[MoonDragn]

I just got this game for christmas and so far I have been addicted. In my first game I started out with 1 planet, low tech, being used to strategy games like Masters of Orion I imediately started building tons of colonizers and expanded to every planet in my system, not just the ones my colony can breath. I had emergency build turned on and was building colonizers like crazy. By turn 20 or so I met a race 2 systems away. I took my fleet, a group of frigates, made one transport with small troops and went to his home planet, blew up the defenses and dropped a bunch of troops on his home planet. I then issued a message asking him to surrender and he did. So by turn 30 I had about 20 planets.
I started to build more colonizers from his home planet and thats when I found out the atmosphere/breathing thing for races(mind you I never read the instructions, I just jumped into the game). Its intresting in this first game, after a few hundred turns, I got a message that the sun in my home system was gonna explode... I tried like mad to research stellar manipulation thinking maybe I could do something to stop it. Well it was hopeless, I never got to the tech levels, the sun exploded along with my home planet and everything in the system... by this time I had about 5 systems with every planet in each system colonized. Looking back, had I been higher level in Stellar manipulation I wonder if I could have built a dyson sphere that could have stopped the star from exploding or would have still have gone?
Anyway I started another game, this time 1 planet, medium tech cause I was determined to get high enough in stellar manipulation to find out if I could have done anything to save my planet. I read some of the documentation, and this time I was in the middle of the quadrant, I rapidly pushed all the races back... after 3 or 4 days of no sleep I managed to conquer most of the quadrant. I captured one race of each atmosphere breathing type and have spread them accordingly to all my planets. I did not find any races that lived normally on zero atmosphere so those are the only planets that are small. This definately is a valid strategy for all of the games. It beats waiting to reseach those atmosphere improvers.
Even now, I got them research but whats the point when I can wipe out the rest of the universe with just 3 dreadnaughts?


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