So after a very quickly failed game testing out the machine empire rebalance, where I had to become a protectorate of a neighbor by 2250 because I had so neglected tech for alloys, this game was machinist origin + byzantine bureaucracy + beacon of liberty and xenophile + materialist + egal. I really enjoy playing wide and 'fat' so this is/was probably my favorite type of build. Expanded pretty aggressively, choked off a rogue servitor to the south and then found I had a stupid amount of space to the north. The first bit of cheese was spamming envoys to improve relations and get in on the fed forming beneath me. That worked out and I proceeded to neglect fleet and just expand ad infinitum while they squabbled with neighbors. I waited until battleships to really bother with fleets around ~2350.
L-Gate was easy gray. Funnily enough, I missed/ignored the Great Khan message assuming it had spawned across the galaxy. Nope! It was the marauders in the cul de sac next to my system. I only started sending fleets when they landed on my adjacent planet. 5x didn't seem to influence their strength so I wasn't concerned. Killed the Khan quickly and then raised a few clone armies to get my darn planet back. BUT NO! When they abruptly became a regular empire, with my Gaiia world as their capital, my fleets went MIA. I was worried they'd join a fed or otherwise become diplomatically entangled so I immediately, fed went along with it thankfully, and wiped them. The whole thing was quite a silly mess. Remember folks, prioritize building a damn gateway in the colonized system next to marauders.
After that it was pretty smooth sailing until the crisis. The spruced up AI economies were actually building megastructures. After repossessing multiple intergalactic assemblies I finally started engaging with the GC. No, scratch that, I became very acutely aware of the GC suddenly when I swept a planet and had to spend the next ~10 years getting reamed by sanctions. I was ~100k diplo weight ahead of all others combined last I checked, but repealing all the shit they'd passed was happening so slowly I mostly gave up on it. Vote down new crap and otherwise just deal with what it had become. Also worth noting that shortly after the Khan debacle, I truly began to understand the wonder that is staying below the admin cap. Never in all my years of stellaris have XXXI repeatable techs been sub 12 months. And with only 2 research ring sections + 2 research building relic worlds + 2 dedicated planets from the beginning.
And finally the contingency. The one crisis that can fairly consistently make the game interesting. I managed to fend off the 2.5m total fleets that spawned adjacent to a system within my 'original' borders, despite the sapient combat AI debuff. After that was fixed I beat two more back and parked all my fleets on the closer one to SELECTIVELY (thanks GC) bombard a hub. I was then pleasantly impressed to see that the combined forces of the literal rest of the galaxy had been smart enough to park above the (now undefended) other hub and clean it too. Which leads us to where I left this game. Truth be told gentlemen, my victory might have been eventually assured but it had just been massively prolonged by a curious incident. I sent the same stack of fleets, 7x250k + 400k fed fleet to intercept the last major fleets and 4th hub. When, excuse me but wtf, they were all swiftly defeated. I assumed it was the invincincible fleet bug, alt+f4 then reload, aaand nope. Maybe it was that they weren't particularly grouped up? Same system but staggered. I can't really say. But as the screenshot below will show, my once mighty ~3k worth of fleet capacity fleets, are now gone. Oh, and the surviving contingency fleets just deconstructed the starbase in my dyson sphere system and are one jump away from my home world. Maybe I should play this one out...
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