This campaign was set up to test out a couple of ideas. The first was the concept of having two civilizations on different moons of a gas giant. I thought that this was an interesting idea, as they would always be in close proximity, always able to ?reach out and touch each other?. The second idea is something I?ve been interested in for a long time. Can a smaller, weaker power keep up with a larger, stronger power, if the smaller power devotes all of its resources to building up its military and the larger power diverts a significant percentage of its resources towards exploring and building an empire? "Keeping up", in this case, is defined as "remaining relevant", or "presenting a credible threat", not equalling or exceeding.
In this case the Colonists had approximately 60% of the Strug construction and mining capacity, and around half of their research capability. I made sure they had large accessible deposits of minerals as I didn?t want them diverted from focusing on the Strug. The Strug were in nearly every way a standard starting race. They wanted to get out and explore and expand. I wanted to see how long the Colonists could be a reasonable threat if the Strug were expanding and the Colonists weren?t.
My original impression was that the Colonists would be able to remain a significant threat throughout the early phases of the campaign, but if the Strug were able to set up even a medium sized empire they would quickly be left behind. Unfortunately, I added in another factor which distorted this basic concept. I made the Colonists mulishly opposed to the Strug, to the point of open warfare from the first. This distorted the experiment and produced some unexpected results.
What I had expected was that the Colonists would be able to equal or exceed the Strug?s investment in their military in the short term, but, as noted above, I felt that once the Strug were able to set up any sort of interstellar empire, they would be able to outstrip any possible level of military investment that the Colonists could make. The way I saw it, the Colonists, because of their smaller economy, were forced to focus on their short term safety by investing solely in their military, while the Strug, with their larger economy, could focus on long term growth while still guaranteeing a degree of security with a (proportionately) smaller investment in their military.
What I didn?t foresee was that the implacable hostility between the two races would distort this relatively simple equation. After the first two missile exchanges passed with relatively little damage to either side (or none), things changed for both sides. On the Colonist side, their ability to survive two wars with the Strug began encouraging me to look at their chances for longer term survival. Survival over the longer term meant economic and technological expansion, at the cost of military expansion. Thus I began diverting resources to expand the economy. On the flip side, the Strug, while they had handily survived the first two exchanges, were seriously worried about the implacable, and apparently unreasoning, threat presented by the Colonists. Because of this, as time passed I began focusing more and more on short term survival as opposed to long term growth. This change in focus meant that I began diverting more and more of their resources towards the military.
The final destruction of the Colonist state was almost inevitable at this point, although I didn?t realize it at the time. The Colonists were spending a dwindling proportion of their small construction base on their military at the same time as the Strug were spending an increasing proportion of their larger construction base on their military. By the time of the last war, the Strug had retooled all of their shipyards to building warships or bases, and their construction factories were either building PDC?s or ordinance factories. The Strug research centers had been devoted to improving missile tech for years, to the exclusion of long-planned economic research. The Colonists, on the other claw, had increasingly diverted their construction capacity towards increasing their number of research facilities and construction factories, in an effort to ?close the gap? with the Strug. Worse, Colonist research had been diverted to economic techs at a time when Strug research was focused completely on missile improvement.
I?ll be continuing this campaign for a while, if for no other reason than I don?t want to start a new campaign until the next version of Aurora is released and its been tested a little.
Kurt
