I strongly suspect you are doing something catastropically wrong, yet easy to fix.  Something like not upgrading your planets, or not expanding fast enough, or not using the black market to buy minerals.

Upgrades:

Make sure that you upgrade every planet you colonize RIGHT AWAY.  You should always have the necessary cash/crystal.  If you don't, buy whatever crystal you need before you colonize.  If you can't buy it, then wait until you can before you colonize.  But this shouldn't be an issue.  UPGRADE ASTEROIDS 1 TIME.  UPGRADE ALL OTHER PLANET TYPES 2 TIMES, RIGHT AWAY, BACK-TO-BACK.

Expanding:

Don't dilly-dally around.  You should always be expanding.  ALWAYS.  As soon as the game starts, you need to drop a capship factory, build the COLONIZING CAPSHIP, drop your 2 civil labs, research ice and volcano, and start expanding.

Black Market:

If you don't have crystal or metal when you need it, buy it at the black market.  If you don't have cash when you need it, sell crystal or metal to get the cash.

Make sure you turn off pirates.  I'd recommend playing the Entrenchment expansion, so you can use starbases to defend yourself.  Start with easy AI, and set it to defender.  Make sure you are only playing against a single AI.  Play a small, random map.

Do these things and I don't see how you can lose.

Also, bear in mind the differences between ships and what they counter:

Light Frigates (LF): Support Cruisers

Long Range Frigates (LRF): LF and do well against most anything else

Flak Frigate (FF): good against Strikecraft (SC) and decent against LRF

Fighters: Good against LRF and Bombers; decent against LF

Bombers: Good against cruisers, capitals, starbases, structures, etc

Heavy Cruisers: Good against pretty much everything

Capitals: While they do have good damage, don't think they will deal the majority of your fleet's damage.

Really, I think part of the problem a lot of people have is the overuse of capitals and not understanding the value of LRF's.  Also, don't bring out carriers until you can really start making them in large numbers.  Oh, and one more thing..  Make sure that you don't go for trade routes until you have a good sized empire (5-6+ planets)

Between the people who are giving helpful advice here and ditching Diplomacy (for now), it has gotten a little better.  I at least played for longer and still have not been wiped out :)   I think I am still missing something about fighting but it is finally getting better.  I found a planet that is the bottleneck (?) between myself and the green AI. I need to figure out how to take control of it-- it is a pirate planet.  I assume since they are still there after disabling the pirates that disabling the pirates is like taking away the roving barbarians from civ (stationary are still there, they just don't come to you)....

I will continue to re read all your good advice to make sure I catch it all.  I can be persistent if I see some improvment.

Pirates are exactly that, they are still there, but aren't actively seeking to raid your empire. A pirate base makes an excellent choke point if its the only one between you and your opponent, as it makes fleets trying to pass through subject to attack by the pirate forces gurading the base, and if you take it out and colonize it, its gives you a decent credit amount of income and offers a good deal of tactical slots. I would leave the pirates alone until you have a force that could certainly wipe it out. I would recommend Attacking the defending pirate base with bombers and heavy cruisers. Get yourself around 20-30 bombers squadrons and 10-15 heavy cruisers as the meat of your fleet. Adding extra ships (like hoshikos!) beyond that is certainly helpful, but having that meat will guarantee that you kill all the pirates and keep your losses low. Set your fleet to "Attack local area only" so they dont go wandering off and take needless damage from the defense platforms around the base. The pirates will come to you to attack, so let them. After your bombers have shredded the pirates, you can let them dismantle the turrets on their own, or have them focus on a few so you can start bombing the base itself (its a tough little cookie with 6000hp and takes a while to bomb) without taking damage from them. Bring your cap ship along for lots of XP.  Once you colonize it, you'll find that it doesnt offer any logistics slots, but has plenty of tactical upgrades AND is already upgraded to maximum health (though it must, like all planets, slowly build up to it). you'll also find that, while it doesnt have a population, it DOES have a little effect called plundered booty that gives you an additional 3.5 credits per second.

Slap up some defenses there and you can build up your fleet to start attacking your opponents side of the map.

Take it slow. If you're outnumbered, fall back to your defenses and build more ships until you aren't outnumbered and attack again.

Also another tip for you. Repair bays are one of the BEST defensive structures, because they allow your fleet to defend against enemy fleets that are significantly larger. If you;re playing as TEC, you can upgrade your repair bays to heal twice as much as they would without it. In the military tree its tier two, in between the tech that allows you to bud them, and the tech that allows you to build hoshikos. You can research this tech twice to have your repair bays heal 40hp per second, as opposed to 20. Putting 2 or 3 of these structures up will keep your fleet, defenses and each other (if you place them within range of eachother) healthy. Just be sure that when you're defending, you keep your fleet nearby these structures. You can press "ALT" to see how far their repair can reach.

Id imagine you're also having trouble with enemy siege frigates sneaking in and bombing your planets. To take care of those pesky critters I recommend using the hangar bay defensive structure, and loading them all up with fighters. Fighters do extra damage to siege frigates and can kill them super fast.

