Welcome! You probably played a lot of this game back in the 90s, so did I and I really enjoyed each and every second of it. It is still a fun game to play nowadays, if you don't mind all the micro management. You can get this game relatively easy online. Be sure to also get the AI patch called "Antagonizer". It will make the game playable casually, since the AI is really stupid if you don't use it. For speedrunning purposes, however, you will probably don't want to use it. To run the game on a modern machine use DosBox. If you don't like the very small resolution of the window, go to the install directory, start "DOSBox [version] Options.bat", change "windowresolution" to whatever you like and set "output" to "ddraw". (at least this works for Windows 10) Now run DosBox and navigate to the directory, you unzipped Ascendancy to. If you want to play without AI patch, simply start "Ascend.exe". To run with AI on, start "Antag.exe". You can also create a shortcut linking DosBox directly to an Exe-File so you can start the game just by one double-click. That's it! Have fun!

One hint for grinding runs in the winning categories: if you recognize, you are playing against the "Arbryls" (the tree guys) the run is already lost. They can lock you out of their star systems and you probably don't have weapons at hand to shoot your way through. However, this may somehow glitch into the "Conquer 2/3" winning condition. Maybe I will put some research in this topic some day. :)