Favorite victory strategy?

i used to be diehard for a puppetmaster strategy, avoiding all wars til someone had one foot in the grave then swooping in and masacring them. with the price of starting wars increasing a thousand fold or so with 1.2 that is much more problematic. i still spend a lot of my effort channeling opponents as best i can, and slowing down their research and invasions but i don't jumpstart their wars for them. stealing all their resources takes priority over taking thier planets for the most part, if i can arange to have another ai take out a starbase i make sure to keep a constructor handy to grab it.

take my own sweet time doing military buildups if possible. if you can keep them calm long enough to build your infrastructure/economy into a monster they are pretty much doomed. i buy as many of thier transports as i can reasonably afford and deposit them in locations around 15-20 sectors from the junction of opponents spaces if possible. or i store them in the form of taxpayer if i have empty planets still(usually 30% pop growth bonus). this means i rarely have to build my own transports, spend my own ppl. tech trading has to be on to use this sort of strategy, that's my main means of manipulating the ai. you can brake or accelerate their research efforts, sometimes even redirect them with your trades. the downside is you have to spend a lot of time on the diplomacy screens, checking ai research or doing actual trades. almost every turn, blah.

i don't push that hard on influence really, mostly using it to police up stray planets rather than building starbases for full influence assaults. i don't make alliances unless it serves to start a war, or break an ai alliance. i use my trade exclusivly as a diplomatic tool, almost all my money comes from huge numbers of stockmarkets.

hmm, think that covers most of it. had good success on gigantic maps, stock settings, 9 opponents, masochistic. this may sound a bit slow and boring to some ppl but these are not necessarily easy, sure wins. sometimes a good initial planet with a big industry bonus tile causes one lucky ai to turn it a beast because of a monsterous initial rush. sometimes they just get a good part of the map and go on a mad research rampage, making it hard to hold on to that top tech position. there are lots of things that can go wrong here, and i almost never restart because of a crappy map, i suffer it out.

Well, generally I try to grab the best worlds I can early on. Grabbing the best planet in the system and moving on to the next. And if the planets in a system are crappy (like below an 8) I skip it entirely, unless its so isolated I can't grab it culturally later. Then, when the other races start moving in on the empty worlds in my territory I switch gears and grab up those I left behind earlier.

After that I focus on the infrastructure. I know that If I have a decent soldiering ability I'll be fine for any battles, despite not haveing a navy(waste of money early on). I keep tech tradeing on, mostly so I know what weapon and defense types a particular civ is focusing on, also to help the weaker civ in a war hold its own awhile. If I see a civ thats ripe for the picking I go for it. But mostly I wait for the others to declare war on me. But eventually it gets to the point where the only civs left are all friends. But thats okay, because the whole time I make sure to keep my Cultural techs a few steps ahead of my counterparts, which usually gets me an extra planet every few months. And to boost my influence I continue researching all morale techs, and collecting influence and morale resources, so that I can have higher populations. Eventually I'll get bored and blow someone away with an overpowered ship. Usually I'm so bored with this particular map that I ally with whoever is left and finish the game. But sometimes I feel like totally annihilating everyone.

I conquer, through war of attrition. First i destroy my enemys trade routes, then i just pick off any ship that he sends at me. Eventually he will run into debt, and that is when i strike, when their people have their morale at their lowest(oh, more soldiers for my invasion force! ).

I might try go for a alliance victory if my enemies are too strong, or they just would take thousands of years to conquer cause they have so many ships.

i go neutral, stay out of war (trade, diplomacy) and with via tech victory
most times i try to win via military means but even if this is going good i usually get to tech victory first
conquering stuff just takes too much time compared to research some techs (starbases + NLC = 3000 tech points per turn on my last tech capital )

I generally go for a mix of mega influence and capital ship style warfare. I tend to get impatient waiting for fleets of smaller ships to band together.. i mostly play on gigantic maps so it can get to be a real pain to either A) wait a dozen turns or more for small ships to get across my territory to the front lines from my production planets or wait forever to go up the tech tree to add enough weapons and engines to make these smaller ships useful.

