I just finished playing a gigantic galaxy with the Altarians and figured all those hours shouldn't go to waste, so here is my post-game summary.

Everything was abundant, conquest was the only option, no tech trading, tough difficulty, 9 races. I was trying to explore some of DA's new mechanics on a large scale. My strategy was to out-tech the AI even with an all-factory build, and it worked in the end. Oddly, one of my custom races appeared randomly in this game, which I had never seen before. My abilities are as follows:

Altarian Custom
+30 Economy
+10 Morale
+20 Research
+25 Luck
+20 Research (Technologists)



Looks like I'm near an edge. My home world has 3 morale bonus tiles, so I won't have to worry much about its future when I increase taxes later. My intuition tells me there are going to be a high percentage of hostile planets that I can't colonize, so I'm directing my focus to finding normal 8+ PQ planets. I can fill in the rest later.



My suspicions are confirmed that over 60% of the planets are hostile. I am rather happy to find a morale resource located near my homeworld. The rush continues, but I am pacing myself economically by building up markets on most of my worlds.



I get an economy resource and push a constructor toward the research resource since I am speed 3 and the minor race is speed 1 only; I should beat him to it. I've met several races through their scouts and I'm above average it seems, so I'll just keep doing what I'm doing.



There are a couple more minors for me to gobble up once I'm running full speed. The Thalans are building up their military, so I'm expecting some action soon. Right now I'm focused on research and economy, though I have the infrastructure to build ships when the time is right. They don't seem to be right next to me, so maybe they'll hit someone else.



Apparently my lack of a military has made me a target for several races. However, I have a stronger economy, industry, and tech level than everyone else, including the Thalans. Now it's time to switch gears, get a few more weapon techs, and build a defense.



Since my planets are all build in a similar way, the defenses don't need to be shuffled around; they spring up more or less at the same time throughout my empire. The few newest colonies get a rush built ship so that all are defended. My military, unsurprisingly, is twice that of the nearest competitor. Plus, my economy is very strong now by design. I've built several specials including Eyes of the Univsere, so that helps me see what's going on and scout faster.



My "Baby Dragon" ship design has 3x the weapons of most of the ships running around because I'm at a slightly higher weapons tech level. My economy now supports continous production on all planets, so I'm just going to let them accumulate while I attend to other matters. No one has really even dared to attack me yet on my planets, but I lost the undefended starbases to the Korx, who will give them back very soon.



A typical colony. I run from 30-50% factories depending on the number of tiles and the distance from the border (some of the new colonies near enemies are all factories so they can build ships faster). I am able to research quickly using my +65% innate bonus, and can of course build improvements and ships quickly as needed. I used to build more factories, but they have diminishing returns after a certain point, so I decided to focus on having more money; this turns out to benefit me greatly later.



The Krynn, who I have yet to see anywhere, have twice the population that I do, making me realize that I might have a major competitor. However, I think they are on the other side of the map, so it's not my current concern.



Remembering how several people declared war on me near the beginning, I had an idea. I created a beautiful web of destruction using my enhanced diplomacy skills from tech and special buildings. It only cost me about 2-3K to start each war, which my treasury was easily able to support. I was also able to get research treaties from the two largest empires cheaply, knowing that they were not feasible targets in the short-run. This lead to a "divide and conquer" type of strategy on my part, and allowed me to focus on taking out the two weakest races, the Iconians and Korx.



The Iconians simply have no defenses with all my auto-attack ships running around. They are near the end of their time. It's looking like my next target is the Custom Race, who unfortunately has the same colors as the Arceans so it's hard to tell where their ships are. All of this destruction is only possible because...



The Baby Dragon has evolved into a Dragon! Although its firepower isn't that high, it's still higher than any other ships I'm seeing. No one else is using medium hulls extensively, much less large hulls yet. It's HP is over max because it just leveled and it hasn't registered the change yet (should be 48/48). It's very difficult for the enemy ships with 2-6 beam to kill these, and I have masses of them floating around.



The Iconians are no more, but I am a bit disturbed by the sheer number of ships traveling through my space. It seems that my unmanaged military production is keeping me on the level of the Krynn, and with all the wars I don't think anyone is looking at me right now (I continue to pay the Krynn and Thalan to declare war on all others, as it keeps them distracted and is cheaper than asking others to attack them). My research is climbing to over 3x all other races combined from focused production alone and my research abilities. I have over 550 Dragon ships distributed throughout my empire, ready to strike my next target.



