Yesterday my group played a game where I happened into a somewhat difficult to pull off but basically unbeatable tactic. I started on a copper planet (we refer to the metals as copper, silver, and gold by the colors of the card, as we are all veteran fantasy game players, and that paradigm is well established) and my three opponents started with copper, food, and fuel. My first move was to fly my ship to another system and landed on an alien planet. I drew the "alien blueprints" artifact, allowing me to later build a ship for only two different ores. Through trading and the other copper player producing resources, I ended up in the second turn with five copper, two silver, and three gold as my entire resource hand. I played a build card as my first action and produced three ships, followed by a ship scoring card and a movement card. I now had an insurmountable ship lead, and a presence in five different systems, guaranteeing me at least a couple turns of dominance in system presence scoring. Additionally, I landed two of my ships on copper planets, allowing me four production each time that metal was produced. The net effect was that I could guarantee dominant scoring in two of my score cards, and at least rack up four points (if not seven) just dumping the four copper on the same/different scoring card. Needless to say, I gave up resource harvesting completely and pressed the scoring advantage mercilessly for a victory at my first action of the fifth turn.

Sounds like you had a solid victory. How come you could move that many ships? I can imagine people not wanting to trade energy with you

Ships make their first move for free, so I never had to spend a single energy to move

Very nice play . . . . though it hinged a lot on a luck of the draw pull for that artifact, and being set up on that particular resource planet.