@JohnJames
No thats my point. Its not less income. You get wayyy more quite quickly because you can claim the wells you want with no battle right in the beginning.
Here is why.
Normal strat is some explore and build a small fleet to take neighboring wells. Sometimes you have to reach out further because neigboring wells have little resources so you skip the battle (with neutral). Under this strat the play used resource for the fleet AND exploration (Ok that is cheap.. IN fact I did that as well but I see no point with this rebel strat).
The Rebel colony strat need only get the tech to neutralize the other rebels (neutral armies) and only build colony ships early on. Resource wise it is about the same. I did not do the exact math but I have played the game with all stages of expansions enough to know when I should be expanding etc. and if I have enough resources.
Under this strat you send out one single colony ship and get it with no battle. ideally you find ones you need no new techs yet (not volcanic or ice). Eventually you want Ice and Volcanic anyways so those should be the target techs after neutralizing the rebels.
As you take each colony you develop it so it is not consuming but rather producing. Timing wise it seems I can grab like 4 or 5 wells to what a normals strat gets 1.
As long as one upgrades the wells as they get them their resources are INSANE compared to normal. I kept flooding the market. I constantly had resources on the market AND I would crash the market as well. Once I had roughly 1/3 of the system I raced for the Titan built it and slaughter 'close' neighbors. by close I mean the ones closest to my home world. I then proceeded to slaughter the remaining.
Time wise a Huge game was about an hour and I new the system was mine and about another hour for clean up. I still have I am guessing 30 min to 1 hour to claim which victory I want now.
