I usually don't have a military built up for attacking, just defense of my planets. What I am looking to find out is: How much time do I have to build up enough to attack if I have very little military? In my current game the Drengin declared war on the Torians (who found the Precursor tech) before I could so I went ahead and declared war on them as well. I already have a decent military in this game but I really didn't want to go to war just yet if I didn't have to.

Oh, yeah definitely. The Duration before they become unstoppably powerful must be very long. In one of my earliest games that event occurred within 1-1.5 years into the game, and it took me forever to figure out how to handle it, so, the duration is most adequate for almost any kind of researching/hording you need to do.

I consider it a simple declaration of first target.

Ive never seen em get out of hand myself, but, im sure the idea is to encourage you to get up in their junk ASAP, or suffer 'possible dire consequences'

There are 2 versions of the event, one a standard random event, one a Mega Event.

In the standard event, the affected Civ starts getting a 1% increase every turn in one of the many global attributes that take % modifiers, weapons, defense, economy, etc.

If you maintain several survey vessels throughout the game, in the 1.8 version, with spawning anomalies, you the player may actually improve faster from the anomaly bennies.

In the Mega Event, the named civ also gets a 1% increase to attributes each turn...ALL attributes. Kill them soon, or ally, or tech out. In ~2 years you won't be able to scratch them.

Actually, if it happens to one of the lower half civs in a large game, you're probably OK. Any time it happens to one of the 2-3 leaders, especially an agressive one, you will have big problems if the civ is left alone. I once saw the Thalans get this. They were sorta off to one corner on a gigantic map with all rare planets, etc, and there was just nothing much around them for expansion. For a couple of years, the were out of the main action of the game and left reasonably alone. Eventually their influence, from basically 1 planet, covered about 40% of the map, and the defenses on their ships were untouchable. Then the influence doubling event hit and they had it won.

drrider