ES2 Community Scenario #2: Glorification of the Gorgeous

This is a really good map and starting position.  Without giving away any spoilers, extreme aggresive scouting earlygame will give you *huge* rewards.

I'm on track to splice every major and minor faction available on the map by turn 100.  Currently at turn 80 with the majority of the galaxy colonized (140+ systems).  All other factions will be eliminated within 3 turns, and it's just a matter of shuffling the hundreds of populations across the 140+ systems at this point.  This is pretty tedious so I'll finish that sometime in the next few days while watching TV.

EDIT:  Just finished and spliced every single faction on the map (32 total) by turn 90 on the first attempt without knowing the map beforehand, cheesing, or exploiting flaws in AI behavior.  Will do a more detailed writeup and upload screenshots/save files later on to avoid giving spoilers since it's still early in this monthly challenge.  I think it's possible to splice every faction by turn 80 if you know the map layout beforehand and cheese AI behavior combined with heavy min-maxing.  Probably won't attempt though since micromanaging and keeping track of populations across a hundred systems is pretty painful, and turns take 10 minutes just to load when you have the entire galaxy colonized.

First attempt without knowing the map beforehand: All 32 factions spliced by turn 90.

Second attempt knowing the map beforehand combined with extreme min-maxing and mercilessly abusing flaws in AI behavior and broken synergies: All 32 factions spliced by turn 68.

Write-up for my thoughts and strategy theory crafting prior to starting the game

Here is a chart for how many total non-Horatio populations we need for n splices:

To simplify the calculations and theory-crafting, we can ignore the type of population and treat the different types of population as interchangeable.  This is because if we have 10 Mavros and 50 Sophons, we can use the Mavros as our 5th splice and use the Sophons for our 25th splice.  As long as a given population type remains below 64 (the final 32nd splice), a population growth for that type is not 'wasted' and counts towards our total population required.  Once we have 64 of a population type, a growth for next highest population type becomes 'wasted' when it is at 62.  Then 60 for the next one, and so forth.  We can more or less ignore this since by the time we have 60+ of multiple types of population, our scale is so large that a few wasted population growths won't make a difference.

To put it another way, this challenge can be translated as: how many non-Horatio populations can we grow by turn 100?  So our main goal for this challenge becomes maximizing non-Horatio population growth.

To maximize our non-Horatio population growth, we want each system to have as many different types of populations as possible.  Consider the following example.  Assume that for determining what species the next population growth will give us, Horatios (main faction) have a weight of 2 and other factions have a weight of 1.  (I don't know the exact figures for the weightings but the same concept applies regardless of what the weights are)

If a planet has one type of non-Horatio pop, there is a 2/3 chance of a Horatio and a 1/3 chance of a non-Horatio for the next growth.

If a planet has two types non-Horatio pops, then there is a 2/4 chance of a Horatio and a 2/4 chance of a non-Horatio for the next growth.

If a planet has three types of non-Horatio pops, then there is a 2/5 chance of a Horatio and a 3/5 chance of a non-Horatio for the next growth.

So as you can see, the more types of non-Horatio populations there are on a planet, the greater the chance we have of getting a population growth that we want.

Following these two concepts, we want to stockpile our populations and delay splicing for as long as possible, since splicing reduces the availability of a population type and thus decreases our chances of getting a non-Horatio growth.   Furthermore, we want to save our early splices for population types that are difficult to get, such as the Vodyani.  Remember -- as long as a type of population is below 64 (for the final 32nd splice)/62 (for the 31st splice)/60 (for the 30th splice)/and so forth, population growth is not wasted.

So to maximize each system's chances of getting a non-Horatio poplation growth, we adopt the following strategy:  If a system has more than one of a given type of population, we want to send it to the nearest system that doesn't have that type.

For example, if system A has 2 Mavros and its neighbor system B has none, we send a Mavros from A to B.   When system B grows and has 2 Mavros, we send a Mavros from system B to its neighbor C, and repeat until the Mavros are on as many systems as we desire.

The main bottleneck for our strategy is the size of the galaxy and how spread out everything is due to the map size and 8 spiral configuration.  To mitigate this, we need to colonize systems next to ones that have population types we want to grow so the travel time isn't too high.  The different populations are spread out across the entire galaxy, so we basically need to colonize the entire galaxy to maximize our non-Horatio population growth rate.  Furthermore, we want to place research emphasis on increasing civilian ship speed (empire growth stage unlocks, Autonomous Materials for wormhole travel, N-Dimensional Topology for quicker off-lane movement, and Supralight Aerodynamics for +2 movement on ships)

To do this, we need to rush the Saints and Sinners law to deal with unhappiness.  The religious political faction needs to be voted in as the primary faction 3 times to have enough political experience to unlock Saints and Sinners.  We rush this by forcing elections via repeated government changes early on.   Note that HyperPACs combined with the strong election action will guarantee any given political party as the primary party.

So our roadmap and general strategy for this challenge:

1)  Rush Saints and Sinners as fast as possible using government changes to boost political experience.  We do this by focusing on influence generation earlygame while keeping the total number of colonized systems small.

2)  Colonize the entire galaxy once we have Saints and Sinners and don't have to worry about over-colonization penalties.

3)  Proliferate population diversity using the guideline "If there is more than one of a type of population on a system, send the extra to another system that doesn't have that population yet".

4)  Emphasize food generation on systems.  We want to reach breakpoints of +150 net food (one population growth every 2 turns) and +300 net food (one population growth every turn).

I'll post write-ups of my two runs in a few days or next weekend, since there will be a lot of spoilers regarding the map layout and certain minor civilization and map interactions, and I wouldn't want to know these beforehand on my first attempt if I haven't started the challenge yet.

Well my attempt was 12, looking here at Skeezi, I guess I was way too casual, going for craver-like galactic onslaught and micromanaging the hell out of the galaxy would have been far better way to go, but then I have to agree the brutal micromanagement required to achieve the desired result is just too annoying and even at the casual playstyle it was really overly annoying to handle so many planets.
Rather than going saints and sinners I tried to stay within rational range of the other absurd overcolonization option - going Federation, but the scale is just too big. I did however manage to stay devoted for most of the "end"game.
All in all, I guess the challenge was a meaningful one, however annoyingly large which invites a high factor of repetitive tasks.