It is the beginning of a glorious day for today marks the first day of galactic conquest! Seeing as you are only one planet strong information must be gathered in order to expand your empire. To start, you build scout ships to move around your beginning solar system and scan for any anomalies that may appear and if lucky, perhaps another planet to colonize. While this is happening you’ll be putting together small groups of scout ships that will journey outward into other systems using the warp lines that are connected at the edges of your solar system.

You’ll need to be careful while you explore for you have very little supplies and military might. You could run into pirates, monsters, or even worse! So for now, the main focus is simply on information gathering and speed to get out of fights if that were to happen. Thankfully, you don’t run into any trouble during your travels and have found a few suitable planets to colonize. Your stellar database collects info about all suitable planets allowing you to filter out certain criteria such as habitability, atmosphere, composition, and more.

Now that you found planets to colonize it’s time to make a ship-build queue of colony ships to begin the colonization process. And even though there are no dangers for the trip, you’ll never know what can happen so it’s always best to protect said colony ships with a few fighters just in case. Once they reach their destination the planet will be turned into a colony after a few turns in which then you’ll be able to build from!

With the colonies created it’s time to expand them and make them grow. Facilities will need to be built and placed in each colony all of which having their own unique purpose from gathering resources, researching technologies, aiding production, and much more. Each facility also takes up a certain amount of space so you’ll need to pick and choose how that colony develops and utilize its starting resources to get the best results for your empire.

For some time as these initial turns, deciding how to allocate your limited production resources (build queues) between vehicles and facilities will take a lot of your attention. As the game progresses, though, and your empire grows larger, you will be able to rely more and more on build queue automation so you don’t have to micromanage everything by using default templates or creating specialized templates.

You now have a few colonies, your homeworld is thriving, you’ve researched a bit of technology to help your expansion and you’re ready to send scout ships out on long range exploration missions. First, you design a better scout ship with the vehicle designer, adding some weapons, more efficient drives for longer range, as well as more supply and fuel storage. Satisfied with that, you queue up your new scouts in some build queues of your more developed worlds. In a few turns, you are sending out scouts in auto-explore mode to determine what the universe around you is like.

In one of your early scout missions, you encountered a dangerous ancient guardian guarding a ruin that could have valuable technology or resources. So you also decide to design and build a small fleet of combat ships. First, you design a capital ship (you’ve done enough research to create light cruisers), then you design a fighter and a small carrier, and finally a few support ships – supply ships, repair ships, etc. With that, you add these ships to your build queues and will have a small fleet ready in a little while that will hopefully be enough to defeat the guardian.

Finally, you’ve built enough ships to form an effective fighting force, so you gather your ships in one place, create a fleet, spread the ships into various squadrons, each with their own formation, movement, and targeting strategies, and finally decide the general placement of the squadrons in relation to each other.

You send the fleet out to fight the guardian, end your turn, and cross your fingers, anxiously awaiting the results of the battle. On the next turn, you pull up the event notifications to check out how the battle went and watch a video playback. You watch the battle, zooming in close to the action points, pausing and rewinding occasionally, looking at the stats of the enemy ships that your scanners could determine. At the end, you’ve lost some ships, but the guardian is disabled and the ruins are open to explore!

You send your fleet limping back to your colonies for repairs and send your best scout ship, piloted by a hero unit, to explore the ruins. While waiting for the scout to arrive, you leave a science ship from the fleet behind to analyze the remains of the battle and hopefully find a few clues to interesting technology.

While sending your scout ships across the galaxy you finally come across another empire and it seems almost simultaneously, another empire has made contact with you! Seems the galaxy is becoming more aware of everyone’s presence and you’ll need to get a head start if you want to be on top. The first way of doing so is by comparing where each empire is located in the galaxy and figuring out who you can and can’t be allied with. Don’t want to bite off more then you can chew after all so it’s best to make everyone your friend while you slowly raise an army with the new technology you learned prior.

In order to make friends with other AI empires you’ll need to see what it is they like and dislike. At first it’s easy, you only see 2 empires at the moment and it seems the empire of humans likes it when you make your own people happy and dislikes senseless killing while the empire of Nova wants to be allowed to migrate to your colonies and also love receiving gifts. The only thing they hate is provoking combat of any kind and building megastructures on stars which is great cause you can’t even build megastructures yet anyway!

