So, if you haven't played Stellaris and you like Grand Strategy Games, you should! It rules. This post is covering my recent run as the Queptilium.
The Queptilium Colonies is a xenophilic, egalitarian democracy founded by the Queptilium themselves.
These fungoids, as you can see above, have about 19 mutations. This is due to their being Evolutionary Predators.
Basically, you get random traits over time, and the speed at which you get those traits depends on how many genetic insights you can acquire.
It combos really nicely with Genesis Guides, a Civic you can pick at the start of the game where all of your colonies come with a pre-sapient species alongside your colonists, which you can then Uplift once you unlock the appropriate technology.
Things were going well for these fungi, until we ran into a planet that had a cracked shield around it.
We decided to ignore the time loop lizards (we had more important things to do) and, about 10 years later, they burst out of their loop and declared immediate, genocidal war against us. Their planet was in the Janlohikassa system.
Janlohikassa was two jumps from my nearest colony, Barnard Prime, which was my first colony out of our origin planet, Sidima Prime.
And these lizards had a navy that was twice as strong as ours.
The lizards (more properly the Prikki) destroyed Wanamis Station and the small station orbitting Barnard's Star as I frantically scrambled to produce as large a navy as I could. They landed an army on Barnard Prime and pacified the planet, and then purged all of the people on it.
Long story short, the plantoids were able to fight the lizard people back to their home planet and conquer them, and then all that was left was trying to integrate these Xenophobic lizards into our Egalitarian, Xenophilic civilization. We eventually succeeded!
This is the kind of thing that makes Stellaris one of my favorite games.