Influence the planets away from them in your main star system that you must destroy but what you really should've done was colony rush all 5 planets in that star system before the Iconians or the Krynn can get to them. That however isn't my main concern for this mission, it is the fact that it will take me over 130 weeks just to research each stage of the terror star construction. How on Earth are you supposed to accomplish the research when you have a tanking economy of -745 billion credits per turn?!

About the negative income. I found that it was the sheer maintainance of the Arnorian ships that was causing my eco to tank. I sold them off to the Iconians and Krynn for as much money as I could. Balanced me out a bit. I also take creativity and pray it procs me through the Terror Star techs ASAP, pray that the Krynn and Iconians use the ships I sold to them to good effect and hold the Dread Lords off long enoough for my terror star to complete building, bought one of their planets outside the main system I needed to blow up, and blew up the star even though the Krynn and Iconians had planets around it (and thus declared war, not that it mattered much since the mission ended straight after with success).

Oh?  If your teammate the Iconians don't have the techs, then it got patched to remove them.  Sneaky sneaky...

Well, depending on what your current relations are w/ the Krynn, you may need to slug it out and learn the techs yourself.  That may just be quicker than trying to build relations up.

w/o the ability to buy the techs, it really makes this mission more fun.  With them buyable, the mission was done in as quick as 15 turns...not many shots fired.  I think my first run thru I tried to research way, then I noticed the techs in the Iconian's list.

Which version are you playing the campaign under?

Well, Technologists party, +Research and Creativity may cut those times back considerablly.