Heya, furballs! Faora here with something very different to what you normally get from me.

I'm not just a writer of your favourite porn. I'm also a gamer. A big fucking nerdy gamer who enjoys such things as Stellaris! Stellaris, for the uninitiated, is a space-based 4x real-time-ish strategy game from Paradox Interactive, the fine folks behind such gems as Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis. You build your species, their homeworld and their government, and you then build their interstellar empire up from their homeworld out across the galaxy. I really enjoy it because of the emergent storytelling that often comes up.

Thus this situation. I was talking to a friend of mine as I was playing, who had never played Stellaris before, and I was elaborating about a massively sticky situation that my species had found itself in. Before I knew it, both the game and the commentary had taken on a life of their own. This one game of Stellaris (which I for sure would have cast off and started again from given all the shit that went down if it happened any other time) became something very, very special because of what happened and the story that it told. And here we are, with me now telling you the story that I began to tell just one person.

Two last things. If you're expecting the usual furry stuff here, don't bother. Stellaris is a sci-fi game and there's some furry species you can pick for your race (I'm partial to the space-foxes, myself!), but this is not a typical furry story. This is an after-action report, or AAR, of the game I was playing. Secondly, this was written (at first) for someone who hadn't played Stellaris before, so there's going to be a lot of explaining some simple things as we go along so that people new to the game can follow. That annoys me if I know a game well, so… you know. Fair warning.

All good? Then let's explore the story of the Ashryth Pan-Solar Order, and their encounter with the Prethoryn Scourge.

-          Grand Archon Faora

 

A good place to start is a bit of background on the people of the empire I created, I suppose. The Ashryth Pan-Solar Order originated on the oceanic world of Zish, in the Zarasha system. They're relatively cute reptilians; for this game I used the brand new fairy dragon portrait that Paradox gave away for free for the Stellaris anniversary that just came (for those reading whenever, you should still get it free if you pick Stellaris up!). Their government is Fanatic Spiritualistic and Militaristic, and most of the people fall into one of those two categories. They're industrious (produce more minerals), intelligent (gain bonus research points) and communal (they're happier when they're all together), but they're non-adaptive (suffer habitability penalties on all worlds not their homeworld) and sedentary (they don't like to move around). Their system of rule is oligarchic (which means they elect a new leader from a small pool of candidates every few decades), their primary weapons systems are kinetic projectiles and their vessels achieved faster-than-light travel through the use of wormholes that they build stations to generate for their ships.

Their early interstellar empire was marked by good fortune. Several habitable worlds surrounded them, and were quickly snatched up before two neighbouring species, the Kalaxenans and the Vag-Oross, could take them for their own. Both species seemed to be relatively similar to the Ashryth in terms of development and while similar ethos made the Vag-Oross natural allies, the Kalaxenans were… not so friendly. They became the first targets of interstellar war by the Ashryth, and were quickly subdued and brought into line as a vassal empire to follow my commands in wartime. Administration of their systems remained their own, but they came under my protection and were expected to support me in wars declared against their sovereign species. Thankfully, their slightly-more-advanced technology and militaristic ways were put to fine use under Ashryth leadership.

Development of the Pan-Solar Order continued apace. Knowledge that I would soon have to turn on my friends, the Vag-Oross, in order to expand saw the severing of ties as a precursor to war. That war never came, however; by the time war could be declared against them, they had managed to build up not only a fleet to rival my own, but also had entered into defensive pacts with two other empires. To take their systems for my own (or more aptly, to enslave them as vassals like I had the Kalaxenans) would drag other empires into a war that would swiftly see the Ashryth overwhelmed. They were forced to learn patience, which would serve them well for the hell that was yet to come.

Two more empires rose to challenge the Ashryth. The Penthulan Interstelar Nation was a materialistic society dedicated to advancing technology, and they had aligned themselves with defensive pacts with a nearby hive-mind, the Qix'Lufran Hive. The path that the Ashryth had chosen to develop down left both of them subjugated by the Pan-Solar Order in the same war; the powerful Penthulans taken as vassals, and the hive transformed into a resource-offering tributary. They would bristle for many years under the rule of the Ashryth, but their loyalty never wavered. It might have had something to do with the annexation of the Kalaxenans into the Pan-Solar Order and the final dissolution of their remaining sovereignty, but there were never any more complaints. A whole quadrant of the galaxy was almost completely under my control, save for the suddenly-surrounded Vag-Oross Kingdom. Development was coming along nicely. The Ashryth discovered their latent psionic powers, and both technology and their fleets grew by leaps and bounds.

In Stellaris though, there's this thing called an end-game crisis. Designed to shake up the mid-late game and stave off the stagnation that many 4X games suffer at this point, Stellaris offers three different crises dependant on numerous factors. In this particular case, word came through of an extragalactic signal… a hunting call. The galaxy was about to be beset by an alien swarm; the terrifying Prethoryn Scourge. These living ships had but a single goal: infest habitable worlds to create more of themselves. They would consume whole worlds, grow, and move on to consume yet more. Once a world was infested, there was no way to save it. The only response could be cleansing fire from orbital bombardment. They were a threat to the entire galaxy. Stellaris does not fuck around.

Stellaris also has ancient precursor races known as Fallen Empires. Once proud rulers of the galaxy, they only have a handful of systems left to their name, cannot rebuild what they lose, and possess technology far beyond anything else in the galaxy's capacity to produce. Even at the top of the tech tree, you can't build some of their stuff. Taking on an FE is one of the big challenges of the mid-late game, and it can be very lucrative if you can pull it off. I was eyeing off two – a xenophilic and xenophobic empire respectively – relatively close together, when the Prethoryns entered the galaxy... right between the two of them.

Now, I'd not seen the scourge for a long time. Like, I'm talking ages. I always get a different crisis, and it pisses me off because sometimes you want some variety. But hey, I figured this was a good thing. The scourge would soften up both fallen empires and be softened up by them in turn. Then, once the scourge's back was broken, I would sweep in and take the freshly weakened FE homeworlds for myself, along with their unique, awesome technology. There was no way the Ashryth Pan-Solar Order could lose.

I was wrong. I was so, so very wrong. The scourge used to be a pushover several patches ago, but that was not the scourge that I was seeing. What I was seeing was terrifying. In Stellaris, the strength of your fleet is represented by a number called, funnily enough, your fleet strength. It's weighted by your weapons, your defensive techs, and any other nifty modifiers you might have picked up around the galaxy. When you start, you're usually building corvettes worth about twenty to thirty strength. Early game fleets feel pretty powerful when they breach 1k. Fallen Empires have a couple of 25k stacks and usually a 50-70k fleet.

These Prethoryn bioship fleets however were travelling in forces that registered as 50k and 75k fleets. That alone would have been cause for concern that would have set any Ashryth admiral on the back foot if it were an enemy empire, but that's not what these infernal creatures from the extragalactic void were. The terror didn't come from fleet strength, but from how the Prethoryn gained new fleets. Each infested world would produce a new fleet regularly. The fallen empires didn't react very quickly to the threat on their collective doorstep and, by sheer luck, the scourge had emerged into the galaxy in the perfect location: right on top of a trio of habitable, uninhabited worlds. And because xenophobic fallen empires get mad if you colonize any world near them, there were a LOT more where that came from.

You begin to see the reason why this became a very big problem.

It was a snowball effect, and then a massacre. From a position behind an irate empire on the other side of the Qix'Lufran Hive, I could not even build the wormhole stations I would need to bypass them and throw myself into the fight. I watched the scourge utterly destroy the combined fleets of these two ancient enemies, and emerge from the battles with equal losses that were almost immediately replenished. Worlds were infested faster than I had ever seen in a game of Stellaris before. A perfect storm had brewed to make this Prethoryn Scourge the greatest threat I'd ever seen in a game before.

As the grand fleet of the Pan-Solar Order moved to try and slow the expansion of the scourge, we were granted front-row seats at another of the most terrifying things that can happen in a game of Stellaris. Those fallen empires don't have to remain stagnant relics of a bygone era. Based on various events in the galaxy including, say, an extragalactic swarm intent on consuming all life in said galaxy? In those situations, a fallen empire might awaken. Awakened empires can, in a few short years, be speeding around the galaxy dispensing their idea of justice with fleets over 200k strength. In some cases two can awaken almost at once and begin what is called a 'war in heaven' that can leave the whole galaxy in ruins. Awakened empires are serious bad news, and so when word reached the Ashryth that the xenophile FE had decided to awaken, I wondered if the Prethoryn had bit off more than they could chew.

Within a couple of months, their homeworlds had been consumed by the scourge.

