Woat

Yeah, it's random. If you want to cheat and have an endless boom, you can just quicksave every few turns turn and reload whenever it ends.

I've played a few random games in TA so far, and from what I've seen, the AI is pretty screwed up when it comes to research and ship building. Much more so than in DA. Races will often randomly either not build ships weapons (or not research it), or never build transports. Big, far reaching races with good tech and ecconomic ratings will never build combat ships, and keep a military ranking of zero. Often they'll have war decared on them, build dozens of transports, and just fly them

It would be nice if there was an option to disable Espionage, just like Tech Trading. For me, it's mainly annoying and slows research/development, but it's not really that effective at stopping me. The AI just wastes tons of credits on it and wastes both of our times, when they'd be better off researching and building more ships, and gameplay would be funner if they did this too.

Other nations will usually get a "-We don't trust you", if you don't have that already.

There should be an "Abandon your Ascension Research" option IMO that you can try to buy or blackmail other races into doing, and AIs should try to persuade you to do the same when you are researching it.

Has anyone else had Torrians go completely psycho near the beginning of TA games, build up their military and declare war on every evil race, while the Humans and Alterans never even raise their combat rating above zero, even when someone else declares war on them? Is this intentional or a bug?

Works for me too. I'm not sure if this is true in the newest expansions, but before, if you aren't happy with your random map and do Ctrl+N to start a new one, it will give you a random map with all the same races/options EXCEPT for tech trading, which will be re-enabled.

Yes, it can be very annoying if you don't deal with the Drengin threat early on, and there's so many ships near their homeworld that your game starts to crawl when you're focused on that section of the map. Anyway, just research defense for whatever weapon they have on them, build a couple ships with heavy defense, and wipe them out. You can wipe out every single fleet with one highly defended ship.

Yeah, I think the only way to win an infulence victory without a shot fired would be to have a huge army that's bigger than anyone else's at all times. The moment you get your Military rating down, and they'll go after you if you control the largest area. Especially if you're building infulence bases everywhere. They don't like influence bases in general, not just the ones directly over their planets.

Yeah, the thing about the high-quality enemy planets is that they are usually very useful to capture rather than destroy, especially if it's an enemy manufacturing center, and especially if it's deep in the heart of enemy territory, and if the AI is working correctly, then the enemy should throw everything they have at your TS, so it wouldn't really be much harder to capture a planet than to destroy its sun. The times I'd imagine myself using one of these things is when dealing with the