Oh, this is fun!

[Will]

Originally posted by dbt1949:
In order to increase my other racial stats my physical strength is only 50% so ground combat is out.

I used to set physical strength at 50%, and I made every attempt to capture planets intact (once in a while, a small colony with WPs gets glassed, but oh well). I kinda considered it a bit of a challenge, but not much since many AIs don't build troops. I would tweak settings so that ground combat Lasted 3-5 turns instead of 10, and I used destroyers as troop drop ships (usually max engines, 1 shield, one small weapon (ie. PPB or HPB), 1 PDC, and two or three cargo containers). Load up about 20 of those in an attack fleet, attempt to capture every planet in the system. If I succeed, I set spaceyards to work to replace any ship losses, and non-SY planets build replacement troops (lots of them).

Of course, if I tried this against a human player, I'd have to be much more cautious. With the AI, you can get away with two minesweepers at the warps, and move freely past that point, and less is needed to guard the remaining warps against reinforcements. Which is why PBW games routinely see 100+ ship attack fleets, and why single-player AI games get away with no fleet needing to go above 40 ships.

But that just adds to the fun!