Twitch Livestream Playthrough: Winging It

This is the short summary of a game that I played on Livestream at the beginning of 2025 as part of my ongoing Civ Fridays series. I still get more requests for Master of Orion than almost any other game and I think it helps that I'm just about the only person still streaming and uploading video playthroughs of this game to YouTube. For this particular occasion, I decided to employ the Alkari since I hadn't featured the bird race on Livestream previously. The Alkari are rated Excellent in the Propulsion tree (which cuts the cost of these techs by 40%) and have a very strong racial combat bonus that grants all of their ships an additional three levels of maneuverability. In other words, if an enemy would normally have 50% odds to hit their ships in battle, that drops to 20% odds for the Alkari - very useful indeed for early game brush wars! However, the tradeoff for the Alkari is being rated Poor in the Force Fields tree and having one of the worst diplomatic situations in the game, with innate enmity against the Klackons, Sakkra, Mrrshans, and the Darloks (who everyone hates). These penalties are substantial enough that the Alkari usually grade out as being somewhat below average unless they can get lucky enough to roll galaxies where their racial enemies aren't present.

I decided to play a minor variant where I would only be able to design ships with Small hulls, excepting colony ships from this rule to avoid making this a truly insane challenge. This variant fit thematically into the Alkari racial identity and would present some interesting twists to my typical use of Huge ships packing lots of powerful specials. Once the game was underway, I found that the initial start that I rolled was located in the north-central portion of the galaxy. We were using a series of bird puns for names (with the Alkari being giant space birds) and thus the homeworld was named Nest, that sort of thing. There was only one star within range which turned out to have a Minimal 45 planet in orbit for a decent if not great opener. There was a large gulf of space off to the east as I found myself in a relatively sparse portion of the galaxy. I was hoping that I'd be able to clean up the northwestern corner at a bare minimum and then I'd see how far I could press forward into the center of the map. Here's what the initial scouts discovered after fanning out:

Most of the nearby habitable planets were medium-sized and unfortunately the eastern of two Ocean planets nearby was rated Ultra Poor. However, the gem of this map was the Terran planet in the deep south which rolled as a Fertile 135 world, holy cow! That was among the best planets I'd ever seen the map generation throw out, apparently having a base size of 110 and then hitting the Fertile event for another 25% size increase on top of that. I absolutely had to make an attempt to claim that world even though I'd be stretching out my neck to do it. Fortunately Range 5 tech was available and didn't take long for the Alkari to research, then I could leapfrog down to that Terran gem of a planet assuming that it wasn't colonized ahead of time. All I could do for the moment though was build the initial factories and cross my fingers that the AI races would give me enough time to reach it.

First up was colonizing that Steppe world to the southeast which was needed to bridge the range gap further south. I did manage to colonize that planet which we named Kestrel in a double bird + FTL reference, only to find that the Klackons were right next door! The bugs had their homeworld a little further away to the southeast and they'd already claimed most of the planets in that portion of the neighborhood. I felt compelled to build about 50 Laser fighters to hold that position and only then could chase after the big prize to the south. Much to my relief, I was able to reach the giant world before anyone else which we appropriately dubbed Big Bird. The first portion of the gameplay had been a success.

The following turns saw my fledgling Alkari empire doing its best to claim the remaining planets in my portion of the galaxy while avoiding attack from those nearby Klackons. I was avoiding sending a colony shop to that red star north of Big Bird since it had an Ultra Poor 65 planet though I would eventually get around to claiming it a bit later. I was also starting to meet some of the other AI races in this galaxy, with the Sakkra off to the far east along with a small Human race. I really would have preferred to have a larger Human empire since they often make good allies and trading partners but they were clearly the runts of this map. Surprisingly, it was the Bulrathi who were the dominant race as they were the ones popping up on the GNN messages as having the most planets. I eventually discovered that they were in the southeast corner, further away from me than anyone else, and it took some time to make formal contact. This did allow me to vote for the Sakkra and then the Klackons in some of the early Council elections and score diplomatic bonus points with each. The Meklars had to be in the southwest corner by process of elimination where I hadn't seen much of anything from them yet. Hopefully they would stay down there building their factories and allow me to expand further to the south once I had some additional range tech unlocked.

