Twitch Livestream Playthrough: Rock And Roll (Silicoids)

This is the short summary of a game that I played on Livestream in Fall 2023 as part of my ongoing Civ Fridays series. Despite its age, Master of Orion continues to be one of the most requested games for me to run on Livestream and this felt like a good change of pace after spending the previous months enveloped in Civ4 AI Survivor stuff. I had seen a few comments asking for a Silicoids game since they are the most unique race in Master of Orion and this would be another good opportunity to showcase the rocks. The Silicoids don't need to pay for waste cleanup at all and can colonize any planet type from the start of the game but suffer counterbalancing penalties of all population growth operating at half speed (they treat all planets as Hostile) along with being rated Poor in every tech field other than Computers. This makes the Silicoids very strong in the early stages of the game while slowly becoming less and less powerful as other races gain more advanced technology. This game turned out to be a great demonstration of the strengths and weaknesses of the Silicoids as it streched out long enough to highlight their issues in the lategame.

I named this playthrough Rock And Roll and generated a map with standard settings for Impossible difficulty. The homeworld that we named Bedrock (the first in a long series of planets named with rock puns of some kind) was situated in the southeast corner of the galaxy with what appeared to be a comfortable amount of room for expansion. There were only eight yellow stars out there beyond the two visible in the above screenshot, with most of them clustered on the western and northern edges of the map. There were nine worlds in the immediate vicinity for me to grab, all of which the Silicoids would be able to use immediately with their racial bonus, then a potential group in the northeast that I might be able to reach. I sent my colony ship to the northern white star due to the need to expand range towards the center of the map; it held a Barren 45 planet which would be a disaster for anyone else but was perfectly fine for the rocks. We named the world Plymouth and the game was afoot.

A Silicoid opening doesn't play out the same way as any of the other races in MOO. The Silicoids completely avoid waste cleanup costs which is a massive deal at the start of the game where normally a third of all spending goes up into smoke to keep your planets from choking on pollution. They can therefore build factories and colony ships faster than anyone else, even faster than the Klackons, and the player can begin colonizing other worlds at a ridiculously fast date. The crippling downside is that population growth is atrociously slow and it takes forever to max out your planets; factory construction will outstrip population growth in the worst possible way. The Silicoids therefore have the highest skillcap to play out of any of the races in this game, just as the Sakkra have the lowest skillcap, and it requires real skill at managing population to move transports around and try to keep as many planets in the fat part of the growth curve as possible. The player cannot afford to grow population at 20 BC apiece in the early game although that can be the correct decision in some circumstances to avoid having planets sit around with unused factories for ages on end.

Anyway, I've had the best success with the Silicoids at building factories until reaching 2x population so that all of the population is employed on the homeworld, then swapping over to research or colony ship production as needed. This is typically somewhere around 55 pop / 110 factories to provide an idea of how far short of the max numbers the rocks will be working with. There were enough planets in the vicinity that it looked like I only needed Range 4 tech to begin expanding... which was a good thing because there was no Range 5 option when I opened the Propulsion tech tree. I started out by grabbing the Arid 65 planet at the green star to the south, the only one of decent size, then colonized the Dead 50 planet to the east. A typo on the naming screen caused the southern planet to become "o" while the eastern world took its intended name of Plymouth. That was the one real downside to this starting position: every planet that I found was on the small size aside from a Poor 100 planet in the backlines. The Arid 65 world was the largest and most planets were in the 20-35 base size range. Hostile planets tend to be smaller but they also tend to be Rich or Ultra Rich and I didn't have any of those.

I had seen Human scouts buzzing around in the north and knew that they had to be located at the nearby yellow star. When we made formal contact, I was stunned to discover that they only controlled two planets in their whole empire. All of the worlds to their south had various degrees of hostility that they lacked the tech to colonize while they apparently lacked the range to reach the group of stars in the northeast. This was great news in one sense as my Silicoids were in prime position to snap up many of these locations and plant the blue flag of the rocks across the galaxy. On the other hand, the first GNN message had relayed that the Psilons were the first ones to reach 6 planets. If the Humans were this stunted, it meant that a huge portion of the map was going to be open for the brains to expand into. That could cause major problems down the line so I was hoping that the Sakkra would do their usual lizard thing and expand all over the map. Much better to have a strong Sakkra opponent than a Psilon one, believe me.

