Ok, playing normal difficulty, with common planets and common habitable planets and 7 opponents on a medium map. Oddly enough all the planets are grouped in the middle and I was lucky enough to grab 4 habitable planets while most others have 2.
Ok, skip forward about 100 turns. Things are going well, I now have 8 planets and I'm on my way to a nice influence victory... This is where things get odd.
1st One of the races (can't remember who) gets some kind of influence bonus and now their influence is covering over 1/2 of the map. No biggie, just a random major event, kinda cool, gives me something to fight about.
2nd About 10 turns later one of the races stumbles on something that increases all uninhabited planets by 14 building squares and since all the stars are close together, EVERY planets becomes a habitable planets. I buy colony ships on all my bases and rush to claim the land. I get 8 more planets.
3rd The very NEXT turn, another race stumbles on something that increases all uninhabitable planets by 12 building squares. Now, the other planets that I didn't claim on the first round have 26 buildable squares! I build more colony ships and keep doing this until I now have about 30 planets, and most have 26 buildable squares....
CRAZY!
