"As a part of the grand plan military recruitment had been toned down in favour of promoting more economically minded jobs like farmers, technicians, miners and the like in order to ensure the Cartel had the resources it needed later. The Fox Cartel were certainly playing the long game as in their minds winning one war, one battle at a time was insignificant, they wanted to ensure they would win all of them before they had truly begun. It was that concept which birthed the grand plan in all it's glory, only time would tell if their forward thinking would pay off or not."
Stardate: 14-2-2296
Once again we find ourselves in the far too comfortable seat of the Oligarch of the Fox Cartel, I know the last few parts have been a bit mundane but hopefully that won't be for much longer. So just hang in there and I promise there will be more space battles and fun stuff going forward, I just don't want this to end prematurely!
Right now we need to find ways to make our fox citizens more frisky so we get more foxes to fill all the empty job slots we have. So we will need to get lucky with our society tech rolls to get some faster population growth, though there is no real time pressure right now as the rest of the galaxy seems content to war among themselves.
Just as we get rolling the Alvothari Hegemony our other immediate eastern neighbour alongside the Uriy Suns decides to throw a diplomatic insult at us. The Oligarch of course has to stifle a fit of giggles before closing the comm-link, I guess they want to be next in line for a visit from the first fleet. I get the feeling not many people in the galaxy actually like the Fox Cartel right now, just a hunch.
Meanwhile the society division finishes it's research to further increase our star-base capacity giving us a whopping 15 to play with. There aren't many vitally important next choices to research so I just go for hyper-entertainment forums, just in case one of the new colonies needs a bigger happiness boosting building, that and it's cheap so it should finish quickly.
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| The first fleet heads out of the Capella system en route to a system infested with mining drones. |
I decide to give my new admiral a road test, there are still some mining drones and weaker crystal entity systems that need clearing so I order them off to deal with them. You were thinking there'd be no space battles, well, me too but this gives us something more fun a taster of what is to come if you will. Hades looks like it needs some more jobs ready to go soon so rather than making use of the building slot for now, I drop down another mining district. We may have a massive mineral surplus right now but once we upgrade the alloy foundries and consumer goods factories that is going to drop pretty sharply.
The first fleet engages the mining drone fleet in the Algol system along the Uriy Suns border greeting the faulty drones with a hail of bullets and plasma. Once the early nemesis of the Cartel's early interstellar military efforts the entire drone fleet is obliterated without a single loss among the first fleet. Without breaking stride they pulverise the station as well before moving out of the system toward their next target more mining drones in the northern area, the crystalline fleets have seemingly got larger. Let's get a constructor ship over here to claim this before the Uriy Suns do.
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| The first fleet clashes with the mining drones in a hail of auto-cannon rounds, plasma and cutting beams. |
With Blissful Elysium now half-way to being established it's time once again to sell off our excess minerals to terraform yet another planet. There's an arid world in the Vorsham system that's a decent enough size, so let's terraform that just to give us some more internal expansion options down the road. Whilst I let things tick over for a little while my branch office in the Skanuri Bloc gives me some intel on the war, whilst the Prossnakan's are definitely fighting pretty hard it seems they are being gobbled up by another neighbour. The Galactic Ymacera Assembly seem to have cut a huge swathe through their space which is as impressive as it is worrying. I may have to turn my attention west rather than east if they keep expanding at this rate.
The society division cheers up the Oligarch by being very much on point, finishing the last tech and giving us a very helpful option with food processing facilities. Basically it's another resource multiplier building but for food which means Hades may oddly enough become the Cartels bread-basket. Not to be outdone the engineering division makes our admiral giddy with excitement as the Ripper auto-cannons have also been researched and we have a lot of interesting options to ponder for the next tech.
Better armour, improved housing, railguns, bigger consumer goods factories and an L-Gate insight.. Hmm. I can't even see the L-Gate anywhere near me so I'll just skip that for now as it feels like it'd be a waste to research it. So let's improve our ships armour I have a feeling we may be needing it sooner than I planned.
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| The first fleet continues it's clean-up campaign in another system, taking on another fleet of mining drones and their supporting station. |
The first fleet engages the next collection of mining drones in the nearby Baxom system, as with the previous engagement the first fleet obliterates the drones without a single loss. So I send them home for repairs and cake, not to mention a well deserved retrofit including refitting the old salvaged cruiser into the newer Sylo-class.
Something more worrying than rapid expansion begins to happen among the more galactic eastern empires though as the Alvothari and the Prime Wardens enter into a series of pacts with each other. If they become a federation that could be a whole mess of trouble the Cartel doesn't need. For now though I think the 'Grand Plan' is safe to continue if only for the reason of getting more alloys to massively fortify my territory.
The physics boffins finish the research institute for us but Vulpinus is still growing very slowly so it will be a while before we can make use of it. I opt to take the rare tech of speculative hyper-lane breaching next which allows us to (with some risk) avoid the typical hyper-lanes, my science ships will be the ones using it as they are stuck with nothing to survey now.
That brings us to the end of the Cartels adventures for today, we even got a couple of space battles in and some more concerning activity from our unwitting future subsidiaries (meaning the other empires.)
Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope you enjoyed it! As always feedback, comments, tips are always very much welcome either here or on twitter.
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| A beauty shot of another world the Cartel aims to terraform for it's own use. |
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