Adorable Lizards Conquer the Galaxy!--A Stellaris AAR

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

I have recently been playing the game Stellaris and I intended from the beginning to make an AAR(After Action Report) about it, creating a race specifically for that purpose--then I got distracted actually playing the game. Then I did it a second time.

Anyway, now I'm going to try this again.  I'll play the game in short bursts for this race, then go back to my other game.  Hopefully that works.

So I give to you, the Turgottans.



A tiny race of bloodthirsty would be conqueror--who also happen to be both tiny and adorable.

I will be roleplaying mostly so expect some potentially stupidly suicidal things.  Can a special of adorable warmongers conquer the galaxy?  Find out in their own words for chapter 1.

Note that for this play I will be using the Leviathan DLC as well as a number of mods, mostly new event mods and some new banner/name/alien picture mods.  Two of the latter are in use in the picture above.

[BentonGrey]

Haha!  Well, this sounds entertaining.

[spydermann93]

  A STELLARIS AAR!?!?! My cecum is bursting with excitement!

I see the GEICO Gecko has joined your cause. I always knew that he was a war monger

Spoiler

Not to detract from your thread, Cat, but in one of my Stellaris games with one of my buddies, I had made a race of snail people whose society was built on "who has the prettiest shells", but not in a narcissistic way. More of like "oh no, that other snail has a bad shell; let's help him out!". They were Xenophilic Fanatic Materialists.

Any who while I was playing, I encountered a race of beautiful butterflies. I greeted them, but I noticed something... off. They were Fanatical Purifiers! So there I was: a race of friendly snails locked in a bitter war against militaristic butterflies! Never have I seen such bloodshed and cracked shells. Poor butterflies... they never stood a chance.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

I do not mind other people posting their Stellaris stories.  Gives folks something to read while I work on Chapter 1.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

Listen young ones, to the tale of our glorious people.  For countless years, our people fought and learned on our home planet, Turgotia.  Since our most ancient times, our people have told tales of beings from outside our world.  Beings that were not like us.  Being we could fight!  We trained throughout the centuries, fighting one another, getting stronger.  Then our great philosopher Oomalala realized that our sun was like the stars.  That was were the enemies came from!  We dedicated ourselves to going there.

When we finally launched our first ships into space, we found to our disappointment that we could not go any further.  Space was just too big.  Our warriors were so disappointed. That's when one of scouting ships, flying towards the sun, first detected strange radiation that would lead to the discovery of hyperspace.  Several of our war vessels and a scout ship were given our first Hyperdrives, and we emerged at last into the galaxy, anticipating our first conquest.



Our scientists had already located two planets not far from ours very similar to our homewold.  On the very first one we surveyed we found life.  It was not intelligent as we are, but our scientists agreed that this meant that our enemies were out there somewhere.  Soon they would cower before us!



It was at this time when our scientists announced that our many wars had damaged our homeworld more than we thought.  Our home was dying.  Our leader, the grand Archon Koh Ye announced that we would search for other planets that were damaged, hoping to find the solution to save our own planet.  All of our leaders agreed that it would be vary heard to crush our enemies if we were dead, so our great search began.



As our science teams began to search stars further away, we found the first remnants of ancient technology.  Our enemies were out there! We only had to find them.  We thought we had when the first reports of ships came in, and some of our explorers came under attack.  It turned out, however to be merely space dwelling animals.  The Archon ordered the dangerous ones culled as necessary, but we had other matters to attend to.

One of the those being our very first colony.  A colony, hatchlings, is a new place that people live away from home.  The world we live on now was once a colony, but our people have been here a long time now, so it is just home.



With all of this flying around not finding any enemies, just dead ships and dumb animals, it is understandable that some of our people became bored with the way.  Some of them built their own ships, becoming the first space pirates.  There is an old term for "pirate" in the ancient language.  "Target Practice."



Nearly ten years after beginning to explore space, we encountered our first intelligent life form. They were quite primitive, however.  We would deal with them later.

[Podmark]

I just got Stellaris for Christmas! Very cool to see others here play. It's a really neat game with some cool customisation options.
Haven't played it for a few weeks, I got Civ 6 around the same time and I occasionally do others things too.

Very fun thread Cat.

[spydermann93]

It begins! The scaly expansion of the Turgottan race!

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

Chapter 2

For a few years, we continued to exploring, find a few other primitive civilizations and encounter more space beasts.  Hunting the space beasts occupied much of our effort and we in turn learned much from the biology of the Crystaline Entities in particular.