Since I didn't need tech to expand outwards, the homeworld of Bedrock largely stayed on colony ship production for ages. I would build a colony ship, then run a turn of factory construction to allow factories to catch up to the population growth over the past few turns, then back to colony ships again. Gibraltar had to carry the research load and supply the new colonies with at least a little population to let them get started; it takes egregiously long to get a Silicoid colony up and running if you don't ferry in at least some colonists. This meant that overall expansion was excellent while the research pace was anemic, very typical for the Silicoids. The rocks also tend to be weaker than you would think for someone who has a whole bunch of colonies because all of their worlds are nowhere near max population. This game was even more painful than usual in that regard because almost every planet was small or medium in size; at least Terraforming +10 into Terraforming +20 helped those small worlds out a lot. (The Silicoids are always guaranteed to have both techs present because by rule they can't research the other Planetology techs.)

This was a very concerning GNN update:

Hey, remember how small the Humans were with only two planets under their control? Well, the GNN newscaster was now telling me that the Bulrathi and the Meklar were EVEN SMALLER than the Humans! And my population remained fairly low due to being the Silicoids but I still outstripped the Sakkra who have the opposite benefit of incredible population growth. If the lizards were below me on the charts, they had to be fairly stunted themselves. That left the Psilons in first place which was, uhhh, not a good sign. Very much not a good sign! Trust me, you really don't want to face Psilons who have free run on half the galaxy. I might not have a choice though due to the apparent feebleness of everyone else on this map. Interesting times indeed.

For the moment, there was nothing that I could do beyond continue developing. My colonies were all building factories and I was still trying to claim every planet available which was a lot of them as the Silicoids. It's imperative to priorize scouting when playing the rocks because you can often find Toxic or Radiated worlds that no one else can colonize deep in enemy space. I would end up getting one or two of them later on in this game, places that the AI simply ignores because it lacks the tech to settle them. I was fortunate that my one close neighbor was the Humans who had drawn an Honorable Technologist personality, making them easy to befriend and thereby avoid conflict while all of my planets were still developing. Eventually the Humans picked up some additional range and broke through my scout blockades to settle several additional worlds in the northeast. I was disappointed not to get them all but it wasn't worth picking a fight with the Humans while so many of my planets were still immature. When I made contact with the Psilons shortly thereafter, the overall state of the galaxy became clear:

The good news was that the brains still hadn't expanded beyond 7 planets while I had 14 to my name plus a few avenues for additional expansion. The bad news was that the Bulrathi were apparently stuck on their homeworld and the Sakkra had a mere 3 planets with little chance of growing into a major empire. The Meklars were further situated in the southwest corner with 2-3 planets themselves and that meant the entire northwest would eventually be taken by the Psilons. Sooner or later they would have enough tech to colonize every star that had a planet present and the distances were so far that I wouldn't be able to stop them. At least I had enough territory of my own to become a similar powerhouse although again many of these planets were small in size and had all of the various Silicoid penalties to limit their effectiveness. I would eventually colonize the Radiated planet to the west and another Radiated planet in the north-central part of the map, plus I had finally picked up two Rich planets (both small planets with base sizes around 20-30 again, argh). The one star with no planet present was in a terrible spot as it denied me the range to reach the Terran and Dead planets off to the west which would be snapped up by the Sakkra in short order. Maybe that would help them offset the Psilons to some degree, I wasn't getting my hopes up though.

The Galactic Council met for the first time shortly after this point and I was able to cast my votes for the Psilons to score the big diplo benefit. Then the Council met again a few turns later since it was 2375 and I was able to duplicate the same vote; this was enough to get the brains to Relaxed relations and ensure that they would avoid conflict for a long time. I was able to stay peaceful for most of the first 100 turns before the Sakkra and Bulrathi eventually decided to declare war. They were weak and far away, not a threat on their own, however I was concerned that their AI cheese alliances would bring in more partners to the conflict. That was exactly what happened with the Humans piling on shortly before the 2400 Council vote; I had to scramble to get a treaty with the Sakkra to ensure that I wouldn't lose the next vote as I was still a little bit short of a veto block. Terraforming +30 was in the percentages and I expected that would be enough to get me over the 1/3 hump to prevent any future losses.

