So I started a new campaign for 7.0.
Found one neighbor, the Perdus Magnus, two jumps from Sol. Inconveniently, their home is the secondary star which puts them about 10bkm from the jump gate. This made the invasion and their subsequent integration into the empire a bit of a logistical challenge, but we sorted them without much fuss and only one lost ship, a civilian tanker.
They did an odd thing I've never seen before from NPRs: They put extremely strong garrisons at their remote mining colonies. The few defending units at their homeworld were easily knocked over. The 1st Infantry Division rolled them in about three weeks. Defending garrisons at the remote mining sites were much tougher. The 1st was outgunned and we had to wait until we could bring in two brigades of the 3rd Marine Division to reinforce them. Even then, the fights at Perdus Magnus-A asteroids #34 and #42 took several months each, and consumed 3-4 replacement battalions each.
Those creepy aliens with the supercarriers who leave no wreckage or lifepods (we usually call them the Tyranids) were present in Proxima Centauri, one jump from Sol. They had a 60,000-tonner which, near as I can tell, is one of their smaller carriers. I've seen them as big as 200k in earlier games.
We've explored about 36 systems. The new jump-point rules are terrific. It makes a much more interesting and less crowded map.
Oddly, we've found absolutely no trace of the aliens that we usually call the "Necrons." These are the ones that tend to be present in small strength in a great many systems, and also frequently emerge from ancient ruins. Seems like in previous games we've found these little devils in every third or fourth system. We don't know what to make of their apparent absence. I've double-checked the universe config and we've definitely checked the box which enables them.
We created the game with one NPR, and we strongly suspect that the Perdus Magnus were they. They bore signs of old age, such as explorer craft with over 10 years in the field and many remote-mining colonies. (These data aren't conclusive, however. We didn't precisely measure the time, but it's possible that ten years passed from the time that we first met the Perdus Magnus until the glorious unification of our two worlds beneath the standard of the Senatus Populusque Solari.) We created another NPR after absorbing the Perdus Magnus, and we've permitted NPRs to spawn other NPRs, so there's at least one more NPR out there and possibly several.
In ~2055 we detected a hostile transit in the Sol System, at a JP out beyond Uranus' orbit and consequently far past the range of our thermal sensors. An immediate search turned up no sign of any ship. It may have left quickly, or more likely just hasn't blundered into our searchers. The Sol system is very large. Chastened by this failure, we're rapidly improving our thermal sensors in Sol and deploying more listening posts in surrounding systems. Never again will an alien fleet reach the Sol system unobserved.
