Suggest a game setup for me to beat

[sishelper]

Hi all, I plan to play a SiS game today being my free day. Please suggest a game setup in order to be interesting/challenging
Please have in mind I only play Brutal difficulty and I have never EVER lost a game, so be as sadistic as you can be.
I will play your setup and share the story here

[zolobolo]

Try this:
1. Default amount of star systems (do not increase number of stars)
2. Each AI empires on the map once
3. Play as Humans
4. Decrease the distance between star systems

You can ignore the raiding activity settings does not seem ot change anything at this time

The above should give you maximum challenge if unfair towards the player

[sishelper]

by Default you mean 66 stars?

[zolobolo]

88 stars - the default for the largest map - difficulty of coruse increases with lower amount of Starts as the AI really has benefit in its starting phase

[PrivateHudson]

Please have in mind I only play Brutal difficulty and I have never EVER lost a game

At this level of mastery you should probably start to impose artificial restrictions on yourself. For example, postpone Cloning tech as long as you can. Or mod in handicaps for AI. I for myself in strategy games try to find balance of difficulty so that win/loss ratio was around 50/50.

[Ashbery76]

Play while only building scout ships.

[sishelper]

88 stars - the default for the largest map - difficulty of coruse increases with lower amount of Starts as the AI really has benefit in its starting phase

As you didnt reply I did play on Normal - 60 stars and the mentioned setup. Habitable planets Rare, small races Rare, Hourglass, Brutal . Beat the game in 121 turns. With Humans on dense stars you seem to have huge advantage. I grabbed the two largest planets immediately as I had lots of choice. One paradise and One arid with tinkers living on it. With my Heavy Cruiser first 40 turns I was the bully of the galaxy. Send it to protect a third Huge Glacier to protect from Neighbour Orithin. The other neighbour the Tinkers were hostile from starts so I figured that should be my first target and tried to take all planets near them or allow Orithin to make outposts near them for a nice diplo boost. Used that diploboost to make Orithin stay away from other habitable systems as far as I could. Meanwhile the other race on my side of the Hourglass Phidi was fast allied to me.

Tech strategy was - Nuclear Missiles first and then Xenology - reached within 5 turns from start as I did kill some harpies with my Cruiser. Immediately building destroyers with the Arid planet - nuclear missile and science lab armed. Build sciencelab base all around planets . No science labs on planets only mines . Next research was market. After that - Fusion - Fusion warheads and lastly the Hyperspace in order to get the speed boost. By the time I got there the war with Tinkers started. They had 5 systems but only 2 habitable ones. Turn One - 3 systems lost - the ones with the fuel nodes. And one of the systems was bombarded. Turn 2 the first habitable system falls and I head for Dzibix with all the fleet - their fleet arrives on my paradise planet and destroys factories and orbitals. Turn 3 their fleet reduces my population on half on the PAradise, but Dzibix is about to fall. Turn four. Dzibix falls my planet survives with a quarter of its population. I took some turns to recover and started the war on Orithin. This time the Phidi joined and got a bit pounded by them, But this gave me the necessary time to take all their systems. losing only half my production and pop on the Arid planet. While doing all this PAradise planet with 3 factories was pumping colony ships and I had almost 6 habitable systems before the wars and 13 after. 3/4 of my hourgalss side was mine and Phidi joined my ranks making 50 percent of the galaxy mine. On the other side Yoral was fighting Gremak and the Colonials and star systems were obliterated reducing overall galaxy population. First Galaxy council - Seems I will win it. I reject the proposal and rage quit.

Play while only building scout ships.

During the game I had only the initial cruiser, the missile armed destroyers with science labs and a single light cruiser armed with missiles which now I consider a mistake because it took a while to build the space station and the cruiser itself and for that resources-time I could have had more destroyers. I guess I wanted at least a second stronger ship which to send to the front to be pounded while the missiles do their job. You could argue that I could have gotten away with all scouts setup as suggested

[gaerzi]

Play as the humans, with all factions present, and only 8 star systems.

[zolobolo]

Ellipse Galaxy is the best for challenge as there are no safe corners in the early game- this is why you also need dense systems

The more AI the better: suggest putting in each empire once on the map (would only not duplicate them due to confusion of colors)

[sishelper]

OK, I will play on Ellipse 88 stars. I would suggest for future DLC to be made 3 changes to the AI for better challenge:

1. When sending Colonies or Outposts sometimes accompany them with a fleet so that you can settle no matter the star is protected
2. Sometimes make the AI add Warp extensions to fight ships so they can travel further, especially valid on Sparse maps
3. Nerf or re-balance rocket tech. I think that should work as rock-paper-scissor thing with 3 distinctive weapon branches. One is Matter weapons, the other light weapons, and third explosive weapons. Later in game there could be weapons that fuse two of them like Plasma fusing light and matter , or torpedoes fusing matter and explosive etc

[sishelper]

Play as the humans, with all factions present, and only 8 star systems.

But that is a piece of cake gaerzi. With humans I can choose which planet to take immediately with my Heavy Cruiser and 7 mobile populations. I think Phidi will fall immediately because Seralta has the coin boost plus Phidi/Human inhabited Seralta will reach almost a 20 pop cap and you have a second habitable in the system. With faster reaction I could even take one or two more races like Colonials or Orithin. I bet I can take almost all of them before they build ships or defenses to counteract. Game over on turn 15 max in a dense galaxy. Also I am sure you cant do that - game wants 3 or 4 stars per opponent else does not allow the add.

[sishelper]

For those who want to try my first game themselves. I attach the first turn savefile
https://drive.google.com/open?id=190B0fbGBNmgV6olpUtf9VuvIS1O0pRAw

And a proof I beat it just before settling the juicy and central Toliman system and Phidi joining.