More importantly, I was now dragged into a war with the Humans who were right on my doorstep. Enough time had passed that my various planets were mostly maxed out on population and factories (with me paying through the nose to grow the final 25% of the pop on each world via Eco spending) and had started some missile base construction. I had Planetary Shield V and Scatter Pack V both in the tech tree and was working towards each of them, the default go-to solution for stopping early game aggression in MOO. The Humans chose to strike at two planets, Mantle and Pebble, with the former lacking any defenses while Pebble managed to assemble five bases. That's when I had a chance to get a scan on the main Human warship design for the first time:

SIXTY FUSION BOMBS?!? My bases with 2 points of shielding were utterly helpless against that kind of planetary damage. In fact, the very weakness of the Humans had caused them to lack much in the way of Weapons tech and therefore led them to design ships with the one tool that they did have: Fusion Bombs, ugh. Mantle had no chance and was obliterated from orbit without so much as scratching the Human ships. There was another Dreadnought incoming towards Pebble and I realized that my only hope was to fight this threat with ships of my own. Although missile bases were useless here, the Dreadnought design was so heavy on bombs that it would be weak in ship-to-ship combat. I had fortunately researched the Neutron Pellet Gun previously, the best beam weapon of the early game, and threw together a Small design with Nuclear engines for 2 movement speed in combat. Actually I made three identical NPG designs since the Dreadnought only had 1 movement and a triplet of ships can together block an enemy ship with 1 movement from ever reaching a planet's surface to drop bombs. Shipyards across the Silicoid empire immediately began building these new designs.

The missile bases on Pebble were still firing nukes which couldn't even penetrate the 4 points of shielding on the Human ships. Pebble's defenses were blown away without achieving anything (ironically, Scatter Pack V missiles then popped immediately after the planet was overrun, heh). Fortunately the Humans didn't destroy the planet completely from orbit, instead holding position to conduct a ground invasion. I rallied about 250 of the NPG fighters to Pebble and blasted the Dreadnought out of the skies, saving the planet for the moment. After that, the Humans were more interested in clashing with the other races with whom they were at war and I was able to get them to sign peace a little bit later. I had dodged a bullet for the moment and went back to teching upwards; I needed a better weapon of some kind to launch my own counter-invasion of the Humans as I currently lacked anything which would punch through their shields.

Despite my best efforts, I wasn't able to steal or trade for some kind of bomb from the other AI races. I was making trades for outdated techs with the Bulrathi, Sakkra, and Meklars whenever I wasn't at war with them because they were so pathetic, however none of them had a useful weapon for me. The Humans had 9 points of total shielding for their bases which ruled out most of the early game options. Finally I turned to the Fusion Beam that I was researching: the heavy version of the weapon deals 4-30 damage which was enough to punch through the Humans defenses even with the half damage penalty against planets. I almost never use beam weapons to crack bases but it was the only option available here. Since I had the Autorepair special, the best ship design was a Huge hull packing lots of goodies; too bad the Heavy Fusion Beams took up so much space that I could only fit 12 of them on board. Also less than useful: the only Weapons tech option at the next tier was Ion Stream Projector, certainly a useful special but the lack of Antimatter or Omega-V bombs was a major gap.

This Heavy Fusion design wasn't particularly good at fighting other ships since it lacked much in the way of guns. It was very tanky for this stage of the game, however, and designed to break apart the missile bases of the Humans (who had inevitably returned to war with me again). My rivals to the north only had Hyper-V missiles for their bases which were almost useless against this design (Hyper-Vs deal 6 damage per shot against the 5 points of shielding here). I launched my initial attack against the Human world of Argus, with one Heavy Fusion design squaring off against 10 defending bases. The combat went exactly as planned, with the bases inflicting minimal chip damage which was instantly healed away by the Autorepair special. The fight timed out after hitting the round limit with 6 bases destroyed and I simply came back again the next turn to finish the job.

Now came the hard part: the ground invasion.

