Im sorry to PlayJeff45. It wasnt meant to be either nice or cruel. Just an observation. I thought it was funny too.

i have thought of a more PRACTICAL tactic that might work.

about half way thought the colony rush stop colonizing planets, instead build military starbases around your empire and have a small fleet near each of them for taking out enemy ships that approach your empire. it should protect you long enough to create a grand army of ahips and transports to when your enemy does break though you'll have a little suprise for them.

Nelio you'd like this tactic.

hope it helps, LostHero AND BlueHawk.

yes it would be very expensive, but all races do this before war:
>Colonize planets
>Take Galactic Reasources
>find all anomalies
then they will start to declare war on people.

Interesting. I do build military starbases but not this early in the game. I do like going to war early but the amount of money you would spend on constructors here would be better spent on fighters.

Remember, that Milt SB's are not that affective till you have researched along way down the weapons tree. Early in the game you would get little to no help from them.

by the end of the colony rush i would say that i have "taken" more planets than i have colonized. Very rarely does the AI max out it's colony ships. So a lightly armed transport with about 300 trops on it does the trick. This works for me, by no means do i think this would be the case at suicidal. In fact i don't seem to get as much value with this tactic at painful. But for tough and challenging, it works great.

Good to see your evil streak coming out a bit LostHero

hehehe, my evil partner in crime. just thought you might like it, your always into that going to war early stuff

You are all talking about blockading somthing, ie, a planet or half the galaxy to use yourself. However, wouldn't it be much more effective to stop te problem at its source? Being the enemy AI's homeworld. If you went strait there and blockaded that, it wouldnt matter how many collony ships they built, they couldn't send them anywere. I mean... why blokade one especily good planet for your exclusive use later on via a massive waste of resources when compared to one colony ship, when you can give yourself exclusive control over an entire region around an AI's space with the same amount of resources spent. You get complete control around them!

This is the only way I can see a blockade being feesable in the Colony rush stage. It works well. The AI ofcourse gets afew colony ships out before you can blockade them off but you stop there main source of production and force them to rely soley on under populated non-developed worlds, while you pick and choose what you want.

If you want to be really dirty, you can even buy the intended target of the blockades worlds off him as soon as he colonises them before your ships are in place, rendering him completely doomed.

I play on this tactic a fair bit and its best if you only go for one AI, preferably your closest neighbor with either:
-the most planets around him
-or the one thats most likely to be a threat
Never try to do it on more then one AI, two at a push if your in very close proximity and seperated from the rest of the Galaxy by a decent amount, otherwise your Econemy is ireparably damaged and you cannot feild anough collony ships before your hostages research sufficent wepons to punch threw you.

Just my Two Cents,

Fate,

Hahahahaa, my my. The poor little Torians always get the rough end of the stick.....

Hey, i know. they are my favourite race, as you can see above in my medals. Just thought i'd try and play the victim card, the Drengin do seem to hate them soo much....

That's pretty much what i do. In a map with 900 or so planets i only colonize to about 30. From then on, i follow an AI's colony ship with one of transports, he colonizes it and i take right from under him....cripples their economy too...

This strategy only works for large/gigantic galaxies, right? Otherwise it seems that colonization will have been completed before you've researched the techs required for planetary invasion. (It's a cunning strategy, I just want to make sure I understand the limitation. )

whoa... your way more organised than i am. i just research what i need at the time.