I've been playing around with various strategies a bit, and it seems to be a valid strategy in some situations to not kill any warp gates. The thought is that the reinforcements are going to come anyhow, killing the gates just lets you channel them a bit, so if you have a map that you can't really create a small number chokepoints on easily (say the nearest chokepoint is a tier IV world or they just don't exist), why not just build up defenses everywhere and save a huge amount on the ai progress bar(at least 60 or so early on, since your main area will usually have at least 6 planets you want or need to clear to make a decent backfield and more and more as you expand).
note: that this is on 1 progress per 15 mins/normal, haven't tested on anything faster yet--it does slow you down a bit but it seems that it would still be valid with 1/5 and f&f since that speeds things up
Basically you have to worry about raids in more places which slows your offense down a bit since you need to keep back more defensive forces and spend a bit more knowledge on turrets (though laser I's+mirv II's+short II's can handle pretty much most tier 1 raids, thats only what ~5k knowledge?), but this slows the ai progress by a huge amount.
(I've been combining it with the whole raid idea + avoiding taking any planets I can, and instead just throw in a small turret group + anti sniper + mark II energy plant way outside the path that most ai ships travel for your energy needs on junk planets still owned by the ai adjacent to your highly defended high resource/home worlds--I guess that's really 3 synergistic ways to keep the progress value down though).
First test results (diff 7+) was that AI progress was 60 when I got first advanced research planet(my 4th, other 2 were good resource planets (4/4 and 3/4)). The advanced research gave me teleport battle stations, which makes stopping ai raids in my connected planets at this point trivial, but even before I had that, I wasn't having any problems. The other plus to this is it seems like it gets better on the "harder" map types(realistic hub), since you aren't trying to create chokepoints, thus having more connections and easier access to more map only helps you.
Anyone tried leaving all of the gates at higher difficulties (only tried it at diff 7 against moderately-aggressive ai's(stuff like bully))?
Edit: Well much of this may be outdated already with the raid resupply killing aspects of the new patch
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