Yeah, get em before they get you, this can only end in tears.
Didn't end in tears quite - though it was damned close.
They went hostile, so I decided stupidly to move my missile frigates toward them at Mars, only for my poor frigates (with no anti-missile capability mind you) to get slammed by multiple waves of size 6 missiles. They tried running back to Earth, and for a moment I thought they were going to make it as they were faster than the hostile ships. Unfortunately, more missiles came in and destroyed them.
The aliens then sat at 75-80 million km out, out of range of my own planet based anti-ship missiles, and emptied their entire magazine contents at Earth. This went on for, well, god only knows how long; but my anti-missile pdc's performed admirably, with only a few dozen missiles leaking through to the planet itself - although I did lose a few other ships in orbit too.
I burnt through my entire stockpile of amm's - I had 12,000 to start with, and at the end had 200 left
So I am busy rearming and trying to improve things before they come back - I don't even know where they come from, though I've got scouts out looking.
This is my 7th attempt at a game - and finally I have a war. I went for settings of 100 star systems with 4 NPR's at the start this time - I found a 100 star map was just too big.
Oh, and there's swarm 2 systems away too
RE