Seems like everything is costing well as you slowly raise your standing with the Humans and Nova by sitting back and playing it passively. That is, until you run into another empire known as the Kra’hn and it seems these guys are right on your doorstep. Odd, seeing as they just appeared from nowhere but looking further you see they have access to stargate technology and they have access to a part of the galaxy you were not anticipating. No matter though, all you need to do is make friends and then you realize something terrible, they like all the things the Humans and Nova hate.

It seems the only thing the Kra’hn like is fighting!? Thankfully the things they dislike are betraying other empires and attacking people without declaring war so it seems in this scenario the best option is to play it neutral with the Kra’hn while continuing to be allies with the Humans and Nova. However, in doing so also runs the risk of them making the first move for they have an incredibly strong army and due to their stargates can send said army on you at a moments notice.

With this complex situation, you decide to send in agents into the heart of the Kra’hn empire to keep a close eye on their operations. The Kra’hn have a very strong army but they have almost nothing when it comes to dealing with counter-intel which makes it easy to pull off your secret operations. You start off with planting agents across their empire giving you vision of their controlled area. This vision gives you perfect intel of not only their armies but also you notice other empires on the other side of the galaxy! Thankfully they don’t know about you yet so you can prepare in the meantime before making first contact. Another operation that would be useful would be reducing their weapon tech output. It’s clear where they are attempting to focus on which makes it easy to slow them down.

And finally, now that you know about these other empires perhaps it be best if you convince the Kra’hn that those new Empires are bad people and deserve to be dealt with! If this goes well, you’ll be able to force the Kra’hn into a war with empires all the way across from your empire which will allow you to expand and build with no worry.

It’s now the end game and all of the empires have been revealed in the galaxy. You have allied with the humans and nova and have reached a point where no amount of fighting will cause them to hate you. The Kra’hn remain your loyal pawns as their entire government is filled with your agents and it’s about time you put this planning to work. With the board set, you declare war on one of the other empires you came across and send your now massive fleet at the doorstep. While this happens you run a secret intelligence operation that gives a boost to any standing you would receive. This means, that the Kra’hn will like you twice as fast from attacking other empires while the humans and nova will remain their dislike at the same rate.

And from all the battles it doesn’t take long to include the Kra’hn into your alliance. And now that you are fully allied with them you’ll be able to utilize their powerful stargates! This was the moment you were waiting for! Normally it takes a lot of time and resources to learn stargate technology so instead you put those resources into making your fleets stronger. And because megastructures were also off the table, you were able to fully unlock some of the most powerful weapons imaginable.

With your amped up military might, you destroy all who stand in your way and can see an end in sight until, something unexpected appears on your feed. Some cosmic entity has made itself known on the far edges of the galaxy with an incredible fleet. And before you have time to react another cosmic fleet appears at another edge of the galaxy, and then another! Seems as if they call themselves “the watchers” and have declared war on not only you but the whole galaxy! A rare event for sure and one that now changes the entire outcome of the game for now you’ll need to co-operate with all empires if you want to survive.

If you want to pull this off you’ll need to use all the best techs from each empire to survive. The nova has researched destructive plasma weapons that can melt through most defenses while the humans have access to psionic shields which are perfect against the pure damage those cosmic fleets dish out. And thanks to the kra’hn’s stargate technology you’ll be able to move from one edge of the galaxy to the next as you take on these watchers. And if you can’t be there to defend your allies can pick up the slack and hold the line on their own due to you sharing your powerful techs as well.

An unstoppable alliance, you and your allies beat back the watchers and thanks to the help of some of the other empires can do so with minimal loss to your own. With them out of the way, you can now go back to conquering the galaxy as before! But, before you can even think of doing so the game is now over. You won. With the watchers defeated the galaxy has now come together under a common purpose with you standing at the top.

The game took an interesting turn at the end for one moment it was a blood bath of last one standing to the next a co-operative defense of survival. Who knows what the next game will hold and if those watchers will even show up the next time! Regardless if they do, you’ll know one thing for sure…

You’ll be ready.