OSG 14b - Cold Blooded Killers

[Sullla]

20 Death Spores?! Now that is a walking biological contamination unit for sure! I'm not particularly worried about the Humans using their Pulsar technology (AI rarely smart enough to deploy specials intelligently), but it IS possible that we could get caught in a bad matchup and see a stack of Small spore ships go poof. I'd also favor Dathon's proposed Large model, but mostly just so we can cut down on attrition. Combat speed 3 means it takes 3 turns to reach the planet in question, so that means facing 2 missile volleys... We can probably wipe out all life on most planets with as few as 10 of those Virus designs. Looks like a pretty effective ship, I definitely like it!

Ordinarily, I would probably favor a Large or Huge design for our support ship using Hard Beams, but we have to consider the following factors:

1) Our two most serious opponents both have Repulsors
2) 2-space beam weapons won't fit on a Small hull (well, maybe Heavy Lasers would! )
3) No Autorepair special (the biggie)
4) No missiles worth squat (so much for Medium missile boats)

So in this situation, that Medium Heavy Ion design may not be a bad way to go. I'll have to play around on the ship design screen too and see what I can find, but in principle it looks sound. (PS Megabolt Cannon will be a fantastic weapon for us down the road! Especially once it fits on a Small... yum.)

Hopefully I'll be back early enough tonight to play my turns, but barring that I'll get the done tomorrow morning. Dathon's right - the game IS finally getting interesting!

 

[dathon78]

Last FF question and I'll get back on topic

What emulator do you use? I've used RockNES for awhile, but it's not running smoothly on my new machine for some reason.

Thanks,
dathon

 

[Sullla]

What emulator do you use? I've used RockNES for awhile, but it's not running smoothly on my new machine for some reason.

I've used an emulator called FCE Ultra for a while now; it has never caused me any problems. Maybe worth a look? (I have no idea where to find it.) Anyway, on with the turnset.

(0) 2460 With us having just hit in all tech fields, it's time to finally design some ships and go on the offensive. We're already well over 1/3 of the overall galactic population, so I'll target the decrepit Mrrshans first and see if I can grab their two worlds for our empire. First up, however, is designing some actual ships! I just don't like the whole "build two identical models of the same ship" idea to fool the AI; that feels rather exploitative to me, so I scrap the Small Virus 5.0 and 5.1 designs. It's actually extremely rare for me to build more than two designs at once, although I'm willing to compromise a bit for this SG as needed. I like our Ion Fighter design; I scrap the current version and redesign the exact same thing so I can include the warp speed in the name. Sorry, but I very quickly get confused if I don't list the warp speed in ALL of my designs! I'm going to focus mostly on those uber-cheap Ion fighters for now along with our Large spore ships; we can readjust our focus as needed when we shift to new (non-Mrrshan) targets.

Two differences from Dathon's designs: I give our colony ships additional armor plating (almost no cost to add Duralloy) and add better shields to our Virus design (Class V instead of Class III). If we're going to go with a Large design, we may as well max shields to try and minimize attrition as much as possible. We can still fit 17 Death Spores on the design; are 2 extra points of shielding worth 3 fewer spores per ship? I say yes. Our Ultra Rich can build one Virus design per turn, so I plan to have it do that for a while.

I do a little tweaking at our newer planets, but mostly leave things alone. I'm going to follow Dathon's plan of hurling boatloads of Reserve money to stand these up faster. The Riches and Ultra Riches have ALL maxed already, a mere 20 turns after being founded! Wow. I also notice a lot of our backline worlds are slowly working on Planetary Shield X; I crash-course that everywhere to get them all finished immediately (yes, I'm a little paranoid about that!)

In other words, this first turn is mostly spent finishing shields. Gotta defend before you can attack.

(1) 2461 Mrrshans bring a sizable fleet against Bootis, but we have 15 (!) points of shielding, meaning their designs are useless. Seven different planets finish Planetary Shields, so I order up a lot of shipbuilding at our larger planets (the smaller ones go back to research). It will take them some time to get there, so I start emphasizing Propulsion research for Star Gates. That will definitely be a big help! (Also give Robotics V a slight emphasis; we can certainly use that too!)