The Silicoids are the worst race in the game, bar none, at conducting ground invasions. (The Sakkra and the Bulrathi are the best due to their racial bonuses.) Since the Silicoids treat all planets as Hostile, it's very expensive for them to grow additional population with the Eco slider and throw it at their enemies in planetary invasions. Things were even worse in this game because I had so many planets on the small size; even with Terraforming +40 already finished, it was PAINFUL having a bunch of worlds with max sizes of 60 or 70 that could only send off 6-8 population points each turn. The Silicoids are supposed to offset this with the Cloning tech, which is guarateed to be in their tech tree... except that in this game it wasn't present due to some kind of bug! Instead I had to research Advanced Eco Restoration to advance the Planetology tree which did absolutely nothing and isn't supposed to be a research option at all. No clue what was going on there but this was a major setback that made it very difficult to launch invasions. The Humans also had +30 to their ground combat rolls from their Armored Exoskeleton and Personal Absorption Shield techs which led to rounds like this one where I landed 30 rocks and killed all of 8 defenders. Worse than 4:1 casualties for the marines, rough stuff.

Still, I did grind down the defenders of Argus eventually and captured the planet after about ten turns of invading. I picked up Personal Absorption Shield in the ruins which was a big help, dropping the Human ground combat advantage down to +20. The invasions were still costly while being a bit less suicidal. Now that I had captured the first Human planet and had about a dozen of the Heavy Fusion designs in operation, there was little that they could do to stop me from crushing through the rest of their holdings. I tore through their planets in the northeast corner of the map one by one and took them all for myself over the next two dozen turns. Horrendous luck in terms of finding tech meant that two different planets yielded zero techs despite having 150+ factories, something that I've pretty much never seen before. Even so, the Humans couldn't stop me and I completely wiped them out from the map, taking the genocide penalty in the process. The Humans even were kind enough to research Ion Drives for warp 6 movement right before their elimination which I took in the final invasion. I had also managed to trade something to the Meklars for Omega-V Bomb which plugged one of the remaining holes in my offensive setup. I was approaching 50% of the galactic population and this game looked to be in its finishing stages; I was thinking that I would probably win at one of the next few Council votes and that would be it.

That assumption was dead wrong and this game would drag out for a long while longer. In retrospect, I probably should have left the Humans alive with one world somewhere to avoid taking the diplomatic penalty from eliminating them. While the Psilons had left me alone for the entirety of the game up to this point, they clearly didn't care for my actions and sent their main fleet after my recent Human acquisitions before I'd had a chance to stand up defenses. The Human homeworld of Sol and the nearby planet of Hyboria were both on the large side and would be critical additions to my territory if I could hold onto them. The Psilons had other ideas though as I was unable to stop this massive armada when it arrived on Sol's doorstep:

On the positive side, the Psilons were mostly fielding gunship designs which could be defended against with improved shielding tech. I had 10 points of shielding at the moment and that would go up to 15 points of shielding when I finished researching Planetary Shield X which was about halfway finished. On the not-so-positive side, 10 points of shielding wasn't sufficient to stop Tachyon Beams (1-25 damage) from hitting Sol's bases and the brains had an awful lot of them in that Sun Fire stack. They obliterated Sol immediately by bombing from orbit and it was small consolation that I was able to do the same thing to them at the spud world of Mantle nearby. I was also working with highly obsolete Hyper-X missiles which did basically nothing against the heavily shielded Psilon designs at 8 damage per shot. The old Scatter Pack Vs literally were useless and I had to remember to toggle them off in each combat. The Psilon ships had excellent engines and were zipping around the map at warp 7 speed which made it hard to know where and how to defend. After blasting apart Sol, they hit Hyboria next and then proceeded on to one of my longstanding colonies at Gravel. Three major planets of mine, wiped out just like that.

