Oh hey mister AI. Could you step out of the way? No? Uh, that's fine.

[Regdren]

Heya. Nice to meet you all. I've put about 120 hours into this game and I still feel like a beginner.

I'm enjoying the game a lot! There's a lot more I could say but for now just take a look at this map. It's a 7/7 game with random moderate/easier AI types.

It seems likely that the map will have two more A-class shield gens on the other side of the AI core cluster. So, I may need to bust through to the other side of the map. I've got an advanced factory and starship constructor so my offense is pretty decent. But still, these are core worlds and I'm a bit wary of waking up everything in there as I try to bypass those planets. I'm going to guess that some of you have played enough to see this situation before. How would you recommend dealing with it?

[Toranth]

Ooh, that looks like !fun!, all right.

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of subtlety or trickery I can think of that will help.  Best plan I can think of would be to first capture the CS-A world nearby.  Yes, this will put the Core World on alert, but that's an inconvenience, not a disaster.  If you have the spare Knowledge and you are willing, you can put a Warp Jammer station on it.
Step two is to load up Assault Transports and perform repeated suicide runs through the three Core Worlds, trying to kill as many Tachyon Guardians and the like.  Once you have a clear path for stealth units, use the Assault Transports again to run a fleet and some colony ships past everything, and capture a world on the other side.  Either the CS-D one you already see, or one of the next three (two hops further in).
Once you have a beachhead on the other side, life becomes easier again.

If you don't have, and cannot afford, Assault Transports, you can try to make do with Cloakers and normal Transports, but they have a much shorter range, and your options for activities on the other side will be much curtailed.

[Regdren]

Thankfully I did know about the usefulness of assault transports from reading the forums, so I had them unlocked at the time I asked for advice. After taking the bordering planet as you suggested, I did indeed go for somewhat of a brute force method.

I considered telling you how it went, but I decided it would be more fun to record what happened and show the forum-goers instead. So here it is!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUqcEXWTxc8&feature=youtu.be

Let me know what you think.

Fake edit: I may have overused the word !fun! in my commentary. My most humble apologies.

Real edit: As a follow up, Added the You Win! picture. Thanks again for the advice, it helped a lot.

[RockyBst]

Spirecraft jumpships. Used first to jump-scout and find a poorly defended planet, then establish a beachhead on the far side of the cluster. Assuming you have spirecraft turned on.

Always have spirecraft turned on, jumpships are awesome.