So far the worst game ever

You are joking, right ?

If you're playing Diplomacy/Trinity, try starting up Entrenchment. AI is not nearly as tough.

 

If you really find yourself hopeless, get online and ask someone to help you out in a team game.  You're playing pretty horribly if easy AI can get you.  There are probably some fairly important things you've missed that will show up in that setting.  I'll do it myself if you don't mind the satellite latency.

 

I'll second the entrenchment recommendation though, the beefed up pirates and near competent ai do make diplomacy a lot harder.  I had to change tactics for those damned pirates.

Tbh I can't see how get get defeated in every game. It'd be extremly helpfull if you could describe what happens so we can narrow down our thoughts about what's wrong

I just re-downloaded the game.  I've never so muched as finished a game, so maybe you and me can learn off each-other?

 

Don't be a quiter!

I'm struggling with ship production.  I never have enough crystal, I can't expand much.  AI comes straight for me (within 20 min).  It doesn't matter what difficulty adjustments I make. (does easy mean the AI gets resources easier or that they take it easier on me?  I don't know and there is no manual to tell me and It doesn't make a discernable difference either way)  I even set it up with a large map with one other race.  They expanded and came for me with infinite ships- Accross 3 star systems within half an hour.  The minefields I set out did nothing to slow them down.

The tutorial was a joke

I'm baffled that I'm having such trouble as I've never had this kind of problem with any other game and when I look for tips online I just find tons of blogs ranting about how wonderful the game is.

 

Psycho has an idea that may or may not help.

 

I'd be interested in trying without the 'diplomacy' just need help getting rid of it since I downloaded all three together.

then just use the entrenchment execution file

each game has its own execution file so you don't need to worry about Diplomacy yet then dont, go to Entrenchment and play there (the pirates are also a hell of a lot easier, too easy actually)

*Don't forget to use the black market.  If you *need* a particular resource and have excess of another, you can acquire what you want.  The inefficiency of the market is often worth dealing with.

*Always remember to do infrastructure improvements on your planet to make the underdevelopment tax go away - 1 level on asteroids, 2 levels on planets.  If you don't do this, the planet will actually COST you money.

*Understand that the "long range frigate" class of ship is the bread and butter ship in this game, not the "light frigate".  LF's certainly have a role, but a common mistake I made when I was new was building too many LF's and not enough LRF's.

*Repair bays are your friend - a repair bay with 3 point defenses built inside the range of the bay plus a fleet will mince pirates/early AI fleets.  If you need more stationary defenses, you can add hangars and more guns but the best defense is a fleet garrisoned at the planet.

*Are you playing with quick start shut off?  Build a cap factory FIRST (the first ship is free) followed by a crystal extractor

*I would recommend building your battleship, carrier (w/ fighters), or colony cap ship as your first ship, they are straightforward to use

*Learn the counters of the game - long range frigates beat light frigates, light frigates beat flak frigates/all cruisers but "heavy" cruisers, fighters beat long range frigates and bombers", flak beats fighters, bombers beat capitals

[edit] there is a lengthy manual inside your stardock games/sins/ folder, its a lengthy pdf that will also break down every ship/building in the game.

I got stomped my first 2 or 3 games on Vanilla Sins. It takes a bit of time and practice to get the hang of things. Best thing you can do is start on a small map with one other AI player (and I'd recommend Entrenchment -- Diplomacy has some issues with pirates being over powered). Aside from that, follow the tips above and you should do alright.

 

Just start out with the original plain Sins and not Entrenchment or Diplomacy.  You'll only have two tech trees to consider, not counting the fleet tech tree which is pretty straightforward.  Sins is a really great game--you just need to learn some of the basics.  Also, go to the strategy discussion forum and read Raging Amish's pinned unit disucsison guide.

The very first thing you want to do is to build your capital ship factory and your crystal extractor.  Then order 2 scout ships.  Then queue up orders to build your metal extractor.  Send the scout ships each to individual gravity wells and continue ordering them to scout.  You might also set them to auto-explore.  Make sure that you've looked at every gravity well connected to your home planet.  Sell about 300 metal at an opportune time and buy 100 crystal at a good price.  Then upgrade your home planet's population cap.  The capital ship factory should be done by now, so choose a capital ship--choose a mothership that can colonize--go with an Akkan (TEC), Progenitor (Advent), or Evacuator (Vasari) and choose Colonize for your first ability.  In the meantime you should have found your nearby asteroid.  This is the easiest thing to colonize and it's cheap to colonize, so send your mothership there, kill the militia siege frigate and order it to colonize the asteroid.  Upgrade the planet population on the asteroid (wait a few seconds if you are Advent so that you get a 15% off discount) and then order the building of the metal and crystal extractors.  Then make as many military labs as you need to be able to research your long range fighting frigate--LRM (TEC--2 military labs), Illuminator (Advent--3 military labs), Assailant (Vasari--1 lab) and start pumping them out.  Take other nearby planets other than ice and volcanic.  At some point build two civics labs so you can take ice and volcanic.

