This AAR of my recent metaverse DA game includes:
- the pirate megaevent
- Korath spore ships
- starting in a bad spot
- extreme colonization as a tech to research early in the game
Galaxy: gigantic; stars: tight clusters, occasional; planets: abundant, occasionally inhabited; my race: Altarian Resistance, Super Organizer, Pacifists party; difficulty: crippling.
I started in the top corner with few inhabitable planets, so I researched extreme colonization before weapons. I grabbed some extreme planets in the nearest group of stars a few sectors away, where Korath were. Sure enough, they declared war, but just after I had acquired some weapons techs from the minor races. I needed to upgrade my ships only in the Korath region. As usual, Korath had spore technology but no soldiering abilities...
The pirate megaevent saved me. Korath spored me, and I saw at least one spore ship intercepted by a pirate fleet. I already had some fast transports in the area and could take some Korath planets.
There were some evil races in the centre of the galaxy, and the pirates weakened everyone, causing some races to surrender to someone. Korath and Torian surrendered to me. The Korath planets had many bonus tiles (factory and research, including the 700% of both types) which explained why they got so powerful quickly -- but now they were mine!
As usual with the pirate megaevent, I went for Master Trade tech to build the Galactic Privateer which also protects trade ships from pirates. It turned out that those (my) freighters which reached other races, were nullified when that race surrendered. I sent freighters to minor races but I had hoped to use them to improve diplomatic relations with major races.
Drengin surrendered to me (thus creating even more pirates!), and Yor declared war. I had to destroy the pirates in my regions before the Yor destroyed theirs; they were starting to get troop transports through to my planets and build up their military. They took, unsurprisingly, a few of my isolated planets such as Toria. My troop transports got intercepted by pirates, even with the Yor space limiting all ship movement to 3.
Yor were rush buying ships, races were surrendering to them, and the Thalans declared war on me. I admitted defeat when we were the only 3 races remaining.