Now that I knew who I was going to be matched up against, there remained the task of, you know, putting together an actual fleet. One of the reasons I hadn't done any shipbuilding up to this point was that I had been stuck with Retro (warp 1) engines, having missed out on the first upgrade. With Sub-light (warp 3) engines finally in hand, I could put together some designs that wouldn't be hopelessly immobile. Since I had already discovered the Auto Repair special (first time it was in my tree out of six total games played!), I went with a large gunship sporting neutron blasters. Maybe I should have gone with a huge design because of the Auto Repair special (?), but what I came up with seemed to work well enough. I also drew up a small bomber, warp 3, carrying one fusion bomb. No missile boats, because I was still running around with nothing better than Hyper-Vs! With those two pieces, I figured I had enough to begin some offensive action.
Before I could go on the offensive, however, I first had to defend against the Sakkra fleet. They were intent on attacking my frontline worlds, which fortunately had plenty of bases (although with nothing better than Hyper-Vs to shoot at them, I wasn't as safe as I should have been!) When I did order the attack, I went after Firma, the weakest planet on the front lines:
My border worlds you can see above (Exis, Aurora, and Jinga) all have at least 20 bases already, and I'm adding more whenever possible. Mu Delphi has done nothing but build bases (and factories) for its whole existance, as my exposed point world. The purple ships look like they're heading to Exis, but they were actually charging past it to attack the world behind it in my back lines! (Smart AI) I had to scramble to stand up some bases at that planet, Primordius, but since it was a former Terran 95 (and even larger now after terraforming) that wasn't too hard to do.
The attack you see me ordering above actually failed! 
I hadn't realized that the Sakkra were very strong on shielding; they had a Class X Planetary shield in addition to Class II deflectors, cutting out most of the damage from my Fusion bombers. I would have to return a little bit later with more bombers (which wasn't hard to do, since I could build more than a hundred each turn). In the meantime, the main Sakkra fleet made a move on Exis. This could be a decisive battle!
I don't have much of a fleet on hand, you can see, but those 22 bases will pack a punch. Here's what was on those designs:
The Spectre and Spirit ships were completely irrelevant, but the Titan and Juggernaut designs (especially the Titan one) were pretty nasty. Fusion Beams were a step up from the Neutron Blasters my gunships were using! And those Heavy Fusion Beams could even punch through the shielding on my bases to do damage. I focused on shooting down the Titans first, and then proceeded onto the Juggernauts. When my Blaster ship was about to be killed I retreated it, after which the Sakkra retreated most of their fleet. I managed to kill off all of the Titans though, and that was the most dangerous part of the Sakkra fleet. They would continue building large swarms of those Juggernauts though, which remained a serious danger to my ships, if not to my bases.
Our navies continued to clash, but as I added more bases I lost less and the Sakkra lost more. It wasn't long before my worlds were impervious to attack and I was able to focus on bomber production, soon taking out the bases on Firma and clearing the way for a ground invasion. Once the Bulrathi marines touched down, it was all over:
Firma was a small world, but I was still able to loot two techs from it, one of which was highly significant:
Fusion Beams! There goes the Sakkra advantage in fleet to fleet combat. I immediately redesigned my Blaster ship into a Fusion design, upgrading from 6 Neutron Blasters to 7 Fusion Beams, and nearly doubling my overall average damage per shot (from 43.5 to 70, if I've done the calculations right - not counting shielding). The difference in damage was immediately noticeable.
While my older Blaster designs held back to protect the newly-acquired Firma, I sent my new Fusion ships along with a swarm of bombers to attack Sssla. The first attack sent over 250 bombers and failed! I took out about a dozen bases, but they had too much shielding and too many bases (almost 30) for me to take the planet. Looks like a poor estimate on my part, heh. Still, this is a game of strategy and not battle tactics, so I returned again with the SECOND wave!
