Chokepoint Borders

[corfe83]

How do people approach the problem of forming the borders of their claimed territory, in the "realistic" map type?

I often feel a little overwhelmed by all the places the AI can attack me, and so my first impulse when I start up a game is to work out a plan to conquer 20-30 planets in such a way that after destroying the AI command posts on all of them, I will eventually end up with only 2 or 3 chokepoints to defend. I only build my own command post on the systems with good resources / valuable capturables, but of course I make sure every system in my network has supply for knowledge purposes.

I've actually never completed a game yet, and have always died before successfully setting up my territory, usually due to some careless mistake, like not building enough turrets . I generally play a self-enforced permadeath mode - if I die, even due to a careless mistake, I'd rather chalk it up as a loss, remember the lesson and create a new game, than load to an earlier save and pretend it didn't happen.

Does this "conquer many planets until I only have a couple of chokepoints" strategy work for some people? How do others "solve" the problem of defense, so they can focus their attention on offense?

Edit: I'm playing on Difficulty 7. I realize on higher difficulties it may be harder to capture 20-30 planets and still survive, but I'll cross that bridge when I actually win my first game

[x4000]

Well, I tend to choose a starting position with an eye towards having few inroads, and typically conquer about 5-8 planets in the first few hours of the game to get it down to 2-3 hostile wormholes.  I might have a few more wormholes than that bordering AI planets, but if I've cleared off the warp gates and special forces guard posts, then that isn't much of a worry, really.  Little bits of stuff might wander in, or a CPA might come through there (which is bigger trouble), but overall it's nothing too terrible.

Then, as I grow out into the galaxy, I'm likely to have a lot more planets that are in danger based on being adjacent to many enemy planets.  Some of those I capture and then just lightly defend (if I was capturing them to get an ARS, for example), and then if I lose that planet, that's fine.  Having a central "resource producing core" that is well defended is critical, and if you don't have an advanced factory in that then getting a well-protected Advanced Factory planet is also then a good goal.  And beyond that, fabricators and whatever else can be helpful, but it's dependent on how hard they are to defend compared to what you get from them.

My general total of 20-30 total captured planets on an 80 planet map includes those planets that I took purely for positional advantage to get closer to the AI homeworlds, for instance.

(Moving this to strategy discussion.)