Awakened or not, they had nothing left. No means to reproduce their lost ships, and no existing ships left unassailed by the scourge. They had been beaten, awakened or not. They had awakened so late into the conflict that they were never going to save anyone, let alone themselves. As the fleet of the Pan-Solar Order began to engage the Prethoryns, their sensor arrays were able to capture every moment of the ancients' slow demise.

The xenophobes fared considerably better. They also lost all of their production starports and their ships, but several of their worlds were untainted by Prethoryn assault. Exactly why the Prethoryns didn't finish them off is beyond my knowledge. Theirs was a luck not afforded to their rivals or the others in that region of the galaxy. Without the awakened empire to hold them back, the scourge found exactly what they needed at exactly the right time: more habitable worlds that had gone unclaimed. Food. Growth. Power.

In the years that followed, it was all the singular (but powerful) fleet of the Ashryth could do to stall out the advance of the scourge. Their weapons systems were constantly changing, cycling through refit after refit as I sought to find the right combination of weapons to stop the swarm. Losses were harsh at first, but as new technology came online – better railguns, stronger armour, better shields – we began to suffer less and less casualties each time we engaged the scourge.

Unfortunately, they have numbers on their side. Every time a fleet of theirs is destroyed, they have another two ready to move out into the galaxy. Their reach is slowed by the Ashryth fleet, but none of the other empires in that region of the galaxy have anything remotely approaching the strength or the technology that we employed. Their paltry offerings served as little more than fodder for the Prethoryns. I'm hardly surprised; even the ancient empires of eons long past couldn't stop this swarm. If those titans couldn't hold back these invaders, what hope did the other empires on the front line have? What hope did we have?

The news became worse. There were three empires that formed a sort of buffer between myself and the bulk of the scourge. The Haahn High Kingdom and the Lox'Ungrak-Va Nation (who had also joined defensive pacts with the Vag-Oross and their two other friends in a massive joint effort I called the Alliance of Five) formed the majority of the beachhead, along with the Qix'Lufran Hive. Unable to enter the alliance's territory, I could only stall the scourge by preventing them from accosting the Hive's holdings.

Worse still, constantly replacing the losses to my ever-growing fleet was straining the resources of even an empire so grand as the Pan-Solar Order. The whole budget was balanced on a knife's edge; to lose even a single system of my own could have started a chain of events that could lead to the utter obliteration of the Ashryth, and no doubt the galaxy would soon follow. When the fleet can barely hold as it is against an enemy that gains strength from any ground you cede, ceding any ground becomes unacceptable.

It became clear that the only hope left was a desperation play. Construction ships jumped into dangerous systems to try and build wormhole stations at strategic points to give the fleet more room to jump far behind the Prethoryn lines. There, the hope was that the fleet would be able to surgically strike at the infested worlds. It was a simple plan: jump in, glas the planet, and jump out before the scourge could muster a response.

There were flaws, of course; every plan has some. Eliminating the infested worlds would do nothing to stop the overwhelming might of the fleets that they already had warping across the quadrant. It also wouldn't stop them from infesting any new worlds, unless I could also prevent the scourge from doing that once the fleet returned to the front lines. All it would do is contain the scourge to what they already had. From there, the fleet could take its time picking them apart. The plan was solid, if desperate. At the time I considered it not the best hope for us to manipulate the state of the galaxy. It wasn't the best hope to gain fallen empire technology and production facilities. It wasn't even the best hope for the Ashryth's survival as a species. It was considered to be the last hope of the entire galaxy.

The plan, unfortunately, never came to fruition. The scourge chose the time of the fleet's deployment to begin an incursion into Ashryth space, and the risk of losing supply lines and reinforcements was too much to bear. The fleet retreated to friendly space to deal with the decidedly unfriendly aliens that had begun to knock on our door. Losses began to rack up at a far higher rate than I was ready for. Research stations and mining stations evaporated under the scourge's assaults. Between maintaining what I had and building new ships to replace the lost ones, I didn't have enough mineral income to keep my balance positive. I had to use one of the galaxy's two trading stations to turn my energy into minerals at an awful 2:1 ratio. The knife's edge upon which my budget balanced became a monofilament blade.

Still though, technology marched on. My ships became sturdier. More deadly. Faster. Railguns were replaced with plasma cannons to better burn through Prethoryn armour. Flak artillery took some of the fleet's strength away, but helped to shoot down swarms of starfighter-analog craft that boiled out of the Prethoryn queens like bees, and even helped when the scourge closed range enough that the long-range heavy weapons could no longer effectively hit their targets. The fleet of the Ashryth Pan-Solar Order began a thing of terror, and I wondered if the scourge's hive mind was even capable of feeling fear. Surely the sight of the Ashryth fleet crashing down upon them would induce such a thing.

And then the scourge started attacking two fleets at a time.

You might remember I mentioned that fleet engagements were being completed with a few scratches but nothing major wrecked, but that was only when one of their fleets engaged the Ashryth fleet at a time. The moment that two of their fleets engaged at once I knew we were in trouble. Unfortunately for us, it happened and then it kept happening. We lost dozens of ships. We lost so many ships that the Vag-Oross, once cowed by the awesome power the Pan-Solar Order could bring to bear, dared threaten me. You could really feel the love for our attempts to save the whole fucking galaxy, but I would expect nothing less from a short-sighted, weak, primitive civilizations such as theirs. Their time, I decided, would come as soon as the scourge were dealt with. But that, unfortunately, would require the Ashryth to survive the scourge in the first place. I didn't see how we could do that with the current state of affairs. The wormhole stations were being destroyed a month after they were completed. The construction ships were being obliterated, their replacements taking up precious time and resources that needed to be dedicated to the war effort. I was being battered from all sides as I tried to fend them off both in border systems and the Qix'Lufran Hive's territory, and then they began to move on my worlds.

I don't know if the AI in Stellaris has a sense of humour, or if the AI honestly learned that I was the bigger threat, but they began to send what ships they could spare from their occupation efforts at me. As the years wound on, the Ashryth were forced to abandon the Qix'Lufran to its own defense, acknowledging that it was lost and its worlds would soon be a cornucopia of organic material used to launch more bioships at the next nearest neighbour: the Pan-Solar Order. Survival in the immediate term was all I could focus on, and it took every ship we had to keep the scourge outside of the Ashryth borders and away from those precious fringe worlds.

As we held for the next few years though, I began to observe something that surprised me. The warships of the Prethoryn Scourge kept coming and coming and coming like a massive tide of flesh and malice, but... that was all that they sent. Warships. The occasional transport to subdue a population and begin the infesting process, but basically just warships. No actual infestors to take nearby habitable worlds. Their territory was growing from orbital stations that exerted control over the systems within their own borders, but the worlds they needed to take were not increasing in number. This was a blessing to me; they'd already taken so many worlds that stopping them seemed a practical impossibility.

This new observation changed everything, though. If the scourge were on a pause for some reason – contented with what they had until they had enough power to overwhelm the Pan-Solar Order completely, perhaps? – it gave me time. Time was exactly what I needed. I absolutely ravaged the sectors under my control. I sacrificed control of the space over two of my key worlds on the edge of the conflict. I watched and rebuilt, the ever-growing fleet nearby in case they needed to be recalled to handle an actual infestation threat, but otherwise ordered to stay put and gather in strength. New targeting computers came online, and the fleet was retrofitted with them. They watched. They waited. They gathered, ready to pounce on a serious threat.

No threat came. No infestation was forthcoming. I built and I built and I built. I watched the number of fleets moving at the edge of my sensor range (and through my ally's territory) with honest to goodness horror. They had insane fleet numbers roaming about. I began to wonder if we could even take them on after we dealt with the infested planets, if I dared to hope we could even do that much. That was a concern we had to begin to prepare for, though. If the scourge weren't going to take my worlds yet, I had to begin to make inroads into theirs again. By this point, decades had passed since the scourge had arrived. This is the length of time where, if an end-game crisis in Stellaris has not been curbed yet, it has snowballed to nearly unwinnable proportions. I love a challenge, but this is the point where I was on the verge of giving up. The Ashryth had no chance. There was no way.

A breakthrough came with a new FTL method becoming available. Jump drives literally tore the fabric of space and time apart to effectively move ships in a manner that put the best versions of all three other, 'normal' FTL systems to shame. The technology was marked dangerous, but faced with the prospect of my whole empire being literally consumed for an extragalactic swarm, it was a risk worth taking. I began to retrofit the old ships and build new vessels that incorporated this new jump drive technology even as the fleet began to use the older, wormhole-capable ships to launch the first strikes against nearby infested worlds.

