Help getting started

My current start tends to go something like this:

1. Build a Capital Shipyard.
2. Build resource gatherers in home system (Crystal first, then Metal)
3. Set the first (free) Cap ship building (the one with Colonise)
4. Set 3 Scouts building.
5. As the Scouts are built, send them to the nearest worlds and set them on auto-explore.
6. If there is a colonisable asteroid nearby, send the Cap ship to it (asteroid planets are only defended by a couple of frigates). Once captured, build resource gatherers and upgrade colony population to maximum (only one upgrade for asteroid planets).
7. If there are no asteroids, build a few light frigates to support the Cap ship (5-10), create a fleet and send it to nearby planets to cap them. Develop as per asteroids, above (might have to wait for full population upgrades, as they add up).

After that, it's a case of looking at the layout of the planets and phase lanes and trying to grab at least four or five. I tend to build a couple of civilian research stations on my home planet and do the final population upgrade on it asap, then research important techs (ability to colonise ice and volcanic planets being very high on the list).

Buy and sell metals and crystals from the black market to balance cash, metal and crystals.

Pirates are fairly easy to avoid, just bump the bounty on opponents to make sure you're not the target for the next raid.

Oh, and your starting planet is automatically set as your capital - no need to move it for quite a while.

Sounds like you're playing a map where you start with no capital? Most maps do have you starting with one, so you may just need to try another.

Exactly what I was thinking. If you have to take the time and resources to set up a planet as your home, that'll set you back some.

Oh, and snipe the pirate bounty at the very last second to send em off to the enemy. Don't waste your time before it gets to the end cause the AI will just make it bigger.

Excellent point about pirates.

I've found that you are allowed launch time of the pirates before sniping the bounty. Wait until you hear the announcement or shortly thereafter ~30s max after 0 count is reached, it will stay at 0 before pirates decide who to attack. If you wait long enough the AI won't have time to increase again. Otherwise you will be notified that your bounty has increased again after this. Go back and raise it another 250. Working this up I was paying ~1500c every 15 minutes to stave off attacks increasing between 250-500 credits each time they attacked the AI. I had to increase bounty while mine didn't wear down since it was never claimed. Eventually, you can drop this by building a defense fleet and allowing the pirates to attack a couple turns.

Paying a lot for bounty staving is actually an advantage once you have income superiority. You will drain the enemy credits in a bounty-race. Coupled with uprisings if you have the research will allow for gains by attrition even with slightly inferior land holds.

Two more starting questions. Using the Map Designer I start out on a small two player no pirates map. When I look in the preview and playing, look with scouts, all the unclaimed planets have militia ships in them with up to heavy cruisers. That means I can't colonize any planets until I can research and build a fleet to defeat the militia heavy cruiser fleets. By the time I get to that point, the AI is on my doorstep with capital ships. Question, is there a way to get rid of the militia fleets on Map Designer maps just to start a few games for learning? You can't learn anything if the AI is so overpowering you can't even get off your home world.

Alternate question. Is there a way to mod the production/research speed of the AI to tailor the game to your skill level?

The ability to scale the strength of the AI is a major selling point for all strat games. Without it, players will get frustrated and move on to another game that they can tailor to their own playing style.

Make sure you set the neutral colonies slider to 0, that's what spawns some heavy militia fleets with stationary defenses.

However, the normal "few ships around the planet" is always there, there's no way to disable it. You never need a large fleet to take care of them, in most cases a level 3 capital and a few frigates are enough to take out the heaviest "spawns".



Not currently These changes are global, modding it changes it for all the players (or desynchs in Multiplayer unless the other human players have the same changes)

Hmm...I've only managed to run through the tutorials and start a game on the small beginner map before I had to switch this off. Is it always the case that planets have a few frigates in the vicinity when you show up? I assumed that they were exploration fleets from the AI player, and couldn't understand why they opened fire as soon as I showed up.

Feel better now I know they were actually "neutral" militia vessels - I though the diplomacy model had been thrown out or something.

I follow the same general process as others have outlined. Two small changes, though:

1) I build two Civic research buildings asap, to research volcanic and ice planet colonization. I also either research the trade center building, which dramatically increases your cash flow early on (TEC don't need any more buildings, Vasari & Advent need to build a 3rd).

2) I use pirates as free training for new cap ships. Because pirates attack the closest, richest planet, I park my new cap ships and a small fleet at that planet. I find this allows me to vastly out-level (and thereby out-perform) enemy cap ships.

Try a different map. I've found that most of them set you up with a fully upgraded planet except Fertile Crescent or whatever that Small map is called. Paying to set your capital on the ONLY planet of your empire is ridiculous and I refuse to play those maps until they're fixed.

>> Not currently These changes are global, modding it changes it for all the players (or desynchs in Multiplayer unless the other human players have the same changes) <<

Right. That's why the construction and research loops have to be spawned threads off the main loop so they can be fed parameters from the main where they can be controled. But that has to be built into the design from day one. It's hard to add those sub loop parameters without having to break apart the whole design and factor out the AI functionality. They have to be independant of the main loop timing for it to work.

Still, a single control from 1 to x that, applied to parameters that control AI speeds for research and construction, allow the user to scale the difficulty of the game in a basic way that adds greatly to the value of the game.