Space Empires--The Advanced Campaign

A few weeks back, my friends Terry, Tom, Joe and I set out to reconquer the galaxy in GMT's Space Empires.  We tried to randomly draw which empire we'd lead, but Joe & I resumed command of the Altairans and Chulakians we played during our initial session.  Terry & Tom ended up swapping realms, with Terry ruling Terra and Tom the Viscount of Vasyria.

We employed all the advanced rules, which included vessels like fighters and carriers, raiders; along with bases and merchant pipelines (trade routes).  We didn't include the warp points and doomsday machines from the optional rules, but added the indigenous aliens of deep space.

After we explored and exploited our home regions, more or less, we ventured beyond our borders, where the last remnants of the Greyling Empire awaited us.

Despite inhabiting the cold wastes of Deep Space, the Greylings gave our scout ships warm receptions at:

Cygni...

...Babbage...

...Aries...

...Abydos...

...Gath...

...Deneb...

...and Arrakis.

While the Altairans managed to avoid tangling with the Greylings, they had problems of their own.  Altairan scout ships encountered:

Unknown dangers...

...black holes...

...or merely got lost. 

The other empires ran afoul of natural hazards, or experienced catastrophic accidents, to be sure, but after loosing a half-a-dozen scout ships, the Altairan High Command wised-up.  Research and Development efforts were then focused on building cruisers with long-range scanners (in game terms, this is the Exploration Technology).

The other star-faring races didn't catch wind of this development until an Altairan cruiser group uncovered a nebula and mineral deposit just outside their border, without blundering into them.

By the end of the Explore & Exploit Phase of this campaign the galaxy looked pretty much like this: 

The Expand & Exterminate Phase of this campaign, will be resumed at a later date, when our starfleets are strong enough to take on the Greylings--and each other.

Note:  There's still a lot of uncharted areas in Deep Space.  This is because, we decided on an in-house rule, brought up by Terry (I think), that replaces the Danger! and Lost in Space counters with another token until something tangible turns up.