Relations were good enough with the Klackons that I was actually able to sign them to a Non-Aggression Pact which had me sighing in relief. My frontline planets like Kestrel and Big Bird were still in the process of constructing their factories and any additional time that I had before the traditional lizards vs birds warfare broke out could only be to my advantage. However, this diplomatic overture may have backfired as the NAP prevented me from shooting down Klackon colony ships over neutral worlds. The Klackons gained two planets this way and then successfully invaded my startup colony at the Ultra Poor world since they already had an attack underway before we agreed to the non-aggression. I nearly fought them off in the ground invasion but came up a bit short, then it wasn't worthwhile to burn down our relationship afterwards over an Ultra Poor planet. So this wasn't exactly great as the bugs jumped from three planets up to six planets despite our ongoing quasi-friendship.

The bigger danger, however, was the arrival of the Meklars. I thought that I would be able to push further to the south with additional colony ships only to be rudely disavowed of that plan by the cyborgs. The Meklars had a core of four planets in the deep south and I hadn't even been in contact with them before they shoved away my scout blockade with a massive fleet of Large ships to colonize their fifth planet. They immediately grabbed the other two worlds nearby and suddenly this extremely dangerous enemy power was sitting just below my borders. I can't stress enough how much of a surprise this was, I went from no contact at all with the Meklars to them having three planets near my territory merely in half a dozen turns. Now I had another major headache to worry about.

I was also hit by a brutally rough event when Big Bird drew the Rebellion disaster, plunging a population of 145 million into rebel status. This was probably the worst event that I could have gotten short of drawing the Assassination one against the Meklars, forcing me to lose control of my strongest planet for a dozen turns while also diverting all production from my other best three worlds into growing population to send on transports. This easily cost me a full tech discovery in terms of lost research points and set back my growth curve substantially. Even worse, the Meklars apparently discovered enough Planetology tech to colonize a Toxic planet in my backlines, the green star to the north of Emu in the picture above. They sent a substantial fleet along with their colony ships and therefore I was unable to keep them off this spot. Now my borders were hopelessly intertwined with both the Klackons and Meklars which meant that I had no safe areas and every planet needed to invest heavily into missile bases.

Inevitably brush wars will break out with the AI empires as they seek to probe for weaknesses, even with "allies" with whom the player has trade agreements and positive diplomatic relations. That was very much the case with the Klackons in this game who liked my Alkari quite a bit in diplomacy, just not enough to stop their fleet from attacking any soft targets. The bugs sent a fleet with 21 Large ships and about 350 Medium ships after Emu, fortunately mostly sporting outdated weapons that couldn't punch through my shields. The only dangerous ship was the Large design since it had a Heavy Blast Cannon on board and Emu was able to shoot them down with the loss of some bases. They continued probing around afterwards but I was strong enough to defend against any threat that the Klackons could currently muster.

Once again though, it wasn't the Klackons that were the problem in this galaxy - it was the Meklars. The cyborgs are one of the most dangerous AI races if they can manage to get enough territory under their control and this was a map where they had successsfully broken free of the southwest corner. Eventually they dissolved their Non-Aggression Pact with me and came calling at the medium-sized planet Seagull. Faced with their core fleet, my defenses were utterly overwhelmed and shortly thereafter the planet was captured in a ground invasion, ugh. The Meklars were heavy on missiles for their ship designs, with lots of Large and Huge ships packing Merculites and then Stingers on the newest models. I wasn't that far away from being able to push back this threat if I could manage to improve on my shielding tech and defensive missile tech. I had 8 points of planetary shielding but was still using Hyper-X missiles which weren't doing much to shoot down the invading Meklars.

After shuffling around for a short time, the primary Meklar fleet moved to target Big Bird. This was the strongest planet in my whole empire and I had to make every effort possible to defend it. I had earlier gotten immense trade value out of shopping around Inertial Stabilizer to the other AI leaders and I tried to do the same thing this time around, looking for better shielding tech. I had my own Stinger Missiles sitting in the percentages on the research screen that had unfortunately not popped yet. Well, I was able to trade for the Class V shield which upped my total shielding to 10 points, only to discover a bug in the gameplay: my defenses didn't upgrade until the following turn!

