"Accidentally" won too soon

[slickrcbd]

I wanted to play with the Defiants and see if they were as good as I remembered, and so I started a vanilla game as the Feds on "Domination".
Yet I managed to get the AI to surrender in a little over 110 turns, never even got the second generation heavy cruisers or dreadnoughts, let alone Defiants.

I was using the knowledge from my last post about finance, apparently having played with improper knowledge before made me that much better now that I had better finance.
Then again, I was playing on easy mode with me starting at tech 5 and everybody else at 4, I was more interested in testing the finance exploits than a challenge.

Is the game really that easy on easy mode or was I just lucky?

Basically, I had one of my starting systems turning out a transport every turn to be scrapped except when another system was building a ship (until I got more dilithium worlds).

[thunderchero]

If you were playing vanilla on easy it is that simple and giving AI -1 tech disadvantage makes it even easier.

Plus vanilla only requires a 67% of galaxy to get message. even though user guide says it should be 75% see this topic
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1331&p=18759&sid=52 ... 0f2#p18759

So if you had 14 of the total 20 systems held by majors game over.

The real challenge would be to dominate without meeting any majors lol
and yes it should be possible if you built nothing but colony ships and terraformed only 1 planet just to get system count high enough before other majors.