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his diary was originally published back in 2007, when this site was just a cosy corner of CVG. We're republishing it here a few entries at a time, every Saturday. “I just finished the game you saw me start at 4.30,” I messaged Tim, at half past midnight. “It was a 'Medium' sized one.” I'd gone home and eaten in the meantime, but other than that I'd been utterly lost in Galactic Civilizations II, specifically the Dark Avatar expansion, and I could no longer imagine what other people do with their evenings. Or jobs.

GalCiv invites careful thought about each turn—economies crash easily, people become restless and revolt, other races storm ahead of you in at least one respect, and rash choices quickly lead to war. So we got talking, or I got talking, about what lay beyond the seven-hour game I'd just finished. The galaxy sizes go up to 'Gigantic', I had a third of the maximum number of opponents, and the AI on the third of twelve degrees of difficulty. Cranking that up too high would be counter-productive—my demise would be swift. But putting everything else on maximum would set me up for an epic game that would take me weeks, at least, to complete.

So this is the saga of the largest, longest possible game of the largest-scale, longest-lasting space strategy in years.

Galactic Civilizations 2 spectres of agony

Day 1: Full of stars

Ulp. Gigantic appears to be somewhere close to the actual size of a galaxy. My race—the suspiciously bunny-like Spectres of Agony—found itself in a cluster of around twenty solar systems which, upon further exploration, turned out to have only one other race in it. We were isolated by a vast stretch of void on all sides, large enough that our ship's range would barely cover it, and which divided us from a chain of central clusters where presumably most of the other races lived. A few other islands like ours were dotted around, one as remote as us, but we were on the outskirts of an incomprehensibly vast nowhere. I got off to what seemed like a good start. Conserving cash as much as possible, I put what little I could afford solely into grabbing the juiciest planets and asteroid fields, including an absolutely utopian class 18 right on my rival's doorstep. I even stole one in the same system as his homeworld—only a class 6, but it's the malicious, gloating thought that counts.

Nicely settled in, I locked my war-chest, cut spending, and dropped all taxation to zero. This made my people very, very happy. This made my people very, very horny. This made my population growth very, very fast. This is the Super Breeder ability, and at our peak, two-billion Spectres of Agony were being born a week. We were breeding like Spectres, definitely not space bunnies.

We were mighty.

Day 2: I did not have diplomatic relations with that species

It didn't last long. I hadn't bothered to build up a military, because I was neighbour only to an incompetent pacifist, an opponent so feeble he wasn't even worth the warmongering reputation crushing him would garner. And it wasn't like one of the warlike races—the huge Drengin empire, for example—was about to cross the void to conquer what must have been the two militarily weakest races in the galaxy, sitting on a cluster of superbly fertile planets. In fairness, that isn't what happened. What happened was that I crossed the void with a single defenceless mining ship that didn't have anything better to do, and wandered around their territory for a bit. They opened negotiations and suggested I donate 132 billion credits and the Universal Translators technology in exchange for my 'continued existence'. I amended the terms of the deal to them giving me 4.5 trillion credits, their entire military fleet and their homeworld, in exchange for shutting the hell up. They impolitely declined. We parted ways, snarling. I knew our next meeting would be even less productive.

Galactic Civilizations 2 Drengin

The trouble is, with no military—even with one of the highest populations in the quadrant—everyone fancies their chances. I was the defenceless fat kid being bullied for my lunch money. Before long even the normally upstanding Altarians were demanding tribute for my continued existence, and eventually the unthinkable happened. The Torians, my incompetent pacifist neighbours, were bullying me for pocket change. The Torians! The joke was on them, of course—my early-game economic balancing act involves making exactly no money for the first few years, and the only technology I had that anyone seemed to want was Universal Translators—the very devices both of us were using to negotiate in the first place.

Nevertheless, I had to sit back and breathe deeply for a while before I could trust myself to touch the diplomatic relations window without demanding every penny in their coffers for the privilege of being incinerated by the glorious ionised fire of the majestic Spectres of Agony military (which I would be building any day now). Instead, to vent my anger, I made a counter offer of their entire civilisation—their treasury, every planet they owned, their fleet, all of their technology—for 1bc. They ceased talks in a huff.

Day 3: Populous

I had a bigger problem. People were unhappy. I'd never quite been able to work it out, these plummeting approval rates as my civilisation expands—perhaps because by the time it kicks in, I'm usually in a position to obliterate any colonies my wretched inhabitants might want to emigrate to. But I'd still like to know why it happens. My dim red approval percentages offer only “-50% from population” as an explanation. I didn't understand. Every planet had masses more food than it needed, and yet they all cited as the cause of their malaise simply the number of people.

I was being stupid, of course. What it really meant was over-population, because however much food they might have to spare, eighteen billion people just don't fit on a planet. My fallacy had been to assume that high-quality planets—since they have more buildable land - were larger. In fact they're the same size or frequently smaller than their less habitable counterparts, and the game takes that into account.

Galactic Civilizations 2 stellar

My homeworld—my richest, most populous and most productive colony—was also my least happy planet, partially because its citizenry had swelled to fill the generous eating- room I'd given them by building so many goddamn farms. My generosity had been my downfall. My most loyal people were about to defect unless I stopped charging taxes entirely, and thanks to my knife-edge budgeting that would bankrupt me in weeks.

