oh man
I previously wrote about my prior conquer. Well it turns out the Uhuru commonwealth was still operating ships even after I took their homeworld-- and they opened up several new systems and a new alien species. This species was crazily jumpgate happy, so I couldn't allow them to continue to operate. First contact was blasting a couple of their jumpgate ships. The race appears more advanced, but my empire has a focus on missile, industrial, and propulsion tech-- I own the battlefield even though my armor and defenses are weak. Turns out they were a beam-heavy race, but had some FACs-- so after blasting their early contingent, I had to flee back out the jumpgate since I couldn't target their FACs before they were dropping nukes on my fast, but still primitive defended ships (i had only AMMs, no beam defense yet). Put together a good FACship, and brought three of them to the front.
Wiped out their FACs, but then they had fielded new ships, so I started blasting them-- but I ran low on ordinance. SO I had to retreat while I got the logistics together, sneaking in each time I got enough HonkeyTonk missiles to pop a few boats. Another couple months of cat-and mouse, and putting a division and a half of ground forces together, I was getting ready to make a play for the core. Flew in, BOP BOP-- three beam ships sitting on the jumpgate. Oh my god it was horrible. Both FACbombers destroyed, and they started chewing through the defenders before my fleet woke up and started flying towards the core. Not a crippling loss, but it cut out ordinance I needed to hit them. The last missile in my magazine popped the ninth vessel in orbit around their homeworld-- so now I could take station and try to invade.
In the week it took the troopships to arrive, I had the fortuitious delivery of a few more missiles, just about 20 of them but they'd be needed. The troops dropped, I discovered they had a pretty good advantage numerically-- my ratio was only .8. So I nuked em from orbit, and the war got under way. They were still building ships though, and fast-- FACs were coming off their lines, and could drop a load of bombs on my ground forces before I could pop em. Frustruating. This happened several times. Eventually I cleared their forces, and dealt with the rest of their ships coming in from other systems. I was reduced to flinging AMMs offensively (all of them, because I had seriously no missiles left at this stage-- both colliers were running overtime to pick up a couple construction cycles up from earth and uhurus and run them back to the front). When I finally took the planet (required bringing every single unit from every planet I control) I captured 1.4 billion aliens with an intact industry, an order of magnitude more shipyard than I currently operate, doubled my research capacity, and obtained OODLES of research in beams and other defensive techs that I'd been neglecting. My entire population- human and uhuru-- barely taps out at 1.4 billion spread over 5 worlds.
Not a bad day, but it took all day to actually accomplish. And there's gotta be 80 wrecks to chew through.