I enjoyed the grace period of neutral relations after first contact, but once relations with Toria started to slide, they went down fast. Once again, I find myself at war with them. At least this time I've got a much better position from which to fight.

Look at that military graph! I expected to have no chance to defend my two outreach colonies in the eastern cluster, though, so I gave one to the Drengin, hoping to draw them into the war. I'd give the other to the Yor or Carinoids, or maybe the Arceans, after a little while, and try to defend my four home clusters. The distance factor favored me, as Toria had a lot of space to cross, and by the time they reached my space, a lot of things could happen, including help from the other evil civs, or time enough to build defenses strong enough to fend off the initial wave.

I decided to buy Altaria to attack the Arceans, to distract them. The very next turn, the United Planets came up and offered the "end all current wars" event. Gah. I voted For that, and it passed, meaning my big payout to Altaria went to waste, but at least the Torians were back up to Cool relations and off my back for the moment.

Shortly after making peace, Toria offered me Battleship tech for Improved Environment Control, a tech the AI never researches. It offers +10 pop growth. It was a huge bargain for me, though, so I had to take it. I then gifted the tech to everyone else, which raised my relations one notch in each case.

Ironically, despite me sending them most of my trade, relations with the Drengin started to worsen. They couldn't exactly afford to attack me, though, so when relations with Toria and Altaria remained steady at Cool, I saved the game again, calling it "Stable", since I thought I had reached a stable point in the game and could cruise forward as I often do, focusing on wonder building in the middle game.

Here's the position I thought of as stable:

I thought wrong.

You can see I finally met the other minors, all in the far north. Nothing useful came from that, other than a few k in tech sales to the Alexians, and the chance to buy Translators, which a minor had built early on.

The Drengin were obsessing over the Carinoids, and thus had their entire fleet posted to their rear when the Altarians launched an attack. Stupid Drengin. I paid them to make peace with the Carinoids, and they went right back to war against them! Phooey. Next thing I know, the Altarians are pummeling the northwest Drengin cluster, smashing colony ships in orbit, killing billions through the orbit bug, and trashing those colonies. They even managed to get transports through and capture a few worlds!

I had thought that one Altarian extension was so much milk toast, but it's the rest of the cluster that is falling now. Unbelievable.

I had sent all my Drengin trade to Filtreus, which I had thought of as secure. I was thinking it was smack dab behind the Yor, but the Yor were busy with one-on-one Torian warfare, while Altaria was tackling the Drengin one on one. Perhaps it was not a good thing I made peace with Toria so quickly after all, as that has allowed the good civs to concentrate on my evil brethren, and frankly, I'm in no position to help them.

The Altarians have now taken two of the five yellow stars in the Filtreus cluster! Turns out that without factoring the Yor, that's actually the front line between Drengin and Altaria. Gah! Well the good news is, if the Altarians take Filtreus, I'll instantly have five mature trade routes to them. Perhaps I can switch to the winning side in this war. ... Hmm, Demonic Zero alignment. Nope, that's a pipe dream. Now what am I going to do?

There were only four galactic resources in my region of space. One economic, two military, one influence. There was another military and influence between my northwest cluster and Yor space, and several more on the far side of the nearest Drengin cluster. The good news for me, having one economic resource boosted my domestic economy significantly. The influence resource let me hold my own on that score, and the two military resources would keep me in the game if I got to hot war. Still, no research resources was crushing my economy, as the AI's had them all and that only put me farther behind the curve. And I was in no position to poach, although one of my range-extending constructors did manage to poach a morale resource on the edge of Altarian space. Too far away and too insecure to improve, but at least I had it. 5% beats having squat.

I decided for my own safety, I needed to push as far north on alignment as possible, as quickly as possible. I had skipped all the PQ12's, not having the PQ bonus pick to let them reach 15. Well, time to grab them now. So I settled all of those, picking the good option in every case. There were over a dozen of them in my space. I got a grand total of +19 alignment out of that, including one morale penalty and one PQ penalty that forced me to abandon two of the colonies. Evil 19. That's not good enough. I'm out of planetary events to go for, though, so the rest will have to come in time, with the periodic events, or... if I can manage to settle some low-PQ worlds in alien space.

By the time the Yor began to collapse, and the Drengin had lost their entire northwest cluster to Altaria, I had managed to get my alignment up to Evil 26.

At the time, I was first in influence. I managed to poach the military and influence resource on my coreward border when the Torians took out the Yor bases there. I did not have these improved yet, but that would be the first order of business when I went to shipbuilding. I managed to use the time it took the good alliance to destroy the evil civs, to nab all the mid and late game wonders and trade goods, work on changing my alignment toward the hope of an eventual Alliance win, and finally build up some military after getting to Overlord tech. My military buildup is about to begin, in the previous screenshot. I'm just finishing up the Terraformer and terraforming. I decided to go ahead and build Hyperion Shipyards at all my strongest worlds, though, and Starship Foundries everywhere, so that took another eight turns or so, during which my PQ12 planets had time to build stadiums and teleporters, so that worked out about right.

Now all I need is for the Yor and Drengin to surrender to me when they do collapse. Of course, for THIS game, that would be too much to expect. I was not destined to catch a single break here. The stupid Yor surrendered to Toria!

You can see my military uptick. There's no way, in my estimation, that I can build enough five-packs of constructors to take out the entire galaxy in one swing, even if I was willing to exploit not paying for the Terror Stars. I've GOT TO stay at peace with these monster good civs, especially the runaway Altarian empire. I've played over forty games at Masochistic, and not since the very first one have I seen a runaway Altarian. Then, I rode their coattails to my first Maso victory on the first try, but here, I'm on the other side of the aisle. So I felt I had to go for party palaces, to open up the chance to settle low-PQ worlds in AI lands (to speed my alignment regression). This should also help my power ratings. Might even flip some Torian planets, as the Altarians had whatever influence resources I did not. That should keep my power graph growing, hopefully enough to let me bribe my way to close relations.

I was now paying out 2222 bc in chunks, to bribe the good civs to remain on cordial terms with me. It was working, but cowabunga to the pocketbook! Ouchie.

The Drengin held out for more than two years, after the Yor had cashed in, and I managed to get a lot of constructors flying and continue to build my overlord fleet, but by 2199AD, the Drengin were dying, the Altarians had Excaliburs, their military graph was off the charts, and they were coasting to a tech victory so fast, my head spun. Then the ultimate insult, the Altarians made peace with the Drengin, the Torians declared war, and the stupid green-hairs surrendered TO ALTARIA!

This is not the galactic map you want to see if you rode most of the game on Demonic Zero! Let me assure you.

The moment the Drengin surrendered, something strange happened. The game began to play a music track I had never heard before. It was a mournful little dirge, sounded very sad. What could this mean?

The title of that piece of music turns out to be "Losing".

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