Ouch, I'm sorry about that fortydayweekend
I recently started 2nd game and this time, it lasted until almost end of transcedence era, well, only because I was researching stuff at 1 tech a turn.
Got myself an scientific victory.
I don't know, AIs seem like they can do ok on even very high alien aggression with medium difficulty.
Solar Dynasty died off early, I have almost whole world explored, I can't find the remains of their improvements so I"m guessing they got killed by an opposing faction not xenomorphs this time around.
Then how I won an scientific victory you say? Well you see..
Divine Ascendsion faction went berserk and wiped Terra Salvum out, then I went nuts because it meant the continent that I'm on is now half controlled by them with me controlling 1/4 and other 1/4 is currently empty wilderness.
Pumped out as much Serenity tanks as I could on avenger hulls. The war was mixed bag of success, plus I found it really encouraging to dow divine ascension because Noxium/Torga was both furious at Divine.
Divine ascension was actually winning the war against noxium/torga until I joined in and traded blows with me taking 80% of Terra Salvum cities into my hands stopping a runaway cold. But both of us took so much causalities that AI decided to ask me for peace I was like ok.
At this point I was basically in permanent mineral shortage until I got warp mineral facilities built. Had lots of Photon Demolisher tanks and fought defensively with flak avenger/demolishers supporting.
Noxium/Torga was still berserk proving plenty of distraction with their cannon fodder soldiers which actually helped my tanks alot because they was having trouble fighting without sacrifical units. Basically shaved about maybe 30 turns off my planned offensive.
Then divine ascension just broke down and spammed nothing but colonial troopers and prescedion something troopers. Which made it really easy to mop her up, I think she finally started to suffer badly from mineral shortage now with me rolling in minerals. xD
Thank god I used the temporary ceasefire to prepare for 2nd war which was initated by Divine ascension not me. Otherwise it probably would've gone badly for me because I was having trouble building demolisher type tanks with 1st gen factories
Despite using Civ 4 style of combat, I think its really well done, you can't really make a stack of doom or attract the attention of orbital rain of LULZ Does a way better job than artillery suicide for stack damage because Orbital linkup of Lulz only requires you to build the structure then its' all based on cooldown. I found myself actively avoiding big stacks unless I really have to like defending my fortress city which was kinda isolated because I wanted all that mountains for minerals plus gold.
And I learned how awesome Refit system is, my obsolete level 10 steel avengers became useful again by upgrading them to demolishers.
Its awesome, AIs actually cooperate and do battles with you unlike in Civ 4 xD Which is likely the result of such combat design style in pandora. I was staring at one isolated city and knew i didn't have enough serenity tanks to suicide on it. But I saw a bunch of Noxium colonial soldiers eagerly waiting for me to sacrifice my six serenity tanks to take the city. So I did that. And Noxium got the city, I have no complaints.
And the fact that Noxium and Torga kept on praising me and showering me with gifts, so I returned the favor and took them off my kill list. And the gifts made me happy enough to sacrifice my serenity tanks just like that. Because otherwise I would've just retreated and came back with better troop arrangement, all my supports got killed off XD
Your opponents must have been having some alien problems or fighting each other a lot. 