[MegaTrain]

I loaded the next turn in my current game, and saw that one of my neighbors had opened a warp point to one of my home systems.

Mistake #1: I anticipated that he would send through an attack fleet to pick off the worlds one at a time (because that was MY strategy when invading). I had a medium fleet a couple of systems away (these roaming fleets were my primary offense/defense), and a few miscellaneous ships mingling around the system, which I immediately send to the sector NEXT TO the new warp point. I figured that I wanted to see the size and makeup of his fleet, and that a couple of single ships were just going to get munched if I parked them on the new wormhole. BAD IDEA.

Next turn, I had about 25 Level 5 PLAGUE SHIPS swarming each planet in that and all adjacent systems. DOH! And the Plague ships had no defense--if I had parked my ships ON the wormhole none of them would have gotten through.

I hadn't laid mines, because I figured anyone with a large invasion fleet would be packing enough sweepers to make them irrelevant. I did have weapons platforms, but all the plague ships need is 1 shot to infect the planet. It was a huge mess, within a few turns most of my empire was rioting, and production was down in the negatives.

Mistake #2: After I got all that cleaned up, I built a little better defense on each and every planet. He opened another warp point to another couple of my systems. I immediately sent my fleets toward the systems, and sent individual warships to defend each planet in the system, anticipating another Plague fleet.

Nope. This time, it was ONE tiny ship, with a STAR DESTROYER component!! I even had a whole turn to panic, because I could see his ship sitting on top of my sun, and could scan its components.

I lost about 80 BILLION people that turn, and about 27 planets. (I had populated every planet with native breathing population, and had Replicant Centers III--most planets were maxed out on population.) Fortunately, my attack/defense fleets had not quite made it into the system, so they survived.

After that, I parked a defensive ship on every sun in my empire.