Note that the game started off with only the links between Atlantic City—Tarren Defense and Tupelo—Lisa Marie being open.
This game started off great for me, I had four jumps from Home World so built four cols, moved over, and tricked on five planets. But I screwed up and forgot to dismantle my two remaining science ships :( That drove me down to 0.7 tech and I couldn't build the next turn. SBlaster had sci ships exploring north, and as bad luck would have it found and nuked Atlantic City while I couldn't build. He then went on to explore my Home World the next turn.
He knew his geography was bad, though, and I didn't let him know I had done anything wrong. I built engineers to close all the links connecting us, slipping one of them south while he tricked and making sure I got the extra planet in Atlantic City. He still hadn't explored all the way up in the northeast, so had to keep a fleet of attacks and scis on hand while I sat back and built my tech back up. When he realized I had closed all the jumps he was satisfied to terraform what he had, giving me more time to rebuild tech and slowly terraform my own planets.
We finished terraforming at about the same time, but those extra turns of his having to carry around a defense fleet allowed me to catch up and pass him in tech. He took the initiative and built an engineer in Lisa Marie...forcing me to play defensively since I didn't know which gate he was going to open. After a few rounds of sparring, though, I eventually forced a confrontation and won it. From there it was just a matter of finding his Home World since he didn't have the econ to stop me.
Thank you SBlaster...thank you very much. :)
