You Want the highest number possible but if you look on the boxes in the corners they give you other information like Tech Advantage and Morale bonuses. Its important to check those numbers out, the first time you hit a planet your going in blind, but be shure to check thier morale and tech bonues out as they play a huge role in the invasion its self. Its really hard to invade a planet from a race with a large ground warfare tech advantage. Just think what it would be like if your using WW2 tech
Araku
1.03 has this fixed, The trade federation UP issue will always have a time limit so this tactic will only work for 5 years or so and then the trade federation will expire and you will go down. ~SDC~
Easy once your terror star is fully constucted just click on a stat system and your terror star will start its glacial attack run. To use a terror star just click on a system that is adjacent to its location on the map and boom no more system. its big limiting factor is its massive and as far as I can tell unmodifiable speed of 1. Best tactic I have seen for it is to get 5 constuctors and escort them to the sector your gonna wipe out and build it on sight. This is assumeing your go
Dreads can be chaper for a number of reasons. 1st is in game they make it very clear that the BB is the first ever combat capital ship. A dreadnought does not have to be that much larger then a BB its just a more refined desing. The lowered cost may be from the fact that your race now has better asembly line production capabilities as well as the fact that you get to all proven concepts from a BB and get rid of the bad Ideas you started with. 2nd BBs do benifit from some technologies that Dreads