It was the Sun Fire design that was killing most of my planets due to those Tachyon Beams. I probably could have saved Gravel if Planetary Shield X had popped sooner; instead, it went all the way to 80% odds before finally completing. This was enough to protect my existing worlds since they now had 15 points of shielding, enough to stop the 1-25 damage of the Tachyon Beams when factoring in the half damage penalty against planets. I spent some time clashing with the Psilons along the border between our territory, razing the new colonies that they tried to set up at Sol / Hyboria / Mantle / Gravel to keep them from entrenching their gains. One of the biggest weaknesses of the Master of Orion AI is that it always keeps moving its fleets around, never keeping them in one place to defend a strategic conquest. Eventually we signed a peace treaty which allowed me to rebuild Gravel from scratch while I was temporarily safe from brain aggression.

When the Psilons came back for another round of combat, I made a major effort to invade Hyboria:

This was far from an easy task given the Psilon doom fleet highlighted in that screenshot which kept buzzing around the area and the inherent problem of conducting another invasion against an opponent with superior ground technology. It was worthwhile to make the effort though as every tech pulled in a successful invasion was another lottery ticket to catch up to the Psilons. They were roughly 20 tech levels ahead in each field and I desperately needed to capture technology somewhere to close the gap. Thus turn after turn I was sending the maximum population that each nearby planet could afford in a grueling attempt to capture this target. I think I had about eight planets in all sending as much pop as they could in this invasion, with the Poor world of Sisyphus being the best contributor at roughly 18 pop per turn. Most of the planets couldn't manage much beyond 10 pop and I would have given anything for that missing Cloning tech.

Gradually, gradually Hyboria's defenders were worn down at the same -30 ground odds that I had faced earlier against the Humans (thanks to the brains having Powered Armor and the Personal Barrier Shield). After an ungodly amount of rocks died in the course of these invasions, I finally captured Hyboria and found... one tech, Battle Computer V. Granted there were only 97 factories present but this was still a rotten bit of luck, absolutely nothing of use to be found there. I tried to stand up defenses at Hyboria following capture but that also proved to be a futile effort as the Psilon doom stack came back and wiped it out before I could secure it. Then to make matters worse, the Psilons attacked me at my Rich world Planet X which was apparently inside the nebula (I thought it was just outside it). With no shielding for protection, they blasted through the defending bases and then conducted a successful ground invasion that stole Omega-V Bomb tech from me - arghhhhhh!

That settled things: I couldn't take and hold any of these planets along the front lines of battle. The only option was scorched earth, razing everything and keeping the disputed planets locked in spud status for the moment. We were deadlocked in the Galactic Council as well with the Psilons having 20 votes to my 19 votes, neither of us able to gain the 2/3rds majority needed for a victory. I sent my fleet against these planets and annihilated their underbuilt defenses whenever the Psilon fleet was elsewhere on the map. Sol, Hyboria, Mantle, and Planet X were all repeatedly razed whenever the Psilons tried to fortify them. Sometimes this is the best tactical option in Master of Orion when you aren't strong enough to control a location yourself and you only want to deny it to a rival power. I could not afford to have the Psilons gaining control of any more planets, not when they already had Advanced Soil Enrichment which my Silicoids could never use and were closing in on the end of the tech tree in Planetology. Some of the YouTube commenters thought that the game was lost at this point and I'll agree that it was a rather bleak moment. Time tends to be on the player's side though in Master of Orion; if you can keep breathing and avoid a Council loss, there's often a chance to turn events in your favor.

While we were at an impasse along the main borders in former Human space, I had identified another potential Psilon target in the deep south. That was Imra, a small planet with relatively light defenses in an isolated position far away from where the Psilons were moving their main fleets. I've written a number of times before about how the AI tends to prioritize the center of the map with their movements and often ignores planets in the corners and along the edges, just something about how their pathfinding happens to be programmed. I had been slowly expanding in this area over the last 50 turns, with Alcatraz a Radiated world that the AIs all ignored and then Flintstone and Zoctan former Sakkra planets where I'd been able to hold a fleet overhead long enough to construct missile bases and a planetary shield. While half of my fleet kept the main battle lines locked in hot potato status, the other half bombed out the bases at Imra and then held position to defend the incoming transports. Once again this invasion was an exceptionally painful process working with the Silicoid population growth penalties against an AI opponent who had superior ground technology. It had to be done though, no way around it.

