What strategies do you guys like?

[Soulfisher]

I enjoy large quadrants, team battle, with 7 - 9 allies (AI) and 11 - 13 AI opponents. It can get quite interesting with 4 AI empires breathing down your neck! Once (only once) I pit myself against seven AI on hard in team battle .... I lost ... was burried in intelligence attacks.

.... but I digress. Intelligence is a great part of the game (even more so I suspect) when the AI only uses useful attacks.
I tend to pick quadrants with the most variety in their system makeup with a random setup: mid-life or ancient.
My war campaigns tend to be running around from one threat to another, yet my focus is to destoy the most dangerous AI (one with PPBs or Aligence Subverters) or the ones most cut off from their allies (then I can rest from defence in that region).
Lately, I've glassed new enemy colones (>200 pop), captured medium sized colonies (200 - 1000 pop), and used Puppet Political parties to take larger colonies and homeworlds (< 1000 pop. - these tend to have the heaviest AI weapon platform defence).