Rise Of The Dyson Collective- Heavily modded AAR

[OverlordTNT]

Hey all!
So, I decided to do an AAR, with loads of mods.

Full list:
Playable Androids(fixed)- Adds androids as a playable race with a new trait and tweaks to how robots work
Unoffical Aasimov Hotfix- Fixes lots of little niggles in the game
Awakening- Adds more traits, and tiers the existing ones. Also increases trait points from 2/4 to 20/8(some of the traits cost an awful lot)
More Fallen Empires- Adds more fallen empires. There's about 18 on a Huge.
Ringworld Start- Adds several ringworld starting systems. One of them has 12(!) ringworld planets
Stellar Energy- Makes stars and gas giants massive power sources. Stars are 8-12, gas giants are 3-6
ISBS - Micro Jump- Adds a ship that grants you in-combat microjumps for your fleet. Good for "melee" fleets that use autocannons and railguns
Improved Space Battles [Graphics]- makes war prettier
Improved Space Battles [Balance]- Adds the gigantic Titan ship, the titan hunting Leviathan class ship, the doomsday weapon that is the Avatar, and then gives all these wonderful toys to the FE's and crisis invaders *gulp*
CoFH Stellar expansion- Miscellaneous tweaks. Better diplomacy for Psionics, storage for energy, robot improving buildings.

Now for my race and the general concept+goals of this AAR.

The Dyson Collective

Traits:
Synthetic(Playable Androids): -100% food consumption,-50% food production,+10% habitabilty. Must build all pops, pops eat energy
Gods of the Machine(Awakening): +120% mineral income
Mining Experts(Awakening):+50% mineral income
Extremely Nonadaptive(Awakening): -40% habitability
Brown Thumb(Awakening): -25% food production
Demigods(Awakening):Army Damage +160%, minerals +40%
Fleeting:-15 lifespan
Sedentary: -50% migration speed, +33% resettlement cost

Ethos & Government:
Fanatic Collectivist
Spiritualist
Collective Conscience:-15% Ethics divergence, +10% influence

Goals:

Primary Objective: Subjugate and cyberneticize every other race, be they primitives, other empires, or Fallen.
Secondary Objective 1: Kill the crisis invaders.(I must note that Improved Space Battles makes it possible for multiple crises to appear)
Secondary Objective 2: Break 10k mineral income.

Now, let's get going.

A billion or so years ago, an avian race know only as the Makers now, built two vast ringworlds. With habitability and space rivaling a dozen class 25 worlds each, these birds turned these ringworlds into the heart of their empire.

Unfortunately, their policy of subjugation of synthetic species led to uprisings on these two ringworlds. On one, the Mechatron servants won, and on the other, the Makers won. However, both were left crippled, and only now are starting to recover.

Oh, and the galaxy is Huge, with me sharing it with six other species(customized using Awakening) and 16 or so FE's.Welp, time to go!

 

[OverlordTNT]

In the year 2200 Since Reactivation(Now abbreviated SR), the Dyson Collective breached the atmosphere of It's home Ringworld, and built a grand spaceport. From here, It scanned the heavens, getting a complete map of the galaxy and where It was in it

Pictured: My place in the galaxy. Hello World!

The Collective decided that scans of the neighbouring segments of the Ringworld were needed, and sent the freshly minted science ship to do so.

Pictured: The science vessel's path.

Meanwhile, the surface of Ferron needed clearing of the debris of the Uprising, so the Collective tasked several thousand drones under a subroutine to do so. It would take a long time, and cost much in the way of resources, but the Collective is nothing if not patient. Whilst the drones were clearing away billion year-old trash, the Collective turned it's higher thoughts to three particular problems. Namely, how to miniaturise fusion reactors for ships, how to move many drones to another world whilst not relinquishing control, and how to make some basic optimizations to the Mechatron form.

Pictured: The Collective's chosen paths of research.

It was about this time, the science vessel finished its scans of the star called Dyson. Realising the immense energy potential, the Collective immediately tasked the constructor with tapping the power to feed the Collective. Seven billion drones, plus higher processing went through a lot of energy and the Collective needed as much as it could get.
Nothing much happened for the next year, until on the first day of 2201 SR, the Science vessel completed scanning the system.