Success came quicker than I thought. The first three worlds to be engaged fell quickly, and any reinforcements seemed distracted by my quickly-becoming-obsolete wormhole stations to react in any sort of time to stop the ships themselves. My fleet popped in and out of their space, moving from one system to the next almost unassailed. It wasn't until I came across the fourth infested that I stopped long enough to see how my upgraded ships could handle a Prethoryn fleet. They were already there, of course, and I would need to kill them to glass the planet. Unfortunately, another fleet warped in just as I engaged them. I grit my teeth, but figured that we could destroy the first fleet before the second could close to weapons range. I was almost right; our fleet was just cleaning the first scourge force up when the second launched their initial wave of missiles. We began to engage them at extreme range as they closed. I watched damage begin to tick up on my fleet. We were holding our own, though; the second fleet had arrived too late to save the first, and the damage they were doing was nothing in comparison to what we had inflicted upon them.

Then scourge fleets three, four and five all warped in right on top of our fleet.

Trapped.

Fuck.

I was forced to pull the fleet out with an emergency FTL jump. They couldn't have handled that volume of reinforcements, no matter how many ships I pooled into the grand fleet of the Ashryth. Several ships were torn to shreds by the forces of the emergency jump and the whole fleet was MIA for a couple of months, before they limped back to a vassal's spaceport and began to repair themselves. The losses weren't as bad as I'd feared, but still crippling in the short term. If nothing else though, it proved two things. One, with only our inferior wormhole technology, we were able to successfully raid, glass and flee from Prethoryn worlds before they could muster a response, and two (and more importantly, I add), they still hadn't infested any new worlds.

And while all of that had been going on, I'd been saving minerals desperately so that I could afford to upgrade the old wormhole ships to new, fancy jump drive-equipped vessels. The change once the retrofit was complete was night and day. No longer shackled to the stations that had held them back before, the fleet now raced across the galaxy at record speed. Their numbers continued to swell as I reinforced them further, and soon I had a fleet that surpassed in size what I'd had during the peak of their invasion. It was glorious; an armada to shame even the ancients of the galaxy. I felt true pride at the resilient little Ashryth.

Target number one was the last infested worlds near my borders. Within a handful of short months, those worlds were purified by flame. Within another couple of years, the territory that had once belong to the xenophilic fallen empire was wiped clean of the scourge's planetary presence. They had survived somehow for a lot longer than I had expected, but about a year before the introduction of the jump drive technology had finally succumbed to the infestation. I resolved to erect a memorial on their homeworld to their sacrifice, even as the fleet rolled ever onward. Before them, they broke the very spine of the scourge's efforts. World after world was purified by holy flame, the only thing strong enough to burn away every last trace of the Prethoryn Scourge.

I felt strangely underwhelmed at this point. The scourge had been broken; they had gone from twenty infested worlds down to four, and most of those were a fair ways off from the Pan-Solar Order's borders. Their threat was severely lessened and while they had enough bioships already constructed to obliterate my whole empire's spaceside infrastructure ten times over, those could be dealt with over a much more casual timescale. I had reached such a critical mass of battleships in my fleet that engagements one-fleet-on-one were coming out with no losses and only a bruised battleship to show for it.

I had control. I began to turn my attention to the Vag-Oross and the Alliance of Five. If the Vag-Oross thought they could insult the Ashryth in the midst of them doing their civic duty and defending the whole gods damned galaxy from a ravenous swarm from the depths of hell then they could perhaps be the next target of the Ashryth fleet's plasma arrays. I did recall that I'd promised to deal with them once the scourge were no longer a threat, and I was relatively certain that that was the case.

However, as we are not even halfway through this story yet… you can probably guess that something went horribly, terribly wrong. You would guess right.

Before I could take any action against those little upstart pissants and their precious little alliance, it seemed as though doing that much damage to the scourge had woken them up to their need to consume more worlds and replenish any lost forces. It also seemed as though to them, taking the worlds they already have pounded into a fine dust from orbit are not good enough for them. They seemed to want my worlds, and this caused more than a little consternation. Those two-fleet groups that I had to so carefully avoid now began to converge on my systems from every corner of what's left of Prethoryn space, as if they wanted to repay the Ashryth for what weour did to their infested worlds. The speed of my fleet was not in question anymore. What mattered instead was its ability to survive odds that, in the past, made me flee if it was an option or take horrific losses if I absolutely had to hold my ground. And because they'd sent transports in to infest my worlds? Well, fleeing the field was not even remotely an option. For all our advancements, the budget remained on that knife's edge because I had foolishly decided the scourge were no longer a serious threat to the galaxy and diverted resources to new infrastructure projects. I should have waited. In the long term, the space-habitat that I spent those minerals on will be of use in providing vast sums of energy to the empire (to no doubt be traded for minerals the moment I have a sufficient quantity), but in the immediate term that was still four less battleships to protect myself with. I would find that I sorely needed those battleships.

Another year passed and helped to show me what a colossal mistake I'd made. I'd poked the bear. I'd woken the dragon, and well before I had any idea what I was truly in for. By clearing out so much of their territory, it seemed we had indeed triggered a new phase of aggressive infestation. I was able to take back control of my immediate territory, but others were not so lucky. A planet of pre-spaceflight primitives were gutted. Two more of the Haahn's systems fell swiftly after. Nearly the entirety of the Qix'Lufran Hive's worlds are occupied by the scourge; their infestation is all but assured without intervention. And all the while, more and more scourge fleets pop up to accost not just me, but any habitable world in range. All the advantages I had gained were worth nothing in the face of what I had just unleashed on the galaxy again with my own hubris. I may have paused the game for a half hour to pace nervously.

Quick action was necessary. I decided that my own territory had to survive first and foremost; we couldn't stop the scourge if we was dead, and the rest of the galaxy and no idea what they were in for. The freshly-infested world of the primitives was right next door, protected by a paltry 40k fleet. Our fleet moved on it immediately, only to have three more scourge fleets show up during the battle. The first fleet I engaged went down as the second began to bombard my fleet from afar. The third jumped away, apparently heading onward to some other destination as the fourth fleet joined the second. The second fell, and eventually the fourth; a testament to the new strength of our battleships. I destroyed three of their fleets at a cost of five of my own battleships; a small price to pay for buying enough time to glass the nearby world and then move to forestall the invasion and infestation of an allied planet. A fifth fleet however warped in to try and stop me; it was able to destroy three more damaged battleships before we could resume our work.

By this point, I had been responsible for more than twice the destruction of Prethoryn bioships as the whole rest of the galaxy combined, and all twenty-five worlds that had been glassed to purge the infestation had been ravaged at my command. Six more remained, but I needed to curtail their new efforts if I wanted to buy enough time to burn away the rest. To that end, I needed to stop their invasion of one of the hive-mind's core worlds. If the scourge were able to purge the population, they would infest it. There was little time to waste; quick and incomplete repairs were all I could manage before the fleet had to redeploy. If I could bombard the world quickly, the scourge would not gain a foothold there. So, naturally, there was a Prethoryn fleet in orbit, just waiting for me. It was easily destroyed with no losses, but the real damage was time. Worse even than that, it would take more than just bombardment. This was an inhabited world. We couldn't just nuke it from orbit and call it a day like with an infested world. This world had to be taken back. For the first time, we needed soldiers.

Soldiers we had, but not nearby. And worse, their ships were all still using old technology; wormhole stations were required to propel them across the interstellar expanse. Their slowness wasn't the biggest problem. I feared that they would be intercepted en route and destroyed before they could reach the hive mind's world. Moreso, I had to do the one thing I was loathe to do in the midst of this battle for the survival of the entire galaxy.

I had to wait.

If the fleet left, the scourge would fortify their position on the surface and the soldiers would be unable to take it with an orbital insertion. Without forces in orbit, the scourge would easily obliterate anyone I sent to the surface to liberate the world. I could leave a smaller force behind, but the Prethoryn fleets would arrive and squash them, wasting my ships. I had to wait with the full might of my fleet just hovering over an infested world while I hoped that the soldiers made it through the Prethoryn blockade, and then hoped that they were able to wrest control of the world back for my vassal.

The soldiers arrived, but not uncontested. As they entered the system, so too did a Prethoryn fleet. As my forces moved to engage, the transports carrying my people's finest psionic warriors skirted the battle and moved toward the still-unprotected planet. If they moved fast, they could drop to the surface and obliterate the scourge there before they could fortify against invasion. Thankfully, they made their drop as I wiped out the Prethoryn fleet and, with support once more overhead, the soldiers were able to purge the Prethoryn presence on the surface. One crisis averted however left another, potentially worse one on the horizon.

