On a more serious note, in my 7/7 vanilla game, I set automatic AI increase to what the tooltip claims is the default, 1 per 5 minutes. Is that a typical 'normal difficulty' setting? At 4 hours in I've got an extra 48 AIP from this, so it is certainly adding up, and it's putting some pressure on me to keep things moving along. Which leads to my next question...
I took all the planets in my homeworld area, so I have 13 planets or so, with 5 ingress points currently. I'm wondering if I should take down the gates on a couple of the adjacent planets, to have fewer ingress points, closer together, so if my fleet is needed for a nasty wave or 2, it's not too hard to get around.
After a few nervous moments, where I had 2500 threat from a CPA that didn't actually bother to A, plus 2 regular waves incoming, plus a 1500 ship reprisal wave (I thought I could go attack some of the threat ships on their own turf, but that seemed to be a bad idea, so I heroically retreated), which I managed to survive, after losing a number of planets to dirty rotten cloaked ships, I feel I'm in the mid game pretty solidly.
So, I've got a few long range targets, I've scouted out a couple advanced factories, and some various fabricators, but they're a few planets back from the front line. So I'm wondering how to approach this. It seems that just capturing all the planets between where I am and what I want is going to lead to way too much AIP. So should I look for a weakly defended planet near my target, and establish a base there? Is it practical to try to have a few 'islands' deep in AI territory, to stage strikes? I imagine defending them would be hard, but then, I could always just rebuild them when I want to use them, it's not like the AI will rebuild there.
Also, are there any decent places with semi up to date information? The wiki is pretty badly out of date, not surprising given how much and how often things change. For example, I have no idea how hacking works, or where I could find such information.