Now, set your ships to "hold position" so that they won't suicidally charge towards large enemy fleets individually, one by one.  Try to keep your ships bunched together.  Let the computer AI send its ships one-by-one to your bunched up fleet.  Also, focus fire them on one enemy ship one at a time.  Queue up attack orders by holding down Shift and clicking different enemy ships.

I hope that helps.  Maybe start out with games that only have 2 or 3 AI opponents on smaller maps.

Also, make sure that you have LOCKED TEAMS turned on!  This is very important because otherwise all of the AI is liable to ally themselves with each other and gang up on you at some point.  In other words--turn off the diplomacy aspect of the game for now so that no one can form alliances and everyone is everyone's blood enemy, which means the AIs will fight each other.

I also think that the Tutorial is pretty good for teaching the basic mechanics of the game.  After every couple games you should go through it again to see if you can pick up something else from it.  Going over it a couple times helped me out a lot.

Definitely play regular (AKA Vanilla) Sins. Its an exectuable file and it should be in the start menu with Sins- Entrenchment and Sins - Diplomacy. Dirty Sanchez advice for starting out will get you going. Most importantly though (a mistake soo many new players make) is underdevelopment tax. If you mouse over a planet and where it says "Tax" is red, it is taking money from you. To correct that make sure the planets infrastructure is upgraded. It took me several games to figure out that red = bad and green = good. You can also mouse over where it displays how many creits you have to get a breakdown of where your moneyis coming from. If any of those numbers are red, go make sure your infrastructure there is upgraded.

The tech trees can be a bit overwhelming at first. But Id recommend spending some time to look at the descriptions of each tech as they become available for you to research. To start off, I'll tell you that the ones that unlock units are generally the most valuable. Second to that are the ones that upgrade your units health, shields, Armor and weapon damage. Those will all be in the military tree. In the civivs tree, look out for the techs that allow you to build trade ports and culture beacons, as well as the two techs that allow you to colonize ice and volcanic worlds.

lol you got to be kidding. I can beat 3 unfair AI's before the 1hr mark. and your telling me you find this game too hard?

read the forums, get tips and kick some ass!

Thanks for the advice guys- Pirates weren't a problem (I found where I could turn them off), neither were the gray small ships that were found in smaller numbers.

Tech tree was overwhealming.  I still don't know why when I set the AI on easy they seemed to have unlimited resources and ships.  I will investigate just playing vanilla until I get used to how the game works and will take another look at the tutorial. 

This looks like it should be fun- kinda a mix of Ages of empires style game, starcraft, civ, and others. I'm just as baffled as the posters who said "are you kidding?"  I've been saying this for every game I've played so far.

 

I've a sneaky suspicion that your being beaten by the pirates rather than the other players.  Have you considered turning off the pirate raids or looking at the black market screen so you can pay the pirates off to attack someone else instead?

 

also remember to upgrade your planets.  if you expand too much and the planets arent upgraded, you will have income troubles down the road.

YOU ARE NOT ALONE YOUNG PADAWAN!

 

What i do is make my own maps and start off with a RIDICULOUS amount of money.

You ARE building mines, aren't you?  I don't mean to be harsh, but if you forget that, you get almost no resources at all.

It's much tougher for brand new players to start out now in Diplomacy than it was Regular Sins because the two extra tech trees, the starbases, and the diplomacy add to the complexity.  Also, the new pirates on steroids don't help.  I don't know if the Pirates were buffed up in Regular and Entrenchment, but maybe the standard start for new players should be Regular Sins with Locked Teams and Pirates Off?

Haree's egg sucking academy for Sins

 

1) Upgrade any planets you occupy as soon as you can. It's the Planet Icon with a wireframe going over it when you click on a planet and then it is the top left option in that sub menu.  It's something like Planet Infrastructure, it allows more population (more income and safer planets) and also more importantly stops new planets COSTING you money and starts them EARNING you money.  Hint:  The Home Planet always starts off with 1 upgrade not being done, I recommend against AI you spend your starting resources to do this.

2) Build a Cap Ship Factory as soon as you can at your homeworld and get one Capital Ship built, the first Cap you build is FREE!

3) 1 or 2 Research stations of either type are worth getting.  In the Tech trees the stuff on the left is the cheapest and best value for money.  The upgrade for Terran planets is often a good investment if your homeworld starts as one.

4) Still failing?  Set up a game with something like 3v3 in 1 star system.  You can make the AIs on your team more powerful, watch what they are doing.  They may not be the best tacticians in the world but sounds like you could learn from them anyway.