The solution was as clear as it was terrible. Six billion people on my homeworld of Blood had to go. I'd never be able to deport them with spacecraft—I didn't have any, and I wasn't even sure if I could move them to planets on which I already had colonies. No, there was a simple, cheap and very quick solution to this problem, and I took it. I razed my farms.

In one week, six billion people starved to death, and my approval rate among the survivors went from 49% to 99%. I could see why dictators did it.

Day 4: The Long Arm of the Flaw

I don't—and I say this now because it's bound to become portentous—defend my planets. At all. I rarely give more than two or three them Starports to build ships, and even those don't have a standing guard to shoot down invaders. You could take down my whole civ with a Blitzkrieg of weaponless troop transports. I feel comfortable saying this here because GalCiv has no multiplayer mode, and while the AI is extremely good, I don't credit it with the gumption to track down and read this blog mid-game.

This is a terrible, crippling flaw in my strategy, but over my years of RTS, TBS and even FPS playing, I've discovered it usually pays to have a terrible, crippling flaw in your strategy. It lets you focus your resources on other areas to a degree that AI doesn't seem to anticipate. It assumes some portion of your funds will be reserved for such sanities as defending yourself in any way at all.

Now I was channeling the money saved by my terrible, crippling flaw into cultivating a huge and ecstatically happy populace. By rush-researching Extreme Entertainment, I was able to keep everyone at their euphorically randy 100% approval rating by building Zero-G Stadiums on any colonies that showed even a modicum of dissatisfaction.

This screenshot might not look like much, but it's telling me that 100% of my 85 billion people love me.

That glut of manpower allowed me to quickly research Aquatic and Radioactive World colonisation, which gave me three ripe new worlds to screw on—one of them on the outskirts of that enormous main cluster of stars at the centre of this galaxy. I had joined the big boys. Before long, my farm-burning genocide on day 3 had led to the second-largest and by far the happiest population. And I found myself struck by the same thought every great leader must have had when faced with the peace, prosperity and adoration of his people:

I bet I could tax the cocks off these chumps.

Day 5: WAR

The Drengin Empire declared war on me. The Yor Collective—who have also inexplicably overtaken me in the population stakes—declared war on me. The Drengin declared war on the Yor. The Terrans declared war on the Drengin. The Yor declared war on the Torians. The Drengin declared war on the Korx. The Altarians declared war on the Drengin. The Altarians declared war on the Yor. The Altarians—in an extraordinarily audacious and unwarranted move for which I will crush their bones to dust and mix it with the vitreous humor from their freshly squeezed eyes to make a sort of sandwich spread—declared war on me.

The galaxy is in chaos.

It's possible, I grant, that this cascading diplomatic catastrophe of conflicting alliances, pre-emptive strikes and outright treachery may have been triggered by my slightly glib behaviour in first contact with the most powerful race in the universe, but I'm not going to dwell on that. Back when I've thought of a way to win a war against over three hundred ships without a military.

GalCiv 2 2

Day 6: The USS You Are All So Boned

A few minutes ago, the Drengin offered a peace treaty. Given that they are basically Klingons, this is rather gratifying. You might describe the noise I made as a 'cackle'. I have others at war with me, but they're mostly bandwagon-jumpers or Drengin lackeys—none of them would dare keep the aggression up if the Drengin back off.

I was utterly cornered by these thugs before I even started to design my first ship. My military policy is to skip the first few generations of space combat entirely. Every other race builds up huge numbers of these 'Heavy Fighters', but they don't have the Logistics skill to have them fly together in a large fleet, and a significantly larger and tougher ship can repair and even level up between dispatching small groups of them.

So that's what I built. I was the last race to have a military, but the first to have a Large military craft—bristling with four times the weaponry and twice the horsepower of anything else in space. I named it You Are All So Boned. I wanted to call it something else, but it was one letter too long.

GalCiv 2 3

Does it have guns? Yes it does. It prowled the galaxy, singular in number and in nature, undefeated. It cleared the way for some audacious invasions of the lushest and best-defended planets of my new enemies, and after a few demonstrations of its power, the Drengin offered a peace treaty. I didn't have to think about it.

I rejected.

Day 7: The Blob

So, there were invasions. I was eventually able to afford a second and third YAASBo, but with only a handful of craft you can't keep a large galaxy defended against even the lightest ship. So the Yor, Drengin and Altarians all had a go. Most of them failed, because my lascivious population growth meant all my planets had a full twelve-billion rabbits living happily on them, making them tough to conquer this early in the game.

But after the fifth successive invasion of the planet Death in a single turn, there simply weren't enough people left alive to defend it. It was lost, and just as my few ships were closing in on the Drengin's most fertile planets for a surgical strike. I was doing that thing you're not supposed to do: fighting a war on two fronts. And that was when I first saw the blob.

It lurched through my ships' sensor ranges, past those fertile planets, and was gone before the turn ended. It was like glimpsing a strange and terrible new kind of sea creature in the murky depths, something whose shape was nebulous but whose sheer size foretold a chilling power.

