Partial AAR for a game I know I'm going to love.
I may not be the most militaristic person in the galaxy, but I do know that I'm not the only person in the galaxy.
The production capabilities of Earth were slim - Earth didn't want to be pumping out ships, or even buildings. No, Earth was the bastion of free thought in the Terran Alliance - the place to be for the free exchange of ideas, even militaristic ones.
As such, most of the ideas had to do with researching and trade - research, for obvious reasons, and trade to pay for it all. Some work would occasionally get put into building better space miners, or factories, but only to the point that it would allow the citizens to build bigger and better research facilities.
Mars, however - well, there wasn't much on Mars. It quickly became a economic center, somehow, as banks sprung up everywhere, as an 'offshore' untracable bastion for the greedy. At least they were paying taxes.
As for the other leaders of the tiny galaxy, there was the Drengin, led by some Drengin dude, and the Altarians, led by a woman. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it became clear very early that the Altarian leader had a thing for me. The Drengin leader - not so much. After all, both the Altarians and I looked alike, and were both big into research.. she joined the sorority that my fraternity hangs out with, you know.
Regardless, there was really no way for us to hang out very much, as we were on exactly the opposite side of the galaxy. And, she was sitting right next to Drengin-guy.
In this tiny galaxy, there were only 6 colonizable planets - or so I thought. After developing Mars and Earth, our scout ship came across a nice planet in the middle of the whole galaxy. Awesome, I thought - until we tested the air. It was toxic, nobody could live there. Yet.
So, we set about the arduous task of figuring out how to get closer to our love, I mean, how to colonize the planet. This did not take long, as all the research was put to this task. We had figured out how to make about half of it livable when we launched a colony ship we had bought before we'd realized there were no planets out there to colonize.
By the time we got there to colonize it, we had figured out how to get the rest of the toxicity gone. So, the colony was formed, making us the first civilization to ever have more than 2 planets.
We started building the centralized Markov II into a huge production center, able to build anything within weeks of order. However, there was a problem - the Drengin influence in this sector was so great, even a planet forged here did not give us control of the area.
Constructors were forged, and they set out to build expensive influence bases. Meanwhile, the United Planets met - and outlawed more than 2 modules per starbase.
So, two influence starbases were built, giving us a little blue spot of control on the galactic map.
The Drengin, at this point, decided that Altaria was close enough to conquer, and attacked. We immediately declared war, the knight in shining armor if you will, to defend our Altarian princess.
...
The problem was we didn't have any ships.
Or much technology to build them.
Crap.