I've never been able to get invested in Aurora for long, but recently something called me back to it. So I made a game with a conventional start and NPR martians, just to make things interesting.
The martians' first move was to establish a military base on the moon, which was a bit disturbing. Not wanting to get into conflict before I had any defenses, I sent a diplomat team to convince the aliens that we were friendly, all the while planning my eventual betrayal. Ten years in I began assembling my fleet.
The first attack force was composed of 12 light railgun frigates. Not very effective at that tech level, but I was hoping the advantage of surprise would allow me to cripple their defenses. I flew the fleet to Phobos and opened fire on three light vessels I assumed to be attack ships. Unfortunately, three of the larger craft which I had assumed to be cargo ships revealed themselves to be laser PDCs. Three of my frigates were vapourized instantly. A mass attack on the first PDC managed to disable its fire control, but the others still managed to destroy two of my ships every 15 seconds. With my fleet rapidly shrinking, I ordered a retreat back to Earth. Only once the fleet was out of range of the lasers did the AMM bombardment begin. The missiles were nowhere near as deadly as the lasers, but with 50 hitting every turn, they gradually wore away my ships' armour until only one damaged frigate remained, limping back to Earth on 1/3rd engines. Then, to add insult to injury, the ship which had originally landed soldiers on the moon, and which had left orbit at the beginning of my attack, turned around, revealed itself to actually be a huge battleship and blew up the last survivor with missiles. There were no survivors. My only solace came from nuking the martian base off the face of the moon.
A few months later the martian counterattack came. Their troop transport/battleship positioned itself a short distance from Earth and began launching missiles. The first salvo destroyed two of my three shipyards. The following salvos destroyed three missile bases I intended to use for long-range bombardment, as well as killing tens of millions of civilians. Fortunately, I had built three new frigates which were eventually able to hunt down and destroy the battleship, but not before it had spent all of its heavy missiles on Earth. A lot of damage was done, but ultimately this put things in our favour. Without their battleship, the martians had no offensive capabilities, and their PDCs had a very limited range. Soon after that I was building a new fleet of missile frigates to attack the martians without them being able to fight back.
Four years after the start of the war, I positioned my new fleet around Mars at the edge of their sensor range and opened fire. I staggered the missile launches so that four salvos of 8 missiles would hit at 5 second intervals, hopefully confusing the enemy defenses. The tactic seemed to work, and one by one the martian PDCs were destroyed. Form there it was a simple task to destroy the other, presumably unarmed ships in orbit. The martians unconditionally surrendered after Two bombardment missile salvos. They also surrendered two gravitational survey ships several systems over, as well as data for ten other systems they had surveyed.
BTW, is there a way to view the non-human population of a colony? Or are they all just eliminated once they surrender?