DJMikeWazowski

I play a gigantic galaxy and right now after taking over four other civs, i have maybe a dozen to twenty planets that pump out ships. That sounds like a lot but i also have over 100 colonies. I keep the tax rates as high as i can without going below 65% morale and will have multiple trade only planets to keep the money flowing in. Let the minor civs be. They usually do a lot of trade and you can park some economy starbases right outside of them. Consistantly build s

I tend to go with naming themes for planets. My current faction i've named Interstellar Pirate's Union and I've taken all the planet names from people, pirates, places and ships out of the index of a biography of Captian Kidd i'm reading. So I've got a gigantic galaxy with planets like Blackbeard, Antigua, Madagascar, Kidd, Shivers and the like. For ship classes, I usually go with the name of my productive planets and a descriptor.. i.e. Riff Photon Boat for a med class ship equiped wi

If you're trying to steal planets via influence, it is easiest to steal the ones sitting by themselves in a system. In my current game i've been trying to steal all of the Arceans planets and they have one system with five PQ10+ planets with another two systems with two planets each near by. I've got six maxxed out influence starbases and haven't managed to steal one yet.

Most interesting thing i've seen came twice in my most recent game and never before. It essentially said "The (insert minor race... one was snathi one was carnoids) with some help from our agents managed to steal all the technology from the Iconians. They are interested in trading these technologies, particularily for colonoies."

I like to play on gigantic maps and sometimes that really gets me in troble with tight clusters of stars. A lot of times if i'm stuck and surrounded/cornered, i rush up the influence tech line and pick off a number of planets that way until i have the military base to fight with the other guys. Last time that happened i took over all of the Terran Alliance and half of the Torians before i even bothered with fighting (and then only cause i was kinda bored) =P

About the races living on as rebellions and minors... it sounds like the expansion is going to do just that. It's not on the main page but if you click on the full article and scroll down with the screen shots it says "The Altarians are conquered but the resistance lives on!" Sounds to me like even more of a minor race than the minors. I hope that you can have the option to start out as a rebellion if that's the case.

I generally go for a mix of mega influence and capital ship style warfare. I tend to get impatient waiting for fleets of smaller ships to band together.. i mostly play on gigantic maps so it can get to be a real pain to either A) wait a dozen turns or more for small ships to get across my territory to the front lines from my production planets or B) wait forever to go up the tech tree to add enough weapons and engines to make these smaller ships useful. I don't go for influence all t

I will sometimes pawn off the trade goods which i'm not using. In the beginning of the game i tend to research various paths somewhat evenly until the game progresses a bit and i can tell what path to victory i'll be using. Like in my last game i went for an influence victory so i didn't really need repair bots since i wasn't doing any ship to ship battles. Mostly i am going for conquest so diplomatic translators are not as key as that new weapon tech the guy i'm going to go to war with in two t

My custom race has points thrown into higher PQ but i still sort of ignore that neighboring planet. I usually go with a starport and dump labs on all the rest. Then i let them sloooowly build constructors to throw on my military starbase i always put in my home system for defence.

I had about 9 crashes yesterday. It's gotten to the point where i have auto save on every 5 turns but since i'm fighting a massive war on a giant size map.. when you have to move 30 ships around each turn even losing one turn can be a pain. Sometimes i can see the signs that the game is going to crash. The screen will start flickering. Some of the letters on the interface will turn to mumbo jumbo random characters and half letters. Sometimes the screen will go black and the only part