How hard do you expand?

[Baron Munchausen]

Choosing whether to be 'friendly' and get along or fight for all the territory/resources you can wrench away from the competition is the essence of the game. It's not a question of "best" but of what you want to get out of the game. How do you WANT to play? For people who like ruthless competition it's easy to choose the xenophobic course and not make treaties and not accept other races colonies in your systems. For people who want cooperation, the AI knows what treaties ae though some races are less friendly than others. <shrug>...