Those Altarians are the baddest "good" race I've ever met. I just got done with a game with me as human, the altarians, yor, drengin and iconians on a small map.
The iconians got a little pissed at me when I stole one of their planets with an influence take-over, but they got over it and left me alone as long as I threw them a tech every now and then...usually something I didn't mind giving away.
The Drengin were the first to be agressors. I was playing on Challenging, and I had fallen way behind in pretty much every category, but I felt like I was really just as strong as most of the others...those graphs can be a bit misleading. The Drengin declared war on me because I was the weakling, but I showed them up by pretty easily conquering three of their worlds inside of 3 months.
After that they begged me for peace, which I accepted so that I wou ld have a little breathing time before i conquered their last 4 worlds. This was about the time they went to war with the Altarians. The Altarians had a huge lead on weapons tech in this game...so they were pounding the drengin fleets into dust. I managed to take one of their last 4 worlds, after which they surrended....to the alterians!
So the Altarians, Iconians and myself were all buddy buddy, but not in a formalized way (I know I'm not the only one who has a hard time making aliances...seems like I have to give them every tech I own, plus a couple of planets) . I wanted formal alliances with the alterians and the iconians, so I figured I should go to war with the Yor. The last Drengin world I'd conquered placed me close enough to do so finally. The Altarians were already at war with them, and the iconians certainly harbor no good feelings towards them, so I figured I would engratiate myself to everyone.
Again, I crushed the Yor fairly easily. I took 4 of their worlds and they begged for mercy. I demanded one last world as my price for peace. It was Iconia V, the world immediately adjacent to their homeworld. I'm not entirely sure why they thought it was a good idea to give me a planet within 10 parsecs of their three remaining planets, but oh well, I wasn't going to complain.
Iconia V was a crappy planet, though, and if it was lodged squarely in the heart of Yor influence. I had just acquired this planet and it was already on the verge of revolt. I'd been running a pretty decent deficit, so I couldn't build anymore starbases, so I moved my invasion timetable ahead. My spies told me that there was a Restaurant of Eternity on Iconia, and my troops hadn't had anything other than space rations in weeks. By taking that world I would link my sphere of influence all the way across the quadrant and even make some headway into iconian and altarian space.
The plan worked. Iconia was mine, but those damnable Yor decided to spit their robotic contempt into my face by surrendering to the Altarians. Maybe it was because those two surrendered Yor worlds were now in my sphere of Influence, but that took my relations with the Altarians from Warm to Hostile in a single week.
The Altarian military was no joke. They had Plasma weaponry and were far ahead in research. I, on the other hand, was having a hard time keeping my economic output over 50%. After all I'd conquered 8 worlds in less than a year, and they were all undergoing reconstruction. My situation did not look good. I couldn't convince the Iconians to help me, and my first Frigate class ship was still under construction while the Altarians had already incorporated capital class ships into almost every fleet.
They declared war the next week. I knew they would take their time mobilizing, massing their ships into fleets that could crush my fighters. I had one chance: the drengin and yor surrenders had left 5 the Altarians with 5 planets that were in sectors under my control. I exploited my advantage, taking all five with the transports I had left over from the Yor invasion.
I'd given them a bloody nose, but these planets were not the Altarians stronghold worlds, nor were they particularly heavy industrial producers. The Altarian fleets started to come in to my sensor range. They werer 5 ships strong and my fighters had no beam defenses. What they did have was a missile attack of 6, and the Altarians had no defenses for my missile weaponry. My first few medium captial ships turned back the invasion forces and I got a peace deal.
I built up fleets of shielded ships and started making grabs for the Altarian industrial worlds. I had good enough intelligence at this point to know where to hit them the hardest. Altaria itself would be the hardest nut to crack. They'd put up orbital fleet managers and an Omega Defense system which doubled the hitpoints of their altready formidable crafts. My ships were heavy on experience, though, having survived dozens of combat engagements they sported 3 times their initial hitpoints. I took Altaria without losing a single ship.
From here on out I was playing cleanup. The Altarians wouldn't surrender, but I had them beat and they knew it. I had to bribe the Iconians to keep them from going to war with the Altarians so that they would have no choice but to surrender to me. All but a tiny pocket of remote Iconian worlds were in my sphere of influence now. Once the Altarians finally gave in I controlled 98% of the galaxy. I considered briefly the invasion of Iconia. Their ships were even more formidable than the Altarian ships, but they were not battle hardened, nor were they particularly numerous.
No, in the end the lives of my people were too valuable to waste on 5 middling worlds, only one of which was even as nice as Earth. Cultural supremacy is not as satisfying as bloody conquest, but my hunger will return again soon, and the Iconians have no where else to go.