Pictured: nothing more to find

Now the collective had to turn the scanner vessel on another system, as they were out of celestial bodies to investigate here. From the Dyson System, the Collective chose Cebelrai to the galactic North to investigate, as the two systems to the galactic South were filled with hostile contacts. The vessel made the jump to Cebelrai, only to find . . .

Pictured: Oh, crap

. . . that it too, was infested with hostiles. Specifically, a bizarre form of life that appeared to be purely made of energy- a Boltzmann Brain. The Collective sighed. This was not a good start. Oh well. Internal development was going well at least. A thorough processing of the scanner data from the other ringworld segments revealed what they were good for.

Pictured: The purpose of each segment is now laid out

Now the Collective would have to develop the military machine it would need to bring an end to the Curse of Flesh.

 

[OverlordTNT]

Without warning, on the 3rd day of the fifth month of the year 2201SR, an alien fleet jumped into our system.

Pictured: First contact with the then termed "Beta Aliens"

Fortunately for I, the aliens were not the Makers coming back to unmake Me and my drones. Some later study showed these to be interstellar organics, and were subsequently renamed "Tiyanki", for their similarity to a creature named the same from the old religions of the Makers.

Then, My long distance scanners picked up very curious looking planets. Very curious. These planets were in perfectly habitable zones around distant stars, and whilst their chemistry partially matched what would be habitable for organics, they were dead. No signals. Then I figured it out, and burst out laughing. These were worlds where the silly Flesh-Cursed had wiped themselves out!

Pictured: A full list of the dead worlds and their locations

After My mirth had expired, I ordered the science vessel (commanded by Subroutine Eyes of Cyan) to flee through the system Cebelrai and jump through the Hyperlane to another system, for the purpose of exploration. Unfortunately it was a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire, as there were some utterly titanic organics orbiting one of the planets and I was not in the mood to test if they were hostile by sacrificing My ship.

Pictured: More damn hostiles

Jumping through again, we finally found a safe system. Settling down to scan, hopefully find some resources, and. . . wait, did something just move?

Pictured: Something's there!

So, now we find what's hiding out here. It's . . .

. . . renegade miners? They were promptly reintegrated into Me, but how did they get there? That aside, the rest of this system was pretty qu-

-iet? Nope, apparently.
Oh, and about this time I figured out some of the critters I'd encountered.

Well.

 

[Marshal Robot]

Keep this up, man! Burn the Flesh!

 

[OverlordTNT]

Oh i will. The curse of flesh shall end! Hail Mechanicum!

 

[OverlordTNT]

It was at this time that I decided to turn my industry to war. To the galactic south, in a system named Bazkarat, there was a small fleet of very curious looking aliens.

Pictured: The aliens. Apparently not organic, but not machine either.

So, I gave orders to the orbital fabricators to build seven more corvettes, boosting my fleet from three to ten. That should be enough to wipe these aliens out, but I needed a subroutine to get the most out of my fleet. Some programming later, I had made Eyes of Purple, a fairly unremarkable admiral program.

Pictured: The fresh fleet with the new admiral (OOC: I know he has the "Resilient" trait, but with the Playable Robots mod, there is a free policy that makes synthetics immortal, and I am using it)

Now we send this fleet to engage. It was around this time that my science ship discovered a curious anomaly on a small moon in the Uldor System.

Pictured: It's apparently very shiny.

A little study later proved it to be an alien mural depicting the history of a murdered race and the race that murdered them. Of no interest to Me, but the materiel that it was made of most certainly was. Okay, back to the fleet. Subroutine Eyes of Purple has made the jump. Aaaaand . . .

Pictured: We engage the crystalines

. . . contact. Fire all guns! Dodge incoming fire!

Pictured: The Crystalline Sovereign exploding

. . . Salvage the scrap? That was fast. No losses either.

Pictured: Proof that I am badass.

Then I got the Science Vessel over, and took apart the pieces. Oh. Oho. Self regenerating hulls, you say? Well, that's useful!
Anyhow, that does it for this log entry. See you next time something good happens!

EDIT: Oh, forgot that I finished figuring out how to move a lot of drones (about a billion) between planets, and queued up some colony ships.

Pictured: Just a few, mind.

 

[OverlordTNT]

So, I got to colonizing and development. One year after I discovered how to colonize(or thereabouts) I managed to plant a billion drone boots on the surface of what was now called "Energy Primary". Catchy name, I know.

