The tl;dr is pick the Thoraxian start, defend yourself as best you can, increase your influence to extreme heights with every species through resource gifting, lower their public order to destroy their armadas without dropping your influence too low, then drop your attack beacon and watch as you conquer planet after planet with little to no retaliation and few, if any, ship battles.

I figured out a strategy for Betrayal that works on any difficulty since most of the difficulty changes are to your ship, though a tiny bit of early game luck is involved. I think that goes for any strategy though. This strategy involves taking advantage of the AI programming and controlling their actions in very unrealistic ways. If you prefer to win in a more fair or rp focused way, this guide isn't for you.

The strategy begins at the advanced start menu. Whatever difficulty you choose should be fine. However, you will want to pick Thoraxian for your ship. You want to do this for two reasons.

1. Thoraxians are the most unpredictable of the species from what I've experienced. The Thoraxian Queen will potentially attack you regardless of how good your influence with them is. We don't want that. We want simple and predictable opponents, so picking them for the starting species wipes them out immediately.

2. The Thoraxian start also provides the most ground troop strength. You want a lot of that since ground invasions are how you win.

This strategy takes a little while to get rolling unfortunately. At the start, almost everyone will at least dislike you, you won't have much for funds, your armadas won't be very strong, and you won't have many ground troops. Early game focus should be on making your armadas stronger to defend yourself until you can get some good influence with others, as well as ensuring your RCI values aren't negative. Part of this will be increasing your science and construction speed of course. I personally prefer going for a high science build to gain a tech advantage, but do whatever you find works for you.

Upgrading your armadas is going to go slowly at the start. I recommend not being shy about using your starting credits instead of xenotime early on since it's easier to get credits than resources in the early stages. A great way to get early credits, and some influence, is to go around to the already spacefaring species and expand their usable land area. This pays out quite a lot compared to most other options for getting credits, and it only raises their maximum population, which doesn't generally matter too much. This option steadily dries up as the game goes however, so don't delay on these easy credits for too long.

One species to keep an eye on is the burlusts. You really want them to be at least 0 influence so their hate spreading doesn't hurt your influence with everyone else.

Once you're safe from immediate danger, now you can start focusing inward. Build up your industrial base. Specifically, you'll want to increase your science and your resource production. Having good tech means getting those ground troop bonuses earlier, and the resources will be the main way you raise your influence to ridiculous levels through gifting. You also should ensure your RCIs are at least 0 so you don't take negatives.

Do your best to not upset any of the species, and I generally recommend you don't go into any of the ship battle quests unless you're 100% certain you will not lose. During the months you're repairing your ship if you lose, your species won't do anything while the other species will be advancing.

Now you should have a good home planet with plenty of credits and resources. Pick the species that seems most problematic and go after them first. I usually go after the evucks because they're pretty annoying with their spying and diseases.

Now we talk about how to actually conquer a planet. Drop an attack beacon on the planet, this will cause you to essentially teleport troops onto the planet as soon as all their armadas are gone. How do you get rid of those armadas? Not with your own armadas, that's for sure. Instead you want to lower their public order with sow dissent. This is what we need that massive amount of influence for. Gift them lots of resources to get their influence very high so they don't attack you while you're sowing dissent. Once public order goes negative, there's a percent chance that they'll damage an armada in orbit each month. Eventually they'll destroy all their own armadas, meaning your ground troops will attack due to the attack beacon.

Because you have the Thoraxian techs, no one should be able to stand up to your troops especially since the public order negative will also affect how many troops the enemy can field.

Now that you've conquered one planet, you'll have a higher population growth, more buildings, more strength. This means more troops, which means even more advantage. This strategy will work on everyone. You have now won Betrayal on any difficulty, congratulations! Now try to find your own strategies! ♥