For a lark, I generated a galaxy with no warpgates. All empires would be stuck in their original solar systems until they developed rather late-game stellar manipulation technology to create artificial gates.
Naturally, I didn't expect the AI to handle this at all. So I self-imposed a couple challenges. My race of gentle plants (the Supox, heh) wouldn't develop any weapon technology until they witnessed combat. Even then, they would never bombard planets. The victory condition was completing 90% of the tech tree.
Things went very well. We colonized our cool red star system in record time, including the gas giants and icy worlds. Undisturbed, we were able to make every planet a beautiful utopia full of delicious CO2. Most research was devoted to stellar manipulation, and what wonders we discovered! We formed a brand new planet out of an asteroid belt, dissipated a warp storm, and even designed a device which, in theory, would create whole new bright, nourishing stars from background gases.
And our crowning achievement, the ability to *wrap* said stars in massive sphereworlds. Praise the suns 24/7!
All of that would have taken a super long time to actually do, though, and we were curious about other stars. I built two ships, the Enlightenment and Resistance. The first would open a warp gate (turns out I'd overrestimated the distances, and it could open a gate to *anywhere* in the galaxy). The other could close a gate, just in case. We didn't know war, but we had faced hostile environments. For the same reason we developed advanced shield technology, we made this failsafe.
The first "star system" was... Disappointing. A nebula, devoid of life or planets. We could develop it, but we wanted something more.
The second star system was... the same thing, but a different color. (It only occurred to me just now that these might not have always been nebula systems...)
The third system had... Three races!
One for each planet type gas/rock/ice. Our scout gaped at hulking dreadnoughts with massive spinal energy cannons, three fleets poised in an uneasy peace. Which turned to our strange blue portal, and the unarmed green ship that had spawned it...
"Hi friends, we would like a treaty of trade!" Came the the transmission, even as they sent a dreadnought through the portal. I had placed the portal right next to one of my forge worlds, which in retrospect was... hilariously naive. The dreadnought "panicked" and glassed the planet, its moon, and my portal-spawning ship. Trillions dead in the blink of an eye. "So how about that trade treaty huh?"
"Uh... uh... sure?" I signed the treaty, meanwhile scanning through the... side effects of our great research. We saw now how our amazing cosmic powers could be wielded as... weapons? But it would take time to properly harness such energies. In shock, we began research on gravity-wave "guns" to defend ourselves... Though surely this treaty meant that this was all a terrible misunderstanding! We would help them into a new age of enlightenment, literally, we would create all the stars and worlds they might want-
Oh, on the next turn the other two races sent their fleets in. Deep. 5 utopias burned with crystal-focused heat, or had their surfaces warped by strange chrono-weapons. Only two planets survived. It was simply incomprehensible. They didn't even DEMAND anything! Except... trade treaties.
We had developed the ability to create stars, yes. Along the way, we had discovered how to destroy them. These psychos had murdered nearly all of us, and treated us warmly afterwards. Clearly they had no regard for life whatsoever, and had to be destroyed. Or at least threatened with annihilation... We were panicking.
So development began of the great superweapon. A surprisingly tiny ship, carrying a gravimetric payload which would turn the system of horrors into another nebula. It would take years, but in the meantime we were no longer helpless. Our remaining two planets were rapidly covered in missile launchers and massive focused-gravity emitters. The dark dreadnoughts were heavily shielded, and enormous, but they twisted and rent in the most horrifying ways as they approached our planets. So much senseless death, and still the races acted as if nothing was wrong.
Fortunately, the strange custom of "trade treaty" turned the ships back. As if nothing had happened, there was peace. Looking over our charred and blasted worlds, we remembered a ship we had designed to prevent this. The "Resistance"... had been scuttled due to a resource shortage. Still, it was a better solution than paying murder with murder. We scrapped the star-destroyer and built a replacement gate-closer. Under the guise of this alien "treaty", it closed the gate. Maybe, centuries from now, we would return and offer them another chance...
"A plasma instability has been detected within the star Zitrod Star (sic). Our scientists predict it will destroy itself in approximately 3 years."
...
fuuuuuuuUUUUUUU-
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Topic: How did you last die? (Read 2401712 times)