"Playing with Abundant Native Life makes the game much more difficult, unless you are the Gains, when it offers a cruicial advantage. It also offers a 25% bonus to your score in the end, and greatly increases the value of projects like the Xenoempathy Dome and Pholus Mutagen.

If you are playing for score, enable both the Amundant Life Forms and Iron Man options which respectively add 25% and 100% bonuses. They can be restricting, but they pose a great challenge for a champion player." - RR

"Try to pact with as many people as you can anytime during the game. Build unimportant bases near mind worms and such which are sure to get destroyed the very next turn. Trade them away for powerful bases near the enemy hq. If your not playing with Ironman, then build lots of probes. Save. Probe pact brothers for money, then buy their bases and steal your money back. Get the factions to hate each other this way or to get them to have a common enemy. If you get caught then load. Do this till the hq is the only thing left. Then finish the enemy with a small attack force cause he's broke and only has one base. Sabotage things like perimeter defense first before attacking." - Elemental_FIRE

"when you have the tech, put probe technology on a ship body. that way you can steal tech from sea bases" - dallaswalsh

"As Giains, start on a (preferably) medium+ map and go exploring. Find a patch of fungus outside of your territory (islands work best) and build a few scout units to wander through the fungus. You will get mind work recruits, which can follow the fungus throughout the map, exploring all the land. When you get ships, build ships and start exploring for islands to forage for mind worms. Also build ships to forage for isle of the deep far away from your territory.

Once you've got a small island with no factions on it, plant fungus in every square and farm for worms. Using this method, you get a large, free army that is good against all units (with moral of course)" - Zap