5) Build Resource Collector mines at captured planets.  They are from the Logistic Upgrade icon (Looks like a cog if I remember right) and then the 2 icons on the left hand side, top and bottom are for building mines.  Do this as soon as you can, more often than not the first thing you build.

6) You can buy Crystal or Metal on the blackmarket if you really need it quickly.  Either do this on the Black Market screen or in the top right of your screen are 2 quick buttons.

7) When the pirates are nearly raiding then make sure you don't lose the bidding war!

8) At the start of the game build as many scouts as you have phase lanes coming out of your homeplanet and as they get built right click the Mangifying Glass icon they have as an ability.

9) Gun defences at planets aren't that helpful other than to back up other defences such as hanger bays, repair bays and star bases.

10) In the long term try to catch a planet that will be a choke point, get it well defended, upgrade it's planet infrastructure and also it's planet defences so that it will be able to take bombardment longer.  Use of a Star Base at that planet is recommended.  All Star Bases have a researchable ability that means you don't lose control of a planet until after the Star Base has been destroyed, this can be invaluable in high threat areas that you don't have your main fleets near.

Yup- I build mines right away. I build scouts and tell them to do their thing. I build  the capital ship and a few of the light frigates at the start.  I group them up.  I do upgrade the planets and place a few research stations.  I research to get trade ports (but by this time I'm nearly on the chopping block), increase my capital ship cap, and try to research armor and weapons.

Perhaps I am not giving proper attention to my armies. I basically made groupings of varied types of ships and told them to go to the place I was being attacked and let them do thier thing?  In one game I was able to defend for a short time but the green AI came in endless waves and wiped me out.

How quickly should research be done?  Perhaps I put too many resources in to try to build bigger and better ships.

As someone said before, your best bet in this game, until you are familiar enough with it to de more effective stuff, is to spam LRFs (long range frigates - Javelis, Illuminator and Kanrak Assailants, respectively). Colonize 3-5 (or more if they're easily accessible or weakly defended) planets, research LRFs and start pumping them. Do not stop until you have 50+ (40 if it's illums). If you're doing military techs, research flak frigs (Garda, Defender or Sentinel - in case the enemy goes fighter-heavy) and the weapon type of your LRFs, plus some health/armor/shield upgrades, but don't spew all you got into research. The wisest man may as well be a naked fool when he takes a bullet in the face - you need a FLEET.

Spam LRFs until you encounter lots of strikecraft. Then add some flak frigs. If you went colonizer cap first (Akkan/mothership/evacuator) then it is a safe choice to take an anti-strikecraft capital ship as your second one (Kol for Flak Burst/Halcyon for Tele push/Kortul for Weapon Jam). Remember to fire those Anti-strikecraft abilities yourself.

+ never neglect civilian infrastructure upgrades on planets - a planet with no civilian upgrades reduces your income instead of adding to it.

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PS ignore mines, they suck. They're too expensive for general use! Make a fleet instead. A fleet can move and help elsewhere, a mine won't help against a ship half a screen away.

You should be able to win against the AI with no micro management of your ships.

I have found the AI very hard to beat since Diplomancy, try going to Entrenchment and see.

What map are you playing?  I find even the unfair AI on a medium-large map won't even go more than 3 or 4 jumps within the first 20 minutes.


A common beginner mistake (that I don't think has been mentioned) is purchasing population upgrades on new planets you colonize.  Newly acquired planets have an "underdevelopment tax" that can deplete your treasury if you don't quickly develop the planet.  Asteroids require one population upgrade, full-sized planets require two.

As for units, you typically want to get a variety of units fairly early.  How early depends on the proximity to your enemy homeworld, and that is why the scout is your most important unit in the first 5 minutes of the game.  Most people favour the long range frigate (assailant/javelis/illuminator) as their early-game backbone unit because of its high damage.  Cost-wise, they're actually the highest damage general-purpose units in the game.

If you have played through the tutorial and understand how to play and still get stompped by computers, an easy way is make sure the game settings are not set to fast.  Many players enjoy Fast ship speeds for online.  If you want it to be calm and learn your own strat slowly, try locked teams ( like everyone else is saying) Vs. 1 easy comp and side your self with 2 other hard A.I.s  Watch what the computer does, turn off pirates cause they will slow you down.  The computer will always rush with A cap ship + 10 to 20 ships.  However (TEC) build a repair station, and have your fleet waiting at the entry point of your base, they will attempt to fight you there.  Your reapir station will help you from losing your ships and the AI wont try to lure you out of its range :)  A few def building will help as well.  Try a level where you have one way in and one way out.  So you can focus on the one entry point at the front part of your base.  Levels where you can get hit from all sides Make it difficult to get a good Defense down.  Good Luck, if all else fails go online and look for someone who will teach you step by step how to play.

 

Requirment Play tutorial first!!!!