I don't go for influence all the time... i've played a couple games 100% that way, using dipomocy and influence to barter ships so no one invades. I tend to find warfare more fun so i'll influence one or two races into submission mostly when i get backed into a corner right from the start without enough planets of my own to fight a full scale war in comparison to everyone else.

I like the deception tactic.. I usually run 6-7 other races, making sure 1 is at least slightly evil.. Then ill get to alliances tech asap, align with all but the evil one... Then wait for them to build... I'll align with good, stockpile money, then when time is right start declaring war and defeating all others cept the evil race.. And then the grand finale.. By then their tech should catch up to me.. And its one helluva battle to win or defeat.....lol

I tried the Dip victory, no fun, just the war was challenging but not much fun.. The deception concept is fun...

I only play suicidal lvl. I grab what planets are reasonably close. I focus on diplomacy and totally ignore influence. I research nothing but diplomacy until I reach Majesty. I research the entire Xeno economics tree then Sensors. Once I do this I either trade

Don't have a favorite really. Done them all at one point or another. Seems to me Conquest and Research victories are the best since they are most satisfing and hardest to get.

don't mind this.

My strategy is to destroy the AI with culture. Especially if they have big allies.

Damn images. How do you get the images on the forums? I'll try again.

Maybe it needs a link.

??? Sorry if I'm being annoying, but how do you insert a pictur onto the forums without having to resort to external links like photobucket?

usually you have to put in IMG in front with [ ] surrounding IMG and /IMG at end with [ ] surrounding /IMG.

Been playing long games on Gigantic. Currently at Painful difficulty. I restart until I get a favorable setup, for instance, in a good gathering of star systems with a bonus or two on my homeworld. Then I race to get stongest in the various areas, reasearch, production, economy, etc. I form no lasting alliances and use diplomacy to keep other races at bay. Once I've got the tech tree finished and everything built up, I go in for the kill, picking off weak races first. It takes a long time to play this way (around 750 turns), but I just can't resist waiting till every ship has doom ray, black hole eruptor, and black hole generator. Kicks the crap out of the enemy. Wonder if going in early for the kill would be a better way to play (shorter at least), but that's not what I've been doing. Maybe I should try that sometime.

i don't think you can upload a pic to the forums. you have to have it on a server somewhere and link to the pic. there are free servers you can use tho.

I usually play on Crippling or Masochistic. I usually play as an evil race so that everyone hates me. Then I usually go to war with the biggest opponent as soon as I can afford to build war ships. Usually other 'good' races try to pile on. I thoroughly enjoy the challenge that being ganged up on provides. Alright, I admit it, 'I am a warmonger!'.

I'm strictly conquest. This doesn't mean I ignore the other aspects of the game.

However there are millions of ways to do it. I love that the map size, starting position and number of opponents dictates the way you should play.

As for my favorite:
Personally I love starting positions where you are on top of another civ straight away.
Makes for a great start, and means you get a little mini game of one on one before the main event.
I then like games which are balanced for a while with occassional raids here and there.

I always prioritize getting resourses in this phase (I admit to sometimes stooping to driving a ship up to a resource then giving it to the opponent of the owner... Sometimes they just sit there... but sometimes they kill the base and you get the resource without having to go to war.)

I love provoking conflict and researching up the weapons/defence trees until I'm in a good position to start taking out the biggest threat. Generally after that it is just mop up which doesnt take long on medium maps with speed 39 transports and huge assault ships.

My strategy usually depends on the map and races on the map. Usually If there are few races and one is gaining a lot of influence, I will ally with the smaller races and try to win by Diplomatic Victory while researchingall the techs that increase my influence to push back the enemies influence.

On a more recent map I did, it was a small map with 2 other races and it looks liek I got the better pick of planets so I just took over one race militarily with their bigger planets and culturally with their smaller planets. Then I just waited awhile until I took the galaxy over by Culture Victory.

So far I havent done one entirely militarily but I'm planning on doing it.

I sometime influece everybody and sometimes I just like to crush them all