First off, I know Stardock is hard at work cracking down and fixing many issues as they come up, so I have no doubt that anything I'm putting in here that is an issue will be fixed and corrected if it hasn't already for the pending Beta 6

My game... (feel free to share your game experience and exploits you've used.)

This is and has been my game experience so far with many of the games that I've played, I will point out my strategy and how I have been using the AI's weaknesses to my advantage, either by design or a weakness.  All games I've played with 20+ players, I have never finished a game as eventually sometime between turn 130-170 I tend to get non-stop crashes which I have submitted tickets on.

I started the game using the following settings...

• Large Map
• 42 Major Races
• All minor races
• Abundant all resources except black holes...
• Abundant all planet types.
• Challenging difficulty (all AI gifted)
• Custom race based on the Thalan home world, ship type and tech tree.  (various traits too many to name here.)

Okay here we go, started off on one edge of the map (offset by 1-2 stars) have my colony ship and survey ship and here we go....

I start by putting my manufacturing and research at 50% (manufacturing evenly split between ships and social production)  I research the first tech on the list, place my buildings on my planet, don't rush build anything.  Rush build myself a second colony ship.  (After all a Large map isn't that big with 42 races plus minors and I need to colonize).  Manually surveyed anomalies and sent my first and second colony ships in the area of the nearest star system.  

Great a system with two habitable worlds.  First one I choose the Pragmatic trait to give myself 3 constructors...  (Exploit 1) (With these constructors I place them in orbit around my home world and immediately upgrade them to colony ships, cheaply might I add at 81 credits a pop...  Awesome being they cost almost 2000 credits outright, 3 cheap colony ships.) I send them off and start colonizing additional planets along the galaxies edge,  After the third planet I get another ideology choice, this time I choose the Benevolent free colony ship...  

Now in all I've gotten 5 colony ships very quickly and have 6 colonies before most other races have 3  This is a great start...  I now  have researched universal translator and have met several races so let's chat.  I chat with the 5 or so races I've met, (Exploit 2) (I trade one for several techs I don't have with these races, the majority of their trade resources and have them give me extra credits besides.)  All in all I give most of the races all the technology I have, plus a few of them open borders treaty but, I plan on being peaceful so no real issue to me.  

A few turns more and I have met several more races, at this point I now have more techs than most of them .  So I go for it, time to attempt to get some more colony ships as I see a few more planets that no one has colonized.  (Exploit 3) (A.I. is trading away colony ships to me for low price, a few techs, open borders and most of the time that's enough.)  I quickly now have around 10 colonies when the most any other player has so far is 4 so far so good.

Now most if not all habitable planets have been colonized, I don't see anymore. So I figure I need some Constructor ships, get me some of these galactic minerals.  (Exploit 4) (I trade a few more AI players for any constructors that any of the races I've met have, costs me about as much as the colony ships did.)  I now have several mining bases getting some artifacts and some elerium and durantium.  

Now that I'm fairly set I decide to start cranking out constructors with multiple construction units and build culture starbases a few tiles in enemy space.  So far so good the AI doesn't care and I'm slowly creating bubbles around their planets of my influence. (Suggestion 1) (The AI should see that I'm starting to flip their planets and either tell me to stop diplomatically or declare war.)  They don't and I start flipping planets.  

I now have built the Benevolent ideology building and collecting points per turn, I increase my influence 100%.  Wow, now flipping colonies faster  I continue down this path and unlock the Ideology Prominence III Enticing (Suggestion 2) (I would recommend that this be changed to not flip home worlds or make minor races not effected as once I got this the game was over.)  Now not actually, however, at this point I now control half the map with my influence.

I continue down this path until around turn 150 when the game now has unrecoverable crash, continues to crash every time I reload .  Good game.  Looking forward to Beta 6 when I hopefully will be able to complete a game  Good job so far Stardock, keep up the good work.

**Update, I've tried to figure out what was causing the crash after turn 151, at first it was hanging up at turn end when showing shipyard idle, I removed all star bases that were completing ships that turn, to eliminate that, still crashed...  Then I took over via trade all AI's starbases but two (as they would not give them up no matter what).  Still crashed, only thing I can see that I am unable to alter is one planet has a pirate ship stuck sharing the same tile as a planet, I am unable to destroy or trade for it  Oh well... added information to existing ticket.

Throughout the game I noticed the following bugs...

Pirate bases show up as 0/0 hit points in the battle screen when you decide to auto resolve or show combat viewer.

When flipping a planet I see a ship is occupying the same tile as the planet is.

Otherwise just the others I've already reported diplomacy crashes/ unrecoverable crash.