artillery.

Hyper-velocity artillery itself demanded extremely large guns in order to apply the electromagnetic forces used to accelerate the projectiles - to accelerate a 10kg shell to 15km/s within a barrel length of that of a two stage missile required energies in the region of five gigawatts by the time losses were taken into account, and most of that went on melting the rails.

A quick release system was developed - an automated barrel replacement system that treated the barrel as a consumable as much as the ammunition could replace the entire barrel in roughly twenty seconds by dividing it into one metre sections and swapping them out simultaneously.

All this needed space, and it needed size. The power consumption was immense - by the time that all factors were accounted for the ship's reactor needed to generate as much power as the usage of Humanity from only a few centuries before - and therefore the reactors were larger than ships.

Additionally, the technology scaled well through megastructural sizes - titans of ten kilometre rings that accelerated the projectiles to velocities that defied comprehension were figured out.

So it was no surprise when the proposal for arming a small moon with antimatter rocket engines, massive amounts of bomber wings, hyper-velocity railguns and two-stage torpedoes came in. It was simply the logical solution to the crisis.

UV Ceti IIIa - a molten moon around a gas giant suitable for the necessary energy extraction and manufacturing of armaments - was selected as the first candidate.

The only question was if it - and the others that followed - would be ready in time.


At the wider Galactic scale, the Unbidden proved a threat to everyone, with the Falleen declaring their desire to be custodians of the galaxy until the end of the crisis, and only then voting on the declaring the Unbidden a galactic crisis and opening up all borders and mobilising the galaxy for war.

It seemed too late to Humanity - fourteen star systems had fallen in the first six years.

 

[CBR JGWRR]

The fleet revisions were successful, but there were not enough ships.

The first engagement with the Unbidden was a 170k Unbidden fleet vs a combined 140k from three fleets; the Unbidden lost six battleships and numerous escorts. The Humans lost twenty battleships and an entire fleet of smaller vessels.

Many wondered how it would have gone had there been more ships to fight, and ultimately it led to the election of the first new Star Marshall in fifty years (in a ten year term democracy!) in Por Up Lor, a Venusian SelfMod and Admiral of the Federation fleet until her election. Her vow on taking office was to end the Unbidden by any means necessary.

Her first measure was to announce a reduction in state-supplied consumer goods, and subsidies for Metallurgists instead of Researchers.

But it wasn't enough.

 

[CBR JGWRR]

Man, this is tough. The Unbidden are out of control; the border gore is atrocious.

But, despite my expectations when I made the previous post, Humanity -

Well, that's where I have to start. Baseline Humanity are barely more than half of the pops within the Phoenix Republic. Between the SelfMod Venusians (had the self-modification event fire on Venus, but it hasn't really mattered) a migration treaty with the Falleen and the dozens of Races (I think I have refugees from every non-gestalt) who've turned to Humanity for refuge, the Phoenix Republic has kind of taken on a new identity as a galactic in scope Phoenix, attempting to rise from the ashes of a galaxy lost to war with the Unbidden.

Even the enemy factions of the game so far have sent refugees in; there's two pops of Raptors here.

So, the Phoenix Republic has grown into the Defender of the Galaxy; while the Falleen got the official Custodianship, the Unbidden have basically got free reign over their territory.

Getting back to what I was going to say, the Unbidden aren't really doing anything; they're just fighting each other, and when they do come through the Republic they used to crush everything.

Not so much with the Attack Moon - it has extreme range of engagement with strike fighters and missiles, so even if it has to fight straight in from a jump it is annihilating the Unbidden as long as it is at range from them.

UV Ceti IIIa, now the PRV Endurance, is just the first Attack Moon; Pluto and Charon are both being made into Attack Moons, and there is a few more candidates.

I'm yet to figure out how to define getting the war won. The border gore is just giving me a headache, and the wormholes being on 5x (figured it would give a plausible route for the Raptors to attack in the prologue while also explaining them not spawning nearby) means that it is a mess, and I can't get science ships out to check because of the endless swarms of Unbidden.

But victory is possible.