My Silicoids got it done eventually after suffering terrible casualties and captured Imra's 304 factories. This time I landed the full six techs and there were some real doozies present: Star Gates, Planetary Shield XV, Powered Armor, and Lightning Shield techs along with the less useful Stinger Missiles and the unusable Soil Enrichment. These finds increased my Construction and Force Field tech levels by massive amounts (Lightning Shield in particular is tech level 46!) while also beefing up the defenses of my missile bases and making future ground invasions easier. With 22 points of shielding, I was now protected against pretty much all of the weapons the Psilons were fielding except a Bio Terminator design that they had recently started using. Imra's captured factories and southern location made it easy to flip around into a secure base of my own since the Psilons were ignoring this part of the map. Then the brains decided to pop up and ask for peace, something I was more than happy to give them. I immediately rushed out a series of colony ships and grabbed the contested Sol and Hyboria locations for myself, using the protection of the peace treaty to start building them up for about the fifth time. This looked like a decisive turning point in the game as I finally began to break out of the long stalemate with the Psilons.

What to do during this reprieve before the Psilons inevitably came back again? The best option was to gain territory from the other races in the game:

Yes, the Sakkra and the Meklars were still around although it would have been easy to forget about the pair of them tucked into the southwest corner of the map. With the Psilons temporarily pacified, I started rolling through the remaining lizard and cyborg worlds which lacked enough technology to stop me. I began at Quayal and then continued onwards to Sssla and Meklon themselves, both of which had massive amounts of factories available for capture. No techs though as I had already stolen or traded for everything that the lizards had in their tech tree. With 500+ factories, these AI homeworlds were easy to flip around into secure Silicoid fortresses and they would never come under serious attack from the Psilons. I was working with Controlled Robotics V and Terraforming +60 at this point which meant absolutely massive factory counts approaching 1000 in total. In fact, these former AI homeworlds quickly became some of my best planets for shipbuilding (along with the former Sol which we had renamed Earth in a double pun), able to send newly constructed ships anywhere on the map once they built their Star Gates. I was essentially feeding on the weak to strengthen my own empire - Master of Orion can be a very ruthless game sometimes.

I didn't expect the peace with the Psilons to last for very long. Much to my surprise, the brains seemed content to let the treaty remain in place for quite a while which was perfectly fine with me. I used that time to devour most of the Sakkra and Meklar planets (I planned to leave them each one world but the lizards eventually wiped out the cyborgs) and then build up a fleet for use against a new target. The Livestream audience had suggested that this would be a good opportunity to capture Orion and for once I think it did make sense to do so. Orion was in the extreme northeast corner of the map where the Psilons were unlikely to target it and this long cold war was the perfect situation for taking on the Guardian to secure the uberplanet. My weapon of choice was the Particle Beam which deals 10-20 damage per shot and halves the effectiveness of shields, very important against the Guardian's 9 points of shielding. I couldn't fit everything that I wanted on a Small hull and had to use a Medium size instead that carried 3 Particle Beams along with as much attack level as I could manage. I ran the numbers on stream and calculated that it would take about 667 ships to kill the Guardian in one shot, then targeted 1000 ships due to the inevitable losses taken when closing with the target. Once the stack of Particle Beam ships was large enough, I moved them through the nearest Star Gate to engage:

I skillfully managed to dodge around the Scatter Pack X missiles without taking a hit and closed with the Guardian. Two volleys of shots each did 5000+ damage and that was that for the defender of Orion. (There were three banks of guns on the Particle Beam design so I had considerable overkill here; I was expecting more losses from those Scatter Pack X missiles.) Orion held Death Ray tech as always along with Warp 7 engines, the outdated Warp Dissipator, and the non-useful Subspace Interdictor since the Psilons lacked Subspace Teleporter. That was far from the best tech haul but I couldn't complain about having a planet of base size 120 added to my empire. I flooded in population from nearby worlds and set it to building factories for the forseeable future.