(2) 2462 We get a spying penetration against the kitties! Given that Construction and Propulsion will do nothing but add miniaturization, I opt for Weapons in the hope that we'll pull a useful missile tech. 50/50 shot for Hyper V or Hyper X... score!

Well, that's still a pretty crummy weapon, but at least we have SOME kind of answer to Human Class VI shields now! Let's continue to cross fingers for Pulsons (or even Scatter pack VII) upcoming in the Weapons tree soon.

(3) 2463 We get the Nova event at Mobas, one of our new worlds in the SE. This is pretty much a non-issue at this point in the game, so just remember to keep throwing funds there.

(4) 2464 Get another penetration against the cats; this time I take Construction and Reduced Waste 80% (useless, but miniaturization helps more in this field than in Propulsion or Weapons). We finally meet the Bulrathi! They have only 2 systems, and there are still MORE unclaimed worlds in the southwest corner of the galaxy. There's a Rich Tundra world only 9 parsecs away which we can reach, so I design a temporary LR colony ship to send over there. Our Sakkra plague continues to spread across the galaxy...

(5) 2465 Third turn in a row I get a tech theft from the Mrrshans! I grab Hyper-Vs for Weapons miniaturization. We produce 115 Ion fighters and 2 Viruses just on this turn (fleet starting to shape up nicely). Almost ready to use it against the kitties.

(6) 2466 What the heck, we steal the final Mrrshan tech. Cleaned 'em out completely, so I dial spying down to a single tick. Might as well eliminate them now!

Our Ultra Poor maxes out!

We can have it build a shield if desired, but I opt to do research instead here. Almost 400RP/turn, woohoo! Our Poor planet has also maxed out, AND finished its Class X shield, plus can stand up 2 bases/turn. Almost ready to go back to doing research there.

I feel we've got enough to hit the kitties, so let's try our first attack:

We catch the Mrrshans napping, and they only have 5 Mediums in addition to their 17 bases. Plus, those bases are only firing Hyper-Xs... and our Virus ships have Class V deflectors! The first volley goes for our Ion fighters (which dodge), and by the time the AI adjusts it's too late:

We lose 3 Viruses, but the planet is wiped clean of population! (That was actually a bad break; there were only 7 kitties left after the second batch of spores. With a larger initial attack force, we'll be able to wipe out the population on the FIRST volley, and suffer virtually no losses.) Ships then retreat, leaving a dead husk of a world behind!

(7) 2467 Not a whole lot to do on this turn; I hold our fleet in the Fierias system to build our own colony next turn. Nobody seems too happy on the diplo screen with our use of spores, but we could care less!

(8) 2468 Settle Fierias! Now if we can just Terraform it back into shape! (Max size of 10 currently.) We also settle Klystrom, a Rich 25 in the southwest. Population en route to both these worlds. Our fleet heads to Maretta to finish off the cats for good.

(9) 2469 There are no defenders at Maretta, so we just have 12 bases to deal with. I have 6 Virus ships on hand, which drop 102 Death Spores each combat round. It only takes 2 rounds to wipe the planet clean. How's this for insulting: GNN doesn't even report the genociding of the cats! (Both the Meklar and Darloks complain specifically about the use of biological weapons though. Get used to reading that text!)

(10) 2470 Build another new colony at Maretta; that brings us up to 31 total. There are still two MORE worlds in the southwest to grab, so I have colony ships en route to those as well. Meklar call us up to break our Non-Aggression Pact, so keep an eye on them as well. With our shielding we should be plenty safe, but you never know.

I think our next target should be the Darloks; they're militarily weak, and our territory pretty much completely surrounds them. I already dialed up spying against them (difficult as it may be); the shapeshifters have some great stuff, especially Soil Enrichment, Robotics IV, and Inertial Stabilizer. All of our planets have Class X shields now except our Ultra Poor (in no danger) and Mobas, which is still finishing up that Nova event. Fierias and Maretta are terraforming as fast as they can; try to help them out with some population influxes. Everywhere else should be really quite safe from attack. I'm passing off to StuporMan with a pretty decent fleet ready and willing to go inflict some damage. Just don't forget to keep building colony ships to replace conquered worlds! (Our fleet is currently split between Maretta and Fierias; adjust RELOC orders as needed.)

