It is now two months since I took over as the leader of the Iconian Refuge. "Emperor Zifnab" has a nice ring to it, and I have already started taking the empire in a new direction. It was fortuitous indeed that my ascension to the throne came merely a few months after the news of the hyperdrive reached us on New Iconia, and the government had already pushed for the creation of a new interstellar colony ship based on this new drive.
The first weeks were where I had to make the toughest decisions: What path of research should the government take based on these new developments? Where should we send our two available interstellar capable ships? What improvements do we make to the infrastructure on the planet, to improve life here while people are yearning for expansion?
Clearly the most difficult and important of these was the research decision. This, however, turned out to be one of the easier decisions: Scientists had put forth a proposal already to build enormous Xeno Laboratories, to research artifacts and other items we proposed to find on other worlds. It would take only a few weeks to begin the first testing stages and for us be able to build these vast laboratories, both on our home planet and those we hoped to colonize. Further choices up until now were also easy, as we had a large need for improved drive technology, the basic hyperdrive units taking up so much space that our lowly scouts would take months to manage a single round trip to a nearby star system and back.
The next decision was more complex: there are six different star systems within the range of two parsecs, and any of them could contain planets viable for colonization. We have only two ships, one which we have called Haplo, a flagship in name, but merely a scout in purpose, and the other being the stately colony ship, ready to transport thousands of our populace to a new world.
We could colonize any of the star systems if we could find a habitable planet, or one of the outer planets of our system, a poor choice perhaps due to the terraforming which would be necessary, but perhaps better to take the known quantity. I quickly narrowed down the choices, thanks to our well developed observatories: only four of the systems contained a significant number of planets, and so we sent our flagship towards the nearest of these, the star named Markus. (Don't ask me who names these. Clearly, if I had been in charge they would have been named differently.) Word reached us even as the flagship was enroute that one of the planets orbiting Markus would be suitable for life, and may even be as habitable as our own homeworld! The colony ship was immediately sent, and the flagship diverted towards the nearby system of Iversonia. This however led to a change in decision, as even as the flagship approached Iversonia, it discovered that the system had two habitable planets, the second and third out, and they were individually even better than the reports from Markus! The colony ship changed course, and the first important achievement during my reign occured a few weeks after that: The empire's first colony world was named Labyrinth, and our colony ship set down and immediately began building the infrastructure necessary to become an asset to the empire, rather than a huge drain on our resources. A sad reality of our colonization efforts is that we must sink huge amounts of money and industrial production into them, and it is only months later that we begin to see a return on that.
As I finish writing this entry, I just received word that there have been ruins discovered on Labyrinth, vast relics of an ancient civilization. It is not expected to further our research any, which is a disappointment, but there is hope that it can be turned into a cultural site, preserved for visitors from our worlds, and others, to see. Our second colony ship has entered production, and we are spending great amounts of money to be able to complete work in just a few weeks, as with every week passing we discover more and more habitable worlds near us.
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Clarifying comment for this post: Posts with this title (or later parts) are part of a series detailing playing my current Galactic Civilizations II game. For those who aren't familiar with this, it's a turn based space civilization game. Colonizing planets, meeting different races and trading/destroying/assimilating them.
For those curious about the details: I picked my race randomly (via /random in WoW!) and ended up with the new iconian empire, who start with large bonuses to economics, research and logistics. The intention was to play like the race I picked, with whatever focus they tend towards, and so this one was sort of an easy choice as I tend to play technological empire types anyways. Regardless, I spent extra points in social production, population growth and creativity.
For those wondering where the inspiration for this came from, Lem mentioned that he's read logs of GalCiv games and they can be really fun to read, and so (since I had just started a game) I thought maybe I'd try to write one. I have no idea if this is going to be anything like the ones he reads, but so be it.
Any plans yet on your political bent? I seem the remember the Iconians being a "good" race, but I can't seem to recall... At first, I misread, and thought you were playing the Yor -- I get confused, since the Yor start on the planet "Iconia", and the Iconians start on "New Iconia".
I usually combine my colonization and scouting into a single strategy -- fill lots of large ships with lots of people, and tell them they have to keep flying until they find a new home... It usually works, but it's embarassing when several colony ships fail to find anything good, and I end up with a large chunk of my early-game population wasting away in space.
I was going to mention something about politics, but it ended up being pretty long anyways. Iconians are definately a good race though, so we'll likely be playing that way.
I prefer to scout first and colonize later for exactly that reason, the initial population is really important. Oddly, I think they cut down on happiness scores in one of the patches, it's really tough to get a colony to near 100% for the increased population growth, at least right now. Unmentioned in this entry is that there's a morale resource near, which may help.
Heh, there are some familiar names in this post. :)
By the way, the acronym for "Emperor Zifnab" is EZ. "Curiouser and curiouser," said Alice...
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