It was, of course, just a lot of icons stacked on top of one another, such that their shapes merged and the outline dilated. This was no less terrifying. When it finally lingered near my squadron of second-generation Boned-class ships long enough for their sensors to catch it between turns, I saw that it was-

Well, let me say first that I had often wondered exactly where the Drengin military was. Every time they opened trade negotiations to bully me for money, it listed literally hundreds of vessels, but I only ever saw a few at once. Now I had my answer: seventy eight of them occupied a single parsec, and moved together as one epic and unstoppable beast.

It lurched my way.

Day 8: A fall from space Some of my craft fought The Blob bravely—I was right about a large, powerful, tough ship being able to take on many lesser ones in succession. But the Drengin had learned Logistics since we last met, and their ships attacked in squadrons of six or seven at a time. The You Are All So Boneds, themselves in smaller but stronger formations, were still able to dispatch them, but took irreparable damage in each clash. Soon one of their number was lost, and the reduced firepower meant the Drengin's largely unscathed armada shredded the rest without breaking a sweat.

The Blob lurched on.

GalCiv diary 3 2

The YAASBo's fought well, but the waves kept coming. Who would have thought repeatedly angering and insulting the most powerful race in the galaxy while completely defenceless could have consequences? Who could have known that refusing to end a war with a military over a hundred times the size of your own might lead to tactically tricky situations? Did any among us guess that attacking the heart of their empire with my only craft while the most populous planets in the galaxy lay undefended might ultimately lead to my downfall?

I paced the war room in my underpants, puzzled.

Day 9: War Bastards unite I'm on War Bastards now, the next generation on from You Are All So Boned, with comparable firepower but super-thick armour designed specifically to take spadefuls of punishment from mass-driver class weapons, the type the Drengin invariably use. They look like enormous chrome space-scorpions, and two of them can take on a 10-strong fleet of Drengin Heavy Fighters without losing a craft.

GalCiv diary 3 3

Which is just as well, because the galaxy is now swarming with 10-strong fleets of Drengin Heavy Fighters. I swoop in and intercept them whenever I can, but I have to exercise caution when a cluster of other fleets are nearby—successive attacks can easily polish off the most damaged War Bastard, even in a fleet of three or four.

But I've noticed two surprising things: for one, without really realising it, I've got my Logistics skill up to the point at which I can have five War Bastards in a fleet. It might not sound like much, but the increased firepower per turn should boost the number of Drengin they can smash through almost exponentially.

The other thing is that according to the figures in the Civilization Manager screen, two of my Research-focused planets would actually make phenomenally good war factories—in fact, they're already among my most productive worlds, even though I've set them to focus exclusively on books-an'-learnin'.

Since I wasn't close to getting anything researched anyway, I set them both to Military mode and found that I would now have five shiny new War Bastards in less than two months—seven turns. Combined as a fleet, and deployed as a one-two punch with my current five, I allowed myself to think this might actually be enough to slay the Blob.

Day 10: Outside Context Problem I'd been holding desperately on to that beautiful class-21 world, Petroni I, smack bang in the heart of Drengin territory, and prowling grounds of the Blob. The Blob itself had already smashed the heavy forces I'd posted to defend the planet, but they didn't have any troop transports in the area, so the planet had remained mine.

I couldn't really do much with it; any ships I built there would be smashed by The Blob before I could build up their numbers, and any planetary improvements I built would only strengthen the enemy when they inevitably conquered it. But I liked having it.

So I did what I always do when I can't do anything good: I did something stupid. I built a single War Bastard there and launched it immediately at the nearest Drengin colony—a fairly fertile world with just a few ships in orbit. After smashing its defenders, I would quickly build a troop transport and invade it, achieving no lasting advantage but irritating the Drengin enormously.

GalCiv diary 3 4

I attacked. The planet turned into a ship. The ship destroyed my ship. The ship turned back into a planet. I gaped.

GalCiv diary 3 5

I was not, it turns out, the first race in the galaxy to build a Large craft. And I had been pipped to the post at pioneering the Massive hull type too. The type you use to build battleships. I gaped.

I checked its stats—it had no armour, but a lot of hitpoints and- wait a minute… TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY-THREE GUNS? I gaped.

My star player, the War Bastard—previously thought to be the most powerful craft in the galaxy—has eight. A five War Bastard fleet, my secret super-weapon to slay the Blob, makes forty. This has TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY-THREE. I gaped.

The Blob, I was starting to realise, wasn't really the issue. I stopped gaping and cancelled the troop transport.

Day 11: Three years later… Guurk. Where to begin? Okay, everything that's happened up until now has probably taken place in the space of about eight years. It's now three years later, and things are a little different.

First, the reason so much time has passed: I was screwed. It turned out my five-strong fleets of War Bastards were nothing like a match for The Blob, and one squadron of them was even destroyed by lesser fleets of Drengin and Yor.

There were no sensible moves left, and I didn't have the money to do anything stupid, so I did nothing at all. I curled up into a ball and hoped no-one noticed me.

I kept producing a single tiny, defenceless, one-gun ship on Petroni I so that lone troop transports couldn't invade it, but other than that all military production ceased, and I turned my people's thoughts to academia. I called that little ship The Bongolian Ultra-Prawn, since the single wavy tendril I gave it made it look vaguely crustacean, and it was exploded and rebuilt every two turns.

GalCiv diary 3 6

The Bongolian Ultraprawn bravely kills itself on a Yor fleet.