There was Big Bird sitting there with 8 points of shielding even though I had just traded for the updated tech that should have taken me to 10 points. This was a very big deal as the extra shielding would have rendered the enemy Merculite missile ships irrelevant and therefore allowed this planet to survive intact. Instead, Big Bird wasn't able to shoot down enough of the invading fleet which bombed out the 36 missile bases and then launched a ground invasion. (Insultingly, my Stinger missile tech popped on the following turn right after the battle, argh!) I tried reloading to a save from before the battle and running all sorts of tests but they never worked. No matter what, I could never get Big Bird up to 10 points of shielding even though I had traded for that Class V shielding tech. Evidently there's some kind of a bug in the gameplay in terms of trading for techs and their effects not taking place until the start of the next turn. If I had to guess, Master of Orion likely checks for certain conditions at the start of the turn and doesn't think to update mid-turn if the player gains a tech via diplomacy.

In any case, with Seagull having fallen earlier and Big Bird certain to follow, I made the decision to resign and accept this game as a loss. I would have been down to a mere five planets at this point and the odds of coming back from that were almost nonexistent. It was frustrating because I had been so close to holding on at Big Bird, as the planet would have stood if that traded tech hadn't bugged out or possibly if the Stinger missiles had been discovered a single tech earlier. However, this was probably a lost game regardless because the Meklars had simply gotten too strong too quickly. They had drawn a Ruthless personality in this game, and while Ruthless leaders often tend to be ineffective because they overbuild military at the cost of economic development, if a Ruthless leader does snowball out in front of the rest of the pack then you're in for a world of hurting. No matter what I did, the Meklars refused to stop attacking me with their death fleets because they knew that they had the unstoppable advantage. Not bad for an ancient AI written back in 1994!

Therefore I lost the initial game with the Alkari but I wasn't ready to give up on the variant concept altogether. I decided that I'd simply start a new game all over again with the same variant and hope for better luck this time around. For the second attempt, I found myself in the southeast corner of the galaxy in what looked to be a relatively safe neighborhood. This time we named the homeworld Hawk Tuah after a popular meme from 2024 (caution: that is very much a NSFW search term) and I sent the starting colony ship off to the eastern green star. It held a small Steppe planet which was OK if not a great opener (the white star in range unsurprisingly had a Radiated planet). The Alkari second quest was underway.

As my initial scouts fanned out, they made a major discovery: the red star to the northeast held an Artifacts planet! It was another small Desert 35 world but I did indeed claim the free tech from scouting the location first. Much to my delight, I found that my birds had discovered Controlled Tundra technology! This was a fantastic tech to pop in three different ways. First of all, it had the basic function of allowing my Alkari to colonize Barren and Tundra planets, which was very much relevant in this game since the eastern green star held a Barren world. Second, additional ranks of Planetology tech make colony ships cheaper to build, with the default colony ship dropping from the standard 570 BC cost down to something around 480 BC. That would make a real difference when the homeworld was ready to start cranking them out. Finally, every rank of Planetology tech also increases the natural productivity of your citizens, which starts at 0.5 BC per pop and scales up over time. On a planet with 100 pop, this tech was worth an additional 10 BC of income purely due to this passive Planetology benefit. Thus this was an absolutely amazing tech to pull, with only Controlled Dead or maybe Improved Eco Restoration as better options.

I had my scout ships fan out as usual to explore the local stars and this stitched-together image showcases the information that they brought back. The good news was that this was a habitable portion of the galaxy, with nearly everything in the vicinity coming back with the green glow of places where my colony ships could land. That was due in large part to the Controlled Tundra tech that I'd discovered since there was a pair of Barren planets to the east, with the closer one helpfully allowing me to expand to the desert Artifacts world and then south to the Arid and Desert planets without having to research additional range tech. The north had less hospitable terrain with a Radiated planet and an empty star, then the two planets to the west were 5 parsecs away and one of them rolled as Poor. Still, I was confident that I'd be able to claim most of these planets along with the unscouted location in the extreme southeast which had a very large Terran 110 planet lurking there! Outside of that spot, most of these planets were on the small size (including a truly sad Barren 10 world along the eastern edge of the map) but of course terraforming could help fix that issue later.