I came back with almost 350 bombers and made short work of Sssla this time. (One thing about small ships, I keep forgetting that you need REALLY large numbers of them to get the job done. I'll try to remember that in the future.) Sssla had an obscene amount of factories for a non-Meklar planet, so I made sure to capture it intact:
That granted me the full six tech maximum, including this gem:
Excellent. In time, I would steal or capture Soil Enrichment, Atmospheric Terraforming, and Terraforming +30 from the Sakkra. Their Technologist strategy meant that they had really been pushing the Planetology tech - which I was quite happy to take from them! 
We're gonna grow some BIG worlds for our goofy space bears, heh.
Here's what the galactic map looked like in the wake of my capture of Sssla:
You can finally see the Meklar and the Silicoids, in particular the latter race's disgusting spread across the north edge of the map via alliances. Since I wanted the rocks to be my opponent in the elections, I had to make sure not to capture too many of their worlds and reduce their population. It should also be noticeable how I had grabbed a few additional Radiated planets in my back lines, including a Rich planet and two Ultra Riches! I put the Rich planet onto Reserve spending and used the Ultra Riches exclusively for fleetbuilding. (One of the U-Riches, Bootis, had a base size of 40 and I eventually terraformed it with Atmospheric, Advanced Soil, and +40 into a size 145 planet! LOT of production there.)
The Mrrshans clashed with the Alkari and Meklar fleets on the right side of the map, to no conclusion as far as I could tell, aside from creating a couple of spud worlds. That allowed me to focus on the Sakkra with minimal interruptions, invading each one and grinding them down one world at a time. I was still looting some important prizes from them too, especially this one:
There goes another one of the advantages the lizards had over me; I'd been operating with Class V Planetary shields. Once I added the new shields all over the place, I would be all but invulnerable against the current weapons the enemy races were fielding.
By the time of the 2475 vote, the Bulrathi/Mrrshan alliance had a clear population edge compared to the other four races:
The current standings are 34 to 23; that amounted to a little less than 60% of the overall total, so I would need to add some more population to my side in order to win. That didn't look to be too difficult, and I was on course for a 2500 win so long as I could keep the Mrrshans firmly on my side.
The Sakkra fleet by this point had been pretty thoroughly smashed, but the Meklar still had a SoD that legitimately concerned me:
Depending on what was on those Ajax and Tornado ships, I could potentially be facing the loss of some of these new gains. For the moment the fleet was holding steady at Meklon, but I continued to keep an eye on it with each passing turn.
As my Computer tech finally began to surge out ahead of the other races from tech captures and new discoveries (even the bears can get an edge if they have enough planets), I dialed up increased spying on my enemies. I managed to capture or steal a number of good tech from the Sakkra, but as I cleaned them out I shifted the focus to other targets. One of the critical shortfalls in my tree was a lack of missile weapons, as I've already mentioned a couple of times. The Alkari had some much better stuff, so I had five ticks going into espionage against them. After some low-level penetrations, I finally cleared out all of their junk Weapons tech and managed to grab this:
Bingo! That'll add some punch to my bases. 
I had looted Hyper-X from the Sakkra and stolen Merculites a couple turns earlier, but for practical intents and purposes I was leaping from Hyper-Vs (6 damage/shot) straight to Stingers (15 per). We'll see how the AI races do against missile bases with almost TRIPLE the firepower! As far as framing the Sakkra, I didn't expect that to do anything, but I hardly needed to stoke the Mrrshan/Alkari flames further, heh.
By 2480, the galaxy has tipped decidedly in my favor:
If this were Civ, I'd have hours of mop-up work left to do, but fortunately Master of Orion will allow me to cash in my victory at the next election. Frankly, I would have won easily already if I wasn't fighting EVERYONE but the Mrrshans!
A couple turns later, while the bulk of my fleet was in the north capturing Rhilus, the Meklar came after me at Romulas with their SoD. Here we go!
Romulas was a new aquisition, but with some heavy use of reserve spending (which I had in spades thanks to my Rich planets) I was able to stand up 5 bases as well as my Class X Planetary shield. I also pulled all of my ships in range and amassed 50 ships of the line (44 Fusions and 6 old Blasters) there:
Now let's take a look at what's on those ships:
Umm... interesting ship design, to be sure. 
