fastest turn to orion

[da_hal]

my friend and I have been doing something new recently: who can get through the guardian the fastest. before we found the emg strat, we used grav beams/struc analyzer/battle scanner/reinforced tritanium hull, and he had the lead at turn 114.

when we found this site, the record now stands at 97.

for 114: charismatic/uni/creative/low grav/-pop maybe some other stuff, i'm not sure, with grav beams.

for 97: democratic/lith/artifacts world/-pop/-industry/-spying, with emg strat.

we agreed to stick to imposs/small/8 players/avg tech/avg age, as this appears to be the hardest setup without being too annoying.

i saw somebody post about finishing the game at 7x, but i'm not sure about whether they went through orion or not.

[vmxa1]

No I did not go after the Guardian in that game. I can ot recall my best shot at doing it, but he can be killed fastest with missiles, due to not needing more advanced tech.
I can't even remember my run at the guardian on Moo1 and it was more current (too many games).
Off the top of my head I would say those are very good runs.

[da_hal]

i think the grav strat actually needs less tech than the emg strat, but for the gravs you pretty much must have creative for computers 2750. also, the build time is huge to get enough ships with gravs, maybe 50+ total work turns. my friend uses 1-2 battleships and a ton of destroyers, i use 3-4 bships with 4-5 cruisers, sometimes 5 bships (the bare minimum.)

i might try the grav strat with demo/lith. while the money is substantial, i don't think it will be enough to buy the entire fleet in time.

[vmxa1]

I wonder about a run using a ton of small ships with just 1 laser to take flack or use a single nukes. Then have you good missiles shoot. this would hopefully let the early missiles soak up the lighting shields.

[Harry Seldon]

Just out of curiosity, what is the emg strategy?

[da_hal]

use merc emg's with other types of mercs to kill the guardian quickly and efficiently. not always 100% successful though, but successful enough.

it's in a lower thread here, i forget the title...something about "help with guardian" or something.