The scourge had been massing, but that was not unusual. Their fleets, while reduced in their ability to be reinforced without infested worlds, still travelled in unmanageable packs. Worse, two of my systems had been targeted while all of this was going on. No transports had been dispatched to them since the last failed attempt to siege my worlds, but that was only a matter of time. Once that siege came, there would be nothing I could do. Each world had no less than four Prethoryn fleets swarming about it. Even with every ship and all my technology at my disposal, that was an empire-crushing defeat waiting to happen. Those worlds were fallen; they just didn't know it yet. The only way to preserve them was to try to draw the scourge away, and the only way to do that was to assault their remaining infested worlds. My fleet was damaged and moving so deep into hostile territory would cut off any reinforcements, but there wasn't any choice. My shipyards continued to process my purchased minerals into replacement battleships, rallied to the distant core systems of my empire where they'd only heard of the Prethoryn Scourge rather than having seen their power and horror first-hand, as the battered remnants of my once-mighty fleet launched across the stars to either destroy the remaining infested worlds... or die trying.

Long story short, the mission to send what was left of my fleet into scourge-controlled territory to blitzkrieg their infested worlds worked. I was able to completely burn away all of the primary worlds of the Prethoryns, and thus stem the tide of their bioships. They still had massive numbers of those ships already in the galaxy however, and they would have to be cleaned up, but with my forces able to bring the total number of infested worlds down to two, the scourge looked like they were going to be absolutely incapacitated by my efforts. Unfortunately, I didn't count on one little thing that I perhaps should have: obstinance.

Not the scourge's, and certainly not mine. The obstinance of the other races of the galaxy. Specifically, the obstinance of the Alliance of Five. If you recall, two of their members formed part of the blockade against the scourge in the early days of the invasion. The Haahn had by this point been beaten back pretty resoundingly, but the Lox'Ungrak-Va with their annoying apostrophe'd and dash'd name were still a thriving (if bloody) nation. I would have been at war with them long ago in my attempts to press the insulting Vag-Oross into my service as vassals, but to engage one as aggressor would be to engage all five members of the alliance and a little problem called the Prethoryn Fucking Scourge showed up to wreck all our collective waste output orifices. Suffice it to say that because I've been a big meanie to the alliance in the past (doing such devious things as existing and being insulted and saving the whole gorram galaxy), they don't want to be friendly toward me.

This would not be a problem, except for the fact that these fuckboys were sat right between my empire and the remnants of the scourge. With the infested worlds I'd already burned away, the territory lines had once again been redrawn in the galaxy, and the Prethoryns were now behind and (worse) within the territory of an empire that hated me. An empire that hated me so much that they would not, in the midst of this galactic crisis, allow my vessels to travel through their territory.

Once more: they would not let me into their territory to kill the monstrous creatures that were there eating their faces literally right off.

 I know what's going on. This is an AI quirk because this is still, for all the awesomeness it conveys, just a game. It's a combination of the game's AI and the empire's own nature vying against me. Both of those things are screaming at that empire, saying, "He only wants open borders with you so that he can attack the heart of your empire." Ordinarily, this would not happen. End-game crises often leave everyone opening their borders to everyone else, because they all realize that everyone is at risk. However, because there is such a history of hostility they have with my tributary, the very nice and friendly Qix'Lufran Hive (and that I apparently have with several of their friends more directly), they have decided that the destruction of the galaxy is less important than keeping me from bombarding their worlds from high orbit. I'd be insulted if I didn't kinda want to bombard their worlds from high orbit, but if I'm willing to forgo my hopes and dreams to save the galaxy then hot fucking damn, you'd like to think they would too, right? Wrong.

Further bad luck came shortly after the successful burn-raid into the scourge's territory. As I'd said, my economy was balanced on a knife's edge. I couldn't afford to lose any systems, because the strain on my income would be far too great. I'd been using the aforementioned trader stations to turn my energy into minerals just so I could build ships to replace the ones I'd lost. Hell, my own mineral production is in backslide now because I have so many ships that maintaining them alone costs more than I can bring in. The Ashryth fleet is large and powerful, but the scourge continues to step up their game in spite of my efforts. We're no longer engaging two fleets at a time. Now we're forced to engage three. In one case, to save one of those two accosted systems, we were forced to engage a record four fleets simultaneously. The losses were cataclysmic, but it put enough of a dent in their forces that we could replenish the fleet relatively quickly, now that we (somewhat ironically) didn't have to support so many vessels anymore.

But that was only one system. The other, Polgara, was lost. It wasn't lost because troops were landed. It wasn't lost because an infestor came along. It was lost through something I hadn't seen until it was too late. It was lost because the orbital bombardment had gone on long enough – and had been intensive enough from so many scourge fleets – that every last living Ashryth down there had been obliterated. That qualifies, apparently, for losing control of the world. Their fleets vacated the system, and an infestor came in shortly after to clean it up to their liking.

Needless to say, this did not sit with me. I was able to stall out their infestation of the freshly cleaned-out Polgara Prime while jumping back and forth to the neighbouring Sanopel system (which still needed protection from scourge fleets that constantly threatened it) and one of the Qix'Lufran's systems as it was constantly under threat of infestation. In a move that would prove to be frustrating for years to come, I even managed to re-colonize the Polgara system right under the Prethoryan's metaphorical noses. The planet, once named the underwhelming Polgara Prime, was renamed to Scourgehold. It sits at the border of a terrifying new frontier, one in which the Ashryth fleet must fight off never-ending waves of Prethoryn ships hidden behind the borders of an enemy happy to be consumed if it only means that I will be assaulted constantly by those same forces, or split my forces between the scourge and a one-versus-five war that will strike at my empire's core worlds from my presently undefended flanks.

Worse, the scourge began to use their position to infest new worlds. I had brought them down to a mere two infested planets – and I had sensor range on one of them, and holy damn the number of infestors and transports they had was terrifying – but in less than two years since then I saw them rise up to four again. Worse, the Qix'Lufran Hive is being battered further and further to the brink of destruction by the scourge and our fleet too busy holding our own territory against the Prethoryn's constant sieges to actually render enough aid to save them. With the Lox'Ungrak-Va refusing me access to the scourge, they will simply continue to throw ships at me as long as they like without any viable means for me to stop them. They'll doom everyone, out of fear of me. To say that this is an infuriating situation is to not know how emotionally invested I am in my games. This was yet another near-ragequit moment for me.

The only positive thing to come out of all of this bad news is the alert that in a battle somewhere, a Prethoryn queen was disabled in the skirmish. If we could get to her and capture the queen, we could find a way to turn her against the rest of the scourge and gain the use of our own little swarm to help fight them off. One queen would hardly turn the tide and the battle site is, of course, in the territory of the empire 'protecting' the scourge from me, but it's still an interesting possibility. Alas, I figured it to be a bit too far in the future; for that very moment, survival had to be the order of the day, and that meant clearing out the massive fleets that continue to assault my borders from every direction.

It wasn't until a lull in their attack waves that I was able to upgrade my science vessels with the same jump drive tech that my battleships had possessed for decades and dispatch one, with the fleet, to capture the injured queen. I was surprised that I could even get there; I would have thought the system contested, but the infestation on one of the worlds there qualified it enough as enemy territory that I was able to gain entry. As my fleet engaged the swarm that guarded the infested world, the science vessel slipped off to the other side of the solar system and began to heal the queen. An implant severed her connection to the rest of the swarm and placed her directly under our command, and now any bioship brood she spawns – and she'll do so automatically, with no resource input from me! – will be under her, and thus our, control. I proceeded to then glass the infested world, only to be promptly kicked out of what once more had suddenly become 'enemy' territory. Jerks. They're lucky right now I have more important worlds to bombard from high orbit.

The queen, however, quickly became a double-edged sword. Unlike my prized battleships, the queen and the tame Prethoryn under her command were not perfectly suited to destroying enemy Prethoryn bioships. In fact, they were exceedingly bad at it by comparison. Moreso, maintaining her every-growing brood would only further tax my already strained mineral production. Every new bioship she spawned would just make it harder and harder to reinforce my main fleet. Even as I sent the captured queen back to the empire's capital world to spawn in relative safety, I had to face the fact that I would be very, very hard-pressed to maintain my main fleet anymore. This war with the Prethoryn couldn't continue. Something would have to give, and I was dedicated to making sure that the something wasn't my empire.

In Stellaris' expansion Utopia, you're able to earn things called Ascension Perks. They provide game-altering options such as psionic awakening, cybernetic augmentation, advanced biological engineering, the ability to create megastructures, and many more. You only get a certain number of them per game, and it's very important to make sure that you pick the right ones for your empire. I'd been saving one up, not using it because I wasn't sure which bonus to procure. One of the bonuses is Defender of the Galaxy, which provides me a passive 50% bonus damage increase against an end-game crisis, like the scourge. It also gives every other empire in the game a +20 approval point boost for me protecting them, but that matters very little by comparison to the damage output. I've been loathe to spend one of my very valuable ascension perks on something that might have become transitory, but the pervasiveness of the Prethoryns in this galaxy has become too much to bear. With a second perk now available to me as well as the first I'd saved, the choice was clear. One of them would provide me the Defender of the Galaxy boost, and this would hopefully give the fleet enough of a boost to be able to take the Prethoryn Scourge down for good.

