As you can see on the map, they didn't have special systems and at least mickar didn't have extra dilithium in the beginning.
However, with taking benefit of demands, I can't see anything special about this game. Nice one though.
The problem with damanding money from ai is that it needs some special experience, and some luck, luck at least for me. It works best when ai already is at war, still has a good economy and likes you. And you need to get them fearing your fleet, so best fly around at it's border, prepared for invasion.
In my experience, for the klingon it is easiest to demand money from ai.
When ai begins hating you too much, go at war and with your fleet being superior they often offer peace again together with some more money. In later turns the ferengi even tends to give some 100000 credits just for peace. With having peace, they become neutral again and you can continue demanding more money.
Mickar, be assured, I really desire a fix for it. Anyway, I never ever created a mod for botf and I have other things to concentrate on.
As for the dilithium, you don't need it. Having less dilithium than needed, there exists something like a sequence in which order the systems obtain the dilithium. If one of them isn't finishing it's ship in that turn, the dilithium won't get substracted, causing all remaining systems to be able building ships. That's an obvious bug, but some still call it a future and named it shadow dilithium.
Additionally, in vanilla you can easily make huge amounts of money by raiding, but for a turn 20 game like this one it has a minor influence. Just keep building ships on each system, get money by demanding ai and bye the ships whenever they have two turns remaining (better scrap ships when money comes short than not buying). Don't build anything else but maybe an intelligence energy building and a shipyard or a subatomatic simulator.
If ai doesn't give money, you can still try stealing it by sabotaging it's economy. Sometime that works as well.
However, this match didn't have much of a tactical or strategical appearance but chris having underestimated mickars capabilities. It's a typical progress for short tech5 games with knowing and controlling all the tricks I mostly call deficiencies of botf.
And it's one of the reasons I believe in the need for some more adjustments in the direction 1.0.3 has pushed.
But of course it needs some experience and training to play like this, so yes, you can call it a great example for a 1.0.2 t5 game. Well played mickar.
