[alexti]

With a standard research it's hard to make SC much before turn 10. I suppose you need at least Alt-2 or Con-2 to make a "sort of" SC. And then he'll need couple of turns to get into HoF, so the "dangerous zone" is really narrow.

Mivayan has posted his SC stats (SC with Att 13?) and I'm not exactly sure why it did so badly. MR 21 is kind of low, but I'm not sure if 24 vs 21 makes such a big difference. (My SC had everything slightly better, except attack that was somewhere in 20s). With attack-13 he wouldn't probably stand a chance anyway, but it didn't seem to affect the particular scenario. Perhaps it was combination of all factors with a bad luck.