Here are some of the results from my first game using the Great Galactic Swindle strategy. Until the very beginning of year 2, I had a total of 5 planets, and was ranked last in just about every category. On January 8th 2008 I enacted the first Swindle, and jumped up to 85 planets, including 7/9 of the enemy homeworlds. From this population graph, you can clearly see the effect.
You can also see that the Altarians were the only one that didnt drop down. I had to wait another 12 weeks to speak to them and swindle their planets away. This second population graph is from about 1.5 years later, and you can see that I have many times more population than any other empire. At this point I'm up to 210 planets total, out of about 230 total habitable planets in the galaxy. I've done a bit more swindling, and also some more conventional conquering.
These next three pics are my military graph at various times.
You can see that I went from nothing, to the most powerful military in the space of a handful of turns (thanks Spin Control Center!). Next game I try this, I plan to get to the swindle point earlier, and have a steeper increase in my military rating. I also need to do better with managing the post-swindle period. I was a bit unfocused, due to being delirious with the sudden and dramatic increase in my civilization's power.
I did have some trouble with the actual swindling initially, because it required precise timing, and I had to figure out the best time to do it. At first I couldnt get any of the enemy civs to give away their homeworlds. The optimal swindle period seems to be a very small window. The two most important factors are that your military rating is many times that of your enemies, and their worlds cant have accumulated too much population and improvements. Also, once they start building a military your swindling power dramatically decreases. So timing is definitely extremely vital. The earlier the better, so I'm thinking the all-labs strategy would work best in conjunction with the Swindle. I used the all-factories strategy for this initial game, and it was reasonably successful. I also think it may work better with DL than DA, but I couldnt say for TA.
For those of you who have registered at the
Galactic Core, you can check out this thread,
How's this for a home planet, where Mumblefratz gives a lot of detail on how this strategy works.
Sentient species taste better...
