i used to be diehard for a puppetmaster strategy, avoiding all wars til someone had one foot in the grave then swooping in and masacring them. with the price of starting wars increasing a thousand fold or so with 1.2 that is much more problematic. i still spend a lot of my effort channeling opponents as best i can, and slowing down their research and invasions but i don't jumpstart their wars for them. stealing all their resources takes priority over taking thier planets for the most part, if i can arange to have another ai take out a starbase i make sure to keep a constructor handy to grab it.

take my own sweet time doing military buildups if possible. if you can keep them calm long enough to build your infrastructure/economy into a monster they are pretty much doomed. i buy as many of thier transports as i can reasonably afford and deposit them in locations around 15-20 sectors from the junction of opponents spaces if possible. or i store them in the form of taxpayer if i have empty planets still(usually 30% pop growth bonus). this means i rarely have to build my own transports, spend my own ppl. tech trading has to be on to use this sort of strategy, that's my main means of manipulating the ai. you can brake or accelerate their research efforts, sometimes even redirect them with your trades. the downside is you have to spend a lot of time on the diplomacy screens, checking ai research or doing actual trades. almost every turn, blah.

i don't push that hard on influence really, mostly using it to police up stray planets rather than building starbases for full influence assaults. i don't make alliances unless it serves to start a war, or break an ai alliance. i use my trade exclusivly as a diplomatic tool, almost all my money comes from huge numbers of stockmarkets.

hmm, think that covers most of it. had good success on gigantic maps, stock settings, 9 opponents, masochistic. this may sound a bit slow and boring to some ppl but these are not necessarily easy, sure wins. sometimes a good initial planet with a big industry bonus tile causes one lucky ai to turn it a beast because of a monsterous initial rush. sometimes they just get a good part of the map and go on a mad research rampage, making it hard to hold on to that top tech position. there are lots of things that can go wrong here, and i almost never restart because of a crappy map, i suffer it out.

I conquer, through war of attrition. First i destroy my enemys trade routes, then i just pick off any ship that he sends at me. Eventually he will run into debt, and that is when i strike, when their people have their morale at their lowest(oh, more soldiers for my invasion force! ).

I might try go for a alliance victory if my enemies are too strong, or they just would take thousands of years to conquer cause they have so many ships.

I generally go for a mix of mega influence and capital ship style warfare. I tend to get impatient waiting for fleets of smaller ships to band together.. i mostly play on gigantic maps so it can get to be a real pain to either A) wait a dozen turns or more for small ships to get across my territory to the front lines from my production planets or wait forever to go up the tech tree to add enough weapons and engines to make these smaller ships useful.

I don't go for influence all the time... i've played a couple games 100% that way, using dipomocy and influence to barter ships so no one invades. I tend to find warfare more fun so i'll influence one or two races into submission mostly when i get backed into a corner right from the start without enough planets of my own to fight a full scale war in comparison to everyone else.

I only play suicidal lvl. I grab what planets are reasonably close. I focus on diplomacy and totally ignore influence. I research nothing but diplomacy until I reach Majesty. I research the entire Xeno economics tree then Sensors. Once I do this I either trade or puppet master others into war. Pretty much the games won at this point and I get bored. Right now I'm trying to find a tactic of bum rushing military conquest that works on suicidal for a challenge.

don't mind this.

My strategy is to destroy the AI with culture. Especially if they have big allies.

Maybe it needs a link.

usually you have to put in IMG in front with [ ] surrounding IMG and /IMG at end with [ ] surrounding /IMG.

i don't think you can upload a pic to the forums. you have to have it on a server somewhere and link to the pic. there are free servers you can use tho.

I'm strictly conquest. This doesn't mean I ignore the other aspects of the game.

However there are millions of ways to do it. I love that the map size, starting position and number of opponents dictates the way you should play.

As for my favorite:
Personally I love starting positions where you are on top of another civ straight away.
Makes for a great start, and means you get a little mini game of one on one before the main event.
I then like games which are balanced for a while with occassional raids here and there.

I always prioritize getting resourses in this phase (I admit to sometimes stooping to driving a ship up to a resource then giving it to the opponent of the owner... Sometimes they just sit there... but sometimes they kill the base and you get the resource without having to go to war.)

I love provoking conflict and researching up the weapons/defence trees until I'm in a good position to start taking out the biggest threat. Generally after that it is just mop up which doesnt take long on medium maps with speed 39 transports and huge assault ships.

I sometime influece everybody and sometimes I just like to crush them all