Ha ha ha

What a nice discussion)))) The guy has tread on fan's corns Revenge is coming! 

____________________________________

Moldava

I thought I was doing better, but I wasn't.  That was right before they came and kicked my ass.  Not sure how they got so many ships to me after having to eat away at those Pirates.  Then I played another game and had 4 planets and was trying to build an army to use as a blocking point and they started coming in in massive waves. cap ships go down quickly, I had focused alot on the LRF's but had made sure to produce a variety of other ships.

I was curious, so I saved and reloaded as the AI.  they had every other planet colonized, half their research trees finished, and huge armies at every planet.  This is set on EASY?!?!?!?  Are you guys sure that easy is that they go  easy on me, not that it is super easy for them????

When on easy mode, the AI receives I believe half the resource income you do.  Should they be on vicious or the like, they'll be making many times more income than you.

So, either you are expanding very very slowly, were playing a vicious AI, or found a huge bug.

EDIT: Actually, there is another option...  What map were you playing?  If you were playing Gaian Crescent or some other small map, that could be why.  The rule of thumb is that if you survive the AI for the first hour, you will probably win.  I think you should try a larger map on entrenchment such as gateway with an AI ally set to medium aggressive and have two enemies which are both set to easy defensive.  That ought to help you some for getting the hang of things.  I think your problem may be that you are playing on too small a map to effectively get yourself going.  Try a slightly larger map first as it is going to give you more time to respond to threats...

im guessing this has already be mentioned but im in a hurry so i didn't read every post here, so sry if this is double,

a couple a things new players seem to forget (i did at first) was expansion, development and the first free capital ship,

the first thing you should build is a capital ship factory and build a capital ship (first one is free) i usualy go for the ship that can colonise so i don't need a colonizer-frigate. also you should start building 2 non-miilitary research bases because on of the planets is either an ice or a vulcanic one. use your capital ship and a couple a frigates to secure the astroid next to you and then make your way to the ice/vulcanic, this can be done within.. 10 minutes i think? and then you have 3 planets, important, as soon as you get a planet research the populance-thing, (this will increase the amount of inhabitents) and makes sure the planet becomes profitable, if you don't research it at least once then the planet sucks credits instead of give it to you trough tax,

at this point its up to your way of playing, but you should always go and try to expand your empire (scout frigates are good to give you an idea which way the juicy planets are)

if you have 3 planets, i think you should start considering to increase your fleet-size and maybe your capital ships as well, if you have the possiblity to do so then do so, depending on the amount of presure you receive from your opponent invest into military or research,

if your still not managing, go play a 2 vs 1 game where you have an ally, locked teams might be helpfull here, and just try stuff out, while maybe taking notes from your AI ally

Not really...  Don't get ice/volc research immediately.  You need LRF's more.  For that reason, your first few labs should go into military.  By the time you have 3-4 planets, I would say its okay if you have the cash to get the labs up for ice/volc.

Also, as soon as you get a civilian lab up, get the terran upgrade.  It will help in the long run, especially on small maps where most of your income comes from one terran planet (and if playing Gaian Crescent, its awesome).

Just remember in regards to the civilian tree, an economy supports your fleet.  That is critical, and you must remember that.  Otherwise, you end up as an industrial juggernaut with nothing to defend yourself.  Expand constantly.  The most important stat in the game is colonization.  The AI will have way more ships, defenses, and income than I will, but so long as I have more planets, I will eventually win out.  That is the key.  In the long run, you have to have the majority of planets or AI bonuses (when playing on hard or better) will cream you otherwise...

Maybe something still isn't right with the game and it needs a 1.02 patch.  It shouldn't be that difficult to beat up on the Easy AI.  Maybe you could take one of your game replay files (a .record file) and upload it somewhere and see if you can get someone to look it over and tell you what they think you are doing wrong or how you could improve.

Yeah LRF are critical. Even more so as the harder AI first few fleets will be 99% LF.

lrf are critical only in entrenchment and lower sins and anyway if u rely on only lrfs and illums the game must be boring for u knowing u isnt getting the best battles out of it .mix fleets ftw and the spam doesnt work anyway if u got a good mix fleet. 70 lrfs in entrenchment is nothing they will die fast ive takin them out pretty quick and got tired of them just sending one type of ship at me so now i play diplomacy where they dont just spam lrfs and illums in the 1.01 patch  and its true the vicouse ai fight smart they will wipe a station out  with a full fleet oh i forgot they will also wipe ur whole fleet out they will use all the capship abilities they will reasaerch the entire tech tree i have had the dam little rebels hit me from ai they do  lvl up the starbases and anything else that can be lvled it seems ptetty dam nice for a miniaxpansion finishes the game off and the priates are not hard there fun  babiegirl4269 see if anyone gots a vent or ts then ask if they will go thru a mutliplayer game with u its a good way to laern i tought one of my buddies enough to get him going using vent .

