It was the most anticlimactic war I'd ever fought the slime aliens had already scoured the galaxy clean of sentient life and all I had to do to take away the threat they posed was download the brains in their ships to new mechanical bodies and they were helpless to fight back. It took a couple years to find and free every single one of the enslaved minds from the slime creatures clutches but it was more monotonous than anything else once I was in their systems they were helpless and even if they managed to block me their ships literally were vaporized in a single hit. The alien slime creatures made me think of sea cucumbers only ones that had become sentient enough to find a craving for thinking beings not a pretty picture.
In the end of my galaxy 2 campaign I had freed over a trillion sentient beings and of them only a million or so chose to continue on with me the others about a quarter of a trillion chose to end our association but vowed to be productive law abiding citizens of my empire. After clearing out the last of the slime beings I opened the new galaxy to my organic population and then I prepared for another expedition to yet another galaxy. I sent my pathfinder Ships ahead and waited for their response which took a while longer than the first time and was because of the greater distance involved but still once my ships were in place and the gate opened we jumped through and arrived in a new galaxy.
No fleets came to intercept us in fact the galaxy seemed dead at first glance though I kept exploring system after system and found a few early and late industrial civilizations that might get included in my collective empire but nothing truly advanced I even found a world inhabited by what was humanity however how they had the exact same genetic sequence was beyond a mystery though I did include them into the empire. After exploring every single system in galaxy 3 one of my observation posts spotted something of interest and I rushed over to find out what it was. A massive battle scarred planetoid type starship that was obviously adrift had entered the system and was being drawn towards the son so I towed it into orbit and began exploring the hulk.
The things I found in that one starship left me feeling nervous and that was before I reached the data core who ever had created this ship had been well above my level of technology so much that this one ship could have defeated my entire fleet in a matter of days and there would have been nothing I could do to stop it. I found the data core but it was slagged so it was hard mode time to learn the technology that this monster sized ship had and so me and a portion of my newly freed citizens began taking the ship apart carefully and testing each system cataloging each part and its functions. As time consuming as it was the process was almost therapeutic and it took a couple years of trials and error before we could replicate some of the more interesting things and yet each system we cracked improved my entire fleet in some way or another the power system was one that truly impressed me in a package as small as a desktop computer the system actually produced more power than my own ships power core by triple its output and I basically went nuts installing it on everything. This treasure trove of technology was like winning the lottery without buying a ticket and it was truly fantastic with just the tech in this one ship my own entire fleet was transformed and I could now send ships from this galaxy to my origin galaxy without a problem and have the gates open permanently.
I created an entire new network of gates and a gate network booster array and I even put gates on planets stargate'esk like. My new gate system would allow anyone on any planet to travel anywhere in the network instantly allowing trade across the various galaxies at a rate completely unprecedented. I had become the most efficient empire ever created and I was laughing maniacally in my control center all my sci-fi dreams were coming true in ways I simply could not expect. As my entire empire entered the Network trade reached unheard of levels and my population equalized across some worlds while a few others grew or shrunk depending upon their suitability for the populations on that planet.
I had finally dismantled every secret that the planetoid alien vessel contained and I was preparing to make a trip to the next galaxy when all hell broke loose. An alien armada had arrived on the frontier just 100 light years away in this same galaxy as me so I recalled my fleet and approached their staging point. Upon arrival I sent com's at this new alien fleet which was an eclectic collection of various ships and many of them were obviously not warships if I had to guess I would say that they were running from something. After intercepting and decoding thousands of messages between their ships I could soon translate their speech and it gave me an insight into their situation and it was not good.
It turns out that they had been running full bore from a implacable enemy intent on their destruction so powerful was their foe their only defense was to run away. When the leader of the convoy finally opened coms to me I almost knew what he would say word for word and that was a little scary to say the least. The alien fleet asked for protection and a place to settle a world of their own which I was totally fine doing but my demand for access to their technology gave all of us headaches after we had all argued about it for hours though they finally relented in the end.