Sweet another AC game. So 4 alien factions now this time? Well at least they'll always be at war with each other. Might give those technologically backwards humans a chance hehe. Noticed you picked Domai with his malus to science and Cha Dawn.... honestly pretty horrible in the hands of an ai. Human-kind is gonna suck at science till you manage to ramp up the believers to ridiculous levels again or maybe go probe crazy on the aliens. Get your nerve gas weapons ready, at least that is my go to strat when dealing with the aliens early game.
G'luck and following
My thinking of this game was to get maxscore, the highest score I've ever achieved, with the most significant bottleneck for maxscore being how much population you can cram into the map in 500 turns (or how much terraforming one can tolerate before perishing). Thus: Human Resources. Miriam can field horrifying hordes of formers, probe teams and colony pods without even compromising one bit on security - with four alien factions ensuring there will always be a high-tech foe to probe upon, yet no grand coalitions arrayed against the orange blob colonization machine. This should in theory allow for complete saturation of the entire map within 500 turns
The battle for the Monsoon Rainforest went exceedingly well, with Believing mindworms and rovers overrunning the Usurper outpost despite their technological superiority. Unfortunately, the Free Drones were the ones who ultimately captured the Usurper base, capturing the rainforest for themselves and stunting Believing colonization efforts. This was not enough of a setback to justify abandoning the Believing-Free Drone treaty of friendship, certainly not in the face of such vastly superior aliens. Thus the Believers traded and stored energy, accruing a warchest of 1,500 energy credits, waiting for one of the enemy's invaders to arrive on the perimeter - ripe for capture and reverse engineering.
The dramatic struggles of facing a foe whose single soldier is equal to six of yours could not compare however, to the Believer's efforts to spread like oil across water - a thinly applied paste of humanity scattered all across the red surface of Planet, planting forests and children alike all over a uniform grid with each 1,000 man outpost in mutual support of all but the most remote fringe bases. With the discovery of the Weather Paradigm, teaching the faction how to manipulate the very weather of Planet itself - rain condensers were constructed, pouring the heavens down unto the forests. The loss of the rainforests ceased to be an issue, for now the arid mountains would be the bounty of the earth, and the sparsely populated outposts mark the sites of future cathedral-cities.
Trees provide a balanced mix of food, minerals and energy when harvested, which increases with the usage of tree farms and hybrid farms - base facilities unlocked with the advent of planetary economics. Condensers provide a bonus to food production, but normally cannot be placed on forests, yet there is a curious mechanic whereby forests can spread onto tiles with condensers which allows for the wondrous creation of condensed hybrid forests - whose productivity is only rivaled by late-game intensive resource networks.
By the year 2210, with the construction of the Planetary Transit Network, allowing the people of Planet to flow as an uncontainable vapour through the world, the foundations for this hyper-productive hybrid tree farm grid were being set by a fleet of terraformers, cultivating the future working grounds of the dormant masses of agrarian colonists. The 23rd century stage was being set for the great mass mobilization of the Believer's human resources.
Map of faction territories and their bases - the most notable thing about the Believer grid being that while other factions are constrained by the availability of fertile mountainsides and coastal communication lines, the Believing grid covers all terrain with impunity and disregard.