http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198088036064/screenshots/

Started in middle of galaxy, with a class 8 planet nearby. Lucky. Screenshot not working though.  But you can go to link.  It's  posted there.  (How do I post the screenshot here?)

Turn 2:

Screenshot posted in  my steam folder.  

Found a planet nearby to colonize.  However, I will NOT use the newly converted Colony 7 Long ships to colonize that planet.  They will travel in 3 different directions.  

Instead I will use the Colony 3 ship that I'm about to build 1 turn from now to colonize that planet.

Moving the colony 7 long ships back into homeworld, stock them with 1.8 population each, and launching them out to explore.  

The first little piggy goes West.  The second little piggy goes North east.  The third little piggy goes south.  Consequently I'm exploring and sending colony ships  in all directions.  

Turn 4: My scout ship finds another world near my homeworld.

I set my two current shipyards to produce Colony 3 ships to colonize these worlds.  

Turn 6: 6 colonies.

I get Benevolence level 2, Class 10 Homeworld.  I have 5 shipyards, and 2 current colony ships.

The shipyards are building:

Colony 3, Colony 3, Colony 3, Colony 7 long, Colony 7 long because there are other planets nearby I can colonize. 

The Colony 7 longs are for longer range exploration/colonization.  

I use my Colonizer Super ability to get a free shipyard on each new planet.  I rushbuy a factory on each new planet.

No tech, no wealth, nothing. JUST COLONY SHIPS.  

Turn 10 Continued:

My survey ship finds a scout ship. Will make good use of that.

One of my Colony 7 long ships discovered a nearby world close to my homeworld.  That ship will NOT colonize that world.  Instead I will build a Colony 3 ship from one of my shipyards to take it later. 

Other than colonizing, the goal of my Colony 7 long ships is to explore.  To find new world that I can later take with Colony 3 ships.  

Consequently there will always be a ball of Colony 7 long ships expanding outwards in all directions, with Colony 3 ships filling the planets in between.  

So far I have ONLY built shipyards with Colonizer and rush bought factories on some of the worlds.  I have ONLY built colony ships of different types.  I have set my economy to 100% military production.  I have literally done nothing else.  

First you must diagnose the problem before you can fix it.  "You must first understand the enemy to defeat him."  Remember that, little grasshopper.  

And the insert image thingy doesn't work.  Sensei is bad with modern technology.  Go to my steam account and look at my screenshots if you're so interested.  It's not the job of the Sensei to make life easy on you.  In all those martial arts movies the Sensei BEATS his students to make them stronger.  

Besides, people was telling me: "POST A GAME TO PROVE YOUR CLAIMS. WAAAUGH WAAAUGH WAAAUGH!!!"

So fine.  I'm posting a game to prove my claims.  Blame them, not me for this post.  

I'm actually looking forward to finding out if he's gonna manage 100 by turn 30. Anyone running a book?

Either way, 14 by turn 16 is pretty good going, and once again highlights the weakness of anti-expansion measures.

But but but! You're a Grand Master chess player and you day-trade for a hobby! Luck surely has nothing to do with it when min-maxing is part of your personal code of ethics!

Seriously, though, this is a good way to highlight the lack of anti-growth mechanics - just please don't post half a dozen thread saying the same thing again. That just turns a lot of people off because, well, it's kind of an asshole move.

Ok, I tend to spam too many ideas at the same time.  But I've noticed the best way to get peoples' attention (including the developers) is to come up with legit ideas and then SCREAM AS LOUDLY AS YOU CAN.  

It works.  At the same time if you don't like me very much I fully understand and will not be upset.  

Nonetheless, I want a better game, and I will do whatever it takes to get it.  

Can you do a screenshot now and then that includes the faction power list instead of the minimap so we can have a bit more of a idea how you are doing relative to the AI?

@bigbadb draginol also asked for medium map not immense, but let's not QQ to much and see if he wins first

I don't know the OP in RL (so I dont know if he would or wouldn't be an asshole) but I can see why people could/are getting upset with him, but what he's saying is true.

marigoldran

Most people (myself included) dont look at pure min/max set-ups for games unless they have to. For me it's with PvP settings and I have to say that I'd still have come a right cropper if I'd have played you without you sharing your method.

So, yeah, it works but....

As has been said:how to fix this is much more of a problem that highlighting it though.

Any thoughts on that?

1. He's on course to hit 20 colonies by around turn 18. No AI is in any state to do anyting about it at that point, and as noted elsewhere, he's still able to trigger the 50-turn Pragmatic peace option whenever he likes.

2. LEP scaling, and therefore patriotic, have no real impact here. He's not gotten to a 'big' empire yet in immense/abundant terms, and increasing LEP nerfs the AI more than the player. The trick is NOT simply punishing the player for having a big empire - if you're going to include big maps, then big empires need to be playable. The trick is making a big empire harder to achieve. You need a mechanic which produces a 'sweet spot' for growth rates, so that expanding too fast causes an issue, not simply handing out meaningless punishments for having the audacity to build a big empire in an empire-building game.

LEP isn't part of the solution; it's part of the problem. You can get round it by just not bothering to build farms; the population division effect is far, far, far more damaging than the effect of any number of LEP penalties - and what's more, it doesn't limit the RATE of expansion - it just produces an artificial cap on the number of worlds that you can support. Increasing it won't help, since your best strategy remains spamming colony ships as rapidly as possible until you reach whatever the cap turns out to be.

We need something which makes new planets a liability until they've been built up. That is the only thing that will make any early-game strategy other than colony spam viable. There's two basic options for this - one is increasing maintenance levels from undeveloped colonies, the other is forcing new colonies to 'import' food from somewhere or else lose population until they go extinct.

1) its not possible to expand to fast if all the worlds are colonized before you get to 20-30 colonies, therefore it solves the problem of expanding to fast. 

2) You can make the LEP scale however you want, it's currently linear which is meh.

If tuned correctly the LEP does this:

-small empires have high happiness and get more production/growth/etc to keep up

-large empires have medium/low happiness early/mid game because they expand fast, but grow very strong late game.

-very large empires that expand to fast suffer from rebellion/striking workforces and stuff like that. 

A alternative/combination is to make maintenance cost prohibitive for worlds with low population meaning you go bankrupt if you expand to fast. but i dont like that approach because it incentivizes you to not spent your starting money. But really low happiness achieves the same without complicating stuff, you can easily make a low happiness world a burden by tweaking some numbers around. 

In the end there will always be a cap on how many worlds you can sustain, and things to exploit and what not. Might as well keep it simple and tie it to one mechanic rather then spread i out to much.