I am going to attempt to summarize my most recent game which took about 6 hours.
I started a medium size system with three stars and 8 players. No flagships, medium resources, pirates. I created three teams: team one was Me and another AI on Medium. The other two teams were three AIs with one of the AI on each team set to Hard.
The first thing I noticed when I started the game was that my ally's home world was only one asteroid away from my home world. There were three stars in my game, but somehow all of the teams started at the same star. Therefore even though there were eight players we were all around one star of the three in the system. I won the game without even going to the other two stars.
In the early game I found it quite challenging to to expand. With no immediate Cap ship I had to carefully watch my fleet resources and balance my research growth with my fleet growth to successfully expand. I spent most of the game with four bases. A Terran world, two asteroids and an ice planet. A group of ten cobalts with the 1st lvl of technology seemed to be enough to tackle most of the pirate fleets around planets and to counter the enemy fleets I ran into. However the first time I jumped to another colonized planet to attempt to take it I was a easily defeated. I took a fleet of 10 cobalts, 2-3 siege ships, and Kol The AI had build up around 15 gause guns, and two jump blockers. My cobalts were soundly destroyed trying to kill the two jump blockers, and the kol quickly followed suit.
By this time I had a steady stream of income and a steadily rising bounty on my head. I had also researched the bomber and fighter fleet defense station. I had only two planets with links to other planets. The other links connected to my ally's planets, so I was pretty safe on that end. So I heavily fortified those worlds with 5-7 bomber bases, with a mix of 2 bombers for every fighter, so I would have for example 8 bombers and 4 fighters at those two planets. Once I was fortified I build one of each cap ship and sent them to those two world which were being regularly targeted by pirate fleets. In short order I had a fleet of 7 caps (two kol, two carriers, and one of each of the others) pretty high in lvl. I added to this fleet three carrier cruisers, 5 flak ships, 4 missile ships, and some cobalts. I had also fully researched up to the tier 5 combat research. I then returned to the planet where I had lost my fleet before. I had destroyed everything there in a matter of minutes and conquered that planet without losing a ship. That team of AI's then send a counter strike, but it did so one ship at a time, so my swarm of 16 bombers and 4 fighters cleaned up anything that dropped into the system pretty quickly.
This is when I started to run into trouble. The AI's had all suddenly researched Culture. The color of the planet where took my revenge was from the yellow team. It had 5 different colors of cultures coming into it, so was able to hold on to it. The planet just to the north of that planet was odd though. It was a volcanic planet and colonized by the red player, which was a part of the yellow's team. It only had two space lanes into it. One from the planet I just took over and one from the other side which was a yellow planet. So before I conquered that first planet the planet sequence was Yellow, red volcanic planet, yellow asteroid. The culture lines from that red planet were half red/yellow. Now I didn't seem to be able to influence the culture color coming from my newly captured planet. I build two transmitting stations and researched the cultural influence research to max but none of the lines of culture coming from that planet, except the original culture line from my planet changed color. I even moved my home world to the next planet, but that asteroid never showed any cultural value at all.
When I invaded and conquered that red volcano planet, it immediately flipped back to red control as per the bug that as already been well documented. The odd part was that the red culture to that planet was completely isolated to that planet since it was a single red planet in a space surrounded by its yellow teammates planets. I turned off all of the colonizing abilities in my fleet and just left it a dead world and moved onto to the next yellow world. Since All of these planets had culture lines fully extended between them, I just moved from yellow planet to yellow planet leaving an uncolonized worlds behind me. Then I noticed that my ally (blue) was able to colonize that original red volcano world and hold on to it. It still had the red cultural lines around it, but it didn't instantly revert to red control. When I finished off the last of the yellow worlds by bombing them and not colonizing them, all of the yellow culture vanished instantly. And of course the red player, or the blue player immediately took control of them all before I could get a colony ship to them.
At this point I just worked my way through all the planets without colonizing any of them and won.
It was about a six hour game and my wife had long ago given up asking me to come to bed.
A couple of thoughts
1. When you take control of a planet, I think that its infrastructure should start at 0 and rebuild. It might do this already, but when it flips from culture it restores to full life.
2. The other fleets I fought in the game only ever brought one cap ship against me. While I'll admit it was fun to smash fleets of 20 cobalts, after I made my uber fleet of cap ships I maybe only lost one flak ship.
3. The enemy teams kept sending scout ships to my planets, but never seemed to take advantage of my weaknesses. I left my home world very lightly defended and while my fleet was across the system the enemy could have easily attacked my home world and taken it. I didn't really need to defend my planets except from pirate attack, and even better was the fact that my ally would send in his fleet to my worlds if a large enough pirate group appeared meaning I never had to watch my back.
4. The other AI never seemed to want to expand beyond 3 planets a piece unless I provoked them.
5. Even though I set up teams at the beginning of the game was still able to make alliances with the other players...and those alliances only applied to individual players. I know that there is an option to lock teams, but I think you should limit the team making to be either locked teams with the ability to select who is on which team, or a free for all with everyone out for themselves with flexible alliances. Having locked teams with the ability to create an alliance with another team leads to weird situations like:
6. There were a number of times when fleets of two players I was friendly with attacked each other in my planet space. I was pretty funny getting double the "ally forces under attack" message. I think there should be a check to see that you are at war with your ally's enemies or something.
That is all I can think off at the moment. It was an odd enough game that I think it deserved a write up.
The game is awesome by the way. I don't wish for those hours back at all.