The Drengin love to destroy a planet's defences, but I've never actually seen them invade with troop transports, despite my taking this huge and juicy world right in the middle of their territory. The Yor, on the other hand, invade me constantly, but they lack the soldiering skill of the Drengin, so I can almost always fight them off. And if I've lost a lot of citizens, I just drop taxes to 30%, my approval hits the roof and my people screw the losses away in a couple of turns.

So for three years, I survive. I even hold Petroni I—the Yor don't dare take it so deep in Drengin territory, and the Drengin just don't seem able or willing to use troops. Instead, they do what they've always done: build up their military.

Now The Blob is the standard Drengin fleet. Dozens of them swarm the galaxy. Battleships like the one I encountered on Petroni II jet around in pairs. The universe is a sea of red.

And that's about when the human race declared war on me.

Day 12: The last bill and testament I'd been trading technologies with the Altarians—despite their earlier transgressions—so that I could keep up with propulsion advances without diverting research time from developing ridiculously powerful guns. Trading tech in GalCiv doesn't lose you that technology, so you don't have to worry about the cost to you, only how much you're benefitting a potential enemy. I was doing it on the assumption that the Altarians would never be a threat—or at least that the other three threats would kill me first—so I was being fairly generous. Alliances, Fertility Acceleration, Advanced Trade, I even gave them some of the lesser weapon technologies along the tech-tree branch I was climbing.

You're probably familiar with the literary technique of foreshadowing, so you may well be expecting to hear next of my demise at the hands of a now-mighty Altarian Empire. It didn't quite happen like that. In fact, shortly after our trading was complete, they surrendered under the might of a vast Drengin assault. They were out of the game.

But surrendered under, not surrendered to. Generally when a race surrenders, a report pops up informing you that they've given some of their ships to race X, some to race Y, and often quite a few to the race that conquered them. I am never race X or Y. I'd wondered if it was even possible for the player to be the recipient of these legacies, so consistently did I fail to inherit. This time, though, I got something! Two ships.

Slightly chuffed, I went back to tending my colonies, and clicked away a warning that the citizens of my colony on Amber II were becoming restless and thinking of joining the Drengin. Let them, I don't even remember which planet that is. Hang on, I actually don't remember which planet that is. I've never heard of it. Apart from Petroni and Banfield, mine are all named things like Blood, Death and Carnage (we overcompensate for our lovable physical appearance). I zoomed out. I'd inherited two ships, and the entire Altarian empire.

GalCiv 1

Oh. My. God. It was hemorrhaging money, full of 150 billion profoundly unhappy people, and about to be invaded by a Drengin force the likes of which I'd never seen. But it was mine. I'd been clicking through three years' worth of turns because I was so screwed that there was nothing really to do. But now, with fifty new planets' worth of problems and an empire around eight times its previous size, I had something to think about. I saved, quit, and thought about it.

Day 13: Learning fast Okay Altarian empire, let's see what you can do. Apart from sap my money and complain. Or get invaded and lose. I mean the other stuff. Military—can you make ships? Let's see… no, no you can't. One or two planets have enough factories to pump out the odd War Bastard, but I'm researching ships a whole tier bigger than those now, and these factories are simply too low-tech to cope. Planetary structures—got any? Make any? Not really and not really. Plenty there, but again all stone-age compared to my stuff. Really, guys, was your civ built to do anything other than surrender?

GalCiv 2

Yes, it turns out. Despite the profound lack of it evidenced in their own achievements, their colonies boost my overall Research rate enormously. Wow, enormously. The thing about Research is that every planet doing it is collaborating on the same thing. Everything else is per-planet, so a ship that can't produce ships quickly by itself might as well not be producing ships. But with my entire civ in research mode, every colony with so much as a library is getting me a little closer to HD Spike Drivers; a gun bigger than any I've researched before. In fact, we'll have it cracked in… one week. A single turn.

Scrolling down the list of research possibilities, the next rung up any given tech ladder would be done in one or two weeks. Research was about the only area where we were already competitive: we were a small race devoting all our resources to it, while everyone else was a huge race using only a small fraction of their potential. Now we were huge, and using it all.

There are two ways to catch up with someone: run faster than them, or keep running after they finish. I'd planned to hole up and research until I joined the Drengin at the top of the tech-tree, some time after they reached it themselves. Once we both had Black Hole Generators, I reasoned, their huge military advantage would be undermined. But now I was actually learning faster than them too—there was a decent chance I'd beat them there. All I needed was a little time.

Day 14: The Bongolian Deathcrab Long story short, I got it. My enormous new hivemind of supergeeks plowed through the whole tech tree in under a year, and for an encore we researched the the hardest possible hulls and Ultimate Logistics, which would let me use the superships I created in fleets.

In the time it had taken to research these components, I'd been invaded a lot. The only three remaining races in the galaxy were all at war with me, and while the Drengin still inexplicably refused to land on my planets, the Yor and the Terrans rained troops down on me. Us Spectres have 12 billion people on every planet, and our nymphomania means we recuperate losses quickly, but the scale of the onslaught was such that we still lost one or two planets. So when it came to the fun part—designing my capital-class super battleship to use all the best technology in the universe—I was angry.

