Hi, first of all I have to say I love this game, have been playing other games for awhile and came back to it the last month and its tons of fun. I only have one problem with it, and that is making it *hard*. I usually play on crippling difficulty, my strategy is to research economy/research/diplomatic upgrades until other civs start getting planetary invasion, then research some weapons and get some small size ships out. I often find I can destroy huge numbers of ships by rotating damages ships out to go repair. It gets to the point where my small size ships have so much hp they're basically unkillable. When I get medium sized ships, same thing happens, and at that point I've won the game. There's just no way the computer can kill my ships, even if my empire is very small. My question is, how can I make end game hard? If I tune up the difficulty, I get clobbered because I can't research fast enough, so that doesn't work. Even if I could though, the same basic problem would arise. If I can live long enough to make ships, once my ships have fought lots of battles the game is pretty much over and its no fun to play.