Space Empires

Josh and I played a non-standard scenario in Space Empires, with our regular systems set up in opposite corners and about 75 "deep space" systems in between, with "merchant ship pipeline" and "aliens" rules in play. I forgot that exploration cruisers can reveal and remove "Danger" markers, so I wasted some time in skating around them instead of giong through, and I also mistakenly counted on them to act as a bit of a defense for my own systems. Further, by the luck of the draw, Josh ended up with a few more accessible deep space planets on his side, and consequently more production; I got more warp points but they weren't really helpful. Despite this, I did pretty well.

Phase 1 was "explore and colonize"--for the first few turns I devoted my production to building colony ships, plus Exploration and Terraforming tech. I ended up with 11 planets plus Home.
Phase 2, once I'd mostly run out of available planets, was building Shipyards, Pipelines and Tech Developments. I ended up with 11 maxed Shipyards.
Phase 3 was building warships. I left that a little late and re-discovered that a pack of ten cruisers can still hurt 2-3 battleships; the pair of BBs just don't have enough shots per turn to whittle down the cruisers fast enough.

Around Turn 15, I realized that I was in trouble; so I launched a spoiling attack to try to occupy his attention, destroy a  planet or two and even get past his ships and raid his interior. I didn't achieve as much as I'd hoped, but I did keep him busy on his side of the map rather than mine. I'm pretty sure I would have lost eventually, but I'd done enough damage that it would have been a fight, and he certainly wouldn't have been able to finish me off by Turn 20--which is an improvement over my previous attempts. An overall defeat, but a moral victory.