The Glorious Five Year Plan
Hopeful that a bad plan is better than no plan, the Dhayut leadership scurried off to the four corners of the Kingdom with their sheet of orders, and a hastily printed off addendum stapled to it detailing the things I’d forgotten to mention in the last post. I’d never played this far into a game and the Dhayut Kingdom was not really an example of a controlled expansion, it had got large, wealthy, but disorganized. It was the largest empire in the galaxy, but not far enough ahead to brush aside the rivals, or ignore them as threats. There were a number of unprotected colonies that must have been tempting to surrounding empires, particularly the Boskara Hive who made it known they coveted the Dhayut colonies and resources. The aim of The Glorious Five Year Plan was to make everything a bit more controlled and secure.
The Prodigal Sons colony was promoted to be the Regional Capital for the north of the kingdom, the first step in the drive to crush corruption. It’s an expensive upgrade and I’m not really sure how much corruption is costing, but it’ll bring the north under more control. Apparently without more administration research the Dhayut are limited to only one Regional Capital, so the plan to have a capital in the south and west too was on the shelf until research caught up.
A new long range exploration ship was designed, much like the old one but with more fuel tanks strapped on to expand the range, the exploration fleet was expanded to 12 ships and set off under AI control to map the galaxy and find all the Dhayut’s enemies and potential enemies. (Diplomacy Arithmetic: Enemies + Potential Enemies = Everybody). With the plan to map the galaxy largely completed, most of the exploration fleet was ordered to return to Home to be scrapped. Money’s too tight for extravagance.
Updated galaxy map, a lot of gaps filled in:
Helpfully, a number of empires have very slightly different shades of purple. The Boskara are the difficult-to-see purple in the middle, the Sluken are the very slightly different shade of purple to their east, and the Quameno are the pinkish areas to the south (they're at war with yet another purple empire, the one to their north west).
With the Sluken found, the single Dhayut Kingdom diplomat was sent to set up an embassy in their capital. His previous assignment was with the Ackdarians of Iskabar (big blue circle on the western edge), so he’ll be out of practice with diplomacy. With the Iskabar his job was to let them know whenever the Dhayut had enslaved even more Ackdarians, and say “suck it” if they complained. With the Sluken his job was to make them like us enough to form a mutual defense pact to keep the Boskara in line.
The full military expansion plan was too expensive even with taxation raised as far as it would go without complaints on most colonies. There wasn’t enough coming in to pay for all the ship and troop maintenance that would be required, so only part of the expansion happened. Space ports were beefed up at the main colonies, three new defensive fleets were created instead of five and stationed down the eastern border with the Boskara, and troop recruitment began only on main colonies. The economy will have to grow before more military expansion occurs.
With the borders being more set as the Dhayut Kingdom’s edges came up against other empires, the opportunities to expand out the way were few, but there were still colonizable planets within the Dhayut Kingdom’s borders, either within colonized systems or in systems within Dhayut controlled zones. The Dhayut cartographers sat down with their maps and came up with 12-14 worthwhile targets. Colony ships were built at colonies that had the required colonist races (4 Dhayut, 5 Shandar for volcanic planets, and 2 Ackdarian for oceanic planets) and another round of expansion was underway. The cartographers also found an anomaly, an independent colony of Ackdarians on the edge of Dhayut space. There were only 30mil on the colony so it seemed fairly recently colonized, fairly sure they hadn't been there when the system was first explored. Possibly Ackdarians who escaped Dhayut enslavement and set out on their own, but after a quick introduction to the Dhayut Subjugation Battalions, they decided to join the Dhayut Kingdom after an invasion and a short but decisive conflict.
And with that, the Dhayut Kingdom was up to 53 moderately well defended colonies.