Insert bad Tarka joke here.

21 Jun 06

I think my string of bad luck has ended. I've gone from my initial two planets to an empire of nine. I think Arakor is the crown jewel of the expansion. It's a size 10 planet loaded with resources. Unfortunately, planetary development costs are slowing my economy way down. If I can survive this growth spurt, I should be able to out produce and out research the Liir at the same time.

The war is at something of a stalemate. I took one new colony from the Liir. It's now one of my colonies. I've destroyed a couple of their scouts. I didn't find their home world, but I did find one of their developed planets. Unfortunately, my 'assault' fleet consisted of four destroyers. One was a tanker and another a gate ship. That would have been fine against a new colony or a small defense fleet. They have a fully developed planet with twenty one destroyers in their defense fleet. My fleet was wiped out in their first pass.

My research is slowed by planetary development costs. I can't build too many exploration fleets for the same reason. I can't build the death fleet needed to take out developed world I've found. I do like the accelerated Hiver growth rate. It means all these problems will go away in a few turns as my colonies develop. Estimating from the numbers, my income should at least triple and my expenses should drop considerably. So I'm playing defensively for a while to get there.

I can't be sure, but it looks like the Tarka aren't as comfortably far away as I had hoped. I just need to buy a little time. I don't want to worry about lizards before I finish my fish fry.

I have just a couple of site notes quickly. Since some people have asked, Talk Strategy is the main page for the site and news stories are posted first there, er here. I also post a copy in the news section so people can post comments (if you're reading this on the main page, see the link at the end of the block). I like to keep the main page HTML in case the database or PHP goes down. At least something will be up. If you're looking for updates to the story, check the main page or you can look in the Front Page articles category. I hope that clears things up. Also it looks like people are enjoying the movies. Comments or suggestions are appreciated.

Jason