Not the AI at its finest here. The Meklar had loaded their ships down with missiles, which is a very strange way to go when using large and huge designs (since the ships can't stay in a fight once their missiles are exhausted). Best of all, my planetary bases have 14 points of shielding and are totally immune to everything except the Fusion bombs on the colony ship design. However, I wasn't quite sure how to fight against an AI using missiles as their primary weapon, simply because I had never done it before. Tactically, as a result, I did not fight this battle well. I dodged the first missile volley from the Ajax ships, but instead of retreating, I tried to shoot down some of the other ships, and thus got hit by three more volleys of Hyper-Xs (ouch!) I thus killed all the Tornados, but lost far too many ships in doing it. Still, the Meklar fleet was forced to retreat once I wised up and retreated my gunships, simply because they had no way of touching my bases.
The Meklar fleet had to retreat back to Meklon, but it would be back later. However, now that I had seen how the AI uses missile boat fleets, I would be better prepared for its return. When the Meklar came back, I made sure to have a token fleet in the system under attack. More importantly, I had had time to add over 25 bases at Romulas by the time they returned. This second time, I dodged their initial missile volley, then retreated before the second one could hit my ships. By doing so, I got the Ajax stack to stay around long enough to face three Stinger volleys from my bases, which decimated it and killed over 50 ships. After that, the Meklar threat disappeared permanently, and I had free run on any world I wanted.
For all my military power, I still lacked an engine upgrade over those Sublight drives. I was still stuck at warp 3! I had been trying to steal a better one from the Alkari for ages, until I finally was able to invade one of their worlds and take it in a ground invasion:
Warp 5, a major upgrade. It was probably most significant in terms of increasing my transport speed, but I was also able to design a new ship for the first time in ages. Let's put some of the weapons I've discovered in the last 50 turns to use!
With 22 Auto Blasters, this huge ship effectively has 132 Fusion Beams on it - that's NINETEEN times the firepower of my long-serving Fusion design! 
And while the earlier ship carried one Fusion bomb, this one is packing 15 Omega-Vs. You've got to love how the miniaturization concept works in this game! Of course I expect the game to end before I get to put any of these into use, but I may as well start building them just in case something crazy happens at the council election. I also built a medium Stinger missile boat as well, which would form a nice complement to the huge design.
With the Meklar fleet in ruins, I took the opportunity to pay them a home visit:
The Meklar actually had pretty decent gropo tech, so I was only killing them about 5:1. In contrast, the Alkari were much further behind and I was slaughtering them at an obscene rate, sometimes in excess of 10:1. The highlight of the game in that regard was when I landed 25 Bulrathi soldiers and saw them take out 120 Sakkra defenders. Bears with toys, scary stuff.
Since Altair was so close to Meklon, I decided to pay the birds a visit as well. The cursor is pointing to their world above. (Note also the sole remaining Sakkra world (I didn't want to genocide them) and the Mrrshan flag way up in the northwest corner. Dunno how they managed to capture a Silicoid planet up there!)
Well, that USED to be the bird homeworld! 
One fewer vote the Alkari have to cast against me in the upcoming election.
My glorious fleet. I barely got any use out of the Stingers and Huge designs, heh. My Fusion and Bomber designs did pretty much all of the fighting. I lost dozens of the former and hundreds upon hundreds of the latter. Looks like they were pretty effective though! (Incidentally, the Blaster design has a Heavy Blast Cannon on it because the Sakkra had Repulsor Beam in their tree. Since they never fielded any designs using it, I dropped the two-space guns from later ships.)
And with support from my honorable Mrrshan partner, I become the Galactic Emperor in 2500. I could not have done it without help from the cats (although I would have been darn close!) A Domination win (my first) according to Realms Beyond nomenclature.
What a fun game! I don't think you'll see the Bulrathi and Mrrshans (the two weakest races) team up to dominate the galaxy very often. 
Of course it didn't hurt that none of the three strongest races were present... Anyway, with a third win at Hard under my belt now, I plan to move up to Impossible and see what happens. I may get stomped, but there's no way to tell unless I try, right?
