OK, quite a brief update here, I'm still interested in how things are going, but I've got tied up in muddling through dealings with neighbouring empires instead of everything being "oh my gosh, wow"
End of second war. Turned out fairly well, I lost one frontier system with no mining posts in, and got three quite nice systems that cut off the funguses from most of their empire.
In the post-war "open borders while everyone goes home", I slipped another science vessel through to the other side of their empire to keep exploring, and looked in on their home planets while I was there. Their defences are about what I thought, I hope that if I can build up my military enough I could take them head on in another war, especially if I manoeuvre right. And I had a look at their planets, would be nice if I could absorb the fungus-in-the-street into my empire if I can fell their government. One planet is size 25 which is twice the size of some other planets.
A couple of their systems had starbases in, which put me over the number I can maintain without penalty. I built some more around my home systems when I was panicking before. Ideally they'd be more at choke points, but I'm not sure if I want to disband them and rebuild them elsewhere (they have some upgrades on) or just absorb the penalty (a slightly increased upkeep).
I rebuilt my economy a bit (pirates had destroyed some stuff) and took out a couple of pirate fleets. The pirate fleets are about as strong as the fungus fleets, actually, so if there's another war I could hopefully take them, provided I can arrange for them to walk into my fleet in a system that's backed up by a starbase. Although that relied on one fleet which took on both fleets sequentially, I'd ideally have two fleets like that depending how coordinated the fungus armada is if they attack again.
And very sadly, the Chameleon Napoleons expanded up to my border (which to be fair is a single system I took over to stop them expanding further), and then got outraged about me being in the way and declared rivalry on me and then all my diplomatic overtures look futile. I wasted some resources trying to recover the situation, but I think it's impossible without ceding them the border system. I think my best bet is to build up my military and hope that if we're comparable enough, they won't attack. Possibly I should rival them back and see if any of their rivals are willing to come in on my side -- I'd be willing to work with the parrot supremacists if I have to, and hopefully in the long term they'd shift their politics to be less awful.
My far-flung science vessel looked in on the "oh look, pets" fallen empire. My populace was very unhappy when I let some citizens move there, but now I see their planets, I see lots of different species living in harmony, which is nice, even if it has worryingly dystopian overtones as well.
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