[Barnacle Bill]

I like these ideas, dmm!

Building on them, one way to "play like an imbecile for 30 turns" would be to just turn on all the AI ministers at the start and sit back for 30 turns.

The idea of periodically taking yourself “out of power” is also a good one. For a nasty but realistic twist, the time to do that is when something goes wrong. Every time a bad random event occurs, you lose a big battle, you discover than another empire has some important tech you don’t (like a bigger ship size), you are subjected to a surprise attack, an ally cancels a treaty, etc… then pretend your government has fallen because the public thinks you screwed up. You then have to let the ministers run your empire until something bad happens again (in which case AI party’s government has fallen).

I’ve done the switching sides thing, too, after my original empire got too big. You can even take over neutrals, you know. For a real challenge, take over a surviving neutral in late game (when all the good real estate is gone) and see if you can win from there!

You could use side switching to sort of create a scenario (until MM releases the promised scenario editor). One of the recurring themes in science fiction is the big but decadent empire threatened by the vigorous barbarians. You can create the big empire by playing until you dominate the galaxy (turn off Mega Evil Empire), then switching sides to one of the little guys. To really control the starting scenario, you could actually play all the races hot-seat yourself until you get the situation where you want it, then change the empire & all but one of the other players to human control. Ever read the Foundation Trilogy? An SE4 AI “big empire” would make a dandy Galactic Empire, with the lesser AI empires as the “Barbarian Kingdoms” and your human-controlled little empire (maybe a neutral so you start with only one system) as the Foundation.