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'Cause you won't have the best shields, weapons, and sensors when you build the first one. You have to have the hull size, you can't retrofit to a lagrger hull. The battle cruiser fleet should have a couple of battleship or dreadnought leaders, but this all takes time.

Now the rest of this thread has a lot of specific things to research, and that's important. But what you have to do, is focus your research. You seem to be losing the tech race, still having destroyers when your opponent has dreads, that's pretty bad.

I never research colonization tech. It's too expensive, even though it's so valuable. I always steal it. The stock AI uses slow defenceless colony ships, and will send them to the front. A destroyer with advanced engines and one boarding party will take them easily. Or trade with a neutral.

Well, I do sometimes research colonization tech, to hadicap myself. And I also have to research infrastructure technology (atmosphere conVersion, urban pacification, advanced resource extraction, computers). But I don't tie up my research queue unless I've colonized a couple of large planets and filled them with research facilities.

The most important thing to research is, for me, better research facilities. So everything happens faster. I'll even do that fairly early on PBW. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/eek.gif

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Hmm... I seem to be in first place. Cool, thanks dudes!

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Form one new player to the next... the only game I ever beat was the demo, and that was because I ran out of turns. A good tip is to start a game with everything researched to see what weapons and ship sizes you like best. Then, when you start a new game, focus on the research areas that fit your tactics best and don't worry about teh rest till later in the game.

Personally, I have never beat a full Version game, and I've been playing for slightly more than a year. The closest I ever came was a game against the Kaelons when tehy ruled two thirds of the galaxy and I had the rest. By all rights I was the winner but they would enver surrender. To actually win the game would have taken months of real playing time of just capturing worlds...

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Actually completing a game is very tedious and boring. I doubt that more than a handful of people regularly play their games all the way to completion...

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You’re kidding right? I beat this game straight from “the box”, hence why I came here looking for Mods and suggestions to make it harder.

You are kidding right?

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No, they arent kidding. They arent saying its hard, they are saying its long, tedius, and boring. After your in 1st place for a while, with 2nd far behind, you get bored. You know you won, so why drag it out any longer?

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Exactly...

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I almost always set a victory condition for percent score for the leader over the #2 player. This the game will actually be won by someone without actually having to exterminate all traces of all other empires.

Slick.

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I don’t know there is something about total extermination that tosses my cookies. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/evil.gif

Hay if you are saying it gets boring than I can understand, but your original post sounded like you just couldn’t beat it. Now if I misunderstood than my fault. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/confused.gif

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That's the way I do it, too, Slick. I think 800% is the number usuall use.

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http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/shock.gif 800%!!! That's almost the same as total extermination. I typically use 300% or sometimes even like 260% - with a 5 year delay. I would think that anyone could win being at 300% of 2nd place after > 5 years. It's just a matter of how much you want to continue to develop your empire for your own edification.

Slick.

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I usually set it at 400%. 200 if I'm looking for a quick game. Last time I set out to play a total extermination game, I was playing with in a galaxy that had about 100 systems. I got to the point where I had 31 systems and 3 other AIs had the rest. I'd built massive fortifications on all WPs leading to soon-to-be-enemy territory, mined them heavily and had thousands of satelites over all the WPs as well. My invasion fleets numbered 4800 (and I had about 60 pop transports racing around trying to fill up smaller colonies).
I then launched my massive invasion; 48 100-ship fleets (16 per enemy empire) burst into enemy space through artifically created WPs.
And ran smack into the stiffest resistance I have EVER seen the stock AI put up. I'm lucky I used my own WPs because the largest of the three had the main WP to my space defended by sixteen Starbases! And these weren't your mamby-pamby stock Starbases, either. Each of the behemoths clocked in at 6,000kT.
Anyhoo, I realized that I'd be looking at fighting tactical combat for every single planet if I was to be assured of victory. I then whipped out the calculator and plugged in a few numbers.

69 systems for me to conquer with around 10 planets each makes 690 planets. Call it 650 for arguments sake. 650 planets * 15 minutes average tactical combat = 9,750 minutes = 162.5hours = 6.7days non-stop playing, but since I only average about 2 hours a day game time that worked out at 81 days.

So, to conquer that galaxy would require the better part of three months just counting combat, and not taking into account repair & maintenance, replacing lost ships & troops, protecting conquered worlds, AND running the rest of my empire to boot. Needless to say, I declared a moral victory and went to bed. ;-)

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I don't know if you guys are talking about solo play or PBW here, but I've been in PBW games where 300% or even 400% would have been too low. It's entirely possible for the 1st place player to be that much stronger then the 2nd place player and still get beat if the others gang up and play a good end game. Especially since score is so easy to manipulate by building lots of cheap, low-tech ships. And as bad as it is being in a game that seems to drag on for ever, it's much worse to have what is shaping up to be a really good ending to a game be aborted by an arbitrary limit.

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I second that Geo. In TGE3, my score was above 300% of the second player for many turns, and I did not even play to have the highest score possible (that was just my usual Base Space Yard/Light Carrier production). It would have been very easy to create even more inflation, by building empty starbases, or something along these lines. But I was still a long way off from being able to take on the whole galaxy on my own, though a few Empires would have suffered in a global war.

I would much rather vote on ending the game, when it looks like an Empire cannot be defeated, no matter what. NGC3 ended a few turns before the final clash against the leading Empire (we would have been crushed, but still, it is much better to be defeated in the field than by numbers).