Current fleet:

We may want to switch production away from the Ion fighters somewhere down the line, but for now they seem to be getting the job done. Their only purpose is to protect the Viruses, after all - not do any damage to planetary surfaces themselves.

Map:

Have fun!

 

[Sullla]

And a save file...

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/12069/OSG14b-2470.zip

 

[vmxa]

Sulla I doubt the same design is to fool the AI, it more likely to keep the numbers in check for scrapping purposes. At least that is what I sometimes do. So if I have 20 of each and do not have to scrap all 40 at once.

The other purpose is so I can attack more than once stack. If I have 40 of one type I can only attack one stack each round in many cases.

 

[dathon78]

I used perhaps a wrong word choice in describing why I like two bomber stacks. By "fool" the AI, I really meant split their attack. Having the bombers in two stacks means that missile bases cannot target both at once. Likewise, repulsor ships have a harder time covering the planet if you split them up and run around the edges. It's more for outmaneuvering than exploiting weak AI. Granted the AI doesn't handle it optimally, but when does it? The same tactics would work against a Human opponent, just not as well. On a side note, the AI will sometimes employ this trick with beam fighters, particularly the Alkari. I've seen the Alkari running around with two stacks of identical Ion fighters on more than one occasion. And believe me, that makes them a LOT more effective (as if they needed it!).

dathon

 

[StuporMan]

Things are looking good, I will try and get a turnset done tomorrow.

Stup

 

[StuporMan]

Things are moving fast now, it should not be too long until we have achieved victory.

Preturn I notice we have no agreement with the Bulrathis, I set up trade with them. A few turns later they want to up it, so I agree.

Second turn I get informed that Mobas cannot get enough research to stop the nova. I check and see that it did not have all its factories built, and nothing I can do can fix the issue at this point. If we can get soil enrichment, or advanced soil enrichment we should actually come out ahead in population on the planet anyway.

Attack Darloks at Berel (rich minimal fertile) and then at Paranar both go down without any losses. They do not declare war (they are already at war with EVERYONE else). I get 0 responses to bioweapons usage.
Darlok's steal reduced 80%, Terra +10, and we manage to pick up Tundra from them (vs soil enrichment).

Vote: Humans vote for themselves 12, Bulrathis abstain 3, Darloks vote for US!?!? 7, Meklar vote Humans 5, we have 24 votes out of 51. We were 3 shy of a diplo win with the Darlok's vote.

After the vote, the Darloks decide to declare war with us, yeah someone's been smoking to good stuff!

Megabolts come in, I choose Pulsons over scatter pack VII as Humans have picked up FF9. With the colonization of Paranar we get the majority of the galaxy event. At the rate we are going it will not be long until the Darloks are only a part of history.

Terraforming 50 > 60, I destroy the Darlok Ultra poor in the far East, it had few factories so I didn't bother sending the ions away first. The planet will take far too long to get up to speed at this point. Bulrathis want ANOTHER increase in trade. I decline as it is only a 25 BC increase and our other one still hasn't started turning a profit yet.

Stargates pop late, and I elect for HEF over increased range. I forget to change over production to this until a turn or two had past, but they are now building everywhere we were building ships. I also mishandled things in the southwest, and the Meklar poach a few worlds down there. On the plus side, we have several colony ships to use now.

We now have 2 death fleets moving around, and the Darloks are down to 2 planets (Nazin and an Ultra Poor). The apes have helped a little bit (taking out at least one world that I noticed. I should have split fleets earlier, and we could have taken at least one more Darlok world. I recommend leaving them alive (apes willing) to try and steal soil enrichment and/or stabilizers from them. Humans have Advanced SE and stabilizers so we still can steal from them, but they also have more computer tech than the Darloks. We might also start trying to steal from the borg, since they have Pulsons and some other useful tech.

