Adapting to Tiny Maps

I know one thing....The only sandbox game I ever lost was just a month or two ago. Don't try tiny, all races, all minors, very fast tech, suicidal. The AI will build ships you can't destroy and you have no space to retreat into and play "pick off the transport and take back the planet when you miss one" game.

You probably don't want to build trade goods either! since they kill planet tiles - therefore on a tiny map, each trade good is destroying a far greate percentage of available space. Let the AI's kill off their own tiles and then trade for the trade goods. Avoid building all but the most critical galactic projects for the same reason.

With enough miniaturization, does it work to add a Colony or Troop module to a Spore ship? If so, that would help with the low population spore conquest.

I would imagine the population in the troop module would vanish when the spore ship is used for a spore attack.

I would say you're simply stacking too many races + minors on such a tiny map... Tiny maps work fine with up to 4-5 AI's (never tried on anything harder than Challenging though).
In addition, diplomacy is much tougher since you're immediately faced with close borders.
Some random events are indeed a pain though, it really hurts if half of your planets are given to some new minor race, nothing to do about it unless you want to turn off all random events.

The troops do vanish during a spore attack. Same with colony modules.

With less planets, asteroid mines, economy starbases, trade routes, and minor races all work better.

AFAIK, only the Evil civs have had their planets removed by the Fundamentalists. I saw it cripple the Drengin and Yor in my most recent(3rd) game, by taking away 1 of their 2 planets. Amazingly, the Drengin and Yor didn't attack them and reclaim their worlds, which would've been really easy seeing as they had no ships.

The Vegans also appeared, but they didn't steal any planets. Instead, they turned a Class 0 planet into a Class 15 gem, which I conquered with a spare Transport and converted into a Class 18 using Neutral-automatic Terraforming.

Now I'm off to try a Good-Aligned custom race with Super Dominator. I've thought Super Dominator to be a rather useless Super Ability since it only gives you a swarm of space-junk 2-Gun Corvettes when you declare war, which have no use. Then I found out that Super Dominators can extort money out of the AI in exchange for nothing.

I don't usually play suicidal, but I play smal/tiny (crippling) a lot. Here's my 2c:

No colony rush - rush buy science facilities

resources take too long to develop anyway (with just 2 planets)! So forget them for now.

The smaller the map the better the spin center:
Rush resesearch through the diplo tree, build one. Pay the others to keep each other busy for so long. Then you are respectable.

Next: Go down planetary invasion tree. build 2 fast transports - whenever a war starts - take over the home world but no moons. Do not commit genocide for a lousy planet like Wisp - this is bad for your reputation!

Okay, I figured out a strategy. Korath/30%econ/50%social/10%research.

Resources are good until the war phase and it is a decoy to draw ships away so they aren't making your colonies vulnerable to transports.

Phase 1: Build all labs and one starport when you're done(for starbases), research more research until spore ships is reasonably priced.
Phase 1 ends when the spore ships are used on as many minor races as possible.

Here's where I start having trouble:

Phase 2: Research soil enhancement and econ boosters, switch homeworld and secondary planet to all econ. Build all labs on the new zero pop worlds. Alternate between 100% production capacity and 0% as needed to keep BCs positive(going into negative BCs hurts morale too much).

Once all labs are built or sometimes sooner I build a starport and start churning out defenders to protect from transports once everyone in the galaxy declares war on me.

Phase 3: Economy has stabilized. Start researching hulls and building better ships. I don't know what ethos to be. Good may actually be good as if I have 5 colonies at this point I'm doing great.

So my question is how do I keep winning in Phase 2 and 3 and not lose my lead?

Hi!

Hehe, now you know why I quite often mentioned gigantic games are easy.

How to deal with tinies:
- you'll probably only need one or two colony ships, quite often none, so you don't need factories to pump them out in numbers. Consequently, you don't need more pop, so increase taxes immediately to have approval around 45%.
- the all-labs is almost a must for early and mid game, to get critical techs: early bonuses, enough diplo to avoid/incite wars, Trade techs (here trade routes REALLY matter), planetary invasion or Spore ship to take out non-militarized mayor civs, better infrastructure (in this case labs and terraforming EXCLUSIVELY. For the money you have trade routes, for other buildings you DON'T have room).
- focus-build as many trade ships as you can, and send them to farthest planets possible. Try to avoid planets and space of your intended targets.
- only when you get HWs from other AIs you start caring for approval and better econ buildings, because you'll not be able to finace all-labs without support of more pop and higher taxes. So make sure you transfer at least 1B pop to every new planet you take. You can use two colonizers for that, because IIRC they don't cost money to maintain.
- for warfare use proper defenses on medium hull and go for the troat - the HW. In most my games I've noticed AI simply colapses after losing HW. Take AI out ASAP to avoid the "war has expanded" event. It's significantly less dangerous to have a "minus" in relations for conquering others than 3 suicidal AIs as enemies.
- After you get 4 HWs is the game likely won. To paraphrase Napoleon: "The rest is just a matter of execution."

BR, Iztok