[Arkcon]

Originally posted by narf poit chez BOOM:
is it possible to win?
has anybody done it?

I think I could have in my most recent game. I gave the AI small bonus, and that's not enough, they really do need at least medium.

When the AI gets baseship tech, well, it never builds smaller ships. So a lost planet needs a baseship colonizer, a world depopulated by an event needs a baseship sized transport to repopulate it. All that is too expensive in maintenance, and the AI scraps as soon as it builds.

If they could have found me, they would have killed me sooner. When you reach endgame like this, the AI stratagies aren't so good.

The pinudon were a pain, constantly using intel, and they never built ships. That is, when I took them over, I saw them build, and scrap on the same turn.

The Tolyatan survived pretty good, but then they usually do, but their major system went nova. The terrans were holding their own for a while.

The sergetti were doing very well, building lots of ppb baseships. Really holding their own, even though everyone else had phased shields. I made all the remaining AI's surrender to the Sergetti. With the resource boost they would have been a challenge. An event sent a baseship to my homesystem, and that was the end of me, I wasn't really ready for that to happen. I was relying on a heaviliy defended warp points, and a deep sensor base in cloaking nebula.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have set the game up for high numbers of AI's -- I wanted a diversity of ships to maximize my captures -- but they fought with each other too much. I couldn't even reach some before the were extinct.

I also sholudn't have turned on neutrals, they didn't take the "Is normal" trait, so didn't build resource extracters, complete dead weight. I thought the AI's would kill them quickly and take the planets, but they were too slow.

I wanted to get a battlemoon before I wiped them off the face of the galaxy. But that didn't happen.