Another round about to be given up on. Launching two types of attacks. One is sending out waves of largely autonomous scale-1.0 drones of two designs; one is armed with a reverse inductor(zaps power), mind sappers(zaps control), salvagers(converts enemy ships to metal), and material containment beams(steals stuff from planets), as well as export docks to bank the stuff they steal/salvage, while the other design has chemical bombs to kill planet populations. Both (are supposed to) roam around the galaxy and just wreck stuff, and are quite effective if they swarm a target.
The other method of attack is a conventional force of scale-96 battleships. I built a dozen of these within a few minutes at a shipyard with five planets covered in as many space ports as possible, with fast cargo ships to pull stuff and deliver it to the shipyard. It's pretty effective. As they move to jump to an enemy system, I see the defenders have scale-30 or so ships, no problem. As they jump into the system, they're met with scale-91 ships. While the rest go around dropping shots on planets, two get caught on the system edge trading fire with at least six of these. Four are destroyed before one of mine are (finally) killed, and the others flee.
Then several scale-100 and up arrive in system. I really don't know how they can manage to pop these ships out like that. I can hardly keep up with the escalation, and I just min-maxed an entire star system to produce ships as fast as possible. As far as I know, I'm way ahead in research and economy.
Any good? I heard a lot of things go either way with that one.