the resoruces brought up by other players means putting resources on the black market (you cant do it through the mini-screen) and having them buy them. easyist to do in multiplayer if your vasari and a 3 crystal plasma spawns within 2 hops of your hw.

You could use the galaxy forge to sort of cheat help your way there. Build a map with a planet all by itself with your opponent has a lot of carriers and you have lots of flak.

You can do something similar with pirates, give yourself a super powerful fleet on a map with lots of pirate bases and try to rush kill them all before they get too upgraded.

Hey, thanks for the advice, guys. I'd like a bit of clarification on the resources bought and the 1000 pirates.

For the 15000 black market resource achievement, whats the ideal map set up for this? Do I make a star system with 20 Volcanic planets for the AI to colonize, then have the AI try to buy 15000 crystal from me since Volcanic planets don't have any crystal and the only crystal income will be from the AI homeworld and the 1 asteroid that always get included with the player start-up planet cluster?

For the pirates, I'm playing Diplomacy version. Can I actually go back to Entrenchment, create a map with three stars. One star = 50 pirate bases, 2nd star = my home system, and 3rd star = enemy system (Easy AI, no extra planets)? Then once I get the pirates achievement in Entrenchment, will it carry over when I switch back to Diplomacy, or does the game have seperate achievement lists / awarded for vanilla, entrenchment, and diplomacy?

Finally, what is Galaxy Forge? Is it a map editor tool? I use the in-game map creator thing for custom maps.

I got it yesterday while working on Toaster Roaster. It popped up while assaulting the last couple planets on a Medium-Random map Vs two hard AI. The game did drag on longer than strictly neccesary though. I hadn't beat two before so I was fairly cautious after the tipping point. The last AI was in sad shape though, so I can confidently say it'd be achieveable on a longer map without intentionally delaying victory.

One thought to ponder is that because I was struggling with the hard AI I had left one slot empty when starting the game and was playing 3v3 on the 4v4 map. The pink AI (vasari) had hangers all over, either as a response to my excessive fortifications on the blue flank or simply because the extra space free on the map provided more time to construct them. In either case, leaving empty slots will probably help since you're more likely to kill 2,500 strike craft when fighting larger empires than a multitude of small ones.

Looking back on it I think that my opting out of flack frigates helped too. Fighters are more effective against bombers while having a higher time on target because they aren't constrained by fleet formations. Especially if you leave your fighters on automatic to surpress three hangers while your bombers target the Orkulus that some obnoxious pink AI built on a random central planet for no better reason than having a place to hang out and get drunk.

I do wonder if mines count as strike craft though. I ended up with a task force of 3-5 scouts just to clear minefields from recent captures. They might, since I got the achievement while fighting the blue AI who absolutely loved them. I probably ran over a couple dozen of them in the process of bombing his last two colonies off the map.

Most of the achievements aren't very difficult to attain, and those that are difficult are more time consuming than challenging.  I remember several months ago (might have been as far back as September 09) there was a conversation in an online game over what "appropriate" difficulty achievements would be, and I wrote down some of the ones that got suggested.  Maybe try a few of these:

Serious Business

Defeat a human opponent in an online match.

Blitzkrieg

Defeat an unfair difficulty opponent in under an hour on the random-small map.

Volunteer Army

Defeat an unfair difficulty opponent without ever researching any fleet or capital ship crew upgrades (Sins Vanilla only; no Entrenchment)

Interstellar Sanctions

Defeat an unfair difficulty opponent without ever using the black market on the random-small map

Survivor

In a multiplayer match, lose your empire, but escape with a few ships and re-build elsewhere and rejoin the battle.

Master Economizer

In a multiplayer team match, get your income up to 300 credits per second... after upkeep.

Master Aggressor

In a multiplayer team match, maintain the largest fleet size with the smallest economy and least amount of feed. Defeat at least one enemy by yourself without taking excessing casualties.

Master Defender

In a multiplayer team match, survive a two-front war against multiple opponents while cut off from allies. Never allow your enemies to capture any of your planets, and never lose control of your homeworld.

Master Comp-Stomper

Defeat a team of 5 or more allied (locked teams) unfair difficulty AI's on a randomly generated map.

Climatic Showdown

Fight a multiplayer battle against over 2000 command of human-controlled enemy units and win... without any help from your allies.

Carry the Team

In a multiplayer game of 3v3 or larger, have the largest empire, strongest economy, and largest fleet of anyone on your team, all at the same time. You must go on to win the match.

First Pick

In a 5v5 multiplayer pick up game, be the first player to be picked by the team captains.

Very few people have 100 games in total, let alone 100 5's.  Also, if you're good enough to do this, it's entirely possible to find yourself in a game populated by all the very best Sins players... even guys like you or me could be the fat kid if we found ourselves in those situations.

There's a line between challenging and something that's only feasible for the top thousandth percentile of gamers.

I wouldn't recommend going for the pirate one on this system.  With only three pirate bases, that's less than 100 pirates in existence at the start of the game; you'll have to wait for about 30 raids to launch before a thousand pirates exist, which will take 7.5 hours to happen at normal raid intervals.  I strongly recommend creating a custom galaxy with galaxyforge that has 35 or so pirate bases.