I don't know why you keep saying that what I said is a strawman when it is quite obvious it is not.
I don't know, judging by the posts that are being upvoted and downvoted, it seems like most people do not find it "quite obvious". Quite the opposite, it seems.
I certainly don't think you're actually responding to the argument that I made, and being the person who did indeed make the argument, if anyone should notice, that's me, right?
Wide is conquest because that is what distinguishes it from tall. Growth=/= playing wide. Tall empire must also expand their economy, if you do not know how to expand your economy you are just bad at the game.
If both playstyles are done by people who are good at the game, tall will colonise habitable planets and wide empires colonise habitable planets. This is how the game works for everyone tall or wide. Tall and wide empires both expand.
So how does a wide empire become wider? How does a wide empire become bigger than a tall empire? The only solution is that the wide empire will do lots of early war and the tall empire will not.
That is how it must work necessarily.
If you think wide = expanding and you want to play the game with only your starting planet with no expansion ever and expecting your economy to equal someone that is actually playing the game and has more than the starting 1 planet then I don't know what to tell you, that's not even playing tall that's a self imposed limit that isn't beneficial. Maybe you are doing a challenge run I don't know.
No, nothing of this is even close to what I said.
The error you're making, or maybe intentional misrepresentation, is still that you pretend that going wide through conquest is just the act of conquering territory, and then there's nothing more to it. But that's quite obviously not it, since these planets must also be turned into a useful extension of your empire.
That's why for strategies that are not designed to be hyperoptimized, going wide is usually a back and forth between conquest and build-up, not building nothing but corvettes and ignoring the development of your planets all game long. You're pretending like my argument is that a wide empire is only about conquest, but nobody even hinted at that because everybody knows it's nonsense.
Gaining territory, and turning that territory into something useful go hand in hand. The point I made is that gaining territory and building it up is much stronger than just building up the territory that you have. The empire that makes the most progress it the empire that can expand the most
without neglecting their internal development. It is not just "the empire that expands the most". If things to particularly bad, you may even find yourself in the situation where you need to sit back and tech up for a while before you're competitive again, but in the long run, the strength that you gain from being bigger is immense.
That's why for very optimized strategies focused on gaining as much power as possible, the goal is usually to combine continuous expansion with internal development - made possible only by the fact that the AI is pretty weak right now, and that some strategies are just extremely good at it.
Also I must ask do you what a hypothetical is?
It means an imagined example. A hypothetical is not a strawman it is a hypothetical.
All you are saying is that the other poster did not mention about the corvette spam strategy, why yes that is because it is a hypothetical to prove a point.
The hypothetical is either wrong or right. So you can look at the quotes again and re examine them.
A hypothetical, yes. But a hypothetical that is created as a counter argument to a point, but does not actually relate to that point, and instead tackles a version of the argument that is simplified and twisted to absurdity, is indeed just what it appears to be - a strawman.
As can be seen here my hypothetical does actually correspond to Ryika's gripe that the benefits from conquest are unreasonable (absurd) and my argument in response, if the benefits are unreasonable, why is that only some people instead of all people do a corvette rush in order to expand as much as possible?
Funnily enough, the people who care about minmaxing do exactly that.
That's why multiplayer games generally have a 20, or sometimes 30, year period of white peace at the start of the game: Without these rules, the game devolve into an early rush meta that is usually won by the person with the luckier start, and then the game's practically over due to the immense economical gain - unless the weaker players can team up against the bigger guy.
So when the _competitive_ scene agrees on rules against a certain strategy, then that should tell you something, because these are the guys who care about optimization. And then still, do you know what people do during that phase of white peace? Yeah... they gear up to conquer their neighbors as soon as they're allowed to, because that's still the best way to gain power.
That's also why those year 2250 x25 Endgame Crisis runs are all played with a Driven Assimilator focused on endless conquest and assimilation. They're pretty much the kings at turning conquest of AI empires into progress and progress into more conquest without ever having to stop taking territory while progressing. Total War + not having to purge your pops is a godlike combination in that scenario.
So why doesn't everybody do that all the time? Well, for starters, it's pretty difficult to do it right if you've never done it. But mainly, probably because not everybody cares about mixmaxing everything all the time, and playing like that it not particularly fun for most people once you've done it a few times. And not particularly challenging either, since an early rush essentially just abuses the AI's inability to play a good early game, and from that point on, you'll already be superior towards the rest of the galaxy.
In summary, I think people generally don't play Stellaris just to optimize the fun out of it.
Anyway.. I've spend way too much time writing this post in the hope that you may yet be able to understand that you're grossly misunderstanding, and misrepresenting, the people you're arguing against. If your response is again just some simplified nonsense that ignores half of what I've said, I think I'll just ignore you from now on.