Now for the other startling discovery: the Darloks were EXTREMELY close to my homeworld! I thought that there would probably be an AI race starting at the cluster of three yellow stars to my northeast and hoped that anyone spawning up there would be at the northern end. I had no such luck though as Nazin itself was at the southernmost yellow star, only four parsecs away from the Desert Artifacts planet. I had earlier assumed that no AI must be that close to the Artifacts planet or else they would have scouted it first, but nope, it seems that the shapeshifters just did a really poor job of early exploration. Thus the immediate top priority became colonizing and then defending that Desert world, not even so much because it was an Artifacts planet but because it was strategically crucial for securing everything behid it. Thankfully the Darloks seemed more interested in expanding to the north for the moment where they had, uh, eight planets already. Welcome to Impossible difficulty!

Things weren't quite as bad as they looked in that map overview because I did merge together two images; by the time that I made formal contact with the Darloks, I had already planted my flag over the Barren planet needed for range concerns (Licky) along with the critical Desert Artifacts planet (Bird Brain). Of course just because I reached these planets first didn't mean that I would necessarily get to keep them since the Master of Orion AI is always pushing the boundaries of what it can get away with. The Darloks declared war shortly after I met them, typical Xenophobes, and started sending ships to attack Bird Brain which was nowhere close to being able to build its own missile bases for defense. Fortunately I had previously identified this planet as the linchpin of my defenses and earlier sent both population transports and several batches of Laser fighters for protection. This was another moment where the Alkari racial bonuses really worked to my advantage, as the extra maneuverability on my Small ships made them almost impossible for the Darloks to hit. I was able to use 50-60 of my Laser fighters to shoot down their own Laser-wielding designs and secure Bird Brain, at least for the moment.

It was diplomacy that came to the rescue next. The Galactic Council met for the first time at a very early date due to the presence of the Silicoids in this galaxy who were snapping up all of the Hostile worlds for themselves. Based on the GNN updates and the Silicoid population tally in the Council, I could see that they were the #1 power in this galaxy with the Darloks as the #2 empire. That allowed me to cast my votes for the Darloks in the election, then do so again half a dozen turns later when the 2375 election took place. Repeatedly voting for the Darloks boosted our relations enough that they came calling to me for a peace treaty which I was more than ready to accept. The shapeshifters even gave me Battle Computer II in the deal which was a real surprise. Now I could get back to expanding and building factories across my empire instead of frantically building ships to meet the Darlok threat.

The early Darlok war had slowed me down though, enough that I wasn't able to make a serious effort to colonize those two planets off to the west. The Klackons showed up shortly before I was about to send a colony ship and established their red banners over the pair of worlds, though the Bulrathi then wrestled away the northern Poor planet a short time later. I had no prayer of challenging the main Klackon fleet at this point in time so I was content to leave them with control of these border worlds; better the bugs have them than the Silicoids. The rocks had raced out to 12 planets and then appeared to get stuck there, fortunately not snowballing any further ahead now that the landgrab was over. Thankfully the rocks are the least-dangerous race in the game to face with a lot of territory since they have so many penalties to offset their innate advantages. I thought that this would be it in terms of securing planets for myself, however that Barren 45 planet at the yellow star to the northwest of my territory continued to be unclaimed by anyone. It was 6 parsecs away and I kept thinking it would get snapped up by someone, only to find that the place was still available when I had enough miniaturization to fit Reserve Fuel Tanks on a colony ship. This took me up to nine total planets even as I worried greatly about being able to hold onto the spot.

I spent a long time hanging out in this southeast corner of the map, first building the factories on all of my worlds and then conducting research afterwards. None of the AI races looked to be in a position to run away with the game and therefore I was content to play patiently for the moment. The second Livestreaming session consisted of several hours of just kind of chilling here without needing to worry much as I gradually strengthened my position. For one thing, I was able to sign everyone up to first trade agreements and then Non Aggression Pacts which eventually led to this diplomatic screen:

Was I cosplaying as the Humans here? I was fortunate that the Sakkra and Mrrshans were both missing from this galaxy but even with that in mind it's rare to see this kind of positive diplomacy when playing the Alkari. The wider galaxy had remained peaceful for a long time and my trade agreements had actually matured to the point where they were granting me sizable extra income. Normally only the Humans can get much out of trade agreements because relations normally collapse before they can mature. Not in this game though as everyone seemed to be good friends. My obvious avenue for expansion was westward through the weak Klackons and then against the Silicoids after that. This meant that I needed to cultivate the Darloks as an ally, as otherwise the minute that I went to war with the shapeshifters I would only experience the whole galaxy voting for the rocks. Thus I played friendly with the Darloks for now even as their spies occasionally caused mischief while knowing that their time would come eventually.

