His first game is played with 1.2 on a Gigantic map at suicidal. Took him 3 years to finish the game! 3 years? How is that possible to even get the speed that permits you to get to the other side of a gigantic map?

I recently submitted my first Metaverse game, gigantic map, 9 opponents, every abundant, very fast research, and level Painful. The Drengin finally surrendered to me on Dec. 15, 2229, just under 5 years but it was counted as 4 years because just like everything else the years are ROUNDED DOWN. Playing as neutral with the NLC on very fast research it does not take long to get HyperWarp. At game end a was managing well over 200 planets, with over 3 trillion people, and had nearly completed researching the tech tree (1 turn more to get Black Hole Gun, 1 turn more to get Black Hole Emitter, 1 turn more to get the last farm tech, and 1 turn more to blast through the remaining two teraforming techs).

It takes a long time to finish the games on gigantic.

I started this v1.1 game days before v1.11 game out; upgrading to v1.11 caused the fog of war to return to the explored areas. It took me 2 months to play this game because the v1.1 memory bug caused several crashes while saving the game (causing me to each time to backtrack three months in the game to an early save), plus with a demanding job and family (wife and with daughters ages 2 and 3) I have very limited playing time! Also, I went over board with the micro-management so as my number of planets increased the time to complete each turn went way up.

I just finished a suicidal, gigantic map, 9 opponent game in just under 3 years game time ( around 12-1-2228 ). Pretty sure i use just regular research time. I was going for a conquest victory but got boring so I just got the tech victory after i had about half the map and had taken out 4 of comp civs. Only got like 29,000 points for the game -- but i don't play for score and have no idea how it works. From what i saw and the way things were going I would have had a conquest victory early in 2229, was only taking 3-4 turns to take out a comp player. Had max techs in missiles, speed, logistics, minituarization and a few others. I'm pretty sure i could knock off another 6 months as my strategy gets better.

Note the tech victory was around 12-1-2228 so i stopped playing militarily around 10-1-2228 ( took about 8 turns to finish up that line of research ).
Might have been able to win the conquest by 1-1-2229 but i doubt it -- prob more like 2-1-2229 to 3-1-2229.

Also i'm sure someone can and probably has already come up with a strategy that is better than mine.

Conquest takes forever. Comparing it to culture or tec victory is a joke. Winning a gigantic in 3 years i just don't see it. Granted i don't play with fast research, but i just don't get see how it's possible to do AND to get that kind of score.

You need to build an economy and population. How can you take the galaxy in that time and not have damaged your population ?

Did a revaluation of my strategy last night and found where i can definitely improve -- so winning a Suicidal, gigantic map, 9 opponents, normal reasearch rate game inside of 3 game years with a conquest vicroy is not a problem in my opinion.

However getting population up would be hard unless you spent race ability points on population growth. Personally i maxed out military production, 20% bonus to economy , and maxed out sensor range. And had technologists as my political party. I usually keep my populations between 6.0b and 9.0b -- need them people for my troop transports to expand and conquer.

But i've been thinking about those ability points and if you max out military production and max out or get as high as you can with population growth, it could be dynamite. Population growth bonus's are probably better for the economy than the economy bonus's.

Maybe that's how he does it -- breed like rabbits.

The metaverse scores was already recalculated.

I think the metaverse score will always be a mystery...