I'd say that generally it's a matter of just taking one planet at a time, not clumps of three. Gate-raiding, as Suzera says, is meant to be all you need to do in most cases there. You can do some partial neutering, too, if you want. Or, in the case of the ARS planets that you don't want to keep, you can always make the choice to abandon them after you get what you need, too. For something like a fabricator or an advanced factory, doing what you're doing and capturing buffer planets is certainly not a bad idea, though it's not the only thing to do.
Don't you think this is a reason you might be missing out on some market potential?
It frustrates me to no end that people assume that AI War has failed to hit its market for some reason. Our financial difficulties had nothing to do with AI War, in the main. It's sold better than most other indie strategy games, and especially those that are simpler or easier (the AAA boys have that space locked up tight).
At any rate, even if the financial difficulties had been AI War related: no, I don't think it would have cost us much of anything if it took a long time to lose, and realize you were losing. For someone to even get to the point of realizing that, they would have had to have already paid us the money to buy the game. The only way that could have been at all related in that theoretical scenario was if it hurt word of mouth or reviews. But both have been absolutely stellar: word of mouth is almost universally positive, although small compared to some games; and AI War was the 40th-best-reviewed game of 2009, including all the AAA games. There were only about 5ish indie games on that list at all, and most of them were not strategy games.
Anyway, the tutorial tells you to fear the AI Progress and even teaches you about planet hopping, etc, so most players have come out the other side of that being afraid to take anything, moreso than taking too much. Those that do take a ton of planets usually seem to want a protracted game, and play it for dozens of hours per campaign. For those who are uncertain, the wiki even has a prominent article in the getting started section with some various recommendations.
I see your point, but I don't think it's correct in a general sense. There are always outliers to any statement, though, so certainly there must be some people who are playing the game and running into more trouble because they play the game in a completionist fashion and get curbstomped. There may even be some who then ragequit and don't ever read the manual or try to savescum and figure out what went wrong. I can't do anything about that. But, clearly you're not in that sort of group, eh, as you're really enjoying the game despite it getting grindier as you go based on overall too-high-AIP.
By the way, the reason the AI keeps getting more reinforcements is that the number of planets you control affects the scale of reinforcements even more than AIP does. For more details, see the Reinforcements section in the wiki.
That was long and rambly, addressing points all over the place and out of order, but hopefully it made some kind of sense.
