The most fun I've had in this game is figuring out the rules the hard way, by trying stuff. I've spent way too many hours on this, but that's because it's been a challenge, and I've enjoyed figuring out things before others have, like you can send ships out of your beginning sector, and there are a whole bunch of empty systems in the middle sectors. And there's an extra bonus you can exploit which I don't feel the need to explain, but I will explain to Zark when this game is over.

I'm still trying to decide how I feel about Strongbad's issue. I was on the receiving end of his kind ministrations and I went "hunh ...". The colony he attacked with his 700 ships was a starter colony. His first attack stripped it of all its orbitals, and then I got to watch his second attack, and the colony didn't even lose any population. As for myself, i would chalk that up to a lesson learned and change my strategy accordingly. I know there is some randomness to combat, as I have seen fleets of twenty to thirty cruisers wiped out when attacking an outpost with 2 beam arrays, but I've also seen a fleet of 40 or so cruisers take an outpost with 4 beam arrays with 50% loss. I don't know if this situation involved randomness, or if you just can't take a full size colony without any capital ships, or if it matters that the colony was a "starter" colony.

The problem is that, if 600 or 700 ships of battleship size or smaller can take any fully populated colony, then the military victory is going to happen every time and there's not much point doing anything else. I suspect Zark has done something to make it necessary to do the high level research in order to finish the game, but who knows? The fun for me is figuring it out.

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