The change was night and day. While a defensive boost might have saved my fleet from losing ships against the scourge, the damage boost allowed the fleet to tear through Prethoryn bioships with an efficiency that honestly surprised me. A two-on-one fleet engagement saw me only lose two ships, as opposed to the five I normally would have, due to the overwhelming damage that my battleships were able to dish out. I cleared my space of the scourge, and then began to carve my way through Qix'Lufran space. While I didn't want to risk my ships needlessly – a three-on-one engagement to save a small system on the hive's border was ignored in favour of taking back control of three other systems in one-on-one engagements – I was able to give the hive a little more breathing room while I headed for the nearest infested worlds I could reasonably reach. The scourge had infested others in the interim, further away and deeper in the Lox'Ungrak-Va territory, but that was less a concern than keeping them from infesting any more worlds in my immediate sphere of influence.

A small footnote in this grand conflict came to be added as well, in that a primitive, pre-spaceflight race that I had been observing since before the scourge entered the galaxy almost a century earlier had managed to wipe itself out. Just before the scourge arrived, a rogue Ashryth scientist had established himself amongst the primitives of Varba as a god and advanced their society faster than they should have. Despite us reclaiming him, it seems the damage was done; they had developed nuclear technology before they were ready for it, and a once-vibrant world was now reduced to a nuclear-winter-swept tomb world, full of rubble, radiation and lost promise.

As they rained invasion forces down upon Scourgehold (not to mention reinforcing the orbital bombardment with so many fleets that I took one look at them and decided the planet was already lost), our fleet once more blitzkrieged the Prethoryn infested worlds. Their forces were everywhere and thus good jumps where we only had to engage one enemy fleet before jumping away again were notoriously hard to find. Eventually I was able to burn away their remaining infested worlds, save for ONE final infested planet that I couldn't reach. Gods damned Lox. My fleet was battered and was forced to pull back for repairs, but at the least the immediate core of the Prethoryn scourge was broken down. I was grateful for the reprieve.

Throughout much of the war, the Ashryth has been able to fully immerse themselves in their psionic transcendence. The afore-mentioned Ascension Perks that I'd chosen earlier had allowed the Ashryth the chance to hone their latent, and then full psionic talent. This gave them access to the Shroud, a dimension that serves as the source of their psionic energy. It's a dangerous place, but it can reap fine rewards if one is coy and lucky. Alas, as anyone who well knows me can attest, luck has never been my strong suit. For much of the war (at least the decades where I had access to the Shroud itself), I've been unable to extract any meaningful boons. However, just as my repairs were beginning on the fleet, our telepaths contacted the Shroud again and were able to gain a powerful(ish) boon: a significant, empire-wide boost to the evasiveness of my ships. Given that the scourge use missiles that are impossible to evade, this boon is obviously of great help to me and I thanked the Shroud for its patronage in our species' customary fashion: two raised middle fingers. I think a visitor to our home at some point in history said it meant 'peace among worlds' or something to that effect.

Before I could properly throw myself at the scourge and with any luck purge them from the galaxy, I needed to secure my territory enough that I could divert my fleet if necessary. To that end, the fleet began making more dangerous trips and taking riskier engagements. A three-versus-one fleet engagement was able to clear the Sanopel system and the inhabited world there (now renamed to Scourgebane) with only four ships lost. It emboldened me to deploy the fleet to Scourgehold against the four bioship fleets that were constantly raining death upon my world.

This, perhaps predictably, would prove to be a mistake.

Even with all the advantages I'd built up and with a very strong fleet to use them, four scourge fleets was still utter devastation I was not able to withstand. A full third of my fleet was wiped out in the battle that followed, with another half-dozen ships more ripped apart by the emergency FTL jump intended to save what was left. It was not a loss I couldn't recover from, but none of the four enemy fleets had been completely destroyed in the engagement, even if all of them had suffered significant damage. They would heal soon enough (if not replace their destroyed numbers), if we didn't regather quickly and move to strike again. I had not noticed in all this time however that my sectors (the unassailed ones, at least) had begun to build up a sizable bank of energy and minerals. This proved to be a massive saving grace; I was able to withdraw both to queue up many, many more ships than just the ones I had lost and without expending the full resources of both sectors. One was drained dry, the other to be kept in case it was necessary again. I had a feeling it would be.

For any good luck I have however, there's more bad to even it out. For the last fifty years, I've used a system just back from the main front as a repair station and mustering point for reinforcements. The Kochab system has long been unassailed, too far from the scourge's more pressing targets to be attacked. This has allowed the sector governor to effectively protect it, with space-based defensive emplacements that inhibit enemy ships' ability to fight and move. Unfortunately, these defences would fall quickly without the fleet stationed there to help defend them, and therein lies the inherent problem. With the scourge now pushing deeper into my territory, even this staging ground is at risk. The old frustration of knocking off one fleet only to be assailed by three more proved true, as the system was struck over and over by the scourge as I waited for sufficient reinforcements to retake my borderworlds.

Gaining enough ships to retake control of the space around Scourgehold wasn't as difficult as it might have sounded from previous events, but the time it had taken me to prepare for the attacks had cost us in other ways. The infestors had been deployed again, and new worlds were coming under scourge control, including worlds that had once belonged to the Qix'Lufran Hive. The long decades of bombardment had taken their toll; my loyal tributary had been all but annihilated under the weight of it. I considered my options as the fleet cleared up the remaining scourge within my borders, when I saw it. Finally, a ray of light. A chance. The borders had shifted again.

There was a point of access to both of the remaining infested worlds.

Immediately, I took stock of the threatened worlds in my domain. They could, in all likelihood, survive bombardment for another decade without ill effect. The defensive armies on the surface would hold against any landed invaders long enough for me to complete this last assault and, with any luck, carve out the heart of the scourge once and for all. The fleet turned away from Scourgebane and headed out into the middle of nowhere, all so it could flick around behind the scourge and obliterate what was left of their holdings.

The first of the two systems I attacked proved be a bigger problem than I'd intended. Two fleets were in the system when I arrived, and they were in close proximity to my arrival point. Part of why my fleet has done so well against theirs is that the Ashryth fleet does damage from significant range, destroying enemy ships well before their initial waves of missiles even reach our forces. We manage to get several volleys of fire in before they even scorch the shields. However, those large weapons do little good in close, and the fleet was engaging at much closer range than preferred. Losses were severe, but victory nevertheless achieved over those two fleets.

What I was not ready for however was the system snapping back into control of those damn Lox. My entire fleet was unceremoniously shunted away, my control lost for the better part of several months until they could make their way back to Ashryth space. One more infested world had been burned away, but at great cost: the staging ground of Kochab was attacked in the interim, and lost. While control of the system could be swiftly recovered once the fleet returned, repairs would now have to take place further from the front lines, costing the fleet more valuable time in travel between systems. The front line had begun to push deeper into the Pan-Solar Order. Dangerously so.

The reconstituted fleet met up with its reinforcements at the next nearest starport for repairs, but had to deploy before they could be complete. Two Prethoryn fleets had moved into Kochab, along with an infestor. An uninhabited (but still barely habitable) world lay ripe for the scourge, and they were intent on taking it. Damaged and depleted, the fleet had to depart immediately if they were to stop a new world well within my borders from becoming a bastion of the scourge. If you wonder why this world wasn't already colonized by me, the answer is simple: this was Varba, the world full of primitives that had immolated themselves in nuclear fire. The scourge were set to land on their bones and turn them into new swarms. This would not stand.

The fleet was able to prevail and prevent the infestation with very minimal losses, but a cursory glance showed that there was still trouble on the horizon. The Prethoryns had regathered their forces over Scourgehold, perhaps outraged by the name (and really, whose idea was that, anyway?) and were blasting it to dust once more. Both it and Scourgebane were beset by more fleets, and they had to be dealt with before I went after more infested worlds.

As I was clearing out the scourge fleets over my worlds however, new technology beckoned. It was a powerful new weapon that would fit nicely on my battleships and would be perfectly suited to taking on the scourge. It would be quite some time before I had the designs completely – and a more powerful version promised swifter death still if I had the patience necessary – and so our scientists were charged with developing this powerful beam weapon. It was hoped that if I spent my present time defending territory and preventing the scourge from expanding, that perhaps there would be time enough to research, develop and retrofit this new weapon to my battleships.

