Everyone has one, and with a game as variable as this one, I'm sure there are quite a few out there. Since I couldn't find a thread like this on this board, let's hear about your play styles.
To keep them easy to read, let's put them into a basic template. You don't have to do it if you don't want to, I suppose, but it would make it easier on the eyes as opposed to seeing walls of text. So, here's mine:
Title:
Smiling Bandit
Description:
Just smile at them, make friends, ask for a favor, butter them up, take their stuff, the when they turn around, slit their throats.
Pros:
Hilarious win if played right
Not too many confrontations
Gives you a great economy to work with
Cons:
Hard to start, a quick and militaristic enemy could wipe you out
slow to develop
if your the war-mongering type, you'll get bored fast
What I do:
After the initial planet grab and meeting of the opponent civs, I focus my efforts on researching non-war techs and improving my relations with the other races. I keep my planets mostly focused on research and money making, while only having a few planets ready to make ships. I build up just enough of a military so that war-mongering civs don't just walk over and invade me. I use good diplomacy to convince everyone to give me their research and economic treaties, while giving them the techs for economic and planetary improvement. As the cash starts flowing in from trade, anomalies, banks, and gifts, I begin buying war techs and bribing civs that like me to go to war with civs that don't. I never make a single alliance.
Once I have enough war techs, money, and have researched everything I feel I *need*, I begin slowly converting my research planets to war machines. Once that is done, there are usually two or three major civs left, and they are too busy doing their own thing with each other to notice me. Here is where I make a decision. I can either choose to align with evil, and get the more powerful weaponry, or go neutral and make the win hilarious. I choose based on how strong the other civs seem, and whether or not I think I will need the extra firepower.
Once I choose, I switch everything over to military and begin producing very fast, powerful ships as quickly as possible from all of my starports. This would normally completely ruin someones economy, but the ideal situation here is to have a vast amount of extra cash to sink into the effort. Once I have a great many fleets at my disposal, I find the weakest civ(prefferably one that is about to be wiped out by war), park outside its planets, and take one turn to negotiate as many techs, planets, or wads of cash as I can from them. The goal is to get everything they have before destroying them, thereby netting me a tidy profit. Besides, who cares if I give them all the best weapons techs if they are only going to be destroyed next turn.
The next turn comes, and in one fell swoop, I dive onto all of their planets and wipe them out. This is where giving them the planetary improvement and economic techs comes in handy, as using the propaganda warfare technique to convert as many of them as I can leaves the planet completely intact, usually with a good number of stock markets and loads of empty space to build with. This ensures that if I have to take a couple turns more than I thought, I have a good head start on those planets and can at least keep everyone occupied right around there. Once it's down to two civs, I bribe the stronger one to go to war with the weaker one, and repeat the process of diving onto their unprotected planets and wiping them out as well. Finally, when there is only one other civ left, I quickly turn and destroy them for the win. When I show up on the doorstep of every planet they own with a fleet of battle cruisers and two or three transports full of shock troops, I can just imagine their faces sometimes. "But, but, but... I thought we were FREINDS!"*KABOOM!*
They never seem to see it coming. 
What strategies have you guys come up with to win?
