VICTORY!!!

So after playing for a good 8 hours or so in my first game of "Sins of a Solar Empire," I finally was able to claim victory.

I slowly began to learn a little bit more about how to play the game. I learned that I needed to expand a bit more of my empire. I THOUGHT that I was playing a small map...and I was...but what I didn't know was that a "small" map in "Sins" still has about 16 planets or more. So I was holding down the fort on three planets while my enemy was holding down 13 different planets.

I finally began to expand, and luckily I was playing on the easier settings, so I won battles pretty decisively on the planets that were in the middle of the two empires and was able to slowly start expanding my empire.

After I began to expand, I really learned some of the intricacies of the upgrading system. I upgraded my fleet capacity and my ships to be literally war beasts. One of my cruisers was capable of taking on two of the other fleets cruisers, so if I went into a match with equal numbers I came out victorious literally every time.

You can only imagine what happened once I had amassed nearly 400 ships. Once I had that, I separated my army into two different units, and proceeded to systematically purge the galaxy of my tormentors. I basically went to the two choke points on the map and worked my way into their territory from there. I was virtually untested until victory.

The crazy part about all of this is that it was nearly 8 hours of real time...and that's a SMALL map. Awesome.