What's everyone's favorite SP map/settings and what is your favorite strategy?
I like the Random Huge Multi, unlocked teams, diplomatic win off, quick start, and pirates on. I personally like get outta dodge quickly, leaving my opponents to squabble amongst themselves.
- Build the battleship, a colony ship and max the starting fleet with scouts, then build up a few civ. labs to get the distant jumps tech.
- Search for a way to reach your home star without hitting that pesky pirate base, then explore the 3 player-less stars, choosing the most suitable one for growth (preferably no pirate base and lots of good quality planets).
- Tech the diplomacy options to make everyone an ally
- Start building up my planets. All of them have at least 1 military lab, 1 civ. lab (up to 8 planets), and 1 trade port. Anything above an asteroid also gets a culture center for the bonus, with any remaining slots going to trade. My home planet fills in the remaining slots with frigate factories.
- Build up SBs on every place in the system. All of them get max trade, with defensive abilities following.
- Pump out envoys until everyone shows me their planets. Of course, one lucky winner will also get my treaties
- Build SBs on all of my allied planets, placing them in areas with many structures (priority to resource asteroids). Generally, I'll focus on attack strength here, with a secondary ability if able (culture for advent, trade for TEC/Vasari) Hopefully you can see where this is leading
- Station siege frigates everywhere.
- Break all ties and see who surrenders
Currently, my record is 4 surrenders within 5 minutes of step 9. Granted, this strategy takes a VERY long time to set up and complete. Most of the time, there will already have been some players defeated, so I doubt one can defeat 9 players at once. Also, the siege frigates will be spread relatively thinly. It's possible that no planets will fall at all, if there are sufficient defenses to defeat my siege-craft before the planet dies.
An interesting side effect of this strategy is your relationship with everyone will SKYROCKET rather than plummet, making it supremely easy to regain ties if things get hairy. I assume this is because everyone likes you for attacking the others more than they hate you for attacking them.