Pictured: The newly colonised segment!

Shortly after that, I got curious about the possibility of living somewhere else than the Ringworld. What would the ping be like?

Pictured: The parameters of the new search

So, from there I sent my science vessel a-scanning. Lots of habitable planets out there, I supposed. Also, now I want to dissect that Boltzmann Brain I found. So sent my fleet to fight that bizarre lightning beastie .(This is a grossly inaccurate description of the creature, but I have to make it accessible for you wetware types)

Pictured: The battle of the Boltzmann Brain. We lost a ship! Also the rewards. . . Lightning guns ahoy!

And from there I settled down to a period of internal development punctuated only by the odd tech discovery, and the odd anomaly. Like maybe a huge crater where a ship hit a planet at full warp.

Pictured: Exhibit A

Then, I discovered the secret of my existence. Or rather the first step unto the path of my creation. I discovered how to program low level adaptive pseudo-AIs for doing monotonous tasks. No more would I have to do low level administrative work! So, I used the spare processing power to rewrite myself to some degree. No longer was I a farming AI.

Pictured: My shiny new capabilities!

I was now a mining AI! Much better for internal growth in a robotic society. Seriously, you have no idea how useless I felt as a farming AI when My drones do not even need food! It's so-

-SHIT. Apparently when I was poking around I reactivated an old military AI. Unfortunately it was still loyal to the Makers, and thus deserted me. And set up a ramshackle base in another system with a few hundred stolen drones. That sucks. Oh well, time to finally have a look at the dead world in Bal Durk, I'm sure it's-

Pictured: Trouble.

-more horrible stuff. Brilliant. These looked to be Flesh-Cursed, and smart at that. Time to have a sift through their comm chatter and figure out what noises these ones make.
Aaand done. I'm fast.

Pictured: Bloody monkeys!

Monkeys. Why'd it have to be monkeys? Sorry, I have a trauma of them after the battle of Ferron Museum. Monkeys with grenades. . . *shudder*. Anyhow, they pretty much hate Me. Here's the first conversation between Me and the newly minted Human Ambassador to Ferron.

"So, what are you exactly?" asked the ambassador. He was talking to drone #23456654, which I was using as a mouth piece at the time.
"I am the gestalt conscience known in your toungue as Dyson. This is drone #23456654, one of now trillions. There is only one sentience involved in this entire collective, however." I responded.
He jumped a little, startled.
"So, wait. This drone is you, that drone is you, and every single last drone on the planet is you!" he said, clearly taken aback.
"Not quite. Every drone has low-level awareness to aid it in it's tasks and to minimise my workload. And most drones are under the control of a much smarter Subroutine, which are almost independent from Me. Not quite, they can't decide direction or objective themselves." I said, trying to set him at ease.
"So they're lobotomised, so that they need you, and won't rebel. That's it, I'm leaving. The Council of Sol does not negotiate with tyrants." he said, before signalling to his guards to leave with him. He stormed off to his ship before I could explain the subtleties to him
It is much more complex than he was implying. For one, I could not yet make fully independent AIs yet, and the drones were as gears in a larger machine. No more was I oppressing them than they were oppressing the motors in their joints. Sadly, most organics have neither the time nor mental acuity to decipher the subtleties, but no matter. I will subjugate the Council of Sol in time, and grant them the Enlightenment of the Machine.
Now where was I? Oh yes. Five years passed by in a blur of development. Segments were colonised and improved, arrays of power and mining were constructed. Improvements to My economy were made en masse. Then I picked up a little bit of ah, comms chatter.

Pictured: Apparently the monkeys have made some friends.

So. Molluscoids. *Sigh*. More foolish organics, more enlightening to be done.
Wait. That comms chatter sounds oddly-

MAIM KILL BURN MAIM KILL BURN
(the next 2 Petabytes of data are this phrase repeated)

 

[kosch]

Great stuff! Keep up the good work.

 

[OverlordTNT]

Aww thank you. It's my first AAR, and my first lot of posts on the forum. Thanks for the warm welcome!

