Ok, i think i want to keep this campaign enough to do an AAR on it, so here's what i got so far (details are real fuzzy from the first several hours):
First pic is the state of the map at current with all planet names -- you'll need this. I start with Anti Armor, the ship type you get in tutorials and a nice looking ship (though it's stats are a bit weak). In case you can't tell, i'm a fan of snakey maps
I started out on Upsilon Reticulii. I built a fleet of a couple hundred ships, did some scouting, unlocked MkII versions of my combat ships, and headed out into the galaxy. I subsequently took Gamma Heta, Psi Digamma, and Omicron Sigma (that one had an ARS containing Grenade launchers, and gamma heta had a co-processor i destroyed). A trader was lucky enough to wander by Gamma Heta so i kid-in-a-candy-stored myself into a Superfortress, Radar Jammer, Black Hole machine, Planetary Shield inhibitor, Orbital Mass Driver, and Ion Cannon MkII (which was destroyed by space planes a while later). After a lot of speed-up-to-get-resources-and-dump-them-into-building-an-expensive-ship, i managed to bring online my planetary shield booster and inhibitor.
I did some scouting and i found that Foxtrot Quebec was uninteresting, so was San Psi, Vav Mem had a core IRE fab, and Psi Kappa had a Cursed Golem + Experimental Translocator fab. Victor Whiskey had a Dyson golem on it but was an IV planet -- i knew i was going to be in for a fight at some point. Oh yeah, i also repelled a 2k+ CPA attack at some point (easy with the goodies i had online + my fleet for firepower) during all of that. Anyway, on to the next part -- Capturing the Golem.
By the way, at this point my fleet consists of maxed out grenade launchers MkI and my regular stuff Mks 1 and 2. I re-add Anti-armor later on but it's sort of an on-again off-again thing.
I steamrolled my fleet over to Vav mem and set up shop there. In order to do research with minimal losses, i decided to take a look at the Cloaker Starship. I built one and sent it with my research stations (5 of them) and found that it does a passable job at keeping them cloaked (occasionally one will stray out of the cloaking radius when it arrives at the destination). I knowledge mined the four planets i had access to and secured them. I was now in posession of the golem! I rebuilt it a couple times after saving and reloading some, and ended up deciding it wasn't worth it. I built a nuke and nuked the IV planet in my way (no option, waaaaaay to many ships to take down, 4k+). I rebuilt my fleet to it's max and sent it out into Gamma Theta, where it took quite a beating (odd, considering i've destroyed tougher planets than that with my fleet; maybe it has something to do with the core turrets i had to mop up). The trader also stopped by Psi Kappa, so i picked up a few more goodies. I'm rebuilding my fleet now for another attack, and i plan to take Sampi Theta when possible.