The other thing that I was doing during these turns was looking for various tech trading opportunities. Even though the AI will only agree to tech trades that favor it from a numerical basis, there are still lots of opportunities to be had for a player who spends time searching for bargains. My biggest tech haul came from discovering Atmospheric Terraforming which I traded around for Improved Robotics III, Class X Planetary Shield, and Stinger missiles. These traded techs plugged several holes in my own tech tree, greatly improving my economy and strengthening my planetary defenses. I also found that I lacked terraforming techs in my Planetology tree: I was missing +10, +20, +30, +40, +50, and +60 Terraforming! At various points in time, I traded for +10, +20, and +30 Terraforming to fix this gaping problem which was needed more than ever since I had so many small worlds. At least I did have Controlled Radiated tech to be able to colonize that Radiated world near me, followed by Advanced Soil Enrichment later on to turn everything into Gaia planets.

Part of the reason why I had to build up for an excessively long time was the need to have enough miniaturization to fit weapons onto a Small hull. Eventually though, I was able to fit Antimatter Bombs onto a Small design and then pair that together with a Neutron Pellet Gun setup for ship-to-ship combat. Together those designs looked to be enough to start taking Klackon worlds as I targeted their holdings on my western border. It was at this moment that I drew the dreaded Assassination event, fortunately against the Silicoids who I knew I would be fighting soon anyway. I phoned the diplomatic cables and soon had the Darloks and Bulrathi fighting with me against the Klackons and Silicoids; the pathetic One Planet Empire Humans also sided with the rocks but they were irrelevant. The first galactic war had begun which would continue for the rest of the game.

I had scouted Incendius in the early portions of the gameplay which allowed me to send population transports ahead of time along with the fleet. (I always love the way all those transports converging together look on the map screen.) The Klackons lacked any planetary shield techs and thus had only Class IV shields to protect Incendius, not great against the 20-40 damage dealt by Antimatter bombs. My swarm of Small ships easily took out the defenses followed by the marines storming the place. They looted Andrium Armor which was a big upgrade from my current Duralloy tech and I was able to use Reserve spending to flip the captured Rich planet into my own fortress in a handful of turns. The next planet in line was Denubius which had a huge Klackon fleet protecting it, however when the bug ships ventured off to go attack Hawk Tuah, I raced in with my own fleet and transports to capture the planet. The AI in Master of Orion always retreats to a planet it controls so when I chased the big Klackon fleet away from Hawk Tuah, it retreated to the nearest Klackon world... which was no longer Denubius! That bought me enough time to secure this second Klackon world as well and by then my offensive was off and rolling.

Denubius had yielded Robotic Controls V along with the top Klackon Construction tech, Reduced Industrial Waste 20%, both of which were extremely useful for my birds. I used this captured tech to update my ship designs to the two more recent models pictured above. Along with Warp 6 Ion Engines, my new bomber setup had a higher attack level and additional maneuverability for a missile defense rating of 13 (since the Alkari racial bonus isn't displayed on this screen). That would make it almost unhittable by older missile techs. For ship vs ship combat, I could just barely fit the Megabolt Cannon on a Small hull where the weapon's innate +3 to attack level helped to fix the fact that I couldn't fit a Battle Computer on there. Note that I couldn't do much of anything with specials on these designs which is one of the biggest weaknesses of fielding Small ships. They get more total guns into the fight at the cost of always suffering at least some losses due to attrition and not being able to fit many of the most powerful special devices.

Once I had seized control of the nearby Klackon planets, I plowed right into their Silicoid allies as well. For all of their size, the rocks didn't have that much in the way of technology and they began folding like a house of cards as soon as I started invading them. The Silicoids lacked any weapons strong enough to get through my planetary shielding so anything captured could quickly be turned into a safe zone once I was able to build some missile bases. Several of these planets were even Rich and one was Ultra Rich to flip them around into Alkari industrial bases even faster. There was little fleet vs fleet combat to speak of during this campaign, with the Silicoids turning and running from seemingly every battle as they conceded their worlds to the Alkari. I was content to keep grabbing planet after planet as I grinded them into the dust.

