Okay, I played this one on Tough during Beta 2. I'll recount my third game after my first two failed experiments. Note that the changes to racial abilities means you won't be able to exactly duplicate this. I played without any reloading and purely with the setup given to me in my third attempt (first attempt I teched, my allies were getting whooped, my ships were too weak and I died. Second attempt focused on soldering, but not morale and pop growth). Most of my starting bonus tiles were 100%, though I think I had a 300% one somewhere.
When picking my racial abilities I decided to focus on a race that bred fast, was great at soldering and had good morale to stop the high population rioting. I picked the populist party, which gave me more morale (100% morale allows for mega fast breeding) and a bonus in diplomacy so I could get tech from my allies as quickly and cheaply as possible. This setup was intended to allow me to resist invasions and counter-invade where possible, and as a bonus the large population would form a big tax base, which was important consider how few worlds I knew I would have.
You start with a lot of money so buy buy and buy again. I bought a colony ship for each world, and a defender thereafter so that the Dread Lords couldn't invade off the bat. My research first went into that +10 in all fields bonus and then my economics. I then followed up researching everything on the planetary invasion and defence tree, and then farming and morale. This isn't a precise order, and I researched a few other things, but this was a few days ago
I lost the top right planet quickly, and the far most top left planet soon after, but on most planets I now had an established base of farms and morale, using 50% social spending and social focus (the rest was research spending). I eventually put a starport on every planet.
With this setup I was able to repel almost every invasion of the Dreadlords. Downside? I was unable to help my allies and the Dreadlords controlled space. My last two frontier worlds fell after they assaulted faster than I could breed, but by now I was close to holding every soldering technique, and one of my original three worlds has a population of over 20 billion.
I had a stroke of luck when I reinvaded one of those worlds and stole... Doom Beam! Oh now we're talking
However, the DLs controlled space so it's hard to get anything into the air, and now they're camping around my last three planets. However, my allies must have done something as they went roaring off into Arcean space. I used this to start building ships with Doom Beams (later buying miniturisation tech from my allies to get better engines on to). Currently I had ships with around 30 attack and 4 move. It's now I discovered a weakness in the AI/Dreadlords.
The Dreadlords, at least on Tough, will not use fleets. Their ships fly as individuals. I had fleets of five ships with a combined attack of around 128. Even though they had no armour, and a DreadLord ship would dstroy one a turn, the DreadLords would not attack them knowing they would be destroyed. These fleets became invincible, and with three planets churning out reinformcements I was doing pretty good. I soon had ships with 6 movement, so that I would be able to get first strike, just in case the DLs turned on me.
In the end, the DLs conquered everyone else and the victory planet was surrendered to me, but I was going to wipe the DLs out. One transport of my could invade a DL world with 2000 troops and win with over 1700 left. We were spanking them.
We appear to have lost all that tech in the next mission... not sure how you lose your war winning tech, but there it is
I wouldn't bother with amour. Their attack is about two-three times the level of your hit points. You would need insane levels of armour to save your ships and it's not worth it. Better to get big fleets of small or medium (I used medium) ships which the DLs won't attack.
I was lucky to get Doom Beams, as without it I would have been in a big trouble in the arms race. Taking their worlds was easy, as was defending mine, but without space you can't get ships into the air. My transports could move from my home worlds almost to the worlds in the next sector in one turn, but if they get nailed at launch that does you no good.
Had this attempt failed I would have done much the same, but would have aimed to get transports out faster. I often had planets with max pop sitting around, and I could have planeted transports out by every world to counter-invade. This isn't so much about owning worlds, but rather stealing tech every time you conquer one of those worlds.
Oh, and the aphrodisiac wonder (?) is damn useful for building up your pop again quickly after sustained invasion. The DLs liked to hit you three times in three to five turns. Nasty.
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