I started a Drengin game the other day (I play very slow, comes with old age
that I think I may actually win eventually, so hopefully we'll get a score up for them.
It's my first game at painful, and it's been a real trial. First of all, the Drengin bonuses are not that useful for early game development (colony rush), and their Super Ability is pretty much worthless
What I'm finding at the higher difficulty levels, is that you have to leave new colonies undeveloped for quite a while. If you start developing all the new colonies you get in the colony rush phase, you soon find yourself WAY in the hole economically, and it's very hard to get out of that. So this game, I'm developing the colonies very slowly, and letting my population build up first so that I have more income to finance the building. At the lower difficulty levels, it seems I was able to develop the colonies right away after I got them. Of course, Thalans and Torians have other benefits that help with this.
The hardest part I see is that there's no way to "pump up" your income. If I need more research, I can rush buy labs, or factories if I need ships and buildings. But even if I build markets on my new colonies, +5-8% of 4bc is nothing. And if I crank up the tax rate, then the pop doesn't grow. So painful (with Drengin, at least) is like a whole different game!
Crushbone
Oh yeah, this is also the first game where I'm managing fleets more closely, to try and not lose any units. By rotating units and repairing, I've now got some ships that are as high as level 28! That's fun
The other thing I noticed is, it seems the AI's really stick with building small hull ships for way too long. They may have lots more ships than I do, but it's just more grass for the lawnmower.
