I was pretty sure I was losing this one despite my good map. I made the mistake of exploring east early, and when first contact was made in 17,21 and 18,19 I was very surprised. I scrambled to recover, pop tricking with 18,23 and 19,22. Not the greatest pop trick when your opponent is south and west. Horny beat me to 18,20, which had almost 100 min/food. What a crazy planet. Horny then tricked that system, and I retricked with 17,21 and 20,20. 17,21 was a nice system, and when horny nuked it I was quite dismayed. He had a commanding economy lead, and with that mad builder controling the south map, I wasn't too optimistic. So I built tech, doing nothing else for a long time. When I hit BR5, I overbuilt to the max at BRD and started the long trek south to the massive builder. Horny apparently figured I was BR4, and built a matching fleet, or so he thought. I smashed it, but I lost my sweeper. I didn't know that I was going to be able to actually nuke with this fleet, so I had only built one to go with my sci. I nuked 17,20 while moving in just enough attacks to 18,20 to blow the minefield while moving my second sweeper down from my homeworld. I was overjoyed to see the builder drop to 49 population from 101. I don't know why it happened, but it did. I moved my three attacks onto the defenseless planet, and the sweeper got into position to the west. Once I nuked that, the rest was easy.