My plan is thus:

1. Obtain five Attack Moons
There are five ways into central Republic territory, three from wormholes (technically four, but it is a case of the two wormholes being in adjacent systems, which means only one Defence Moon) and three from choke points.

Secure the means of access, and then leverage the resources while the rest of the galaxy gets crushed.

2. Obtain resources to truly make the war possible
Each Attack Moon costs ~500 Energy and ~100 Alloys to maintain, and it will need dozens of them to progress this war to conclusion. Which means that I will need Dyson Spheres to supply the energy, and Matter Decompressors to get sufficient Minerals that will have to be processed by pops.

3. Fortify to hold out against all out assault from the Unbidden
The issue is by the time I will have the economy strong enough to win this war, it will probably be the Phoenix Republic being the last non-Unbidden faction. Which means that sheer overwhelming numbers on the part of the Unbidden could swamp the Attack Moons and overcome them. So far, they have been tested and a single Attack Moon even after jump drive usage maluses can wipe out a 500k stack of Unbidden. But, if it gets to the point where it is just me left, I don't know the upper limit of how much an Attack Moon can hold off.

4. Launch assaults on the Anchors and the Portals
Take the infrastructure out to cut down the ability to reinforce their forces.

5. Hunt down every last Unbidden
This could be very tricky indeed, but jump drives should make it feasible.

6. Restore the Galaxy
While I can't be bothered to play that out because of the endgame lag, once victory is mine, the Phoenix Republic becomes the Galactic Republic.

That's the plan anyway.

But, just look at this mess:

The light blue inner colour, deeper blue outline is the Phoenix Republic and other members of the Pan-Galactic Combined Forces, the red inner, gold-green outline is the Fatahid Consciousness and their very recently formed Stellar Entente (they were the other founding member of the PGCF, but they left and joined up with the people who attacked us earlier in the game after their group split up and now the Raptors are being nice and diplomatic towards us and the faction who was the stronger enemy in the earlier war is now a part of the PGCF. Everyone else is either obliterated, Unbidden or joined to one of the two Federations.

Yeah, even the madness of Warhammer factional relations has times where it makes more sense than this messed up galaxy...

 

[Nikolai]

Galactic Republic. I like the sound of that.

 

[HistoryDude]

The Phoenix has risen... although they will need to deal with the Unbidden.

 

[CBR JGWRR]

After thirty-five long years of war against the three Unbidden menaces, the Vehement were the first to be locked out of sending in reinforcements. While the tidying up was still needing to be finished, the Republic had struck a massive blow for the galaxy.

It wasn't just in military terms that the Phoenix Republic was taking the lead - although a third of all Unbidden losses were to the three Human Attack Moons - but Humanity, having been the last of the various powers to achieve space flight - was now overtaking all of the formerly more advanced aliens.

First to finish their Science Nexus.
First Attack Moon.
First Attack Moons.
Only civilisation to destroy an Unbidden portal.

The end was in sight.

 

[steptioit08]

The student is now the master. You were the weakest link but now the strongest.

 

[CBR JGWRR]

After more than four decades of war, the final Unbidden portal was at last destroyed.

It would take decades to restore the galaxy to pre-war conditions; dozens of worlds had been harvested, and while no Unbidden warships remained, roughly a quarter of the galaxy was occupied by Unbidden stations.

But peace, at last, reigned. In fact, the greatest threat to galactic peace was now a single pirate fleet out in formerly Unbidden occupied space. All the civilisations of the galaxy were joined into two Federations.

The Phoenix Republic had risen from the ashes of an invaded Earth, and rose to become the defenders of the galaxy.


-----------------------------------------

It is nice to actually finish one of these AARs at last; all the others have ended prematurely for one reason or another. Ok, I technically haven't seen the victory screen, but objectively I've achieved it; Humanity has the third highest score, but one of them is only a few years of development ahead, and the other is getting 50k points from subjects, and is really behind both of us two on their own.

 

[Nikolai]

Bravo!

 

[HistoryDude]

Excellent job! The Unbidden have been defeated, but it might take a while to recover...