For all this, we had yet to encounter any other civilizations that were worth fighting.  We knew that they existed.  Aliens arrived once offering to surrender to our rule because they were so weak, they ran in terror from someone else.  We were going to accept until one of them insulted us by saying our people were cute!

Now don't act so shocked young ones.  I know that's not a polite word to say, but it's important that you understand just how nasty and insulting other species are.  This was but the first time this terrible slur would be leveled again us.  We were so shocked they managed to escape before we could exectue them properly.

We also had other similar experiences, such as when we found and thawed out some frozen creatures--although they were so few and pitiful as not to be worth our time, and another time when we found some artificial creatures that wanted to destroy all life on their planet.  Naturally we were rather excited to find out where those came from so we could kill them first. 



All of this far too peaceful exploration did prove that our homeworld was safe for quite some time, however.



Finally the moment came when we found our rivals!  They were called the Kizh and were disgustingly uncivilized and cowardly, talking about "peace" and "friendship."  Naturally we declared them our archrivals and continued to built up our fleet.  Fortunately in spite of their cowardly words, our spies indicated that they had warfleets equal to our own.  A glorious fight it would be!



They weren't the only cowards either.  Our explorers found an old facility with some of our own people preserved in capsules!  We began to investigate and there was evidence that we and these other were uplifted (that means a smart animal being turned in an intelligent creature) by a greater civilization.  Our legends and stories were true!  Our purpose was clear.  We had been created by our gods to be warriors worthy of conquering them!  We would find and destroy them, as they obviously desired.  Let this be a lesson to you hatchlings, always show proper gratitude to those who help you.



While trying to located the other uplifted beings, we found a giant Cystaline Entity, truly a foe worthy of our might fleets!

[Glitch Girl]

Well this isn't going to end well for someone. 

I'm imagining a 1st contact situation:
"Oh how adorabAAAAAHGETITOFFGETITOFFGETITOFF!!!!!!"

[daglob]

Well this isn't going to end well for someone. 

I'm imagining a 1st contact situation:
"Oh how adorabAAAAAHGETITOFFGETITOFFGETITOFF!!!!!!"

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

Many more rivals were found over the next few years.  Some were mighter than other.  Some were soft and cowardly, but others were might warriors almost as great as us.  Most important though, we found our creators.  A mighty civilization not far from us.  We had thought ourselves strong enough to kill them, but we had to admit that they were much stronger than we were.  We know that if we were to fulfill our purpose and destroy them, we had to become much stronger first.



Word of our might power and fierce countenance began to spread and out of terror, or neighbors began forming defensive treaties with each other.  Let them tremble, our great leader said, for we are coming for you!

So great was their terror that when this was announced most species laughed in sheer horror.



Koh Ye had led us well in our first 40 years in the stars, but the time came when our military had to choose a new leader, and the mighty Admiral Yedo, leader of many campaigns against the Crystaline Entities.



And right away he had to deal with a group of wimpy space birds wanting to land on our Gaia plaent.  I was ours!  We saw it first.  He scared them away with sheer ferocity.



It was around this time that we met a particularly ugly species whose name, I have been told, translates to "Colorful Monsters."  It's a pretty terrible name.  Their species only has only color in a few shades.  Very littler variety within the species at all.  Quite ugly and lazy if you ask me.  They even have strands of string growing out of them.  Also they have terrible fashion sense. Uggh.  When you are old enough I will show you a picture of these Hue-Mons, but it would be too much for ones so young.



Even though we found our creators, a few of our people continued to investigate the uplift facility.  They traced it back to an evil AI who pretended to be copied from our creators.  It tried to trick us into weakness, telling us that we were meant to coddle those less powerful than us instead of conquer them.  From that time forth, we have refused to be deceived from those calling us to "help" the weak. 



But it was right that we should not just ignore the weaker races, so we began studying them.  It turns out you can learn a lot about primitive species by vivsecting their livestock and abducting the occasional random person for examination.



But as interesting as terrorizing lesser being could be, it was time to fulfill our real purpose.  It was time for war.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

I actually meant to take a screen shot of the galaxy map, so I'll do that before I continue the game and post that separately.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

The galactic situation, 50 years into the game.  Our reptillain friends are purple guys to the upper left.



