Difficulty on Large-Intelligent game

from Stardock Forums
Years ago I bought this game for OS/2. I was happy to find the Ultimate version in the bargain bin at CompUSA last month. :) Anyway, I won a couple of games in Medium galaxies with the AI set to Normal intelligence. Then I decided to step up to a large galaxy with Intelligent AI. I'm getting pummeled! I started out making some evil choices when colonizing some marginal planets. First the Altairians then the Torians declared war on me and started attacking me from two sides. Now the Torians have a fleet of Dreadnaughts and have knocked out all of my planetary defenses, and all 5 remaining majors declared war on me! My economy is ~ 1/3 of the Torians who are the strongest. Yet, no one has finished me off by invading my planets.

Last ditch effort now is to give technologies to the minors, make them my friends and try to get them to help me. Also, I'm going to try building the biggest ships I can - battleships and battle hammers, then suspending them as the completion date nears, then have all ships be completed around the same time (assuming I survive that long). Maybe then, with all my planets defended again, some of the majors will respect me and declare peace. When my warships are completed piecemeal, it seems the Torians just come back and attack within a couple of turns, and I'm totally defenseless again. I've even tried colonizing a few more marginal planets and making good moral decisions, yet the Altairians and Torians keep making war on me.
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Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
Unfortunately I can't give you good advice how to rescue your empire. One chance could be to buy peace via gifting technologies or even a planet. But this is very hard once you are fallen behind. Try to re pacify your direct neighbors first. This way you have some kind of buffer between you and your enemies. Another thing is, don't bother with those triads of ships in space and don't try to defend a planet in orbit against a superior offender. When your ships are reasonable fast you can make sneak attacks against their transports. Without transports they can't harm you. Sometime it works to lure away some of their ships with a cheap and fast ship.

Some comments from me:
- don't expect any help from minors their are too passive and weak. All you can do is to use them for trade. (Try to secure your trade routes.)
- don't colonize planets with PQ < 15. This costs a lot of money (e.g. 5 BC fee for a PQ 14 planet per turn) and it is nearly impossible to defend them
- when you can't overcome your temptation for evil decisions, I would prefer to make them only on good planets and maybe good ones on lesser planets
- the trick with holding back the building queue one step before a project is finished worked in the OS/2 version. But in GC for Windows spending is not stopped when you don't build anything. You simply waste your resources.