Alright, here's one for y'all to chew on. One that's *not* related to getting everyone worked up into a screaming fury of quibble-doms. I hope.
My latest game, I neglected to uncheck Invaders on a conventional start. I now have a stable wormhole one hop, skip and a jump away from Sol itself, in a void system where I have no intel at all, and cannot set up an automated listening post/PDC to watch for transits. Except for surveyors, I have yet to expand outside of the Sol system; I've barely colonized Mars and the Moon, and those mostly to set up civilian trade chains. I'm running a difficulty house-rule that only lets me use scientists in the appropriate field to research topics; due to this and some unfortunate luck with scientists, I have next to no Defensive or Energy Weapon research, and I only have one scientist in Missiles/Kinetics, who I've barely used. As such, my best weapons are still pre-TN ICBMs. I'm still on Ion Drives, though I'm working my way up through Stellarators as a priority measure now. Finally, I'm not really inclined to design Rock-type missile sponges (huge, heavily-armored civilian ships with CIWS and great, honking thermal signatures) or other AI- or game-breakers. On a scale of 1 to buggered, how much trouble would you say I'm in, and do you have any thoughts on how to get out of this mess? ^_^
For now, I'm thinking of replacing the old ICBM facilities with hangers, rush-designing some missiles, and setting up a fighter fleet in the near-term to flood anything coming out of that jump point. Thankfully, I have some ridiculous-large jump nexuses (something like 7-8 jump points out of Sol, and several more similar systems within 1-3 jumps), which means that while defensibility and organizing the galactic map are a concern, expansion paths are not. Pushing them out more permanently will be more problematic; I can't set up a stationary facility to keep watch, which means that anything put on station there will need to devote space to maintenance, and at this low tech level, space is at a premium.