Somehow it's fitting that Alpha Centauri fell last. It fell not long after Midway. Interesting.

7 Jul 06

With the Tarka finished, I now had to complete the conquest of the Humans. I had already taken over about six of their worlds. There were only six star systems left. I had the reconstituted Death Fleet. I had a second Death Fleet about to go operational. Then since I had cornered the Humans into one small section of the galaxy, I had shrunk my front lines. This opened up a number of cruisers for assault duty. I was able to move some of the older cruisers to defensive duty so only recent model cruisers would be part of the assault.

The Hivers don't really excel at blitzkrieg tactics, but I was going to try. I had back fill fleets ready to move forward as soon as the gates were constructed and planets cleared so a Death fleet could immediately move on to the next target. So I had two Death fleets and a cruiser assault fleet lead by a command dreadnought. Six planets, two waves, simple, game over.

When the first Death fleet arrived at Pollux, I found six cruisers, a dozen destroyers and a handful of satellites. Clearly my previous assaults and conquests had hurt their economy badly. Compared to the Tarka, the Human destroyers were brushed aside. I had replaced the assault cruiser with a minelayer. I put down mines in a slight zig zag pattern behind the dreadnoughts. This meant that if ships overshot or tried to circle the dreadnoughts, they'd run into the mines. Given that my mines were pretty powerful by this time, it worked even better than expected. The destroyers were damaged on the first pass and blew up in the mines. The dreadnoughts engaged and destroyed two cruisers en route to the planet. The size six planet didn't last long. Neither did the mop up. The next turn the fleet swept the system of satellites and one damaged cruiser.

The second Death fleet arrived at Avalon. What was this? Six ships and no satellites. Three cruisers? The entire defense force was wiped out on the way to the planet. I might have taken pity and spared the planet, but they kept shooting missiles at me. It was cleansed.

After that I didn't see a single cruiser. One planet was uninhabited. The rest were sparsely defended. Only Alpha Centauri, a size ten planet, had one ring of small defensive satellites. It was defended by eight destroyers. They were swept aside. After the last satellite was destroyed and planet silenced, the Humans were no more. The Queen's peace had begun.

Jason