GalCiv 3

The Bongolian Deathcrab, a crab-class craft. This is how, by the end of the half-hour design process, I ended up with a ship that is too wide to fit on the screen. It is around twelve times the size of the Drengin battleships. It doesn't just have a Black Hole Generator—the most devastating transdimensional weapon conceivable—it has ten. They're spread along its one and a half thousand meter wingspan to make it even more impressive when firing, and two huge blades at either wingtip indicate very clearly that it's not something you want to crash into on a dark space-night.

I took almost as long settling on a name—most of the ones that seemed appropriate would be too obscene to mention on this site—and finally decided it would be related to the Bongolian Ultraprawn, the smallest and cheapest ship in my armada. The Bongolians do things in extremes. One day I'll actually get round to naming one of my planets Bongolia, and this will all make sense. Right now it's just an obtuse Stereolab reference.

None of my colonies had anything like the production capabilities needed to produce a Bongolian Deathcrab before the heat death of the universe, so I'd have to buy one outright. It cost 15 trillion credits. I gulped, and clicked Accept.

It was enormous, and beautiful. It crushed a few local Yor fleets, then ran into a Drengin battleship—and instantly exploded. They already had Black Hole Generators.

Day 15: “Fuck.”

Fuck.

Day 16: How screwed I am in pictures GalCiv 2 1

Yes, those are seven Drengin battleships heading to my new empire. I'm screwed. GalCiv 2 2

Military, size of. The red line is the Drengin, the white line is me. I'm completely screwed. GalCiv 2 3

The red lines mean 'at war with', the blue ones mean 'allied with'. I'm so very screwed. I am—and not for the first time, long-term readers might have noticed—utterly screwed. That was my ace, my Babylon 5, my last, best hope for victory. If I saved up for a few years I might be able to afford two of them, but some Drengin fleets have three capital ships and a gaggle of corvettes (that's the correct collective noun, by the way). I was there with them at the top of the tech tree, and sheer numbers and resources left me just as screwed as I had been before.

This was the fifth time I'd discovered my best effort was utterly insignificant in the face of my enemies, and it was starting to take its toll on the reckless enthusiasm with which I threaten and insult the other races. What was the point?

The truth is that apart from that recent glimmer of hope, I've known I was screwed for some time now. At first I assumed my underdog status was just a precursor to one of the spectacular comebacks I'm accustomed to stumbling into, but it just never came. And as I became more and more screwed in more and more ways, and more and more of my last ditch secret weapons failed, it was sinking in that my defeat would not only be pathetic, but also extremely public. Short of posting “Day 17: Then I won,” there isn't going to be any way to get out of detailing my painful defeat on a public blog, when everyone had probably been expecting I was leading up to a dramatic recovery.

Then I saw it. I looked again, and thought about it carefully, but I couldn't see anything wrong with the idea. I sneakily checked the other races, and none of them were trying it. There were a few unknowns involved, sure, but however I crunched the numbers in my head, it came out doable. It would take a while and mean a lot of spilt blood, but it'd render everyone else's military might irrelevant. GalCiv players have probably spotted it by now—I don't know why it took me so long—but I won't spoil it for those who haven't.

I'm going to win.

Day 17: The plan It's called a Technology Victory, and it's a fairly obvious path. It means researching the nature of existence itself, until somewhere down the line you discover a way to transcend this mortal coil and become a being on another level entirely. I had, of course, considered it as soon as I noticed how quickly my new empire could learn things, and in fact a commenter even suggested it before yesterday's post.

But by itself it wouldn't work: the Drengin had finally invaded the first of my planets, and the Yor and Terrans had been picking at me for a while, even managing to claim one or two respectively. I wouldn't last long enough unless I could hold them off, so I'd gone back to researching the components for a Bongolian Deathcrab.

The actual solution was both fairly close to that and almost the exact opposite: Bongolian Ultraprawns. Remember I introduced these diminuitive fellows to defend Petroni I, an incredibly fertile world I stole deep in Drengin territory? They got destroyed within a week or two of being built every time, but they worked. Petroni I is still mine to this day, and making me masses of money. Right now it's paying for most of the Altarian empire.

The Terrans and the Yor will always have a go, there's no stopping that, but the Drengin always crush first and invade later—they won't try to land on a planet if it has any form of combat craft in orbit at all. And there's a word for that, I'm sure. Oh yeah: COWARDS.

GalCiv 2 4

Bongolian Ultraprawn destroyed. Bongolian Ultraprawn destroyed. Bongolian Ultraprawn destroyed. Well, they can make as much Prawn-toast as they like, but every time they launch their troop transports in the murky depths of their territory my sensors can't penetrate, they'll find another tiny space-crustacean waiting for them. And then, I'm almost sure, they'll turn tail and head home.

I set every single one of my colonies to produce Ultraprawns continuously and indefinitely. All had an ETA of 'Never' since I wasn't devoting a penny to Military production, but I only had to siphon of a few percentage points from Research to get a lot of three- or four-week times. Not everything would be defended all of the time, but the only time the Drengin invaded anything at all—in my extensive experience with pissing them off—was when there had been no military craft anywhere near it for months. This ought to do it.

And it did. The next few months the universe was aflame with explosions—everyone and their space-grandma was swooping in on freshly produced Bongolian Ultraprawns and blowing them to dust. But no-one invaded anything. It was a warzone, not the safely smouldering ruin you want to bring a troop transport into.

Before long, I even caught a break. The United Planets council assembled to vote on a pressing issue, and the motion was “Should all current wars be called off?” And I tried to vote yes.