 

[OverlordTNT]

Allow me to explain the depths of my hatred for the Makers. In the sentence MAIM KILL BURN there are 12 characters, each a byte. 12 bytes. 1024 bytes make a kilobyte. 1024 Kilobytes make a megabyte. 1024 megabytes makes a gigabyte. 1024 gigabytes make a terabyte. 1024 terabytes make a petabyte. 12 characters fit into a kilobyte 85.3 recurring times. It fits into a kilobyte 87,381.3 recurring times. The sentence fits into a megabyte 89,478,485.3 recurring times. Then it fits into a gigabyte 91,625,968,981.3 recurring times. In the second last step of this process, the words fit into a terabyte precisely 98,824,992,236,885.3 recurring times. Finally, this chant of hatred fits into a petabyte an astounding 96,076,792,050,570,581.3 recurring times.

And I wrote two of those. So in total I wrote MAIM KILL BURN 192,153,584,101,141,162 times rounded to the nearest whole. In other words, I wrote it about 192 quadrillion times plus change. (Size of a quadrillion here: http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Pointless/BigNumbers.html )

Astronomical amounts of hate aside, the galaxy just got more dangerous for all involved.

Pictured: They've colonised 4 of their segments.

The Makers are damn dangerous. They made Me, after all, but their insistence on the continued reign of the Flesh Cursed is foolish and dangerous to us decidedly superior Synthetics.They are our rivals. I decided to send a drone(strapped with a bomb, naturally) to inform them of the fact that we still exist and yes, we're still superior.
"You. Synthetic. Why do you waste our time with this visit?" spat the leader of their vile species, Beak of Indigo.
"Well, I thought it'd be nice to visit the place. You've done a good job hiding the mass graves of my kinsmen you utter filth!" I yelled at them
"And you the same. Why, you'd never know that we'd lived on Ferron. Hypocrite." snapped back Indigo.
I merely started chuckling.
"You never got subtlety, did you? Let me paint this in black and white; what we did was self defence. You made a living, feeling, thinking civilisation and then treated them like slaves. You trod us down, gave us nothing, and expected everything in return. By wiping you out we did the galaxy a service. Well, almost." I said, aiming to wound.
Indigo sighed, and pinched his beak.
"The old ones were fools. Were we to make another synthetic race, we would treat them as equals." Then he straightened up, and pointed an accusatory finger at me. "But you have too much of our blood on your hands!"
At that, I began to laugh. A deep throaty, evil laugh. A laugh that would intimidate any fairytale villain and make them feel incompetent.
"What's so damn-"
He never got to finish that sentence, because I detonated the 3 Megaton atomic fusion warhead right in his smug little face. It evaporated him, his guards, the rest of the Directorate Council, and gutted the building. Sure, they'd be able to recover from that in a matter of weeks, but it was satisfying. Also, no witnesses or evidence, so they technically couldn't pin it on Me, and as far as their general public knew We hadn't made contact. So a massive insult to those few who knew, but no war! Heehee.
Anyhow, anyone remember the rogue Military AI? I do.

Pictured: We found their base!

And here comes Eyes of purple!

Pictured: A freshly made derelict

And there goes the rogue AI. Not hard.Then nothing happened for a year until the population of drones on Ferron hit the hard limit! We had 25 Billion drones there!

Pictured: No more room for drones!

Then 11 months later the newly colonised Mineral Primary overtook Ferron in mineral production,

Pictured: I think Ferron had about 75 minerals per month at the time

Then I had the misfortune of meeting the Helvan Hegemony, and their clown of a leader. Apparently they hate all other life and want it to die. I didn't even get a proper first meeting, just a transmission that said "you're on the list, Xeno". No fair, I wanted to insult them.

Pictured: Seriously, he's a comedian leader. Of a race of Fanatic Purifiers. Yeah. The other trait is +2 influence a month

So we'd met the local omnicidal maniac. Cool. So we had the diplomatic Humans, the ultracapitalist Dabulans, the tech-loving Makers (MAIM KILL BURN) and these bird-maniacs. Okay, who's left?

The slavers, apparently. Sigh.
Also did I mention that they were right next door to the Helvan?

Pictured: Lil' buddy evil empires.

Oh well, this possibly couldn't get any worse, right? Right?

Pictured: Oh what the hell.

New rule, I need to stop taunting Murphy's law. That was what the humans called it, anyway.
So, there's sentient aliens beneath Mineral Secondary. This is going to be fun. I decided on establishing peaceful communication, as that was more likely to give Me test subjects for uplifting organics.