It's worthy of note that in the midst of all this, there are two more ancient, fallen empires on the other side of the galaxy who have done nothing in the middle of all of this. One, like my species, is spiritualistic in nature. We get along fine, though they're rather condescending toward our people. The others, who are rather space-elf-looking people called the Bebaki Archivists, are materialists. We don't see eye to eye at all, but we've just decided not to speak. A few decades ago they caught wind that one of members of the Alliance of Five, the massive Tiyal Hierarchy (an empire as large as my own which had the benefit of being almost as far from the Prethoryn Scourge as could be – was developing dangerous AI technology and needed to be stopped. Rather than stopping them themselves as the fallen empires are often wont to do, the Bebaki decided to demand that instead we do something about it. I could either decline their request, or I could declare war on five empires in the midst of a galactic crisis in an attempt to curtail one empire's development. Naturally, I chose to close the viewscreen without giving an answer. Diplomacy, obviously, is one of the Ashryth's strong suits.

Unfortunately for me, the Bebaki deigned to take that as acceptance of their demand and expected me to go to war. I bring it up now because at this critical juncture where my empire is beginning to be ravaged by the scourge – the scourge that, once more and for the record, I and I alone have been keeping from reaching that side of the galaxy – they have decided to contact me and tell me that they are very displeased I did not do as I apparently promised and fight a war on six fronts just to win their affection. Now I am in an uncomfortable position where they are mad at me, and mad fallen empires? Well, they're not shy about expressing their frustration with exceedingly powerful weapons technology. Granted, I could crush their fleets with my own and unlike the scourge they won't replenish their forces if we go to war, but that would mean pulling back from the scourge... which would mean giving them room to infest and grow once again. At this point in time they were contained somewhat, if beginning to test the limit of that containment. Who knows what they would do if that containment was weakened?

Thankfully the Bebaki not only didn't attack me, but something strange began to happen. Members of the galactic community in the relative-south had begun to show up near Prethoryn space. Their fleets were not very large, but with the bulk of the Prethoryn bioships engaging my forces they were able to move much more freely. A world that I'd noticed being infested to my relative-north was dealt with by a force not my own. A race of butterfly-like creatures from the other side of the Tiyal Hierarchy, literally as far away from the scourge as you could get, was in the space of the Qix'Lufran Hive, helping to hold off the scourge's advance before I arrived. Finally, at long last and after a century of doing all the work alone... I had help. Pitiful help that was barely doing anything actually helpful, but help nonetheless. It's the thought that counts. It sounds like a nice platitude until you remember the psionic power of the Ashryth and realize that thoughts can be weapons and then most definitely count.

The first iteration of the powerful new beam weapon technology finally exited the theoretical phase and into production as I began to cut back new infestation efforts. While we weren't about to install these weapons onto the battleships just yet – what with presently being needed to ensure that the sector didn't fall into complete disarray in the time it took to upgrade them – it also allowed us to begin work on much more powerful beam weapons that should prove to be more than a match for the scourge ships. After over a century of fighting, this new weapons technology could be what signals the end for the scourge at long last. I didn't dare allow myself too much joy at the thought. I'd thought the scourge contained and under control before and that, as you know, did not end well.

So too it was with this. As I worked to cleanse an infested world in the hive's border and destroy the two fleets within the system, three more fleets showed up on the other side to flank my forces. The emergency FTL option this time cost me no ships, but it put them gods-alone knew where for the next month. Note that by this point I had burned clean forty-two worlds and destroyed four times as many bioships as the rest of the galaxy combined. You would expect appreciation. You would expect adoration and adulation. You would expect something, but my neighbours continue to hurl threats at me.

Despite how well the fleet was performing though, the age-old problem continued. We could not even come close to stemming the tide of reinforcements that boiled out of the scourge worlds, and the fleet couldn't cut through them long enough to burn what was left and prevent those reinforcements. At this point it seemed as though the development of these super-powerful beam weapons might be the only chance we'd have to overwhelm the scourge fleets long enough to lay them down for good. Over and over they threatened my systems in the meantime, and it was all the fleet could do to push back as best they could and pray that the scientists made a breakthrough before they were overwhelmed.

The fleet served well. They punched far above their weight and came out on top with minimal casualties. A steady supply of reinforcements kept coming from the core systems to replace what was lost, four battleships at a time. Alas, it all came to nothing for a long time. Every time a system was cleared, it was immediately accosted again by pairs or trios of Prethoryn fleets. They could replace their forces faster than I could repair individual ships. Tragedy struck just as development of the beam weapons concluded and I directed the fleet back to repair and be refit; four brand new battleships jumped into the system to join them just as the system was assaulted by a Prethoryn fleet. All four battleships were ripped to shreds in mere moments; the greatest loss our forces had suffered from a single scourge force since the war had begun. I consoled myself with the knowledge that after this refit, the scourge's superior numbers would be unlike to save them any longer.

No sooner had the refit begun though than a Prethoryn fleet, as if it knew exactly what was happening, warped into the system. The refit was barely six percent complete when the Prethoryn arrived. I was forced to cancel the refit and engage them, but I knew that this was just the first fleet of many. More would be coming. I wouldn't have the time necessary for the refit. Worse still, the only saving grace my mineral production had had for the last ninety years had been the traits of the ruler of my race, reelected every time he came up. His passive ten percent boost to empire-wide mineral production had ensured that I could suffer my losses and replenish my forces, if by abusing a trader who gleefully accepted my endless stores of energy for those precious, ship-giving minerals. He had passed from old age barely two years earlier and while the new guy (for a given value of new; he was over a hundred years old when selected to rule) provided reduced upkeep costs for my warships, that wasn't enough to restore my mineral input/output ratios. The economy of my empire had begun to tip off that knife's edge, even as the scourge continued to gain strength.

The only way to destroy the scourge was to fight through their territory and burn their worlds down. To do that, the fleet needed the most powerful weapons fitted to their hulls. That was not possible while protecting the main front from the scourge. That was not even viable at secondary staging grounds back from the front; the scourge had begun to make runs at even those systems. There was only one, viable course of action left, and it was one that would see billions of Ashryth people look to their leader with horror, if they were able to look to her at all.

The fleet withdrew from the front line and headed coreward.

Not completely coreward; not back to the homeworld or the capital. Instead, they headed deep into the sector that once was the empire of the Kalaxenans. Under our guidance since their annexation into our empire, their own psionic powers had flourished. Their systems would be the next in line if the front line against the Prethoryn fell, but for now they were the only location where the fleet could reasonably regroup and take the time necessary for a full refit. I hit the button as I wondered how long would it take. I was not happy with the answer.

Months.

Years.

Two whole years passed by, the scourge left unchecked while I did nothing but prepare the fleet to wade back into the fray. I built more in the meantime; battleships of the new design ready to join the old guard and take the fight to the scourge, but that was still two years where the scourge was able to do as they pleased. And they did. New worlds, once guarded diligently by the fleet of the Ashryth, fell to infestation and ruin. My borderworlds were left in flames. Scourgehold and Scourgebane refused to live up to their names, even though they themselves were not quite taken and infested.

By the time the fleet had been retrofitted with their new armaments, the galaxy was more aflame than I'd feared. Worlds on my borders had been infested, providing yet more ships to assault my worlds and people. Their numbers had ballooned dramatically, and I wondered briefly if the choice to upgrade the fleet had left me too distracted to actually destroy the scourge. It was not until the first battle with them over my old staging point in Kochab where I was able to find the answer: no.

These new beam weapons were sufficient, as long as I was not caught unawares. A three-versus-one fleet engagement ended in my favour even with an unfavourable engagement range (two of the enemy fleets jumped in almost on top of our forces as we engaged the first enemy force), and that gave me the confidence I needed. There were infested worlds to take and systems to cleanse. Repairs were a necessity first of course; the battle had done a lot of damage to a lot of ships, but we had our first best chance in about twenty years, and we weren't about to let it slide. It would take everything we had, but it might just save the whole galaxy.

Unfortunately, the very first world that I intended to raze was protected by far more Prethoryn than I'd first anticipated. Four of the largest fleets I'd seen lurked just off my jump-in point, and were primed to attack immediately. The new battleship design could easily go one-on-one without losses, and a single loss for a one-on-two fight. I had no doubt that the old weakness – poor ability to hit targets in close range – was still in full effect, and four fleets was just too much to chance. The emergency FTL left my fleet out of commission for months longer, another setback I couldn't afford to suffer.

As I burned out another infested world the moment the fleet came back under my control (the one on my borders, to prevent it becoming a hub of problems for me later), I decided we should pay the Qix'Lufran Hive a visit and help prevent the infestation from spreading further over there. We were, unfortunately, too late. The infestation had spread. Worlds I'd not noticed had been consumed by the scourge while the fleet was busy elsewhere. Their homeworld and capital, once a bastion of their race, was in the middle of the infestation process. It became my immediate target; better to forestall the infestation than have to burn it out later. It was protected, but as long as the fleet was fast there was no reason to worry.

