I'm not Space Batman, I am Space Jerk!

[Cyprene]

Perhaps this is just a sign that I need to go to bed, but I thought I would post this as an irrelevant observation.
So the Acturians, the metal CEO guys, right?  (I said this elsewhere, but I liked the bit in the the story text about the metallic CEOs doing planetary "acquisitions", it was a cute flavor touch.)

Those guys seem like jerks.  Were they the ones that blew up my planet with a moon?  I think so.   I think they have possession of the ruins now.  I want those ruins.  I don't know if I can have them, but I know that at least, I don't want THEM to have them.
Also they've got real, ugly, metallic faces. 

So I decided to make their lives absolutely miserable.  I'm playing on easy, it's my first game, and I really don't have any clue what I'm doing beyond that I should be doing dispatch missions.
I parked my flagship outside their home planet, and decided that I would just smash every single thing in orbit.  I ran a bunch of steal technology missions to eliminate their tech advantage, and each time I did I smashed all their satellites.
Life on their home planet is slowly getting worse and worse as their society falls into chaos.  I destroyed their hospitals, their weather satellites, their shipyard construction facilities, every single thing I could find.

I have no idea what the effect of this is.  I assume I can make them too weak to withstand an invasion, and then maybe make one of the other races hate them and take them out?
No idea, but for the moment I love the fact that I'm some kind of intergalactic space a**hole, smashing my enemies into the stone age as they shake their fists and rage impotently into the sky. 

[_K_]

Yeah, what you do is get some credit and a bit of positive influence with burlusts or thoraxians, and persuade them to invade the acutians. With no armadas to defend their planet, it shouldnt take too long for acutians to fall.

And once that's done, your main question will be what to do with a power-hungry warmongering race that already controls 2 planets.

[keith.lamothe]

1) If, in combat, you mouseover those satellites you're so industriously destroying, you'll see the effects of destroying it.  Like -15 influence and -10 economic (to that planet).  So blowing that up knocks their economic bar down 10 points, or whatever it says.  In one of yesterday's releases we added logging of those mid-combat consequences to the post-combat results window, to make it clearer what's happened.

2) Also new to yesteerday's versions is a dispatch that lets you damage a race's relations with another race.  This can be helpful if you don't have the credits to "buy a war" : get the other race's attitude towards the moon-droppers low enough (-75 is as far as that dispatch will take you, and it will do nicely) and then arrange for the other guys to have a much more powerful fleet (give them tech, do the dispatch to increase their armada production, attack the Acutian planet to whittle down its armadas, etc), and that other race will likely declare war on its own. 

If you're going for maximum aggressiveness I'd suggest the Burlusts or the Thoraxians (the latter are better at full extermination, I believe).  But the Peltians are a good middleground between destructive power and not being too hard to control after the conquest.  One wants to be careful who one makes the local superpower, after all.