It's been a bit of a steamroll this game, with the only hiccups being the neinzul preservation wardens in the early game sneaking into two of our home systems and destroying our secondary clusters. The game's at about 7h20m, it's a 80 planet realistic map and we're about 4 hops away from the final core planet, so it's also been a relatively short game.
I would guess that this has been because:
- we're playing at 7 difficulty instead of our usual 7.6 or 8 (we had assumed that the hybrids would warrant a step down in difficulty)
- the two random AIs seem to be very weak, passive types: our previous games have involved at least one really annoying or difficult AI type (eg starship commander, speed racer, special forces captain, etc)
- the knowledge issue combined with decreased AI ship caps makes it easier
- we had a super-processor this game, which combined with leech starships just makes the game a lot of a lot easier (even though it disappeared/died without us noticing after a while, as documented in a previous post)
- the planet layout has been fairly generous, with one clear 'best' route to the core planets that included most of the advance research stations, a mark 4 factory and not too many branches into planets that we don't plan on taking
No doubt the difficulty will be ramped back up once the hybrids function as intended, we get back onto 8 difficulty and the randomiser gives us more challenging AI types.
Oh and comment 30: the game slowdown I mentioned at point 22 magically fixed itself halfway through our last session, around when we took down the core planet, losing a few hundred ships. Not sure if that indicates our computers are unable to handle that many ships, or a unit/building/process that was taking up far too much processing power got killed.