By now the Psilons had finally declared war again and were back for our third or fourth round of combat. They actually had the Negative Fleet Bug trigger which set two of their stacks to 32,000 ships, something that likely hurt them more than it helped as the maintenance on that fleet killed the Psilon research effort. It also kept them stuck on their current generation of military designs, ships featuring the Megabolt Cannon and Plasma Cannon, which were weapons too old to break through my shielding. The only dangerous ship was a Dark Star design with a Lightning Shield and 2 Bio Terminators; fortunately I had the Bio Toxin Antidote tech and I was researching Universal Antidote to limit the usefulness of their death spores. Basically the brains had an unbeatable fleet that I couldn't touch but which also couldn't break through my defenses. That situation tends to be a big advantage for the player who can simply dance around the invincible fleet and strike wherever it isn't on the map. Sure enough, I designed a new Huge gunship sporting 46 Particle Beams, 31 Omega-V bombs, Battle Computer IX, Class XV shields and Adamantium Armor for defenses, plus the Autorepair, High Energy Focus, and Ion Stream Projector specials. I called this the Doomship, and once I was able to construct it in large numbers, I was confident I could start taking Psilon core worlds.

My first target was Toranor, a lightly defended Psilon world at the top of the map which I had conveniently built a Star Gate next to earlier. I was able to blast through the defenses without much trouble and conduct a ground invasion over several turns. Toranor yielded Powered Armor tech to make future invasions easier along with the big prize pictured above, Terraforming +100 (it also gave me Advanced Soil Enrichment which my rocks couldn't use). I had been working with Terraforming +60 tech so that was another 40 population on every single planet in my empire which now spanned more than half the galaxy. I was reasonably confident that this would be enough population to win the next Council vote which was coming up in about half a dozen turns. I paused my offensive for the moment to terraform everything and then grow the additional population with Eco spending, wanting to make sure that everything had maxed out in pop before the upcoming vote. When the next vote took place for the year 2600, it turned out to be a nailbiter:

I had 46/70 votes which was just barely short of an outright victory at 65.7%. The Psilons had 23 votes remaining which wasn't quite enough for a 1/3 veto block; even though they had been losing planets, they had finished Complete Terraforming (+120) along with Advanced Soil Enrichment techs and the planets that they did have were all enormous. The final vote belonged to the forgotten Sakkra who, in an unbelievable twist, cast their single vote in my favor to tip me over the victory threshhold and deliver the win! OK so this wasn't that big of a deal, I would have won easily in 25 more turns at the next Council vote, but it was still hilarious that the Sakkra actually made a real difference here. The viewers also pointed out that the empire that captures Orion actually gets a small diplomatic boost in the Council elections which may have swung the lizards over to my side. It's pretty neat to think that taking Orion might have really mattered in this game; I also would have been short of the population needed without Orion and its 220 pop.

Afterwards, I played an additional half hour on Livestream to demonstrate that my new Doomships could successfully invade a Psilon core world. I took Kakata, a fortress world in the south with 230 pop and 80 missile bases on defense, and if I could capture that planet, I could take any of their planets. The brains showed up at the very end of the game with a new design featuring Plasma Torpedoes along with a Lightning Shield and a Cloaking Device. This was a really nasty ship for cracking planetary bases and it was getting close to breaking through the defenses of some of my worlds in former Human space. However, it was strong against missiles and weak against beam weapons, and it would have been easy prey for my growing Doomship stack once I moved it into the main theatre of conflict. It is a bit of a shame that I didn't get to crush the new Psilon design, however the Livestream had run for more than three hours at this point and I was content to call this game a wrap given that I had already won in the Council a few turns earlier. I have absolute confidence that I could have ground the Psilon core worlds into dust over the following turns if it had been needed for victory.

This was a strange game overall. At times it felt like a total cakewalk and this thing really should have been finished off much sooner given how many worlds I was able to colonize peacefully with the Silicoids. The fly in the ointment from start to finish was the Psilons, doing their best runaway impression in this game and putting every other AI race to shame. They probably would have been victorious if I hadn't done such a good job of claiming planets for myself as they came close to being unstoppable without ever having much more than 1/3 of the galaxy under their control. This was an excellent showcase for the strengths and weaknesses of the Silicoids as a race, from their amazing landgrab potential to their painful, PAINFUL invasions that I was forced to do over and over again. In one last twist, Advanced Cloning tech was sitting in the percentages at the end of the game without ever completing its research. That... would have been helpful!

Thanks as always for following along, I hope this game was entertaining.