Well, finally, my first win ever! (tutorial and cheat game not counting)
Playing a vanilla 7/7, Resistance fighter 10/10 (not like they help), Dyson 10/10, Golem+Botnet easy, Spirecraft Easy (yeah, I'm not good)
Spend the first 10 hours or so beating the nebula missions and scout the galaxy...only have 4 planet by then...then I start capturing around (the 5 planet formation at the top came from some random planning...originally only have Barknefen for ARS, but end up capturing Fumirti for cursed golem, Piadmor for Armored Golem and Z Power Gen, and Ranzi for Core Shield D...so decide why not cap Shoed to decrease my ingress point?
Kasekpu has experimental engineer fab (and beam starship fab) which is nice...
Anyway, after that I cap Likboom for Adv. Factory, then start invading Yezoaros to get a staging point...managed to slog through that and Rizar...only 400 ships or so and nothing much in terms of guard post...although surprised as hell when I tried to deploy my wasps from Hive golem...
Yardu is more interesting...Poisark isn't hard at all...but Yardu has a Core Grav and >1000 ships...well that's gonna suck...so...I have no idea why but I drop a nuke on the Yardu (it seems nuke detonate faster than the Warhead Interceptor can blow em up)...enemy ships now down to 4-600 ships...I send my fleet from Poisark in and target exclusively on the Core Grav...I tried it before, blew it up, but lost my fleet (didn't nuke the planet on that try, so reload)...turns out? It seems that my fleet is enough to blow it up and start mopping up the rest of the guard posts too! So send the rest available ships to Yezoraos (with a cursed golem) to prepare to blow em up...blew up command station on Yardu, then proceed to blew it up on the other! Victory!
AIP is 232 before I blew up both home command stations (after cleared out the core guards and drop a nuke)
Now I should try games with minor factions that don't help me alone I guess!