EDIT: Coming next time will be our very first war, two secret reptilian takeovers and a slightly more scaley version of Attack on Titan.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

Titanic shipyards were build and ship after ship was built and launched, forming a mighty fleet.  Meanwhile, our bravest warriors trained for battle while our factories constructed mighty war droids.

What we weren't expecting, was the giant monsters.  Well, we knew they were there.  They were, in fact, a quite popular dinner choice on the planet.  It might seem strange that the people on Sismak Prime thought that creatures the size of skyscrapers could just be treated as livestock without taking even basic precautions, but they did.  It took them mere days to overrun the planet.  Our mighty armies rushed to the planet, but were forced to retreat.  The people on Sismak were on their own.



They survived by retreating into their cities, building walls to protect themselves and fighting the creatures back the best they could.  There are many stories written of the attacks on the titanic beasts.  I will tell some of them to you some other time if you would like.



As there was nothing we could do for our people at the time, our efforts turned to the war.  The cowardly Kizh had hidden themselves behind a tangled alliance of their betters, afraid to take us on one on one.  There was another species on our boarders, however, the Raltek. They had but one planet, which we invaded and easily took for ourselves.  Our great conquest had begun!



As we rebuilt our fleets and prepared for our next conquest, clever and valiant Turgottan agents infiltrated and took over the governments of two more primitive planets.  These were soon part of our empire. 



As they could live on planets that we could not, colonists from our subjugated races soon began to colonize many more planets in our territories.  Our scientists, meanwhile, had learned to change and reshape previously unpleasant planets to be more suitable for our and our subjects.  Tar Valemm III was the first to be successfully Turgoformed.



In the wake of our great victories and rapid expansion, the scum known as the Olohomoid insulted us, calling us weak and in need of their protection.  Never forget this insult, young ones.  It will never be forgiven.



For our next war, an even larger fleet and mightier army were needed.  The brand new Destroyers began to leave the docks, joining a fleet now over a hundred large in size.  A grand army of over 100 battlians was assembled.  Millions of troops, ready to fly out to whereever they were needed.

They were needed on Sismak Prime. Though they were alone, they had not been forgotten.  The people had survived and now we came for them.  Over a quarter of our soldiers were lost, but in the end they triumped.  Sismak was free.



Next we attacked the Rhitoo, ugly lumps of fur with superior technology, but smaller industry.



We could build our fleets faster than they could.  We thought that would be enough to tip the balance while also given our scientists a change to reverse engineer their superior ships.  We were wrong on both counts.  Their fleet was more massive than we could imagine.  Our fleet fought valiantly, but ultimately retreated.



Our shipyards went into overtime.  Sismak, now freed from the terror of the titans, became our forward base, with our newest shipyards putting our largest ships yet, the mighty Cruisers into service. 



We built  a fleet larger than that of the enemies, then prepared to crush them once and for all.  But then, our scouts spotted something new among their ranks.  Massive vessels dubbed battleships, newly arrived on the battlefield.  We lost again.

So again we rebuilt.  Our fleet had damaged theirs severely.  We did not have to build so many vessels this time.  We but needed time.  Our new fleet crushed theirs.  They were defenseless now.  We had won!

But before we could get the news to our diplomats, they surrendered.  Our homeworld, the place where our people had emerged was given to the enemy.  It was our greatest shame.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

I am REALLY regretting setting this up as an ironman game right now.  The game froze and in trying to click around to get it moving accidently clicked on the return all planets to owner button.  As a result I lost hours worth of progress and a good 1/4 of my empire, because that's exactly when the game started running again.

So mad right now.

Alright, vent over.

[daglob]

Hey, wait a minute; that ship looks vaguely like The Winslow.

[spydermann93]

I am REALLY regretting setting this up as an ironman game right now.  The game froze and in trying to click around to get it moving accidently clicked on the return all planets to owner button.  As a result I lost hours worth of progress and a good 1/4 of my empire, because that's exactly when the game started running again.

So mad right now.

Alright, vent over.

Ouch! Sorry to hear about all of the lost progress. I HATE when that happens

Still though, I'm enjoying the little adventure so far. Are those titanic beasts part of a mod?

[BentonGrey]

Urg, that's ugly man!  Sorry! 

Like Spyder said, I am enjoying the narrative, though.  Your approach is very entertaining. 

[Glitch Girl]

I am REALLY regretting setting this up as an ironman game right now.  The game froze and in trying to click around to get it moving accidently clicked on the return all planets to owner button.  As a result I lost hours worth of progress and a good 1/4 of my empire, because that's exactly when the game started running again.