Stup

 

[dathon78]

RCV came in on my first turn, and thus I spent the entire turnset building factories and star gates. Most of our major worlds are at max production, and all of the riches have star gates. They are currently researching (ha!), except for the Ultra Rich. We probably need to re-design our fleet to attack our next target (more on that later), so I didn't see the utility of building more ships. Construction and shields are about to pop, and any re-design should wait for that.

I decided I wanted a go at our toys, so I destroyed Kulthos, the Darlok UP on our border. Man was that fun But then the oddest thing happened. The Humans sent a probe fleet of 1 colony, 4 escort class ships. Of course, I sent a colony ship, so we colonized it first. Then, the next turn, their fleet attacked us there! I checked, and our NAP was still in place. Our fighters couldn't touch the Escort class ships, as they had Repulsors and Heavy Fusion Beams. Oh well, I thought, they'll probably leave next turn. There's a Darlok fleet with 2 huge's on the way, so I'll send some extra Ion fighters there. Then, the next turn, they attacked AGAIN!



I had enough fighters to hang out on the combat screen, so I did, and the ships finally retreated, but then I saw troops inbound! And all under a NAP! There must be a hole in the code dealing with newly acquired worlds. The troops were all shot down, and Kulthos is ours, but very strange occurrence there. That Darlok fleet is due next turn, but there are 900 fighters there, and 350 from Tao next door scheduled, so we should be fine.

After Kulthos fell, the Darloks came begging for peace, and as I like Stup's suggestion of stealing from them, I took it. They seem to be stalemated with the Humans; there is a Human fleet over Nazin. The Darlok Hyper V's probably can't touch their ships, and the Humans don't have sufficient weaponry to get past the planetary shield.

I think the Humans should be our next target. The Meklar's and their Pulson bases are going to be nasssssty. I've dialed up spending against the Apes and Bulrathi to that end. Might as well get as much tech as we can. Omicron is set as the rally point for any system with a star gate; if it's not re-directed, there isn't a gate there. The Humans are definitely running around with Repulsors and two-space beams, though, so we're going to need a Heavy Ion ship of some sort. Of course the other option is to wait for HEF to come in, which would be safer, but less fun

dathon

 

[StuporMan]

Ahh the nuances of the NAP. NAP applies ONLY to systems that do not contain colonies. Only alliances allow you to sit over a planet without retribution.

Humans should be an interesting next target. We can hit their planet, and they can take us in fleet vs fleet combat (right now). So basically, we can hit and run them but holding planets will prove difficult. We may want to consolidate our Darlok holdings before going on the offensive against the apes.

 

[dathon78]

NAP applies ONLY to systems that do not contain colonies.

We DID have a colony at Kulthos; all of that occurred after I settled it. My guess is that since their ships went into orbit the turn I settled, it wasn't registered as "ours" for the NAP code.

I'm always a fan of consolidating before moving ahead.

dathon

 

[StuporMan]

NAP applies ONLY to systems that do not contain colonies.

Read that quote again NAP apply to systems that Do not have colonies owned by the members of the NAP. If you sent your fleet to SOL, they would attack you. Likewise, if they send a fleet to Sssla we will attack them with our bases.

NAPs may (I cannot recall ATM) allow a human fleet and our fleet sit above a Darlok planet without attacking one another.

 

[Sullla]

OK, I have the save file and will be playing later today. Darloks sure disappeared fast, didn't they? (OMGWHTTD! ) We really do not have any weapons capable of hitting the Humans or Meklar right now, due to their Repulsors (Heavy Ion weapons, at this late in the game?!) I'd rather consolidate for a few turns, and then attack with better tech in a little bit. Pulson missile boats would be a nice escort weapon for our Spore fleets, for example, and High Energy Focus special plus any beam weapon (Megabolt Cannon?) makes for a great dreadnought.

More important question: I think we should probably try to win a Conquest victory in this game. Diplo doesn't fit the variant at all, and even Domination less so. The reason why I ask is because I may have to turn down a victory in 2500 if we get votes from some other races. What are your thoughts on that? I'm quite sure we'll have 2/3 of the galactic population by 2525, if not earlier...

