Just completed a fun game vs 5 cruel AIs on a random medium-large map. Settings were no pirates with large fleets and unlocked teams. The AIs were 2 TEC, 2 Advent and 1 Vasari.
What made this one interesting is I only had one chokepoint and a max 2 phase lane trade network. Couple of contested space junk and gas giants between me and a TEC. I SBed the chokepoint early but never upgraded it as the TEC never came in full force. Mostly it is was back and forth on one of the gas ginats and me pressing the attack on one of his volcano worlds. There was a backdoor wormhole to my space but wasn't really ever a factor until much later in the game (and even then a minor one). The fighting with the TEC was back and forth since my econ was strapped with the limited space. At least extractor income was decent. His closest world was crazy mined and with a fully upgraded Argonev. So I went around and slowly eviscerated him. Took time but then I could SB a gas giant for trade network and ate his empire. Btw I later on salvaged my original SB since it never saw action. My SB for trade was later nixed by some attack I never even saw since I was busy elsewhere (so I played for a chunk of the game with inferior trade ... sigh long story).
What made this game interesting was that the Vasari though next to me in terms of distance was cut off from me entirely by the pirate world. This meant he grew to immense power as he took out the Advent (they always die first) and started reducing to ash the other TEC while I killed my TEC. I decided to step in and save the remaining TEC faction before the Vasari got too powerful. This led to some back and forth big fleet battles. I intentionally stayed down one notch in logistics so I could work on Kostura cannons. While building them in sequence I had some large fleet battles and used subverters and gravity warhead to pin my enemy when I could but he always had near max fleet as he just built more (he had like 17 planets at one point).
I took a couple of his worlds by the time I finished building my 11th Kostura cannon. Then things got fun. I had used a couple of Kostura shots before to stun phasic traps when I invaded. But when I went to take one of his desert planets I guess he snapped and basically sent his whole fleet. He only had two caps since over the course of the previous battles I had destroyed a total of maybe 12 caps. But he had close to 2000 fleet supply in the grav well I was invading. Then I used the Kosturas. All of them. very closely synchronized (9 at once and two after that so he couldn't retreat). I would be surprised if he saved 100 fleet supply. Shortly after that I invaded some more worlds, used some more Kosturas, and killed off a mini fleet and then with him still having nine worlds and 800+ fleet supply he up and surrendered.
From there on it was pretty formulaic vs my former ally TEC. I again used Kosturas to clear out his choke point world, leaving only his Argonev. The only SB that ever saw action was something I built in haste near the end when my main fleet was out of position and I needed to buy time for my main fleet to return to a central world near the TEC who had just turned on me (I though I had more time for the Vasari to keep fighting).
In my opinion it seems kind of silly that you can bait the AI into a fight in a hostile grav well and nuke it with Kosturas while not taking any damage yourself. But still it was fun. My first victory over cruel AIs essentially using no starbases.
