My first Maso victory
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I decided to try out masochistic and won. 
Wanted to share the approach I took.
I went with a small map, uncommon habital planets, tight clusters, +60 Diplomacy, +30 economics, populist.
I started in a sector with 2 minors. My normal strategy woul be to trade up a storm. But they worth both sitting on base PQ 20 worlds on a map where good planets are few. So instead, I never built a single colonizer. My starting colonizer never even found anything to colonize in time. Rather, I pumped spending and science to 100% and raced to transports. I got lucky and got a +1 weapon upgrade on my explorer ship so did not have to race out star fighters as well. I took over both worlds quickly, getting universal communication before I took the second one out so that I could trade for all its techs. Even coming out of the start tech heavy I had to play catch-up on tech.
After taking them out with transports, it seamed the game was so fast paced with all the tech trading that I had battleship tech about 20 minutes later. With three solid system to build from (5 planets) I built a task force of battleships and combat transports. I then went around taking out other civs with alpha strikes. The Arcaens apparently had the same game plan and picked up 2 additional star systems for themselves. I had about 8 systems to their 3, but they had significantly more powerful fleet than myself, and rather than spend another hour setting up an alpha strike on them, I just took an alliance victory.
The whole thing took 2 hours. I could have done it even faster on a tiny map. It never got dull like some of the gigantic maps do when you are just working on the inevitable. And over 15k isn't to shabby point wise for a game that took only 2 hours.
Overall, with good tactics it was just plain easy. I'll have to increase the size of map for a challenge.
Wanted to share the approach I took.
I went with a small map, uncommon habital planets, tight clusters, +60 Diplomacy, +30 economics, populist.
I started in a sector with 2 minors. My normal strategy woul be to trade up a storm. But they worth both sitting on base PQ 20 worlds on a map where good planets are few. So instead, I never built a single colonizer. My starting colonizer never even found anything to colonize in time. Rather, I pumped spending and science to 100% and raced to transports. I got lucky and got a +1 weapon upgrade on my explorer ship so did not have to race out star fighters as well. I took over both worlds quickly, getting universal communication before I took the second one out so that I could trade for all its techs. Even coming out of the start tech heavy I had to play catch-up on tech.
After taking them out with transports, it seamed the game was so fast paced with all the tech trading that I had battleship tech about 20 minutes later. With three solid system to build from (5 planets) I built a task force of battleships and combat transports. I then went around taking out other civs with alpha strikes. The Arcaens apparently had the same game plan and picked up 2 additional star systems for themselves. I had about 8 systems to their 3, but they had significantly more powerful fleet than myself, and rather than spend another hour setting up an alpha strike on them, I just took an alliance victory.
The whole thing took 2 hours. I could have done it even faster on a tiny map. It never got dull like some of the gigantic maps do when you are just working on the inevitable. And over 15k isn't to shabby point wise for a game that took only 2 hours.
Overall, with good tactics it was just plain easy. I'll have to increase the size of map for a challenge.
