Chapter 3
Seven and a half hours into the campaign....
When I last left off, I had a new taskforce preparing to invade Armageddon. Well, it was a mighty taskforce indeed, one I thought was well prepared for the job at hand.
Taskforce Sinistra forms up for a jump into Armageddon
We hit an extensive minefield going in (I sent some scouts ahead to clear them, but they couldn't get any work done before being eliminated), but pressed our attack against the rebuilt Armada space station and it's accompanying fleet, destroying both. Victory! I then ordered in our Purge vessels to begin wiping out the enemy population below.
This is where things went wrong again because the Armada warped in with another massive wave of cruisers and frigates which kept my fleet busy while they built another space station. And again, we found ourselves trapped between a hammer and an anvil. Unfortunately, I was too stubborn this time and refused to call off the invasion. We fought it out until tragedy struck:
My empire's flagship, Sinistra, lost its shields and started to suffer hull damage at an alarming rate. It was then I ordered a full retreat, but it was too late. The Armada focused everything they had on my flagship and hounded it like a pack of wolves, ultimately destroying it!
Sinistra surrounded by enemy cruisers as it tries to flee
This time, the famed luck of Sinistra ran out
I was devastated. Sinistra was the very first capital ship I ever built, surviving many battles and achieving a crew with level 10 experience. Its loss was a great blow to the morale of the Advent people.
Line of succession dictated that Discordia, my Halcyon Carrier, would now be my empire's flagship. It rallied the remainder of the fleet and led a hasty retreat back to Danae...in defeat yet again.
The flag is transferred to Discordia
Now I was stumped. I couldn't just keep bashing my head against the same wall over and over again. What to do?
I had noticed that since hostilities raged around Agamemnon, the right flank of my empire had fallen quiet. I thought it was a reasonable assumption that all those reinforcements that he was sending my way were probably being stripped from other fronts. With that hope in mind, I sent a lone scout into Charybdis. Before being destroyed, it reported a sole starbase....
Charge!
Taking my fleet that was quietly guarding my asteroid base a Garuda, led by my Radiance-class battleship Pyranea, we launched an invasion of the enemy's neighboring system. My guess proved correct as it took some time for the enemy to bring in reinforcements and when they arrived, they arrived piecemeal. There would be no repeat of Agamemnon this day!
The orbital bombardment of Charybdis
After a short plastering of the surface of Charybdis, a new Advent colony was founded! Best of all, we now had access to a new phase lane into the hub of this star system, allowing us new avenues of attack.
The enemy did try to force us off the planet, but he just couldn't mount a cohesive attack.
Broadsides from Pyranea defeat an enemy counter-attack [File Photo]
And that is where the war stands. The Armada seems to have given up on reclaiming Charybdis and has only launched sporadic raids on Danae. Perhaps we have turned a corner in the war? Right now, the proxy pirate raids are still continuing (opening bids are up to 3000 credits!). Also, we have embarked on a propaganda campaign to weaken the enemy planets that neighbor ours. We'll see if we can spark any revolutions.
Right before I signed off last night, I started to pick through some of the stats from the game and found this to be a very interesting graph:
It depicts available credit (I'm pink; my enemy is yellow). As you can see, his cash reserves dwarf mine...but notice the two major credit crunches? No, this has nothing to do with Chris Dodd or Barney Frank, but everything to do with the cost of war. It seems my attacks are sucking his treasury dry!
A bit of interesting intel....
