Still working on this (it only goes up to the first few years of the Great War), but here's a preview of some history.

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[center][h2][b]The Empire of Alduur[/b][/h2][h3][i]Battered, Never Broken.[/i][/h3][/center]
The Alduuri people, particularly those who enlist in the armed forces, are proud and capable. To say that subjugation by the Ashtar went over poorly is an understatement. Much of the Imperial Navy was not about to bow to the mind meddling of those who imagine themselves superior. The Navy flew, readying its fleets to show the Ashtar just who the Alduuri were and remind them that they would never bow.

To call the resulting “battle” a massacre would be a disservice to massacres. A thousand Alduuri warships and hundreds of thousands of the Navy’s finest arrived at a meager fringe system of the Ashtar’s territorial holdings, orbiting opposite just twelve Ashtar cruisers. Warships quite literally evaporated under the incoming fire. Almost all of the Alduuri Imperial Navy was slaughtered to a man, wholly reduced to atoms, all to merely disable a single Ashtar cruiser.

The injury suffered on that fateful day was not soon forgotten. When the damned psychics released their deathgrip on the galaxy at large, the Alduuri people were split. There were a few whose fighting spirit had truly been crushed, abandoning the pride of the Alduuri for more peaceful, hedonistic ways. Many were ready for revenge. The sting of their loss had done nothing but fester in the century that had followed it. Just as many felt it was pointless to try. They were free now, and there was no point sending their infant naval forces back to the slaughterhouse.

The galaxy took mere months to explode around them. Those who desired for blood soon shifted their sights from an impossible adversary to many more very manageable targets. Manageable, at least, to the Navy at full strength. Almost no reconstruction had taken place during the subjugation of the Ashtar, and the number of war-ready, FTL-capable spacecraft in the whole of the Empire could be counted on two hands. So they bit their tongues, sat on their hands, and waited.

Biding their time gave an opportunity to rebuild a standing naval force. The Imperial Navy put together a technological marvel of a fighting force in just four years. Having thrown away their entire naval arm at the dawn of Ashtar subjugation, their newly constructed forces were bleeding edge military technology in stark contrast to the archaic fleets most nations were busily beating each other with. Though the Alduuri industrial complex was a powerhouse and the Empire was far from a minor player on the galactic stage, four years was grossly insufficient to construct a naval force that could rival the larger powers at war. Advanced as it was, the lack of training of officers and sheer lack of quantity would come to haunt it.

The military veterancy unanimously held that these new ship classes could face down two adversaries of equivalent classification and emerge decisively victorious. When the Alduuri Imperial Navy took to the battlespace for the first time in over a century, they were not so fortunate as to be faced with two to one odds. The fleets of <someone> outnumbered the reconstructed navy by nearly five to one.

For the second time, the Imperial Navy would fight to the last ship. Despite attempting to fall back into Imperial territory after the harsh realization that they were simply not eliminating enemy ships fast enough, the fleet was pursued into the orbital defense layers of <planet>. The price to fully knock out the fleet was exceedingly high, massive casualties coming from both the technological prowess of the warships and the ruthless power of the orbital defenses. Nonetheless, The Empire of Alduur was once again stripped of its naval superiority. The mistake of rushing into battle half-cocked would not be repeated again.
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I did totally decide to be sadistic to my poor empire (I still love them). I figure they'll spend the rest of the war using part of their military industrial complex to produce someone else's ships in support, while the rest of it steadily rebuilds their core navy force. The Treaty of Detente would widely be viewed as a suggestion and careful measures to continue construction of powerful capital class warships would be taken. I expect they'd be given a little bit of slack considering they were completely stripped of naval forces twice, but they'd still be very carefully walking on eggshells.