Day 18: The vote Advertisement I couldn't do it. The Spectres of Agony, who again are definitely not rabbits or adorable, bow to no-one. Engraved on the seal at the base of a mile-high statue of their leader, Paul Davies Mutilator of Worldsblood, are the words “Bring it the fuck on” in Latin.

It wouldn't have mattered anyway—my population wasn't enough to swing a United Planets vote, particularly against three allied races. But then something completely bizarre happened: the motion passed. I voted no, the Terrans voted no, the Yor voted no, which meant that- good God, the Drengin voted yes? They're only at war with me! Are they scared of the Ultraprawns? Are they running out of ammunition to slaughter them with? Is the boredom tearing them apart?

Regardless, this was space-Christmas for me. Not only did their decision prevent the Terrans and Yor from invading me for a while, but it was the ultimate slap in the face for them to learn that I'd voted against it. They'd probably imagined they were being benevolent, granting a dying race its last request, but they'd ended up looking like they were begging me for mercy.

Day 19: Time left GalCiv 2 5

Quite literally the path to enlightenment. There's a misconception that the Technology Victory route is boring. I'd thought it would be too, which is why I didn't try it from the outset (that and arrogance). But it's actually the GalCiv equivalent of those RTS missions where you have “hold the base for five minutes”. Only it's “hold half the galaxy for three years.”

For a while though, thanks to the vote, it was quiet. That massive swarm of battleships closing in on Altaria prime sheepishly veered round and headed home, bound to oblige the bizarre decision of their masters to abort the war. The Terrans and the Yor drifted aimlessly, geared up for invasion and unsure what to do with peace. And I learned, furiously.

Another reason heading for a tech victory isn't boring: I don't know if it'll be three years. At each step along the path—Galactic Understanding, Near Omniscience, Beyond Mortality—you only know how close you are to a breakthrough with your current task. The next ones have no ETA at all—they could be the same again, or ten years. I'd reckoned on each rung on this ladder of learning to take about twice as long as the previous one, but each time a new ETA was revealed, the numbers made me wince.

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More and more bored of war with the Yor. War broke out again, of course—the joint resolution reset all race relations to 'Cool', but it's not quite the same sense of the word as “I'm cool with the French.” Soon they were demanding cash for my continued survival, and I was only able to avoid spitting on my monitor by repeating my counter-offer of their entire civilisation in exchange for some space-cumin.

So the Drengin declared war, the Yor declared war, and finally the Terrans declared war. Another, more intense spate of invasions rocked my colonies, and another planet was lost. And at last I mastered Beyond Mortality, the second-to-last milestone on the path to enlightenment, and discovered exactly how long the home stretch would be.

Sixty weeks.

This was going to be a tough year.

Day 20: The first thirty weeks The GalCiv races are loosely based on common sci-fi archetypes, the most famous instance of which is usually from Star Trek. The Drengin are the Klingons, the Terrans are the Federation, and the Yor are the Borg. That should give you some idea of how bizarre and hopeless it is to fight an alliance of all three. Sixty weeks was just the wrong length of time, and I knew I wouldn't make it curled up in the corner reading books and mumbling about going to a better place. That didn't work in primary school and it wouldn't work in interstellar war.

The problem wasn't surviving sixty weeks—I was sure I'd make it that long if my Ultraprawn tactic held. The problem was that if any of my significant research centers fell in that time, it would take a hell of a lot longer. I'd hoped to counteract this by using the money I was making to buy new Research centres, enhancing my least productive planets to spread our learning power more evenly. But money was going to be a problem: I lost Petroni I.

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I was just about to rename it to Bongolia, too. It had been invaded before, by the ever-rhyming Yor, but shrugged the enemy troops off by the sheer weight of numbers. Tougher to do with the Drengin, when their invasion fleets land with 6 million angry gerbilmen. Their Soldiering skill got them a 3-1 advantage, so they crushed our 12 million militarised rabbits easily. They might bide their time, but when the Drengin do invade, there's not a lot you can do.

My Ultraprawn tactic was not holding. I lost four more planets to the Drengin and Terrans, and had to stop most of what little I was spending on military to get my research ETA back in line with previous estimates. My income sunk below zero. It was starting to look like time for Plan Omega, my top-secret financial gambit tha—wait, I wasn't supposed to tell you about yet. Even if it works, though, it seems far from likely that I'm actually going to win now. The Drengin weren't as predictable as I'd hoped, and more dangerous than I'd thought possible.

The only good thing that happened in this whole wretched chapter of my existence was tactically insignificant, if hilarious. A Terran Heavy Fighter swooped in on a Spectres planet very close to our homeworld, and exploded. A Bongolian Ultraprawn had finally killed something.

Day 21: Plan Omega Let me say first that I am an extremely stupid man. I don't think things through. I don't research things (ironically). I don't read the manual. I've played incarnations of GalCiv for a while, but the intricacies of certain subsystems within it sometimes escape my memory. So GalCiv players, please wince with me as I detail my Plan Omega, my secret weapon, the gambit that was going to win me the game in spite of everything. And everyone else, imagine for a moment the glee I must have felt at coming up with such a seemingly flawless idea.

Phase one: tax the cocks off these chumps. Crank tax rates up to an obscene level, to the point at which the entire civilization will rebel or have me killed if I keep it that high for long. This will make money.

