My formula for victory and suggestions for future games

[MindRaptor]

So this post is both a criticism and also my formula for victory.

First my formula. And I will skip obvious steps

I run as financially slim of an operation as possible while maximizing colony growth and research. Spend as little research as possible on military systems that you can get away with. Expand your borders. More on the importance of this later.

Minimizing military research can be achieved by building numerous exploration ships and finding ancient technology. Just use the ships you recover as your military and bully other empires away from repairing those finds even if they are your ally you should temporarily cancel non-aggression/defense treaties to destroy other construction ships so you get all the advanced ancient tech. Don't worry you can re-enable them alter and the AI doesn't care essentially. I even got a "You honored our non-aggression pact relations buff from an ally after NOT honoring out non-aggression pact"

With defense taken care of you should focus on the civilian economy. Try and make time to beeline for planetary governance ASAP. It scales really well. With defense taken care of, you want to get as many wonders as possible. The best wonder is Korolos Medical Academy but you should get Galactic Science Center first because ti will help you get all the wonders. Growing your population will grow your economy. Then go for the other wonders in whatever order gets you them the fastest. You will also want to complete the governance tree before you get all the wonders. The final governance structure is really effective.

Get all those wonders down and winning is a matter of time. During all of this you should be looking for opportunistic invasions on weak neighboring empires if you got lucky with finding ships. Continue conquering until you have enough to meet victory conditions.

You want to expand your borders quickly because you will be running a slim military operation. You want to make sure that it takes a long time to reach our core productive worlds after war is declared or you see an incoming fleet. Large borders will mean more time to build up ships to complement your slim operation. Maintain a large stockpile of cash so that if you are invaded you can build a single ship on numerous planets that have them gather on a core world and group up into fleets. Distributing production like this will let you build up your fleet really fast in response to an invasion.


My criticism is that it seems like every game I have played feels samey. There need to be more victory conditions or types or something.