 

[dathon78]

Conquest all the way!!! We are NOT taking the easy way out. I want to see these spores in ACTION

And Stup -- you're right, I can't read.

dathon

 

[StuporMan]

I think we are all in agreement, go for conquest.

Fumigate all who oppose us!

Stup

 

[Sullla]

(0) 2490 Well, I planned to get to this last night, but the girlfriend wasn't feeling well, and that took precedence. Plenty of time to get the turns done now, fortunately. I take a look around our planets, and it seems we need a few more turns to finish constructing factories and star gates, plus we really could use some better weapons before going after the Meklar/Humans. This will probably be another infrastructure turn then - but I may be able to have some fun with the Bulrathi, if you know what I mean.

The only change I make is to cancel some star gates; I usually don't build them everywhere, just in locations where I plan to do fleet building (any large planet) and in strategic locations. For our game here, I'm only going to build them at planets over size 100; anything smaller can do research for us and won't need one. (I'm also going to spend heavily from the Reserves during this turnset too.)

(1) 2491 Lots more planets max their factories. We are producing 4802RP/turn and our Rich planets funneled over 3000BC into the reserves last turn (!) I feel like a kid in a candy shop here. More mundane management of planets.

(2) 2492 Discover Class VII Deflectors, only option to move forward is a VERY good one, Class XV Planetary Shield. (I've never gotten Planetary Shield V, X, AND XV in a game before!) We get three different "size" complaints from the other races, and the Meklar cancel our (very small) trade agreement.

(3) 2493 We get a tech theft from the Bulrathi; I checked their tech list a couple turns ago, and they have nothing but junk. Therefore, I opt to grab the one thing that WILL help us: more Computer tech. We get Deep Space Scanner, and I get to frame the Humans for the theft. I also find out that the Meklar stole Sub-Light Drives from us between turns; they already had a better engine, so no big deal.

(5) 2495 Discover Improved Industrial 4; our only option to move ahead is Reduced Waste 20%. Too bad we've missed out on so many armor upgrades!

By the way, I've also decided to wipe out the Bulrathi while waiting for techs to come in. Gotta keep busy somehow!

(6) 2496 Now this is just sad:

Hyper-Vs?! And only 4 points of shielding on those bases. Man, our ION FIGHTERS can almost damage that planet! One shot from our Virus Stack of Doom (and with all those Death Spores, it's a true Stack of DOOM!) and the planet is wiped clean. Zero losses to us and the colony is destroyed.

To add insult to injury, we get another tech theft from the Bulrathi after the combat. Since there's no Computer option, I go for Construction and get Industrial Tech 8. The Meklar call us up to complain about our use of bioweapons, but we ignore them. Relations with the bears drop to "Feud" (lowest possible), but they do NOT declare war (!) Weird. Pulson missile research is already up to 4%, by the way (of course - we are getting more than 10,000 RP/turn right now!)

(7) 2497 Another tech steal from the pathetic bears; since they have Neutron Blaster tech, I go for that with Weapons. Unfortunately I pull Neutron Pellet Gun instead, oh well. More importantly, we get an agent in against the Humans! There's no Computer option, so it's probably a low-level penetration. Well, the tech we want is Advanced Soil; even though we probably can't get that this time, let's grab Planetology so we can decrease the junk techs in that category when we DO get a major penetration. Naturally, I get Controlled Barren. But that's more or less what I was expecting; I hope the rationale I laid out makes sense.

We also discover Terraforming +60, which means I get to do a lot of miniscule terraforming/factory construction on this turn - umm, yay? Options are Complete Eco Restoration or Terraforming +80; I take +80 since we have virtually no waste cleanup anymore. Also build a new colony at Phantos, the former Bulrathi world.

(8) 2498 Bulrathi have a number of Large ships at Ursa, but we outnumber them by a lot. Rather than fight, they turn and retreat - silly AI. You know what that means...

We also get a hit in every field with the Darloks! Deep penetration, looks like. We've got a 50/50 shot to pull Soil Enrichment in the Planetology department, so I *HAVE* to try for that... Score!

Well, looks like I'm going to be building a lot more factories for the rest of my turnset!

