A couple of them even managed to take over planets, but once I noticed that I immediately sent in some strike squadrons to free those planets from tyranny.

I started in a huge galaxy with only 10 starting empires and abundant independent worlds, and as a result some of the pirate factions have become incredibly powerful. My biggest threat so far has been pirates. Oh, and in a system near Korrabia I also found the World Destroyer that my engineers have been quietly working on for a while now under the protection of my 3rd Strike Squadron. Having those both really kick started my economy and I was also able to use it to solidify my relations with a lot of minor empires that I've now formed a series of defense pacts with. The other really good news I had in my early expansion was finding a system that not only contained Korrabia (home of the rare and valuable Korrabian spice), but also contained the equally rare and valuable Zentabia fluid. The good news is, if I do go to war, all my major colonies are defended by defensive bases that are packing both death rays and devastator pulses, so they should be able to defeat most any fleets thrown at them.

I've been fighting a proxy war against them for a while now using another empire, but that empire is getting close to collapsing so I may need to get involved directly soon. Way of the Ancients has been a huge boost to my economy, but the only downside is one of the other races found and implemented the Way of Darkness government type and because of that hates me and is far and away my closest rival. I also got fairly lucky by finding a few ancient caches that contained the Way of the Ancients government type, devastator pulse technology, and death ray technology. My start was fairly mediocre overall with a shortage of good potential colonies in the cluster I started in, but once I got a little farther and researched some new colony tech it helped, and I was able to invade an independent Mortalen colony fairly early on and used them to colonize some desert planets. I started with Humans in the Age of Shadows. I'll try to take some screenshots and post some if I can remember tonight. I got to spend a little time with the new version over the long weekend, and so far my new game is going well.

Distant worlds bacon mod