Zagadka

I am wondering what some of you out there do to increase difficulty in AI for rebellion. Lately I've been reducing reb ship costs and increasing their character stats, but that doesn't make it too much harder. Are there any ways of having the enemy side win over planets faster as well? I find that they will only take over only 2-10 additional planets before I have conquered the remaining core sectors. I believe there was a few posts about this before the forums went down a while ago, but they are gone now.

Last night I was playing a game of Rebellion with one of my friends, when I finally tried out a tactic that I've been thinking of for quite some time. I was the empire and I had a fleet of 6 Lancer's + 4 carracks + 1 carrier with bombers/inters. located in the correllian sector. The enemy controlled half of the sector to the right and all of the one next to it. So I did some guessing about the enemies fully occupied sector to the right, and finally launched this fleet at one of his "apparently" unshield planets. About 35 days later I arrived, the planet was undefended and I began my evil plans. Since all popularity was fully against me, I just bombarded the planet to dust. (Since sector's opinions dont affect one another, my popularity remained the same elsewhere.) Everything was destroyed, including about 6 mines and equal # of refineries. Then I moved to the next hopefully unoccupied planet. In the end I had totally leveled 7 planets and the remaining 3 I blockaded. I had lost 1 carrier, 3 carracks and a lancer, but he had lost about 60 mines and refineries. (I used several characters and infiltrators to take down several shields, BTW). Since he had only 2 huge fleets that he wouldn't divide, I had 1 fully occupied trying to find and take on my bombardment fleet and the other one attempting to find another one of my mini-fleets. This tactic turned the tide of battle in my favor and I eventually won. But I still wonder what would happen if both of us would only have used this tactic. Opinions?

Hmm. Are you trying to build shipyards on planets you do not own and are you sure you have enough free spaces to build the shipyard? I can't think of any other problems which would make this occur.