
Freedom is the right of a-ACK
Plunder 8 billion pops.

Plunder 8 billion pops.
Double Cranial Hypertrophy
Edit: Cranial Megatrophy + Cranial Hypertrophy
The Earth Cult has the aesthetics and such an amazing, looming, mysterious presence in the beginning. Seems it's already consensus among logh fans that their potential was wasted. But man, the first three times you see them is so awesome. Rubinsky talking to one like the Emperor, we see how their priests skip ahead of lines in the waiting rooms while wearing their robes, the amazingly badass mystical temple they have in a pretty hard sci-fi setting.
As I understand, the author was inspired by mystical daoist uprisings in Chinese history. The problem is that Taoism and peasant uprisings being led by wizards preaching the tao and alchemy is very awesome, in stark contrast to the Earth Cult which kind of just worships Earth and returning people to Earth. I understand they may have created a religion around returning control to the planet they directly rule with a priesthood. But it's still lame and kind of unbefitting of their amazing aesthetics along with their mediocre fate. Like it's not as cool as the real life inspiration.
I can't entirely dismiss this aspect of it though because in real life, we have countries being controlled by religions to spend trillions of dollars and wage wars for a similar reason. I just think the Earth Cult is a disappointment.
I'm aware I'm speaking to the choir and beating a dead horse on this. But I feel the need to express this to someone on my rewatch because I love scifi, wizards and secret societies.
Rebellions, khans and other constant war led to this border gore. Though there is peace now, this is a patchwork of closed borders which have made it impossible for anyone to touch these planets for centuries.
My current 4 empires I'm running.
I still don't know what the AI empires are doing to piss off the FEs so much that they burn down the galaxy for 100 years.
What if the Archmage just said "Guys renege the agreement in Ald'ruhn so the Telvanni will let me finish growing my mushroom tower."
It's only 30k fleet power and has killed everything in its path. No you can't disband it.
Every game I've played in the last three months I've gone into massive debt and am constantly selling off resources to stay afloat. I have to keep clicking around neighbors seeing who will sell me the resources I need.
At this point I take Prosperity early, get the dyson swarms set up, build trade hubs en masse, and keep a stockpile of strategic resources that I will inevitably sell off. It's incredible how I can actually fight back -300 debt on multiple resources for years. I got attacked by voidworms and had to buy a max size mercenary fleet to stay alive and was hundreds in debt for a year.
It doesn't matter how my empire is built. It happens every time. The extra stress is somewhat entertaining but it's extremely tedious and I can't alt tab out of the game without hitting a resource shortage in under 5 minutes. I also end up having to ignore the rest of the galaxy and not being able to build things until I can trade up the resources I need.