Let's see if i am worthy:
This is my second playthrough and the first without any mods. I started it way back in 4.x afair.
- day 23, german so some shorthands may be different
- "finished" state, over 20 bil credits, 2200 ships and 70 stations
- warlord/profiteer trying to spend his now infinite wealth on doing "good"
- become even more wealthy in the process, every time i check there's another billion
- "give them hull parts and they will fight your war for you" - approach
- some "pretty" stations from the forum, some of my own, almost no "shuffle modules"
- using most of availlable ship models, i love variety
- some SETA, multiple days of letting the universe run while giving orders every few hours, countless evenings that start at 6pm and end around 3am
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hprqWd ... drive_link
I call this the "victory by economy". XEN is dead, but the NPC factions did most of the work. I started building production in TER space, then moved on to ANT, ARG, Split and TEL, always providing their ship yards with what they needed so i could buy from them. By the time i had my own shipyard, only the northern Xenon sectors were left. The RHA Split in that region were upset with me so they became the target instead. VIG didn't like me taking over the Avarice racket, swearing never to be my friends again - so i evicted them from windfall and the universe proper aside from their nice casino.
Then, the PAR became too greedy. HOP had wiped out XEN in the south, fought with the strong ANT on two fronts, and in the process lost on the third, with PAR destroying the main shipyard in holy vision. From there on out, i tried to help HOPs economy, which got plucked apart station by station. I settled in the old XEN sectors and began making everything HOP needed. But that wasn't enough. Without a shipyard and builders, throwing what little resources they could muster into transports and scouts, HOP got reduced to only one and a half sectors, none of which were "theirs": faulty logic 7 and freedoms reach.
So i decided to take um missions to build stations and fleet. The fleet they got were often foreign designs which performed well, but the stations were the true magic. They wated defense station after defense station. The blueprints i made incorporated more and more production on top of that. When i found out that the NPCs will just complete whatever your blueprint says i could comlete missions even faster, making more ships and stations per hour.
Meanwhile, i had two shipyards of my own nearby, doing everything to keep them fed with hull parts. Salvage, teladianium, hauling in parts from other factions - everything. And soon, HOP had fleets again, whittling down the swarms of PAR patrol groups. Then they took cardinals redress back. By now i had made them a new shipyard out of a defense station job. Then they took holy vision. They threw PAR out of pontifex's claim, which housed my shipyard, and so i became the pontifex, i guess. A similar thing happened in tempting fumes, which i was bummed the PAR had snagged up before me.
Now, HOP are throwing my "mercenary" Odachis and Makos at MIN and ANT, while i took up terraforming.
edit: ThaRippa is my forum nick, and this is my very first post \o/