We are talking about early game with the AI. Since the AI uses LF excusivly for the first part of the game. LRF is what you need. No matter what you end up playing though LRF will be a key part of your fleet. It has nothing to do with spamming one type of ship only.

The faster you get LRF the easier surviving the inital LF rushes are. Easier to survive and use other ships. Which is the whole point behind this topic.

You're playing backwards.  Start small and work your way up to a large game.

I'd go for a random small and just 1v1 for a while until you get yourself in shape to beat an unfair ai.  It should be an easy task for someone effectively utilizing their resources.  The bigger the playing field, the more worked over you get by minor mistakes.  Once you can take on cheating AI in a confined situation, you should be good enough to manage those large games better.

No.  Larger games give you more time to barricade yourself and prepare for an attack so their early game advantage is small enough to lose to you.

Larger map with an ally or two was almost too easy

Yeah, now scale it back until you find a difficulty that is hard-ish.  From there, work your way on up.

Foreign Invasion 3v3 is fun make 1Hard Ai 2 Normal on the opposite team and 1 Hard and 1 normal for your team.  Its basically got your team on one side and the computer on the other 2 pirate bases in the middle and uncolonizable battlefields in the middle its one of the most played maps for me until the pact thing for diplomacy.....

i'd still recommand 3 player map with 1 ally...

if there are too many players a new player might get lost and finds himself to be too late for the good parties

I'm going to clarify this... Continue to shrink down to smaller maps and eventually switch AI's to normal.  By the end, you should be able to beat hard AI's on small maps.  If you continue the process, you'll be able to beat an Unfair AI on Point Blank.

On large maps against AIs, a foolproof strategy (for me) in Entrenchment / Diplomacy, for TEC, goes something like this:

1. Build an Akkan Battlecruiser, a few Cobalt Light Frigates, and use this main fleet to start taking over colonies.

2. Build 3 civilian research stations and 3 military research stations.

3. Rush to the Raloz Heavy Constructor tech, and use Raloz cruisers to get a starbase in every sector you've colonized so far. At the same time, research Trade Port technology, and the tech that enables starbases to have trade ports.

4. "Turtle up": this means stop expanding after a certain point, and just continue to upgrade starbases. First I upgrade their merchant docks to maximum; then I upgrade their defense and weapons.

5. Throw in a few Hangar Defenses in close proximity to the starbase, and research the tech (in the Security tree) that lets hangar defense shoot at fighters. Make sure to spend all the command points (for fighters/bombers) on all the hangars.

6. Throw in a Repair Bay or two in close proximity to the starbase.

The AI (at least in Entrenchment) is too dumb to effectively attack this setup until very, very late game. Sometimes they aren't smart enough to get through it at all; I have set my game to 8x speed and went to sleep, woke up 8 hours later (8x8 = 64 game hours later!) with millions of resources and the AI hasn't destroyed any of my starbases.

Once you have this setup, you can basically expand at your own pace. Start rounding out your economy, researching higher techs, building culture, and creating a large attack fleet. Then find the nearest enemy planet and start conquering.

This strategy is only effective if you are able to pull it off fast enough. The critical step, for me, is to get that first starbase built on my most vulnerable planet, as quickly as possible, and then get its hitpoints/shields increased with upgrades. Once that is accomplished, you have a lot of time to build up further, because the AI will throw small to medium numbers of ships at that starbase and they'll just get shot down over and over. You don't even need to station any ships in the gravity well, usually.

Watch out for the rare chance that the AI will deploy massive amounts of anti-station ships (e.g. the TEC torpedo cruisers). This usually doesn't happen until your starbases are already very fortified, and you can either micromanage lots of bombers to take out the anti-station ships, or fully upgrade your starbase's weapon systems so they can fire missiles at the enemy anti-station ships.

This strategy, being a turtle strategy, means that you'll end up having a very long game, and the first half (or so) of your time will be spent defending your territory from waves of enemies. Thanks to the massive power of the TEC starbases, this defense should be feasible. Once you are successfully defending from enemy waves, it's time to flesh out your economy, followed by your fleet. Then you can swoop in for the kill in one of two ways: you can either roll your primary fleet over the enemy worlds one by one until you win, or you can take a world, fortify it all the way up (upgraded starbase etc). The latter method takes much more time, but the chance of an AI comeback decreases with each world you fortify up. The larger the map, the greater the chance you'll need to employ the slow method to prevent the AI from recapturing worlds you've sieged.

Odd I get torpedo bombers that are out of my SB range within the first hour everytime.... Lucky you and, however the Ais weak attacks and persistance in placing bountys on me allows me to lvl up my cap ships one at a time while being Mr. Turtle

actually the best learning maps for newbies is doppelgangers

I will second that. Also, turn off pirates and maybe put another AI on your team to begin with. You'll get better -- it just takes practice.

Mike

you can be great with a regular rts and then suck at sins of a solare empire, it is rts.. but its not like the others (not the ones i've played anyway)