The unfortunate problem with the fleet growing ever stronger, be it through new weapons or incremental upgrades to existing technologies, was that it didn't seem to matter. The longer the scourge exist in the galaxy, the more numbers they can simply throw at you. You are not just fighting the swarm, but you're fighting a tide. They never end. They don't obey the normal game mechanics that dictate maximum strength or production limitations. They don't have maximum strength. Once they begin to infest, the only way to stop them is to burn the infestation out, and I am still prevented from doing that by a belligerent little turd of an empire that insists on keeping me from key scourge systems because they lie within their borders. The irony is that my old wormhole drives could have circumvented the problem partly by passing outside spacetime and simply popping into the system I need them to be. My jump drives, however, cannot. Every incremental advantage the Ashryth fight tooth and claw for is undone by the weight of the whole galaxy pressing down on my empire.

It was time to take a drastic measure. I liquidated the stored minerals and energy of the other sector I'd allowed to build up. I queued up over twenty new battleships. I contacted the Shroud to see what aid it could bring me, and was heartened with the boon of a psionic avatar; a tempestuous, swirling mess of psionic energy made manifest in reality. As I dispatched the fleet to continue to clear the scourge, I prepared a secondary staging area near my core worlds. If the plan was to work, those worlds would soon find themselves under deadly threat.

As the new fleet built, the old guard resumed their protection of the fringe worlds of my empire and the tattered remains of the Qix'Lufran Hive's territory. The intent was to declare the necessary war on the Lox and by extension the Alliance of Five so I could enter their territory, slaughter the scourge, and then withdraw. The second fleet, headed by my new psionic avatar, would be the defensive line in case anyone decided to throw themselves at the core worlds. It was a drastic step, and anything going wrong before the secondary fleet was built up would put the entire plan into disarray.

Something, perhaps predictably at this point, went wrong.

As the main fleet attempted to prevent further infestation within my own territory (the nuclear-blasted remains of Varba was a prime target to them, apparently), they were cornered by five Prethoryn fleets. As I've just said, their numbers simply continue to grow at so great a speed as to render moot any technological edge the Ashryth could carve for myself. At this point, as I've felt many, many times since the scourge began this reign of terror, I feel like I have no power to stop this. All of my empire's technology, resources and strength are insufficient to forestall the galaxy's ruin. No more desperation plays. No more tactical and surgical strikes. The scourge simply had so many ships that there is nowhere to strike at quickly. There's no soft target to quickly jump to and assassinate. A whole fifth of the galaxy is empty space, full of worlds I've had to glass just to prevent the scourge from reaching this point any sooner. I just don't have the resources to maintain the fight as it progresses. It would take a fallen empire's production facilities to even begin to shore up my resources weaknesses.

And no, before you expect the next paragraph to show how I tried to go after one of the fallen empires that remains so that I can take their stuff, I'd considered that. I'd considered it fifty years earlier, when the scourge might have been contained and I might have had the necessary lull in the scourge's offence to allow me to divert my fleet elsewhere for a couple of years. If I'd enacted it then, maybe it would have been enough. Now, it would be too much of a diversion of forces. It would take too long, and the scourge would consume more worlds and then even my boosted production would be insufficient to stop them.

They only had three worlds at this point in time. Three infested worlds with which to produce new bioships. Perhaps a hundred years ago I might have scoffed and thought, "If I just destroy their fleets in hit-and-run tactics, catching them when they're only one at a time, I can whittle them down to such weakness that I can spare ships for other matters and gain the strength I need to destroy them completely!" As it stood, there was... nothing. Nothing else I could think of to do. It was a bad plan, to be sure; consoldate the fleets and simply raid their forces wherever they lurked. There was no other option, though. No viable means to stop them. I decided then if I was to bleed them, to force them into engagements they did not want to take, I would start at home. The fleet, renamed Dragon Flight as I prepared for one last, fiery attempt at victory, headed to Kochab... and the two and a half Prethoryn fleets there that awaited them.

The psionic avatar, for all its strength and power, did not survive the first engagement. It launched itself into the fray and, while it soaked a lot of enemy fire, that cost it its physical existence. The sacrifice was not in vain, however; not a single battleship was lost in the battle. Kochab was saved, in large part due to the sacrifice of the avatar. Even Varba was saved, the infestation halted before it could fully take root. One system saved. On to the next.

Scourgehold had, in spite of all the punishment inflicted upon it, held up surprisingly well. The Ashryth are a hardy people. Their salvation was a necessary thing and, unlike my other immediate options, it was only accosted by two enemy fleets. That was a battle we were willing to take. While victory came to us, it did not come without cost; eight battleships were lost in the engagement somehow. Even bad luck can't account for that. Something was different about this engagement, even though it came in the most favourable manner and after the fleet had repaired itself. It wasn't until I realized that I'd let our minerals run completely out – incurring some massive penalties to the capabilities of my ships – that I realized that the scourge weren't stronger, I had crippled myself. The situation was quickly rectified and Scourgehold was safe for the moment, but the loss had been much more severe than it had needed to be.

Scourgebane, by contrast, was protected by three Prethoryn fleets and would need everything to be in prime condition for battle. It was a battle I had to forestall for the moment, however. Kochab was once more under attack, the Qix'Lufran Hive had been reduced to a pair of thoroughly-sieged systems (one of which was shared with two infested worlds), and more infested worlds needed to be burned before I could continue my purge. More battleships rolled out of my shipyards as the fleet returned to repair.

I knew I'd burned out all my resources on that last wave of battleships. My fleet was strong, but no more reinforcements would be coming for potentially years. As more Prethoryn fleets took up positions within my space, I returned to the task I'd been assigned for near on one hundred and fifty years by this point: eradication of the infestation on planetary surfaces. Fifty worlds scorched clear. Over fifteen thousand Prethoryn bioships annihilated. All that had done was slow them down. They had to be stopped, and after fifteen minutes of pacing my living room, I came to the only conclusion that was left to me.

I declared war on the Alliance of Five.

At first blush, this sounds like a horrible, terrible idea, but bear with me. I declare war on them. I then get access to every single infested world in the galaxy because their closed borders no longer mean anything to me. This is fine. The empires most distant from the swarm attack me with enough combined force to overwhelm the fleet I currently bear. That too is fine; I won't be engaging their fleets. In fact, I will be studiously ignoring the Alliance of Five and all their ships until the infestation has been completely and finally stemmed. They will attack my worlds and they will even capture some. This, amazingly, is also fine. And then, once the infestation is removed from the galaxy and the only Prethoryn bioships there will ever be are the ones they have and the ones my tame queen spawns, I can turn my attention to the alliance. The scourge won't be able to do anything more to the galaxy except destroy ships. Ships can be rebuilt. Attrition will end them the way it nearly ended me. Destroying the infestation buys more time than allowing them to slowly creep across my empire and consume all of my people.

Before I declared the war, we had to take out the only infested world we could (and fight through the two fleets that protected it). The losses were notable, but not severe enough to stop us. The moment the infested world was cleaned, the war was declared and I moved onto the system next door to purge one of the Vag-Oross systems of the infestation. I doubt they were thankful. That's fine. If I stop the scourge AND win the war, they will serve me as payment for my people's valiant efforts. The 'wargoal' I stated in my declaration on the Alliance of Five was the thing I had wanted since shortly after I had begun my quest of subjugation: the complete vassalage of the Vag-Oross people. If the Ashryth live long enough to purge the Prethoryns from the galaxy and regather our forces, that will be a sweet reward in and of itself.

I didn't know just how unthankful the Vag-Oross were until I moved onto the next infested world. One of their fleets (potentially their main fleet, judging solely by the sheer volume of ships we wrecked with only a single loss to my own forces) intercepted mine en route to the next target. If nothing else, my report on their fleet strength revealed that they were no longer inferior to me, but pathetic; they had likely thrown everything at my fleet in a desperation play they may have learned by watching me engage the Prethoryns. They were dispatched surprisingly swiftly – amusingly also like my early engagements with the Prethoryns – owed perhaps to that flak artillery that was retrofitted to the battleships what feels like an eternity ago. Regardless as to the how or the why, this surprise engagement cost me almost nothing and put us on the right side of the war I'd had to start. The Alliance of Five had already suffered considerable losses and Dragon Flight was unassailed as we headed off on our own noble mission.

