All Labs, Suicidal, need advice.

Ok so I just got my first suicidal victory. I've been hyper-specializing in the all labs strategy (although now that I tagged suicidal I have started to work on an all factory strat). Anyhow I *barely* squeezed it out. I was using the same strategy that I had worked on all the way up to suicidal and it felt VERY strong on Masochistic, and even on Obscene only needed slight modification. On suicidal, I REALLY had to improvise badly to make it. I am curious of any advanced insight. I'm sure I can figure it out on my own, but I'm pretty tired of this strat right now so I'm probably writing this as a post-mortem and then moving on with other strats. Anyhow here's what I basically did. Feel free to pick it entirely apart. I won, but not convincingly.

Altarian - +4 research, +4 econ, +2 diplomacy, technologists
Tiny galaxy, occasional planets (I did not want a colony rush), occasional everything, normal tech.
9 opponents.
I ctrl-N'd for a +300% research tile (cheap, but I needed all the help I could get)

- Send miner exploring, basically parking them next to a distant civilization to make a quick freighter the second I get trade
- Eat anomolies as efficiently as possible
- colonize Wisp

Build:
3 labs, 7 markets on home. 2 labs on wisp
Autobuy my first lab, Auto-upgrade first lab, Auto-buy second lab, Auto-buy third lab and first Wisp lab.

Tech:
Basically get Xeno labs, get Xeno entertainment (this puts Wisp at 100% morale), get xeno medicine, get one level of economics, go Republic, get Trade (convert miner and auto-buy another), get economics through trade centers, soil enhancement, go to majesty and democracy, weapons ...

Strategy:
Get a solid financial base ASAP. This requires Trade early, but also relies on Wisp getting up to pop fast as well so after the first round of terraforming I can lay down a couple trade centers and it will almost cover itself.

I get research treaties as fast as I possibly can and try and send my first freighters to evil races to buy myself time. I research extremely useless techs (environment techs) and sell them using my high diplomacy, or just give them away to races that hate me. This strategy HEAVILY relies on lots of tech trading for money in the early game, so I research all kinds of crap like xeno farms and sensors and starbase defense, which I can sell for a lot and give them very little strategic advantage.

Usually somewhere around the 1 year mark things are heating up. I have several trade routes (bought from money I got from selling junk tech) and am working on finishing up wisp (with soil enhancement). This is when the death threats begin. I start a bunch of wars between races and those who hate me, and typically get 3+ races to attach one evil neighbor of mine. All I do is build transports and sweep in and invade when they are weakest. I still don't have a single warship.

From there I have a tech AND planet advantage and can usually roll with it.

This game:
I had a GREAT early game and raced through the techs. I actually manged to get all 11 trade routes up (I always go neutral) before war broke out ... which is a good sign because now I have a massive economic surplus. I was surrounded by Korath, Drengin, and Korx ... which sucked for me since I was good for many weeks and this made them hate me more, but I kept paying them off. Eventually I got almost everyone to attack the Korath and ignore me and within a couple months I had stolen their two worlds with only transports. Next the GOOD races started to hate me and the Drath declared war on me. All the neutrals jumped on them and I didn't really have to defend while I took the Korx out, again with just transports while their neighbors pounded on them. Every other race now had 2 planets to my 6. The Drath were just about to hit me (and I had 3 warships total that I had bought with tech and money), when I was able to get a peace treaty with them. Super Organizer I guess made the war with me a lot harder than they wanted it to be.

Anyhow from here it was a sure win, or so I thought. I had vastly superior tech (I was at phasors and had drones for PD tech ... which basically made my ships VERY resilient vs their harpoons), a somewhat faltering economy (converting enemy worlds to research/econ worlds is SLOW), a HUGE population/planet advantage, and almost no navy ... but no wars.

From there I really struggled to get a navy up and running, but the only thing that saved me was continuing to incite wars with potential enemies. Well eventually those enemies started to fall and the iconians were threatening to get 2 more planets, so I cut off their assault, again sneaking in transports in the middle of their huge battle, and I manged to get Drath, but they got Drath IV (or whatever). The drengin fell quickly to me as well, though some other race got Kona. Now I ripped through influence tech and managed to flip Kona and drath minor. So now I had a staggering planet lead, but suddenly my massive tech advantage started to fail me. My navy (56 logistic mixes of smalls, mediums, and 1 or 2 larges) started to get its ass kicked by very underteched competition.

This is where I had major issues. I had all the resources to surely dominate, but I just couldn't get fleets up and running quick enough. Every ship I lost was a terrible loss, and I only had two or three worlds that could reliably produce anything bigger than a small. Also I now had Aereons and Doom rays, but the remaining enemy was into Mass drivers so I had to quickly get armor tech up. Its just so hard to produce ships with those super techs without any real production. Basically I just ended up buying everything I could, having to drop my economy slider to 50% (which would net me 3000 surplus a week) just to get the cash necessary.

Maybe I just suck late game, but even when I had the last civilization (thalans) down to 3 planets I still almost lost it. My fleet attacked them and all of a sudden, they didn't have mass drivers anymore, they had damned lasers. I lost 37 points of my 56 point fleet in the assault and had to retreat. I had no shield tech so I lease-bought 3 huge's that had every possible slot filled with doom rays and used them ot finish them off ... but it was dicey. At the end I had one of those huge's left and two large's which used to be part of my 56 point fleet.

