Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares/Planning and winning wars

Now fo the fun stuff - you've earned it, after all that careful management of your economy.

Like most of this guide, the pages contained in "Planning and winning wars" are about Medium and larger galaxies - Small galaxies are very different because blitz races are very common there and very rare in other galaxies.

Need to plan carefully
You need to make sure that your campaigns strengthen your empire rather than weakening it. Traps you need to avoid include:
 * Leaving your existing colonies vulnerable. Conquering an enemy colony and losing one of your established colonies is a very bad deal:
 * If you managed you economy well, your colonies are among the most productive in the galaxy.
 * A newly-conquered population sulks, and will not be fully productive for 10 to 60 turns, depending on the size of its population.
 * Your economic and technological strategy is optimized for your original race and may not work so well for other colonies populated by other races. The worst case is usually that if your race is Tolerant you can't research pollution-control techs; and if a conquered colony has a non-Tolerant population (including Natives) and no pollution-control buildings, and the conquest gave you no pollution-control techs, the conquered colony will be severely slowed down by pollution.
 * Needing such a large fleet to conquer enemy colonies and then defend them that the maintenance cripples your finances (10 BC per 1 CP deficit).
 * Needing to feed large conquered populations, which will cost you money and divert people from research (mainly) or production into farming. This is particularly difficult for Lithovores, as they only allowed to research 1 farming tech, which is fairly expensive to research and requires a fairly expensive building ( Weather Controller).