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Breath of Fire entered in the final seconds of the fourth and final update of a Blood Blitz. I was on top of çeasar's home world with an exploring science ship set to nuke. This is a hazard of entering late, having someone nuking someone as you enter as the third empire. I eventually was able to pop trick and have a builder at junction. The extra systems were mighty handy.
Another negative, which can be seen in the map, is that Nuke Bait (me) entered second. A large amount of the time when entering a multi-player game as the second player you will be quickly surrounded when the third player enters. That's why many players will not enter as the second player, leaving someone sitting waiting for a player to enter.
The pluses to joining late are that you are way ahead in technical advancement. Breath of Fire got to BR2 and BR3 before Nuke Bait. Not until BR4 was Nuke Bait, who had by then a 2-1 advantage in economy, able to reach a tech level before Breath of Fire.
BoF played a pretty sound defensive battle, without overbuilding once that I know of. That is a rule of his clan, Clan Drone. Though this is a pretty sound way to play, there are times when overbuilding is very advantageous and will defeat someone not overbuilding.
By overbuilding a bunch of ships and sending tech maintenance to .500, you can have those ships move the next up to an adjacent system and reach there at full strength on the update. You can't do that building only enough ships that your tech maintenance does not go below 1.00. You would have, at best, half as many ships in that system. If you have more time to let your ships get to full strength, you can build to .333 and have ships at full in two moves. Building to .250 gets the ships to full strength in four moves. But always be careful not to let your fuel ratio fall below 1.00, or the ships may say they are full strength but they will be defeated by an equal number fleet that is not below 1.00 in fuel.
An engineer was used to open a link from Nuke Bait's system below Breath of Fire, and an attack followed. During one attack, Nuke Bait popped trick, allowing for the the final, fatal attack.
I thank BoF for a fine defensive game just hours before Thanksgiving. His defense ended when he misjudged a pop trick, leaving his home world below 50. I doubt very much that he would have staved off with my BR4 ships and huge economy.
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