Phase two: spend all of this money on research centers, but don't buy them outright—get them on finance, paying the bare minimum now and committing to weekly payments for the next forty years. This will result in many research centers, and a plummeting economy, but we'll be dead or Gods in thirty weeks, so what are the loan sharks going to do? Pray threateningly?

Phase three: just before hitting -500bc in debt, buy a Neutrality Learning Center, the most expensive and productive research facility possible, outright. For 5,500bc.

Phase four: drop taxes to zero, causing the plummeting economy to nosedive so hard that it almost goes backwards in time, but making everyone extremely happy before they have a chance to rebel.

There are only really six or seven things wrong with it. But the chief among them I discovered just after Phase three.

I'd built eight or nine shiny new research facilities, and decided to buy the Learning Center before going into debt, just in case being in debt stops you from buying things (it does). I waited until I had everything before checking the effect on that all-important ETA, but early signs were very good. I'd bought centers on my most populous planets—the hardest to conquer, and the ones that'll benefit most—and the numbers much improved.

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The real treat came when I discovered I had access to something called an Omega Research Center (Omega! So perfect!), a Galactic Achievement that boosts a given planet's Research by 50%. That put my home planet over 400 research points per week. Space-Christmas had come twice in one year.

So when I finally left the Colony Management screen to twizzle the sliders and see how much all this had reduced my ETA, I was puzzled to find that it now read 'NEVER'. 'Puzzled' is a new word for 'petrified'. My heart was actually pounding. And it was then that I remembered how debt works.

500bc in debt isn't the cut-off point for buying new things, it's the cut-off point for production. All production. Including Research. THANKS, MEMORY. Could have done with that info TEN MINUTES AGO, but thanks anyway.

My entire civilisation would not learn a single damn thing until I was out of debt, and I couldn't put the tax rate one percentage point higher without losing half my empire to a rebellion.

You know that word 'screwed' I used to use in this diary? I was using it all wrong. Back then I meant 'in trouble', or 'a tight spot'. This, this was the true meaning of screwed.

Day 22: The year of hell The only thing that mitigated the damage of Plan Omega was that I'd planned it so badly in other ways too: I hadn't saved enough money to buy that many research centers, so my week-on-week losses weren't as bad as I'd intended them to be. And because it had completely nullified all my research centers, rendering even the new ones useless, the main drain on my finances was gone, and I was eventually able to crawl all the way back up to the lofty heights of negative five hundred billion credits. Nice plan, Paul Davies, Mutilator of Worldsblood. Real masterstroke.

It had blown my ETA out of the water, my entire civilisation loathed me, and all three enemy races had stepped up their invasions in the meantime. I lost at least one planet every turn, including two major research worlds. The only thing that saved me from total annihilation was a minor plan I executed in the first thirty weeks of the onslaught: building extra farms on my most valuable planets. We couldn't make war, but dammit we could make love, and the booming population on those worlds saved several from the repeated invasions of the Terrans. One even survived the Drengin ultra-transports for a time.

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The Terran military was suddenly enormous and everywhere. Worlds fell, billions died, the last of the Ultraprawns exploded, and the ETA ticked down with an agonising slowness. It almost looked like it might be close. But now that I was out of debt and researching away, my academic expenses stacked on top of my debt repayments, and I had to scale back my research efforts to save money. This was more or less the opposite of the idea behind Plan Omega, so you can imagine the bitterness with which I dragged that slider down and watched the ETA climb week-by-week until my colonies would just about be making a profit.

I was at a standstill. It was agonising. Plan Omega had cost me almost exactly as much as it had gained me, and the unrest, instability and steady hemorrhaging of major planets was increasing my ETA as fast as the passage of time was reducing it. In the ebb and flow of those two factors grinding against each other, my destruction was constantly getting closer, even as my ascendance to godhood was slipping away.

But in the end it wasn't close. I won by miles.

Day 23: Rising above it all Before I explain what ultimately tipped the balance, I would like to pen an open letter to the Drengin Empire, just to demonstrate that with Godhood comes understanding, and with understanding comes peace.

Dear Drengin Empire,

HA! HOW D'YOU LIKE THEM TRANSCENDENT SPACE-APPLES? HOW DO THEY TASTE IN YOUR STUPID FAT GERBIL FACES? DIVINE?! THAT'S BECAUSE I'M A GOD.

Sincerely,

Paul Davies Mutilator of Worldsblood

The key was in the fact that I'd already lost most of my best research planets. I'd assumed that because I was losing planets at a steady or increasing rate, my research ability would go down at a steady or increasing rate. But after losing a few good planets, that rate-of-being-screwed was artificially high. It actually leveled out after that: my ETA ticked down week-by-week for the last fifteen turns.

But it was a mega-event that gave me my final break, and saved at least one of my last remaining major knowledge-factories. Because the mega-event was this: sex.

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Some kind of miasma spread across the galaxy and made everyone ultra-fertile. We Spectres were already the most reproductive society in the galaxy by a factor of two, so we benefited from this twice as much as anyone else at exactly the time we needed it. The Terrans, who rely on successive small invasions to wear a planet down, never conquered another world. We just screwed the losses away before they could get another ship to us, even at warp 9. Once the ETA got to single digits, it was clear no-one could stop me. I don't even know if they realised I was going for a tech victory—the furious onslaught they inflicted on me may have actually been them biding their time.