So I won, but I feel like I did a lot wrong. Mid-late game was MUCH harder than I felt it should be considering how massive my tech advantage was and how much free cash I had floating around. I also went NLC's mid-late game and that felt like a mistake. I am extremely comfortable with the early game tech/diplomacy part. I'm also pretty confident in my ability to sneak transports in and quietly take out civilizations I've paid others to attack. But once it comes time to actually fight it out, I lose badly.

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Play Humans 30% Diplomacy 30% Economics 10% Morale Populist Party.

Scattered/Gigantic/Abundant all/Very fast tech/8minor races/nine opponents.

100% Research

Do not build a single lab, only build econ buildings and rush buy diplo translators.

Trade tech(research cheap techs to trade) for planets and research treaties and cash, keep the planets labs and econ buildings, use the stored production to build ships and then disband the starports. Keep trading for more labs. If you can't trade for planets and stay solvent then trade for war ships.

Econ treaties are good, but you can probably only good one by trading for your own but of course you can get all the minor races econ treaties easily.

If an opponent goes to war with you then get the other AIs to go to war with them and then when you can negotiate trade the planets that the AI took back.

Once you have tons of money and all the opponents planets you can trade for build up power until you're ready for war.

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I have never been able to trade for a planet in Maso+ difficulty. I am not sure if I'm doing something wrong, but it's simply never ever happened to me. It's also EXTREMELY expensive to get anything larger than a small ship. They just don't want to cough them up. I don't know if that's a factor of the map size or difficulty level or both.

The map settings won't change because I hate gigantic maps, I may play a small or medium map though at some point, but much bigger and the game sucks to me. I suspect the tiny galaxy was key to my success, but everyone says the bigger the map the easier the game ... I'm just not seeing it though.

Again I am not looking to change strategies, I am looking to optimize this existing strategy. I've already won, I have the feather in my cap, now my goal is to optimize and perfect it so that it's easy. I suppose it's possible this strategy is simply not strong enough for suicidal and thus has to always be this hard, but I really feel like I didn't play anywhere near a perfect game feel like I made some wrong choices along the way. Particularly mid-game when the wars broke out.

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1) At first sight I would say you're a little overdoing the "converting enemy worlds to econ/research" in the later stages: what if you'd kept one more planet as a production center?
Seeing how vastly superior your weapon technology was + with a profitable economy I think you would be better off cranking out some battle ships - unless you see this as going against a fundamental part of your strategy. If your military rating is too low, you get squeezed by many AI's at the same time, taking big bites out of the reserves you need in your later game to buy ships once your production can't keep up.

2) The "trade useless techs with AI" part is a favourite of mine. However have you considered focusing more on researching useful techs? You can still sell some more-or-less useful techs to preferable the weaker of your allies, while in the end you advance faster technologically, giving you more breathing space to add some manufacturing facilities later instead of more labs.

3) Seeing how you won on suicidal (which in itself deserves congratulations) in spite of some hopeless situations on the way, it seems your strategy can definitely also work on suicidal. Probably it's better to play some other strategy for a change, but I wouldn't discard this strategy... And you look really the expert in sneaking in transports

4) I think that in a tiny galaxy even the smallest planet is considered to be so important to the AI that the trade prices for planets go through the roof (no idea how steeply they go up with difficulty levels by the way). Not sure but it certainly looks like it.

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Hi!

Altarian - +4 research, +4 econ, +2 diplomacy, technologists

Too much research you can't turn off, too little production to actually made something. But you already know that.

IIRC my Altarians in current suicidal all-labs game (played them for the first time an all I can say is WOW!) have +4 econ, +2 weapons, +1 morale, soc and mil production, industralists. Reasons:
- all-labs already has insane tech output, so no bonuses needed,
- low production from focus needs a boost, hence +30% to production,
- +20% weapons: I wanted to kick a.., but started with only one resource in 3 sectors around my HW, and that was the military one. For the most-defense ships I use a lot I should've taken +20% defenses, or even more social production instead.

BTW this all-labs game is with tech trade off.

BR, Iztok

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this helps...i culd nvr accomplish a tech victory...the AI usually beat me b4 i make it

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Good stuff guys, thanks for the replies. I should make note I won by military conquest, not tech victory (I was trying to get decent points ... but on tiny I guess it's useless). Interesting build there Iztok ... does +social production help focus? I was under the impression it did not, which is why I never actually researched the base factory upgrade (+10 social) and wasn't particularly enamored with planetary improvements (since I assumed the +social and +military didn't do me any good). I know for a fact that mining doesn't do anything for my social production.

Altarians are highly underrated I think. I mean they have just flat out awesome racial bonuses and their super ability is unbelievable at suicidal. I typically invite wars if I feel I can defend myself, because its usually a death sentence for the attacker. Its fun parking a bunch of transports next to a victim, watch them get all pissy about it and declare war on me, only to have everyone and their brother tear into them. A lot of my strategy has to do with diplomatic manipulation and carefully keeping every at war with each other so they'll leave me alone!! That's probably why I suck so bad once I actually have to get active with the military side of it.

I'll have to try a modified Altarians at some point I think, indeed with less research ability. I was considering trying this strategy with humans and going even more trade/diplomatic ... but humans have that stupid +25 trade which is all but useless. I was lucky this game to fill my trade routes ... most games I get 2-5 out and then suddenly everyone is at war with everyone.

I was thinking of giving Good a whirl with them, but getting +defense to combine with the +20% defense wonder ... and probably some luck. I've been thinking a lot lately about universalist and luck combos ... that's some fun math.

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