I never thought I'd do one of these, but some questions came from league play and I thought I’d share some of my strategies. I’m not a story teller, so this will be a technical account of an ongoing game as it unfolds.

First, some ground rules.

The game will strictly adhere to the Metaverse League’s Round 1 rules.

I’m taking an evil alignment and outlook, so treachery will be the flavor of the day. Narrow minded ideologies such as morality and honor have no place in this game. If this offends you, my work here is done.   

Shameless plugs of the glorious and wonderful "Tyranny of Evil" empire will not be tolerated. At no point will I try to convince you to join us, nor condone others from such an awesome empire to recruit you, even though it just makes sense. You already want to join anyway. You know you do.   

Here’s a quote of the rules…



I’ll be playing for 20k points as a specific goal.

With this in mind, a modified "all factories" strategy will work best, since research can be totally shut down at will and more effort can go into economy and military. My own research abilities are somewhat unimportant, because I’ll be trading for or stealing my opponent’s techs and will take them out militarily if they get too close to a win.

The number of habitable planets will likely be small for a medium map due to uncommon stars. Occasional anomalies means not much money from my survey ship. No need to build surveyors and speed won’t be much of an advantage. From this, I know that the Thalans are the race to choose with Planet Quality and Economy as the abilities. Morale will take up the extra slack.

Having only 4 opponents will be difficult. From the rules, it says we can play with whatever race settings we like, so I’ll be careful with the opponent choices. I’ll need opponents that have good tech abilities and an alignment that will make them predisposed to want to attack me once I choose my alignment. I want their abilities to compliment mine and war is essential. I won’t go as far as to choose abilities and politics for my opponents, even though that would be within the rules. If I did do that, I’d give them extra research abilities and technologists for gov. Too much time and effort involved with that one though.

Suicidal difficulty, Tech trading on and all victory conditions enabled are pretty standard, so no extra thoughts there.

I play DL, so the other settings are not applicable.

Time to enter the Metaverse and set up the game.