Get this: I retreated from Ursa once the population had been wiped out. Since that counted as a retreat, the Bulrathi ships that were in the system got to stay there, and since they had a colony ship, Ursa was re-founded between turns! The new Ursa only has 2 colonists and 0 bases though, so it won't last another turn.

(9) 2499 Bulrathi and Darloks finally declare war between turns, which shouldn't matter too much as the bears only have 1 more turn to live, and the shapeshifters have only one planet. Massive population growth everywhere from Soil Enrichment.

(10) 2500 Wipe out the last Bulrathi colony with our death fleet. We get another spy into Human territory; no option for Planetology (or Computers), so no chance for Advanced Soil Enrichment; I grab Construction tech and get Battle Suits. We found a colony at Ursa.

Bears survive into the council election by virtue of having a colony ship over their last planet, then re-founding their planet when we are forced to retreat from the bases. Bah! They live to cast one vote against us. Vote looks like this:

Bulrathi: 1 vote Humans
Humans: 15 votes Humans
Darloks: 2 votes Humans
Meklar: 6 votes Humans

That gives us 48 out of 71 votes = 67.6% of the galactic population!

And so we wrap things up with a Conquest victory in 2500. Great game guys, even if it was on the easy side!

Here's the final map:

We finished the game with 39 planets to our name - wow. Research on the 2500 turn (after maxing out all planets from Soil Enrichment) was over 19,000RP (!!!) Total income from planets was just over 30,000BC. We could not have won on this date without the fortunate Soil Enrichment steal; population grew by 389 lizards (4 council votes) just on the 2500 turn alone. Nice timing there from our spies.

Here's a final shot of our fleet:

Not very impressive, but it got the job done. We had Pulson missiles at 17% and High Energy Focus at 5%. In other words, we could have opened up some whoopass pretty darn soon even if we hadn't won this council election.

Final save, for the curious:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/12069/OSG14b-2499.zip

Now, time to go check out how the "A" team is doing, eh?

 

[StuporMan]

Well, my question to you guys is, do we want to go ahead and do the final war for kicks. I am torn, because it is quite clear that we are going to win. Humans would have gone down rapidly, especially with new designs and a set of 2 small spore ship designs would have taken care of the Meklar Pulson defenses.

As fun as sporing down worlds is, I think we call this one a game. It is quite unfortunate we reached the winning position before the first shots were fired, but dems da breaks. At least we got to spore a couple hundred million people before the end.

Stup

 

[dathon78]

I agree that the game should be called where it is. Even though we didn't get a lot of use out of the bioweapons, I actually learned quite a bit about them. One very interesting thing is the lack of war declarations. Twice, with the Darloks and Bulrathi, we destroyed a colony and did NOT get a declaration. That's a bug/exploit, IMHO. Also interesting that genociding a race through bioweapons does not set off the extermination diplomatic penalty. I guess the creators thought the hit from the virus itself was enough? Either way, I don't think I'll be using these again except in dire circumstances anytime again.

Great job Stup and Sullla; that was a lot of fun Now it's time to lurk the team A thread to see how well they're doing.

dathon

 

[OlorinStormcrow]

Well, I came to check out your thread, since I definitely won't be taking another turn now. Actually I'm confident that Blake will be able to wrap up an extermination win by 2470 (barring of course an Antidote discovery), and then we could take the conquest victory in 2475.

It surprised me how differently the AIs performed in our two games. We had the Bulrathis faster than us until they ran out of room (and hostile planet tech). The Humans and Darlocks were inconsequential in our game, and the Bulrathi didn't end up being as tough opponents as the Humans were for you.

We were able to fit spores onto small ships faster, probably because we had more planets and faster research, and so we were able to hit the AI planets before they researched better missiles. Still it was a learning experience to see how many spore ships would get killed to take out a planet with a decent number of bases.

Since our spore ships either had no BC, or later, BC1, the bases fired their first volley before we moved, meaning we got hit 3 times before reaching the planet, and another time as we retreated, at least against Merculite equipped bases.

Odd how killing a race with spores leads to a message that they exterminated themselves though. Maybe it's because we end up retreating from the battle, so the AI technically "wins" the battle (Sol was destroyed in a battle where the Humans won...therefore the Humans must have wiped out the Humans???).