Damn those massive uprisings.  Why won't the oppressed stay oppressed, amiright?

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

Don't worry, I've kicked their furry behinds twice since then and they are all happy in their oppression now.  I'll be writing it up shortly.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

Are those titanic beasts part of a mod?

Not certain, but probably not.  Titanic Life is a planetary modifier from the main game, so I'm pretty sure the related events were all from the game as well.  Not completely certain though.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

Turgot had fallen.  The planet of our origin.  Mother to our species.  On her beautiful sandy landscapes free of unnatural water deposits we had grown, learned, and reached for the stars.  It was with heavy heart that the imperial government fled the planet, abandoning it and all the people who lived there, among our greatest and fiercest families, to live under the wretch rule of the Rhitoo.

The next few years were spent recovering from this humiliation.  A new capital was built on the planet of Gor Prime, a beautiful Gaia world which had been settled early in our space faring years.  With the war halted, resources that were going torwards shipbuilding were diverted to building new colonies within our own boarders and developing long neglected infrastructure.

But even those years were not without their events.  The ancestors, quiet since we found then, complained that our sector governor was impeding their pilgrimages.  He assured as that we were not.



It was a test, one which, one which we passed when we caught their pilgrims launching a cowardly terrorist attack on us.  We realized that we much remain vigilant.  The ancestors were watching.



After over a decade of rebuilding, our people we more numerous, our planets more prosperous, and our fleet more powerful than ever before.  We were going to take our home planet back and we would exact a heavy price for the insult.



A massive fleet twice the previous one launched into their territory.  It found—nothing.  They had only a token fleet.  Their victory had cost them their triumph.



It was at this exact time that a virulent disease began to threaten our victory.  The timing was highly suspect.  Even more so when our scientist found the disease to be tailor made for our own DNA.  The infected were quickly isolated and then removed.  Someone was using the cowards way to try to defeat us.



The thought of being defeated by engineered disease and disaster was disheartening to all of our people.  Fortunately explorers on the colony of Siriois Prime found the ancient chronicles of a long dead race, whose stories of valor and combat proved uplifting to all of us.  That is where the Siriois stories which most of you are so fond of come from.  They continue to inspire us so many generations later.



Our warriors threw themselves into the war with renewed vigor.  We took most of their empire for our own.  But best of all, Turgot was our again.



There was a great celebration in the old capital.  We had come home.  And now our conquest of the galaxy could begin in earnest.



Then treachery.  We still don't know who was at fault and who was merely a victim, but traitors from within our empire turned our conquered lands back over to the Rhitoo while destroying several new Battleships in production.  It was futile.  We had all it all back a few years later.

We had just declared war on the Ubarik, when our neighbors, the Igak, closed their boarders, cutting off vital hyperlane connecting our conquered territory—and our newest prey—from the rest of our empire.  The Igak just make themselves our newest target.  Unlike with our previous foes, they brought several subject races and an ally.  It was four against one.  They were greatly outmatched.



Fortuantely for them, they were not our real targets this time.  We only wanted the systems which connected the two parts of our empire by hyperlane.  With those under our control, we ended the eventless war against the Ubarik for our final push against the Rhitoo.  Their empire soon fell completely.  Our second conquest was complete.

[spydermann93]

Holy smokes! Your empire is getting MASSIVE!

I must've missed it, but how many years are you into this game? Seems like you expand a lot quicker than I do

As for the titans, yeah, I've seen the planetary modifier, but I haven't ever had titanic creatures actually attack me. Interesting.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

As of my last post, 150 years.

First post was 10 year, next two were 20 each, and the last were 50 each.  Probably going to stick to that for now.

I'm about 200 years in now and just absorbed the Fallen Empire to the north, so yeah, bit bigger now.

My expansion has to stop for a bit though, because I have Unbidden to deal with.

[spydermann93]

I love the endgame crisis events. Just as it's becoming too easy, BAM! the Tyranids come rolling in so they can eat your cookies.

One time, I had the AI Empire Crisis crop up, but since my people have long allowed AI's to have full citizenship, the AI actually liked me! My leaders were slowly being replaced by synthetics, though. Every leader I could recruit was a robot. Perhaps they weren't my friends, but rather my subjugators.

And I dream of the day where I could take on a Fallen Empire. T'is a distant dream.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

With the Rhitoo conquered, we renewed our advances on the Ubarik, quickly taking half their empire.

