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Of far more intrest to me is whether placing trade posts and factories near the well's edge and/or the jump lane helps the trade/refinery ships be more productive.

Unlocked teams is by far and a way the easier option. As long as you're attacking your neighbour you're almost guaranteed to be getting points with most of the other races. So you can easily end up with a cease fire agreement with everyone except for closest neighbours who will generally be more interested in taking your planets than being friends.

Returning Armada. The top tier Vasari tech that lets you spawn ships from your phase stabilizers once every ten minutes or so.

I should probably have mentioned before that I'm using the beta.

Why would you upgrade this past level 1? Upgrading it increases the cooldown and decreases the anti-matter cost which leaves you with a drop in dps but with a little more anti-matter. Is the description leaving out what makes this a good idea or something?

It's unlikely as hell but it could be a lvl 6 Vasari Marauder (I think that's it's name) using its level 6 phase node ability to ninja a fleet in behind your lines but like I said, very unlikely. Wormhole is the most probable.

This is a very boring map because its slow AND easy, especially for Vasari. Basically all you do is take the first two pop upgrades at the very beginning then get a colony ship out to tag the roids in the two belts. After this just sit on your ass, maybe make a few basic frigates to clear your asteroid, and wait until you can build a cap factory and rush your best combat cap ship over to their homeworld. Alternatively you could go for the cap ship first and let yourself keep the negativ

Animosity forces everyone to attack your Radiance. Revenge causes all those ships being forced to attack to take 120% of the damage they inflict. Do you see?

I generally make a quick save and then explore all my planets when I've got enough spare resources. Then I'll reload and expore the planets that had something. Yes, I know, I suck and it's basically cheating but exploring every planet you find is fruitless far too much of the time and you've no indicators whatsoever as to how likely any given planet is to have some hidden bonus.