Unfortunately, the only other infested world I could find was their bastion. Their fortress. The same system I'd tried to assault much earlier to no avail, and now I could see why. I could also see why the scourge had two infested worlds listed as remaining, but only one system in their control: both worlds in the system were infested. Four fleets protected the infested world there, and it was those four fleets that I had to destroy, and then any fleets they summoned back to protect their last worlds if I wanted to crush the Prethoryn Scourge once and for all. While the engagement with the alliance vessels had only resulted in a single destroyed ship, they had done much broader damage than the scourge had ever done in a battle, which left a large number of my battleships is varying states of damage. This was it. What everything had been building toward. There was no time to turn back. Turning back gave the alliance a chance to gut me from the inside out. This had to end right there, right then.

Of the four fleets, they too were not unharmed. We'd destroyed a great many of their ships in several fleets the last time we'd swung by this part of the galaxy. Two of their fleets were at half strength, and the third was slightly damaged as well. The fourth, unfortunately, was at full strength, but overall they were more like a three-fleet engagement than a four. That was messy but doable... if my fleet was in prime condition. I was surprised as I watched, at the slowest game speed possible, the fleet begin to systematically dismantle the scourge vessels. I dared to think it was done.

Then a full-strength 70k fleet warped into the system, right on top of my battleships.

Perhaps you're starting to sense a pattern here with this tale. The emergency FTL jump I made cost the fleet three ships; hardly a dent what with the potential of losing EVERY ship. Unfortunately, it also cost me in time; six months would pass before the fleet returned to me this time, and even then they would need further time to be repaired. At least in the meantime I could build resources to reinforce the fleet for the ships lost, and then go back after the last infested worlds again. I raided the stores of one of my two rich sectors again (it had replenished itself since the last time, fortunately) and set my starports to produce sixteen more battleships to reinforce the Dragon Flight. There was still a mission to attend to.

A side note. While the fleet was indisposed and off in the darkness between the realms courtesy of the emergency FTL system, it's easy to have forgotten that I had two vassals. The Qix'Lufran Hive have long been at the forefront of the battle with the scourge and, as my tributaries, have been essentially dead weight for a long time. To give me tribute they must actually have income to provide me, and since their last worlds are thoroughly blockaded by scourge vessels, they've got literally nothing to offer. Someone who DOES have something to offer however, are the Penthulan Interstellar Nation. Remember them? I'd won their vassalage in the same war that won me the hive as a tributary? They had long served as a massive side-empire that had become very loyal to me in the decades and centuries since their enslavement to my will.

Originally, I had intended to simply annex them into my empire directly as I had done with their precursors, the Kalaxenans, but they had so many systems and so much military at their disposal I thought it wiser to leave them their freedom, so long as their fealty was sworn to the might of the Ashryth. I haven't really said much about the Penthulans, because they've not really had to worry about the scourge. They're on the relative-eastern rim of the galaxy, with the bulk of my empire between them and the Prethoryns. As I waited for my fleet to return from wherever it is they'd been sent by the emergency jump out, I noticed that the full force of the Penthulan fleet had taken advantage of the alliance's sudden weakness on my behalf. With my forces tied up by the scourge, they had taken my war up in my name. The capital world of the nearest member of the alliance, the ethically-similar but ever-insulting Vag-Oross Enlightened Kingdom, was blockaded and bombarded by my vassal, with a transport fleet ready to rain troops down to capture the system. Without the presence of my fleet, my war was still being driven toward victory.

By the time the fleet had returned, the Prethoryns seemed not to have realized what I was trying to do. I briefly worried that there was a fifth, fully-prepared fleet in the system ready to join the now half-strength four fleets they'd amassed to protect their infested worlds, but a quick check showed that that fleet was on its way to parts unknown. They had not called back any additional reinforcements. This was still possible! Dragon Flight's numbers were not so negatively impacted that a swift strike was a bad idea. Fully repaired, battle-ready and a mere three jumps away, the fleet launched into interstellar space once again against the scourge's infested worlds, hopefully for the last time.

The scourge attacked immediately when Dragon Flight arrived, but they were at the disadvantage. Not only had Dragon Flight been completely repaired, but the scourge vessels hadn't had sufficient time to heal. They were damaged, under-strength and up against the wall. I'd been this close to victory enough times to know that it wasn't a certainty, but there was still a rush at the mere prospect. The initial volleys of weapons fire tore many of the bioships to shreds, reducing a hundred ships to a few dozen. Two more Prethoryn fleets warped in to help support their flagging defenders, but warp lag left them unable to move so soon after their jump into the system. As the newcomers paused to gather themselves, my fleet drove through the existing defenders and sundered them. Even the Penthulan fleet jumped in alongside Dragon Flight, offering their support at this critical time. They had served with distinction and answered the call when times were most dire.

And then one of the fleets that had arrived to reinforce the defence... warped away. But that was fine, because apparently three more were on their way and I'd not even noticed. We were too invested to flee, even though that would have been the smartest option at that point. A three-versus-one engagement would not be a smooth fight, especially if further reinforcements came to support the scourge. If I jumped away however, that would leave the Penthulan fleet vulnerable. They might flee. They might fight. I didn't command their forces directly. The emergency jump could only be used if the situation became irreversibly fucked.

Thankfully, the Penthulan fleet seemed to know who was really going to save them. Their ships formed a screen for my battleships and took strikes that would have obliterated my craft. Damage that would have destroyed one of my ships took out a dozen of theirs, but they formed up anyway. They bought the time for Dragon Flight to target and annihilate those three responding Prethoryn fleets. Make that four; another fleet warped in to support them, and was also utterly obliterated. No more ships seemed to be rushing back to defend, and so the fleet took up bombardment positions in orbit and unleased a century and a half's fury upon the worlds below. The Penthulan fleet retreated to nurse their wounds, their service paid and loyalty assured as Dragon Flight finally finished the mission that they had begun well over a century earlier.

And at last, so, so long after they had first come to the galaxy with the intent to consume everything and move on to the next, the Prethoryn Scourge were left with no worlds infested. Victory, in its most technical sense, finally.

 

… but only in its most technical sense. Hundreds of Prethoryn bioships continued to lurk across a whole quadrant of the galaxy. They had consumed one ancient empire completely and had very nearly consumed a fellow hive mind; my friends the Qix'Lufran Hive had survived somehow in spite of all the odds. Over fifty once-habitable worlds had been glassed to nothing beneath the thunder of the Ashryth's fleet's guns after those worlds fell to the scourge. Resources were still spread thin and, in spite of the lack of infested worlds, there were still planets with Prethoryn ground troops occupying them. All it would take is time and those worlds could be infested again, and start the process over. And all of that while the Ashryth have been forced into an engagement with the Alliance of Five. Even if two of the five were battered to helplessness by the scourge and one of them by Dragon Flight, that still left two fully-capable and well-rested empires ready to deploy their fleets. One such was a direct neighbour, and also the next strongest empire in the galaxy. Agression from that front could come at any time.

But for now, finally and at last with actual certainty, the primary threat of the Prethoryn Scourge is dealt with. Their ground troops will be swept clear by invasion armies as the worlds they occupy – worlds that belong to the damn Lox who will now become the next target of Dragon Flight's weapons – and the threat of infestation will be burned away as clearly as the infestation itself. Their remaining bioships will fall in time as well, with no means to replenish their lost numbers. The hives they've erected in the systems they've found no food in will be the last to go, and then the next challenge will begin: exerting control over these distant, once vibrant worlds and nursing them back to life through advanced terraforming means.

The damage the Prethoryns have done to the galaxy will be remembered, and the captive queen will serve as a reminder to all of the immense feats achieved by the Ashryth Pan-Solar Order.

And eventually, the galaxy will stand united in saluting the Ashryth not only as their saviours... but their overlords as well.

 

 

 

Hopefully, you've enjoyed this little glimpse inside a part of a game of Stellaris. I'll freely admit that most games don't wind up balanced on the edge of disaster for so long and in so many ways, but the game is still full of amazing emergent storytelling that no two games ever really wind up playing the same way to me. I plan on playing these adorable little fairy dragons again in a future game, just to see how that galaxy treats them compared to this one. One can only hope they fare better!

Depending on if you guys enjoyed this little… uh… *stares down the wordcount display and rubs the bags under his eyes* … this long depiction of an end-game crisis in Stellaris, I might do more of these. And for more games! And you know, if you don't like them, I'll drop it. No biggie!

And if you've been intrigued enough by this AAR to check Stellaris out, go check it out on Steam! Look for youtube videos of it. Don't just buy it based on this story; do your homework. It's a big and complex game, but if you're into the kind of game it is you'll get so much out of it. Don't overlook the Utopia expansion if you get the game, either; it adds so much to the game, and it's a sign of greater things still to come from Paradox, I think. And no, I'm not being paid to advertise Stellaris. I wish I was. I could gush for another 15.5k words if they wanted to pay me for the words.

For now though, it's half-past midnight here as I write this and I've been editing this AAR for fuck knows how long. Four hours? Five? I don't care. Done now. So very done.

Fae, out.

*bed*