Hi,

In a recent game I was playing as the Measured and decided that it would be better to be pragmatic rather than evil.

It was quite a friendly galaxy with lots of resources but I was next to the ever disobliging Drengin and after defending myself from them I took them out and with surrendering on but mass suicide off captured Drengi and Kona amongst others.

Drengi turned out to already be a very good research planet (the Drengin are vile but far from stupid) and I made it the technological capital and set about developing (eventually  I got rid of the slave facilities and nasty research stuff as well) and adding some starbases.

Under the new distance rules (just 3 squares apart is OK) you can of course build two rings of starbases round a planet in the middlegame if you go Pragmatic and extend the range by 2 and three rings in the ending when you've got support field mastery.And while I was poddling towards a research victory I amused myself by getting a full set of 36 starbases round Drengi.

Even with huge amounts of prometheon  to be traded I stuck at two levels of production (starbase factory and zero G scaling) and two levels of research  (labs and zero G experimentation) and I don't usually bother with the market line: do other people?

Anyway here are screen shots of the planet and the surrounds at the end (I suppose I should really have changed the market into a university)

I was wondering if anybody else had carried out this somewhat (over)-obsessive plan and perhaps even gone some layers further into the starbase modules?

Cheers,

Jon