I enjoyed reading through your thread. Nice to get a fresh perspective on planet management from Sulla. I still don't know about the debate over when to build the first colony ship though. We went for getting the first ship out earlier, which let us expand our scouting operations faster, and may have led to us being able to take Kulthos before the AI, though that might have simply been due to the Humans and Darlocks being stunted in our game (though taking it from them definitely helped keep them small).

Anyway, very interesting comparison. I wonder what happened to change the fortunes of the Bulrathis, Humans and Darlocks so drastically between our games? Maybe our Humans and Darlocks started fighting over some world and lost several early colony ships. Maybe in your game, someone killed off a Bulrathi colony ship and took a key planet away from them, walling off their expansion. Who knows.

Congrats on the victory, to both teams. I do like playing in a 4 person game more than 7 person ones. Hopefully we'll continue to have enough players to split our games from now on.

 

[Blake]

Oh man you guys were slow (2500 vs 2464) (hmmm what's the PC term for that... Exterminationally Challenged?).

If there's something which strikes me it is that the b team kept on investing in more and more infrastructure and tech... sort of following the dangling carrot of infrastructure rather than just deciding to committing to total war buildup.

I had thought that your AI's were more advanced - and some were - but our Bears were definitely much more advanced than your bears. Ours had 9 shielding on planets and merculites (in 2460's!), vs 4 shielding and HyperV's (in the 2490's!). Of course in our game most the AI's ended up with 2PE's while in your game it appears the AI's did on average quite a bit better. Funny how that is.

However as we found (and I've found in other games) it doesn't matter how tough the AI's ships and defenses are, you can just spore out the worlds where the fleet isn't at (you guys didn't run into antidote, right?). We couldn't fight the Bears and even Mekklar fleets (huge heavy armor autorepair... ouch) but it didn't matter because they bled worlds like crazy and once they've lost most their worlds I'm pretty sure they disband their fleet making the final worlds easy even if they try defending them.

Finally, for early expansion strategy. Despite Sullla's logic, I think it is at least sometimes better to get colony ships out faster. While it does delay future colony ships, it also gets the first colonies a head start on development - it's like you gain development turns at your first few colonies and potentially lose development turns at some of the next few colonies.... but starting the expansion earlier also means you aren't making a sacrifice by sending out a lot of homeworld pop to bootstrap those first colonies - putting a massive amount of pop on new colonies results in much faster factory building - like it may be accelerating the first colonies development by 10+ turns (ie that's how much quicker it starts contributing). So I think it may actually give a faster ramping growth curve just from getting the earliest and thus most critical colonies up faster.

Ok final thing on what I took delight in calling the "Ssspin Department", namely GNN claiming that races exterminated themselves. I believe this is a simple programming hack. Because the final world simply "dies" (ie when you retreat from battle the world is still alive) the game doesn't know what to put as the name of the destroying race - so it defaults to using the name of the race itself. And yes it does appear that you don't suffer the diplomatic consequences for annihilating worlds with gas - you only suffer the consequences of using gas, which apparently is less, at least on the victim race.

Ok final final thing. I've tried using bioweapons in other games and they can be very powerful, when you have an AI fleet which you can't tangle with and worlds with shields which are hard to penetrate, often it can be very easy to just fly around and gas every world which doesn't have the AI fleet orbiting it, once the AI has lost most of it's worlds it disbands most of it's fleet. Also you end up with plentiful size 10 worlds with max factories which other AI's proceed to colonize, and being completely inept at slider management it takes them forever to develop the worlds - this is especially true with Soil Enrichment since you can't start terraforming away the ickyness until you've completely soil enrichment. The human can do this quickly be getting the full 10 pop on the world and adding reserves, but the AI takes forever. So basically the AI - every AI - becomes extremely vulnerable to getting their tech stolen by invasions of trivial size, regardless of respective gropo tech, you create a whole zone of worlds full of tech ripe for the taking. On the whole I have to say that bioweapons are buggy and very exploitive, the AI is quite good at using bioweapons, but the human can abuse bioweapons to a far greater degree.