I am proud of my PQ 29 planet near the edge of the map. It contains nearly all of my special buildings and is quite heavily defended as well as being surrounded by a few other large worlds devoted to ship production. I am also quite evil as you can see, but the Mind Control center on my capital world has fueled the economy for my war machine.



I quickly dismissed the Custom Race from my galaxy as an inferior being, after which I consolidated my position by building a farm on each planet and bringing all the newly taken planets up to my standards (it also created the largest social production spike in this game).



I made the Dragon obsolete after replacing it with the Stinger. The Stinger was designed to be a defender and troop transport for the sake of convenience. It is extremely fast because I want to send a transport to an undefended world immediately and directly. I switched to missiles and shields because everyone else was using beams and shields, and I've been told that missiles are the most effective weapon.



Naturally, having reasearched most techs I designed my ultimate weapon: the End of Days (tm). I could have put more missiles on it, but making its defense effectively invincible against the AI was more important. The AI are all dead anyway as far as I'm concerned, but I will leave the Drengin for last as they have actually been rather nice to me throughout this episode. They (along with a few minor races) were forced to declare war whenever someone did it to me (of course, they were naturally at war before that since I had rigged the whole relations web constantly with wars for my own amusement). Had I enabled an Alliance Victory, I might have been tempted to actually ally with them to win; but, that's just not Evil enough for me (and it's payback for many other maps where they were... unfriendly to me. Karma's a bitch, aint it?)



Good bye Terrans. All your base are belong to us.



Good bye Arceans. All your base are belong to us.



Good bye Drath. You are a bunch of cowards. And all your base are belong to us.



I am now running completely from the treasury and only 20% capacity because it's faster to buy ships where they are needed. It is nearly impossible to use the civ manager because I have several hundred colonies and it takes almost a minute to load that screen. There is no need to micromanage anything at this point. I taught the Krynn a lesson in spying just because I'm Evil and it felt good (I mean ... Evil).



I technically had enough ships to destroy everyone at the same time, but since I use auto-attack to eliminate all their defenses and follow up with higher-capacity transports (Transport-X with 3K troops, 30 effective speed) manually, it just takes forver to shuttle troops to where they're needed. I think next time I will be Korath just so I can cleanup the map quickly with spore ships instead of waiting for populations to grow. That would naturally be Evil. Isn't it kind of funny how the End of Days looks like a mushroom, and the Transport-X like a wing? Well, maybe in a twisted, Evil sort of way.



I like how the population curve would start to flatten, then begin another turn as I started to eliminate a race. Once the Krynn began to flatten and I passed them the second time, I knew I was going to win. It's a pity all the AIs flatlined and died. I suspect that continual wars with each other kept all of them from really developing technology or a solid foundation to develop on for too long, though the Krynn and a couple of others at least had large ships with 100+ beam weapons late game.

Summary:

This game took nearly 3 days of 16-hr stretches to complete. At least several hours were lost mainly because of memory leak issues that are worsened by the huge map. I turned off all textures and performance options for this reason, yet during ground invasions if you just sit there the memory will keep being allocated over and over (for the battleground texture I think is the problem). Problems asside, I am really enjoying my purchase of DA

The Mind Control Center does allow planets to flip, but only if they are near the low end of the influence rating needed to flip them. As my influence approached 12-20x on some planets, they refused to flip. This is why I couldn't do what I wanted and flip all the Drengin planets to end the game for fun. I'm not sure how fast planets will normally flip, but I assume it's pretty fast and helps speed up the end game. I could just destroy the colony that the MCC is built on near the end; that might do it in the future.

Using a standard number of factories and the rest stock markets, one farm and a starport seems to work well for this difficulty level. I'm not sure if it would work on harder levels, but economy is always important in long games. My research bonus effectively complemented my strategy, so that I didn't need to build any labs. Some worlds were factory-only as tactics dictated, though later they were converted as they became farther from the border to just producing a nominal amount of ships.

However you do it, the tech rush seems vital. I just never have the economy for all-labs at the start, so I find all-factories more convenient (plus you have more control over expenses and localization of production capacities).

Manipulating the AIs through war was much more effective than I had imagined, even though I was just having some Evil fun.