dalgo
Emperor
It stinks. I won by gaming-the-game not by playing-the-game. It all comes down to REF. You can work around pretty much everything else, but you have to game-the-game to avoid an overwhelming REF. Too bad.
Maybe I've just been lucky so far but I've won consistently by concentrating on liberty bells from the start. It makes for a much more enjoyable game because you can expand your territory faster, use the poitical points to chase down all the most valuable FF and the production increase gives you a strong economy. The REF does get huge but your troops start with a big combat advantage that increases every turn to the point where even my SoL were routinely taking out Man-o-War one on one. In one game my free Frigate killed four MoW before losing, mind you that was with Bolivar who amplifies a high RS.