Strategy

[Zebeast46]

Just wanna know what are some specific strategies people use here. I tried out a strategy where as soon as a race became spacefaring I would absolutely wreck their economy, which kept the number of ships flying around at a minimum, and I have to say it is working pretty well (except for the huge influence loss, ugh that hits pretty hard).

[steelwing]

Never tried that, but I tend to use the Skylaxians pretty heavily.  I start the Federation with them and whatever other race they're friendliest with, and then I use them to convince other races to join the Federation where possible.  It tends to be expensive, but it does work.  I think the Acutians can do something similar, if I recall.

[atomicinf]

Having just finished a Nightmare/Misery Betrayal game, some thoughts on that mode:

• Thoraxian flagship with 4x Conflagrate Large Ship is OP as hell. Add Shadow Ops as your SA and you can murderize flagships etc. essentially with impunity. Careful not to wander into bullet spam: you are still a glass cannon and can easily die in a single round if you aren't careful.
• On Nightmare strat difficulty the "Fear of Growing Hydral Empire" space power modifier is +5 per additional planet. This will make you sad.
• So the best way to proceed is to carefully suppress everyone's armada sizes and armada construction ability, by any means necessary, without taking planets, until you're ready to take all 7 planets simultaneously.
• You can recover from accidentally taking 1 or 2 planets too early. Past that your life may become difficult if you allowed any significant enemy space presence to persist.
• Save some credits for orbital bombardment for when your attack beacons won't do the trick, e.g. against the Burlust or Thoraxian homeworld. Fleet bombardment appears to be essentially a non-factor: you can personally kill 6 pop per tick at the same time your massed fleets are killing like 0.002 pop.