I also seized Kholdan once I had gained control over all of the Silicoid planets in this part of the galaxy. That brought the Klackon fleet roaring out from the southern edge of the map where they had two remaining planets. For once I actually got to fight someone and pitted my fleet of Small ships against the heart of the Klackon navy. I thought that this might be somewhat close but instead the combat turned into a one-sided rout. Two of the Klackon designs were firing missiles which I was mostly able to dodge followed by them retreating. The Large stacks of 14 ships and 32 ships both went down instantly when I fired on them with my stack of 2440 Megabolt Cannons - OK, I guess we were shooting a lot of guns there! Their Small stack of 4312 ships stuck around to shoot it out with my own gunships, with the net result of the Klackons destroying about 500 of my Megabolts at the cost of all 4000 of their own vessels. I was fine with that trade and this large battle completely broke the back of the Klackon fleet. I captured another Klackon planet afterwards and left them with one remaining world in the far southwest.

I was approaching half of the galactic population at the time of the 2525 Council vote. This would have been enough for a victory except that I had damaged the Silicoids so much that they dropped out of being my opponent and the Darloks of course voted for themselves instead of voting for me. I had fully been expecting this and had been targeting the 2550 vote instead, since that would give me time to finally deploy Terraforming +80 tech for another 40 million population on every planet. The screenshot above captures that terraforming while it was underway, with every planet adding 200 additional factories along with all of those avian lifeforms. If the game wasn't over before, it certainly was now.

I had pledged to the Livestream viewers that I would leave my Darlok and Bulrathi allies alone so long as they left me alone in turn. The Bulrathi made a wise decision here, trading me Advanced Space Scanner to make invasions easier while leaving my planets alone. The Darloks, on the other hand, chose unwisely by dissolving our Non-Aggression Pact and sending fleet after fleet against my core planets while most of my fleet was off conquering Silicoid and Klackon worlds. I had enough planetary shielding and weaponry to fight off their attempted invasions but it was clear that the shapeshifters could not be trusted. Therefore in the closing turns of the game I signed peace with what was left of the rocks and bugs to teach the Darloks a lesson. My initial bombing run actually failed because I hadn't brought enough bombers, whoops, as the Darloks had apparently discovered more shielding tech from when I last received an espionage report. All of my core planets were enormous by now though and it was easy to dial up another 1000 Small bombers, with my new design even having the Subspace Teleporter on it. They tore through Nazin's defenses where I looted some fancy Computers tech that would have been useful if this game was going to last more than a handful of additional turns.

The final turns saw me capture two more Darlok planets and blast a third one out of existence from orbit. I was trying to make sure that I had enough votes to lock down a Council victory since I really didn't want to play out another pointless 25 turns. By signing peace with the Silicoids and Klackons to fight the Darloks, I had actually turned the rocks and bugs into allies... but now I had smashed the Darloks so badly that the Silicoids were back to being my Council opponent again, heh. Would this end up mattering?

Nope, I had 42/59 votes (71%) which was easily enough to meet the 2/3rds threshhold by myself. The bears were loyal allies to the end and cast their votes for me, good work buddy! There would be an honored place for the Bulrathi in the future of this galaxy. Everyone else would have to be content with a seat somewhere in the back row, heh. The Darloks actually eliminated the One Planet Empire Humans on the final turn of the game to keep them from surviving as well - they only had two days left until retirement! Anyway, this second game was pretty comfortable after I was able to fend off the early Darlok aggression at Bird Brain and then secure that long interval of peaceful economic development. I reaped a massive haul from various diplomatic initatives in this game so I might try taking that off the table for my next Master of Orion venture, we'll see. The first game was a lot tougher and I think that I was very close to stabilizing before the Meklars managed to ruin my day. I honestly believe that if that Rebellion event hadn't hit my biggest planet, I would have had enough tech researched in time to defend my planets from their death fleet. Sometimes the difference between success and failure in these games can be a narrow thing indeed.

In any case, thanks for watching and reading along, I hope you enjoyed this pair of Alkari games!