Naturally our great might was very worrying to the other empires.  If they had challenged us properly, we would have accepted it.  Being cowards, three different races turned to sneaky genetic tampering, but we caught them before they could do any damage. 



We retaliated in kind to two of them, but our government tried another tactic with the Bellanians.  They were after all so weak.  One planet.  A pittance of a military.  A bare handful of scientists.  Not worth worrying about.  It was easier to just close our borders.  We surrounded them, so they'd be cut off.  The problem was the sole hyperlane to our new conquests ran right through their system. We were cut off again.



It was vital that we re-secure our hyperlane routes, but once again, the Igak were a problem.  In order to secure permanent passage, we would need to secure the territories of both the Bellanians and their neighbors, the Dirri.  Both were protectorates of our old passage blockers, the Igaak, so another war over hyperlane passage commenced.  Our goals was to free the two smaller nations from under Igaak domination, so that we could either conquer them ourselves or force them to serve us.



The war was not difficult, but was pointless.  Both nations rejoined the Igak at the first opportunity.  It seems that other measures were required.

As we rearmed for the next conflict, our long range sensors picked up a very powerful and very strange signal from the other side of the galaxy.  After a journey lasting nearly 2 years, an lone vessel reached the signal's source to find a mysterious starship graveyard, with a single, immense space station at its center.  The ship was never heard from again.



That is when the unthinkable happened.  That is when the Unbidden came.



I am sorry to scare you young ones.  I know there are a lot of scarey stories about the Unbidden; stories which are quite true.  I cannot tell you the story of our people without telling you about them though.

It was the Humans who brought them.  When they first invented the Jump Drive they assumed that it was safe.  The Jump drive was a revolutionary new Faster Than Light Drive, which tore a hole in the fabric of space allowing ship travel instantly travel immense distances.  A trip that took as a year would take mere weeks or less with the Jump Drive. What they did not realize is that something lived in the dimension that their ships were passing through, and it was hungry.



With the Unbidden invading Human space, our people had but a short time before all our energies would need to be turned to this new threat.   If the warriors of the galaxy did not stand together, there would be no further battles, no further victories.  We had but a brief moment of calm left.  That could mean only one thing.

It was time to challenge our creators.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

They were ancient and powerful, controlling a large portion of the galaxy long before our ancestors came crawling onto the sands.  Now, however, they had become stagnant and careless.  Their ships were powerful, but were built centuries ago.  Their technology was centuries ahead of ours, but they had forgotten how to use it.

When the final battle came, forgotten power was no match for growing strength.



As we integrated their planets into our empire, we learned many things.  For one, they were not the ones who uplifted us.  Maybe the crazy AI was telling the truth, but it didn't matter.  We had challenged the ancients and won.

With this done, it was time to deal with the Unbidden.  The extradimensional invaders had destroyed most of the human territory by this time. 



There was another ancient empire which we had not previously discovered as it too had gone dormant.  Faced by the threat of the Unbidden, it shook itself of it complacency.  The Blanvoq had rejoined the galaxy.



Those were terrifying times, especially for the weaker powers.  As the powers in the galaxy began to band together to face the Unbidden, one nation, the Behmenan submitted themselves to us for protection.  We were, of course, happy to count them as our subjects.



We sent our largest fleet to Unbidden territory, but it was on the opposite side of the galaxy from us.  The journey would take them a couple of years.

As the fleet was in transit, our scientists had a breakthrough—the psy jump drive.  The psy drive, which is still in use today, taps into the latent psy power of it's crew to open a portal through space from one point to another.  It's functionally similar to the jump drive that the human's invented, but as it used the crew's own latent powers is smaller and even faster.  As the Unbidden were already in our galaxy, there was no further danger to using it.



More importantly, it made it possible to make the journey from our side of the galaxy to the former Human territory in mere months instead of years, without the need to travel along naturally occuring hyperlanes.  Shortly after our hyperdive based fleet arrived at their staging point, newly constructed jump drive equiped reinforcements began to arrive.

The first few engagements with the strange, glowing vessels of the Unbidden went well.  Three of their battlefleets were completely destroyed and from the remains, our brave science teams, risking a quick death, managed to reverse engineer their greatest weapons, the Matter Disentegrator.  But with each engagement, more of our ships were destroyed, until finally the fleet was trapped between several unbidden fleets.  They had no choice but to escape with emergency FTL.  Our first contribution to the Unbidden War was over.