I'm new to GC2, but as I've been off work for a while recovering from a broken bone, I've been putting some heavy hours into exploring the game and learning the finer points of the subsystems to start to hone my empire management and work up the difficulty levels. My first few games were small/tiny maps with few opponents just to learn, but I recently finished my first large sized galaxy on normal difficulty playing as the Yor doing a warmongering game. I totally destroyed the opposition handily when I took a heavy early game advantage by eliminating two peaceful neighbouring races and boosting my production with the new colonies. I ran away with it and drove it to the end fast (by last man standing means) and then decided to start a new game with a new strategy and up the difficulty right away.

To make things interesting, I decided to do the largest sized galaxy available with as many races as possible. I increased the difficulty to bright and then, departing from most of the suggestions I always read, I decided to mix it up further by setting every option to random (random frequency of stars, random clusters, random anomalies, random encounters). The only things I fixed were exactly 10 major factions (random minor) and only occasionally habitable planets (I wanted them to be a hot item).

I chose to play as the Korx and, with an immense universe, decided I would hope to avoid conflict and start building trade lanes immediately, quickly trying to make any routes I can find and then developing long-range freighters to make a really strong economic engine to drive my production on my worlds. I gave race attributes accordingly strong values in economics, trade and diplomacy while largely ignoring any militaristic or much research-oriented traits.

So, the game starts and our galaxy is brutal. The clusters are really lopsided to the western side of the map and the the entire eastern half is comprised of basically four little clusters and maybe a total of ~20 planets (probably 5-8 usable). My race started where you see the arrow sign, with a large 5-sector wide expanse behind us and pretty slim pickings before us. I could already tell I was going to be up against it with the factions who are starting in the nice spots on the east side.

So, first things first, I am settled into a class 13 homeworld with a class 11 planet on the very edge of the void. It takes a long time to traverse nearly 100 parsecs in the early game with a colony ship, so I know I can let Korx II sit until I create my first colony ship on Korx I and so I send my starting ship south-west to find the first decent habitable planet I can find to setup shop and prepare for more expansion. Unfortunately, it takes quite a while before I stumble upon Clair 1, indicated by the red box.

Around this time, I then stumbled upon a CHERRY planet called Lasitus I (Class 26!). It was close to Clair 1, but unfortunately it was a toxic planet and I was a fair ways from being able to research the toxic treatment tech. But I made a mental note of this one and started keeping my eyes peeled for any techs which would get me closer to that goal when I was engaging in trade with other races. As luck would have it, I ended up settling Lasitus before anyone else and it become a game changer for me shortly...

I eventually came in contact with a couple of races and shortly afterwards they both rang me up telling me they'd been paid by another race to exterminate me. Fortunately I was able to diplomacy my way into peace treaties by sharing trade goods with them and paying them a bit of cash. With peace in the air, I quickly started pumping out freighters. I made a couple standard ones and send them exploring south and then once I enhanced my engines, I build some longer-range freighters with more speed and life support and started sending them out further still. Eventually, I found the Terrans, who were the vastly superior race in the game. They started in the very choice spot of the map just to the west of the centre. They had many nicely habitable planets in close proximity and the game charts were showing that they had launched ahead very early. I set up numerous trade routes with each of their planets and before long, I had an economic machine that was doing very well indeed.

I used my economic strength to speed my research by allowing my colonies to focus on research (and income) and using the cash to pay for my production. I wasn't building any military units, so I just had to fund my social development, which was easy once I had 10 active trade lanes producing very large income thanks to all the research I had put into trade technologies and I had built various social projects to boost my trade income.

Now one of the most important things of the game happened. I had really strong production happening on Clair (it had few building spots, but had a 700% manufacturing multiplier). I used it to quickly develop the Freighter Command project which gives you unlimited freighters so that your trade lanes will never close. This sounded prudent since I was relying heavily on that income. As luck would have it, I finished this development and only maybe a month later, Space Pirates!!!

Keeping these guys running was a key to staying in the game.

This was my first time encountering space pirates and holy smokes was it brutal. It was quite early in the game still. No nation had any significant military presence. The space pirates came out with loaded gunships and obliterated everyone's military immediately. At first I thought I was in huge trouble because I'd assumed I could talk my way out of any fight in this game. After rapidly building cash-funded fighters which each got instantly eviscerated by pirates, I started to realize that the pirates didn't appear to have any transport ships or any interest in taking planets. It dawned on me that this could be my ticket to overcoming the Terran landslide as I could use it as basically marshall law and seclude myself to my machinations.

I immediately started focusing much more heavily on researching technology. I decided the only way I was going to win against the Terrans would be to surprise them with a Tech victory. They were vastly ahead of me in Tech and everything else as it was, but they didn't appear to be following the tech victory tree, as they were developing a military to fight the pirates.

I started driving really hard to the tech victory condition and even got a comment from the terrans that they "Knew what I was up to". Worried that they might be timing an attack before I could finish, I switched Lasitus I into a 100% research planet. Previously, I'd build it up to a 20b population economy machine with loads of economy bonuses. I razed the entire planet and culled the population down to 8b and replaced everything with research developments, all paid for immediately out of pocket with my huge bank account.

I did the same thing on Korx I and on every one of my planets (I only had 4!), I razed any structure that wasn't a special acheivement or protected somehow and replaced it with research facilities. I reduced taxes a bit and the populations, being so small now, were content as it was.

I was driving hard to the end and just as I was 15 turns from victory, suddenly I get tons of red icons coming up. The Terrans have gone to war with Yor and the Yor's allies have all declared war on me because I'm an ally of the Terrans! I kept an eye on my long range sensors and saw the fleets starting to assemble (keep in mind, I'd even leveled all of my space ports to make more research labs). Fortunately, they were not able to overtake me in time and I won my first immense game, against all odds, by technology victory.

The timelines show some interesting things from the game.

Map balance is kind of important, I guess. The Terran's nice starting position seems to be reflected in all timelines, including population. They got the habitable planets the quickest and it cascaded:

The military can be seen to die off the instant the pirates showed up, but you can see that the Terran's game position quickly returned to dominance.

You can see how few times I ever made use of social production. My big economy and trade focus allowed me to buy almost everything out of pocket and continue to focus on research. There are only two significant spikes of social production in the game which is where I was briefly running 100% production to develop big galactic achievements (probably Freighter Command and then another big one).

And here's the research timeline. The Terrans were very strong in research, but you can see how my output skyrocketed when I started to level all of my developments and go on a research grind. That's some ballin' science.

I had a lot of fun learning more about the game and since I was reflecting on how it went to try to learn more moving forward, I thought someone might enjoy the report, as I enjoy reading these types of reports from interesting games.

Next time I'm not going to let the galaxy be quite so random, though.