Spore

[Belle Hibiki]

The only time I found the game "challenging" was at the beginning of the space stage.

My people, the Chaktul, were intensely war-like. I guess we got a bad reputation or something, because it only took like 10 minutes for my gruff race to (somehow) provoke a war with two neighboring empires. The two unoccupied systems that I HAD taken were swiftly devoured, leaving me with just my home system.

Desperate after being assaulted like every few minutes, they took to the stars, sweeping past the blockade that had formed around their home and into unexplored space. There they met with a sentient race of quadruped, cowboy-hat wearing cacti who were more interested in Sporebucks than anything else the universe had to offer. They didn't particularly care that the Chaktul thought they were the universe's destined rulers. Despite enormous public controversy, an alliance with the cacti swiftly solidified, giving the Chaktul, for the first time in its entire history, an ally in its endless struggle for survival.

As the Cacti expanded their mercantile empire, the Chaktul recruited them to raid its enemy's back lines. It was in one of these skirmishes that the Chaktul discovered an amiable race of helmet-wearing velociraptor scientists. By allying with them, the Chaktul were able to encircle their enemy and wage against them a brutal war of attrition.

Slowly progress was made. The Empire first reclaimed its two lost systems and the valuable spice mines they contained. As system after system fell before the renewed might of the Chaktul and its alliance, the two enemies turned on each other.

New weapons were brought to bear. The Cacti proved an invaluable member of the Chaktul fleet, their sophisticated weaponry slicing through dozens of enemy fighters. The face of the war changed once the Chaktul managed to develop a working antimatter bomb.

Striking with the vicious swiftness that had secured their cavemen forebears dominance of the planet, the Chaktul wasted no time in deploying this new weapon en masse. Entire cities disappeared in the blink of an eye.

Broken, defeated, their enemies offered their surrender, but the Chaktul were merciless. They, for once, had not started the war they were in, and the vengeance that they wrought against their enemy was terrible to behold. Every member of the target races was hunted down and executed. The Cacti and Scientists moved to fill most of the gaps left by the previous empires.

It was here that the Chaktul had to make a decision. With their technology firmly established and their fleet bolstered, they were no longer the infant civilization that had ventured from their home. They were quite capable of engaging their previous allies in a fight for control of the sector, and also fairly certain that they could win. The Cacti, for as vast as their empire had grown during the war, was stretched thin. They seemed more interested in laying claim to as many systems as possible rather than firmly establishing their presence in each.

Again, however, the Chaktul turned from their hard-wired need for violence. The Cacti and Scientists had come to their aid when the need was most dire. They each also offered specialty goods in their markets that the Chaktul did not have access to.

And so, turning their engines away from the front lines of their allies, the mighty Chaktul turned their course towards the other end of their arm of the Galaxy.

... And that's pretty much where the real 'story' of my civilization stops being interesting. By that point my ship was so ridiculously powerful that I didn't NEED a fleet to capture planets - I could just go in and drop one bomb on a city (not even an antimatter bomb, I'm talking my normal bomb) and have it surrender. I crushed like 4 empires before I realized it had gotten really, REALLY boring.