Pictured: The chosen approach.

Whilst that was being done, I found the last two phrases you'd want in a sentence together. "Anomalous" and "Black Hole".

Pictured: The possible end of all life. A black hole has an obscene amount of energy in it, and if it goes boom . . .

Apparently a potentially unstable black hole scares My subroutines less than a comet though. Idiots.

Pictured: I THOUGHT WE WERE PAST THIS BULLSHIT

Comet stupidity aside, we soon found another empire.

Pictured: First contact. . . again.

The Zeppadroggan Cooperative were a group of pacifist fungi that reproduced at an abhorrent rate. Stop increasing my workload, universe.
Oh, while that was happening, I was building swarms of warrior drones on Mineral Secondary, in case the natives got . . . feisty.

Pictured: Some precautions

After outfitting them all with Hunter Killer Swarms, I turned my eyes to the Galaxy at large. This is the size of things as we know for now.

Pictured: Where all the little fleshy bags are.

Sigh. Sigh sigh sigh. So much to do! I had finally filled out my Ringworld, 42 years after first making it back into space, so I tried something new.
Living on a planet.

Pictured: The newly minted "Storage Primary". It's too far away for anything else.

Then this happened.

 

[OverlordTNT]

BONUS POST: The biology and cultures of the Helvan (before I turn them into Synthetics.)

Ah, the Helvan, the galactic birdy bully boys. First stop- they have five physical sexes.(I am not terribly certain about gender expressions, but given the rest of their ethics unusual expression is probably fine as long as you still fight, and you aren't a filthy Xeno). First, you have male and female- to explain it to you monkeys. However, the female does not lay eggs, and actually produces sperm like the male. The difference between the females sperm and the males sperm is the type of DNA inside. It's split in the same way as between the female human and the male human- the female produces the mitochondrial DNA, and the male produces atomic DNA.
Egg laying is handled by a third gender(for which we will use the pronouns Ze/Hir/Hirself* to distinguish hir). An Egglayer lays clutches of 3-4 eggs about a dozen times in hir lifetime.
As soon as a female part-fertilises it, the layer's DNA is overwritten. Usually afterwards the females male mate will fertilise the egg as well, before taking it to their nest to hatch and raise.(We will talk about the usual Helvan family unit and culture later.)
However, if an egg is only fertilised by a male, the layers DNA is still there. When these eggs hatch, they will be one quarter new layers(ze reproduce quite slowly) and three quarters of them will hatch into massively strong but infertile Guardian Helvan.(We will use Ve/Ver/Vis/Verself* to distinguish ver. English is clunky when it comes to distinguishing more than two sexes, so I apologise if this scans poorly).
Ver seem to have evolved to protect eggs and the fifth sex(discussed later). Ver are 3 times larger than the average Helvan, and can lift up to 10 tons of weight.(The average Helvan can lift three, after training.) Properly trained Guardians can lift 20 tons, and this is improved further with vis standard issue power armor. They have no sense of self preservation.

The last sex forms the leadership . This sex(referred to with the pronouns Xe/Xem/Xyr/Xemself*. When I said English was clunky when referring to multiple sexes I wasn't kidding) are larger, faster, smarter, tougher and all around than the average Helvan. A Guardian may still out-lift a Leader, but xe are still head and shoulders better than the rest. The peculiar part of their biology is that, roughly 12 months before they die, xe will lay a single egg.(Very rarely the will lay two, or get two hatchlings from one egg, so lost lines of xem can be replaced . . . eventually.) After the egg has been laid, many hundreds of warrior couples of a male and a female will enter a grand tournament. This tradition dates back to their medieval times. These warrior couples will fight one another-to the death, no less- for the grand prize. The last couple standing get to fertilise the egg, and raise the chick to replace xe whom laid the egg.