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The other myth about tech victories is that they're anti-climactic. This was excruciatingly tense, and GalCiv is great at letting you enjoy the moment of victory. It gives you one turn after you've technically won in which to put your affairs in order. I dropped my tax-rate to zero, making everyone 100% happy, and ceased all production and research. Our work was done, forever.

But it still didn't seem like enough. So I opened up a dialog with the Drengin, and gave them everything I had. All my influence, trade goods, technology and all planets except my homeworld. In return I asked for 1bc, and I very nearly clicked Offer. But then I looked at their sneering Gerbil-jerk faces one more time, and switched my comms channel to the Vegans, and gave it all to them.

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The Vegans can deal with the invasions now, we don't need planets where we're going.

Four different minor races were discovered in the course of that game, and mysteriously all of them were called The Vegans. The Drengin destroyed two of them, I destroyed one. I didn't know about this fourth one until they came up in my comm menu, and had no idea what they were like—one race of Vegans had been utterly evil, the other two had been lovely (I think I even extorted money out of them once). But I gave them everything anyway, and took my 1bc coin gratefully.

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I finally renamed my last remaining world to Bongolia, clicked the Turn button for the last time, sat back and watched a really rather wonderful cut-scene showing our people transcending into pure energy, lifting off our world in a soft white inverted rain.

Then the game crashed.

Post-script: What the Drengin were doing Advertisement Rather appropriately, I finally understood the Drengin's bizarre behaviour just as I was about to acquire total understanding of the universe itself. They did three mysterious things in the course of this six-week game, but there's actually a pretty good explanation for them all. This is fictionalising—it's probably not how GalCiv's AI actually thinks - but it makes a surprising amount of sense.

1. Why did they destroy my ships, but almost never invade? It sure as hell wasn't the Bongolian Ultraprawns—towards the end they smashed right through them and rained troops down on me. But again, still not as fiercely as you might expect. And shortly before I would have been wiped out, they stopped entirely.

2. Why did they declare war, then vote for peace? They threatened, extorted, attacked and bullied me the whole game, then voted to end all wars—all of which were against me. Then they were the first to declare war on me in the new peace. What the hell were they playing at?

3. Why did they stay in an alliance with the Terrans for so long? The Yor seem fairly logical partners for the Drengin, but the Terran are simpering diplomats. Why did the Drengin stay pals with them?

It was mystery number 2 that turned out to be the key. They wanted galactic peace, but they were more than happy to be at war with me. So it wasn't our war they wanted to end: they wanted the Terrans and the Yor to stop attacking me. They couldn't persuade them to do that because the Terrans had all the diplomatic clout, but they dominated the United Planets vote with their vast population.

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But why did they want to call the (human and robot) dogs off? It evidently wasn't to take my planets for themselves, because they still refused to invade me. The answer was actually in this screenshot, from Day 16, and I should have spotted it then. Everyone but me is in an alliance—an alliance formed by the Terrans. If I'm destroyed, the Terrans immediately win an alliance victory for having united all the remaining races. The Drengin would be part of the resulting alliance, but they're warmongers: they want a conquest victory, not to play second fiddle in someone else's alliance win. They had to win by crushing everyone. And that meant keeping me alive for the time being.

This was delicious. All those times I spat in their faces, threatened them with nothing to back it up, stole their best planets and refused their offers of peace, they must have been dying to crush me. I'd flattered myself to think that my bravado had spooked them into assuming I had some secret weapon, but in fact it's a testament to just how much I was irritating them that they attacked me at all. Their path to victory utterly depended on my survival, and they still couldn't resist slaughtering a few billion of my people. The whole game their aggressive nature and their strategic judgement had been in a heated conflict, and time and time again I'd tempted them to lose their patience.

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The more I understood about what had been going on while I dicked around with ridiculous ship names and insulted everyone, the more I realised this had been the Drengin and Terran show all along. They were just using me as a pawn. The Terran's superb diplomatic ability had allowed them to inherit the empires of several races that surrendered early, and form an alliance with all the remaining ones except me. I became a crucial piece in their galactic chess game by being such an insufferable prick that even the gladhanding Terran leader wasn't prepared to offer me an alliance.

The Drengin probably signed on early, when their unison would allow them to be even more audacious in attacking the other superpowers, but soon found themselves in a sticky situation. As huge as they were, the one thing that could defeat the Drengin outright was an alliance of the Terrans and the Yor. The Federation and the Borg. And if they left the alliance, that's exactly what they'd be up against. They had the lion's share of the galaxy's planets, so they could build up their army faster than their allies combined, so they were just biding their time until they were strong enough to take both of them on. We might have been weeks from that happening.

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The trouble was, the Terrans were smarter. They specialised in a weapons tech the Drengin had no defenses against, and focused their own defense research on the weapon type the Drengin used. They were preparing for the betrayal they knew was coming, and once they were ready for it, they hammered me. The Drengin saw the writing on the wall and followed suit, wanting to claim as much of my carcass as they could before they broke the alliance for the final confrontation.

Unfortunately for them, that was just as I was on the cusp of a technology that would render all this irrelevant. But you can't blame them for underestimating me—even I didn't think I was a threat to them for most of the game.