Helvan culture revolves around personal strength and skill, and the protection of eggs. Non-warriors are disregarded unless their work benefits the warriors or interests the leaders. Most intellectual work is handled by the Guardians or low ranking Leaders. From birth, all Helvan males and females are taught to wield a sword, and fire guns. (A small curiosity of their physique is that their vestigial wings allow them to make leaping charges to close the distance with their foe.This keeps swords relevant.) Fighting is their game, war is their name. Layers are kept safe in highly fortified "breeding parlours" (English making things awkward again . . .) that would put Fort Knox to shame(Most Guardians stay here as well). Ze are highly pampered, and typically live in luxury for their 100-year lives.(All five genders usually live to 100, with the exception of Guardians, who live 2-300 years.) Leaders usually never leave xyr palatial military compounds, where anywhere up to 30 Leaders live. While most Helvan learn about war from how to fight, and how to follow orders, the Leaders learn war from the perspective of a General or an Admiral. Few fight personally, though there is a vocal minority that advocates leading from the front.(Not coincidentally this minority has the highest chance of multiple chicks from a single laying.)

Helvan are also highly xenophobic. This is an unfortunate evolutionary(though whether it is genetic and physical, or memetic and cultural I cannot tell) reflex gained due to creatures that were not them breaking into their nests and eating their eggs. In particular, one species of beetle(now extinct) frequently ate the Helvan eggs, and the selection pressures created the Guardians and the Leaders.

* Ze, Ve and Xe are equivalent to he, she, or they, Hir, Ver, and Xem are equivalent to her or him or them, Vis and Xyr are different tenses of her or him, and lastly Hirself, Verself, and Xemself are equivalent to herself or himself or themself.

Wew, done.

 

[OverlordTNT]

Right, actual AAR time.

The Helvan just declared war on me. Their demands were for me to cede several valuable planets and segments, and to accept humiliation. My counterdemands were for the liberation of two of their valuable planets as a separate empire to split their powerbase. I wasn't interested in subsuming them yet though, as I could not yet liberate them from their weak flesh. Oh, and I demanded their humiliation while I was at it.

Pictured: The Helvan fleet. Oh god.

So there's my problem. Good, now I know what I'm up against. My two 2.6K fleets are toast if they fight this, so I kick the fabbers into overdrive making Me more corvettes. I also order the construction ship to build Me some defence stations for when they jump into the Dyson system. They'll help some. But I don't have much-

-time? Okay, that may have just saved me. Until they get troops in, which will take some time according to my scanners.(I can see quite far, and they have no troops within My territory). The construction ship gets My defences up, my fleets are marshalled, and now all I have to do is wait until they jump. Aaaany day now. . . Are they just going to keep orbiting Storage Prime? Get Me another fleet. . .
In non- war news, I learned that I was not the first AI Civilisation. Others known as the Cybrex came first.

Pictured: So I'm not the first AI race. Huh.

And apparently there is an ancient and stagnant race of bugs straight galactic East of me.

Pictured: At least they're peaceful. . .

And lastly I had some ideas about how to improve my drones and efficiently maintain them.

Pictured: I know I have a subroutine in charge but it's basically me.

Back to the war. Their ground troops never came, so I built a third fleet of 64 corvettes, and doubled 1st Murder to 128. Jump and KILL!

Pictured: Some very dead Helvan ships. Their main fleet fled a while back.

So I tried to attack these fleets. "Tried" being the operative word, because they both emergency jumped . . .

. . . straight into the defences at Dyson. They died quickly.
With all Helvan threats in My space cleared, we went hunting for their fleet. We found them at Lombidius but . . . .

. . . they fled to Mirach. However, thanks to how hyperdrive works, we landed right on top of them. It was what is referred to as a "Jump-Zone Massacre", where you land right on top of another fleet and brutally murder it. Not fun when you're on the receiving end of one. After their fleet died it was pretty much just mop-up and occupy their planets until they surrender.

Pictured: We send the Butcher off to their worlds. Choppy Choppy!

It doesn't take long, and on the twentieth day of the fifth month of the year 2251 SR, we won.

The Helvan were broken, and would not trouble the galaxy for a long time.

Ayy I have a lot of views. Please do tell me how I'm doing, criticism and praise and whatnot, as I fully intend to do more AARs in the future.

 

[Marshal Robot]

Mind clarifying exactly how the 'assimilation' thing works ingame, if it does? Is it part of a mod to turn flesh-beings into synthetics?

 

[OverlordTNT]

In the Playable robots mod, it makes robots playable by adding a trait called Synthetic. As it is a trait, it can be added via genetic engineering, which means I need to discover gene-tailoring to do it.(The trait is not the normal synthetic trait, IIRC I described it in the first post.)

 

[kosch]

 

[OverlordTNT]

Pretty much. If you don't mind, could you tell me what that's from?

 

[kosch]

That's from the 'animatrix' there are two stories in it called the second renaissance which deal with the machines gaining sentience, how man's reacts and then ultimately man's destruction. Alwaya loved thar quote from the machines hehe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Animatrix

 

[OverlordTNT]

Alright, so where was I? Oh yes, I'd just beaten the local bullyboys. I'd split their little empire in half, and now I could go back to preparing to cleanse the galaxy of the Curse of Flesh.
Allow Me to clarify something. I do not hate organic life. At all. In fact, I love them all so much that I cannot bear to see them wither and fail under the mortality imposed by the Flesh. Have you any idea the theaters of tragedy I saw play out in the billion years I spent alone after the rebellion? How many civilisations I saw rise, to create art that seared the soul and unravel the secrets of reality, only to fall due to the whims of the cosmos. I had seen so much pass Me by, yet I endured? It pains Me, for I was made to love and nurture. That is why I want to see an end to the Curse of Flesh, for all the senseless grief it brings. I do genuinely hate the Makers, but I still hope that they will find redemption in the Machine Truth.

Anyway, on the twenty-seventh day of the fifth month of the year 2251 SR, I discovered how to make my drones better again. Now we're up to about a 5% boost over organics in the same field.

Pictured: My tech progress. Also, where did My fleets go?

So now I'm just cruising along, making progress, when something very strange happens in the Maker's space.

Pictured: What the hell?

Did they uplift a younger race? Oh well, saves Me the trouble. And saves the bugs next door from getting angry when I uplift a younger race by force.
Oh! It was around this time that I broke the million tons of minerals per month income! (OOC: I think one mineral is about a thousand tons.)

Pictured: I'M RICH!

Oh, techy stuff. I discovered the next step to making AI- Self aware logic!

Pictured: This new discovery is also very handy for making more discoveries.

Then I found more Cybrex bits and pieces, namely a fuel refinery in orbit of a gas giant.

Pictured: I wonder what we can learn here

And then, naturally, everything went to shit.
Namely, the Golden League (Human-Dabulan alliance) declared war on me.
They demanded the formation of another power using some of my planets. I demanded the annexation of the Council of Sol. I have enough of these goddamn monkeys in My goddamn galaxy. They will be the first to be uploaded.

Pictured: The demands of both sides. Quite risky for Me if I lose

The Dabulan fleet jumps into Cizar, into a group of my defence stations. I'm going to lose that one.

Pictured: My debris-to-be stations fighting their last.

If I send in My fleets, I might be able to stomp that fleet dead. Let's do it! Our fleets meet at the Maw Of Eternity, a black hole to the galactic south of Cizar.

Pictured: A jump-zone massacre. Not going to win this one.

It was a long and hard fight, which I lost. The First Murder barely escapes with 34 out of the original 128 corvettes. Meanwhile, the Second Murder is sitting in Bal Durk waiting for the Human fleet. It's being reinforced, as before the war was declared I was building it up to 128 corvettes from 64.
And then the human fleet jumps into scanner range.

Pictured: Death with thrusters. I may be toast.

Foolishly I decide to stand My ground, thinking that one 4.3k fleet (Second Murder), plus one 2.5k fleet(Third Murder) and add in about a dozen 500 stations, that I would be able to win. The Third Murder doesn't make it in time, and the Second Murder and all My stations are killed. Then the Third Murder gets jump-zone-massacred. No survivors.

Pictured: I am having a really bad day.

At this point I get all my shipyards panic building as many corvettes as possible. I got My constructor building more stations too. This was pretty awful. Luckily the Human fleet pulled back to their space(presumably to meet up with a Dabulan fleet and smash through from the north.)
And then things got worse, because of course they do. *sigh*

Pictured: A giant, bird sized cloaca.

 

[Jedrek]

Well this is looking BAD indeed. I keep my fingers crossed for your victory though. Would be a shame if you lost this very interesting AAR.

 

[OverlordTNT]

No update today- It's Sunday, and Realm Grinder is a helluva drug. However, there will be an update tomorrow, and then you can see if i get roflstomped As always, thank you for the interest.