When Push Comes To Shove "PBW/MP Advise"

[Atrocities]

I received this email today from someone but you did not sign it, and the email address is not valid. So if you recognize this email, please read my response below and check your email address for replies.

So your playing along in your PBW game and you come acrossed another player. All is ok for few turns but then he starts becoming aggressive and attacks one or two of your worlds, a "push" so to speak.

You send him a nice friendly sub-space message that informs him that his actions are not welcome. In response he openly declars war upon your empire, and begins attacking your worlds along his boarder. Having had a non-aggression or even trade agreement with this player at one time, had allowed him to do the unthinkable, mine every warp point, planet, and random sector between your core worlds and his space thus resulting in the loss of many of your finest ships and crews. A push has just become a shove.

Now what do you do?

Hindsight is 20/20 so I know the old rule that you NEVER sign an aggreement with another player, however, he seemed so nice at the time.

Have limited resources, building mine sweepers is going to be a chore. If I build mine sweepers, I will not be able to build war ships. In the intrum, my planets are building WP but they are weak and can easily be over run by CSM's, as he has already proven.

I have no contact with another race and he does because he has said that he has already signed a military allince with two other races so I should surrender now and save my people.

What should I do?

Damn, your screwed. Sounds like what is happening to me in my game with Intimidator. He is a great player and has tought me a lot. However the rule of thumb is, expand, research, deploy, repeat.

From the sounds of your email you did not optimize your race during set up, and your paying for it now.

At this point I would simply take his offer on face value and succeed your empire to him. Join another game and this time use the characteristics and points wisely. Also when you start playing start expanding rapidly. Most players use the 10E Leep Rule. That is, Emergancy Build 10 colonizers starting from the first turn and leap frog them out as far as you can go, colonizing small moons and building only shipyards. When the ship yard is build, start buidling new colinizers. When your HW burns up its 10 Emergancy turns, start building Orbital Ship Yards. When they come on line start building Frigates or Destroyers depending on which ones you have.

Order of reseach should be something simular to this: (Be sure to turn off Divide Pionts Evenly.)

Low Tech Start from turn 1,
Chemistry (Gives Armor)
Construction (Gives Mines, Troops, Fighters)
Pysics (Gives Shields, Sensors, Energy Stream Weapons, and Energy Pulse Weapons.)

usually if you have your empire optimize for good research ability, you can knock out Chemistry 1 and Construction in one turn. This will open up new areas for you to begin research. After you get Chemistry 1, strike chemistry from your research que for now.

For Turn 2 add,
Ship Construction (Gives Frigate)
Mines (Gives Mines 1 & Mine Sweeper 1)
Armor (Gives armor 1) Armor you will keep in your que until it is completely researched. It is cheap and offers a lot of protection and abilities. (Scattering Armor and Stealth Armor are very important earily on.)

It will take several turn to get physics taken care of, but during this time you will be building Colonizers and orbital shipyards.

Buy turn 8 you should be well on your way with 8 colonizers and or colonies. Remember to leap frog, colonize one planet per system while expanding outward. On the new colonies, preferably small moons, build just shipyards and when they come on line build colony ships. Manually add 1 million colony each time a new shipyard comes on line or else you run the risk of emptying your colony, or sending out empty colony ships.

Buy turn 8 physics should have been researched giving you access to Energy Streem Weapons and such. Keep Physics in your build que and add:
Energy Stream Weapons and Military Science for Turn 8.

Buy Turn 11 you should have gained Frigate. Design a frigate and begin building those on when the first of your Home World orbital shipyards become operation. You should put 5 orbital ship yards into your Home Worlds Que now. You will be on slow build for the next 10 turns.

Also keep an eye on your resources. If you must, on the small planets or moons that you have colonized, build a mineral or whatever resource you need first before the shipyard, or before you build ships.

Physics 2 will give you access to Phased Poloron Beams which are very usefull. Keep researching Phased Energy Weapons as they go to level 12 and are very good for the Stategy of Maximum Weapons Range which in some instances coupled with a good ship design and trained crew can provide the best result for combat. IE you win.

You will need to research Industry no later than turn 20 to gain access to Point Defense Cannons, PDC's.

Also once you have researched mines, design them and begin deploying them around your planets. All of them one at a time or all at once depending on your resources. Mines are a great early defense weapons.

Mothball or upgrade older ship designs as new technology is gained. This will help to cut down on maintenance costs and such. Keep an eye on your resource expendatures, and put projects on hold as the need arises.

With then new colonizers coming off of your other planets, begin colonizing larger same atmosphere worlds or larger planets. On those begin to build research centers, and mineral, farm, rad extractors.

The one thing you must keep doing is expanding, so keep at least one or two ships out there looking. Like I said, if your running low on resoruces, build a resource extractor first if you must, but keep expanding and keep researching.

Ships Construction
Armor
Weapons - Phased Poloron, Phased Energy Weapons, PDC's.
Combat Support,
Military Training, (To train ships and crews)
Propulsion
Mines
Troops (For landing)
Stellor Manipulation (Gives Solor sails, Solor Panels, and Hyper Optics)
Stellor Harnasing (Monoliths however they are bloody expensive. They are best for long term economy though)

Also research at your leasure but keep a high priority

Scannors
Sensors
Resupply
Shipyards
Fighters
Political Science
Advanced Research
Mineral
Farm
Rad

A good defense option is to build satellites with scattering armor and tachyeon sensors. This way you can cloak them and detect cloaked or hidden ships.

Many players like to sign treaties with you for the purpose of mining your warp point, planets, and for deploying hidden fleets to storms or nebula within your space and systems.

Be very weary of any player who makes a treaty with you and then deployes cloaked ships or a fleet to any of your holdings.

Also avoid games that do not exclude intel. Intel is broken in SEIV and can be horribly misused and exploited.

Use the Cunning points, for reasearch or other. Fyron has a great tutorial on this but I don't recall where it is located. Check out his site, at www.spaceempires.org.

Good luck and good gaming.

[ July 20, 2004, 05:35: Message edited by: Atrocities ]

[Alneyan]

A few addenda to your message Atrocities:

- Emergency Build is eleven turns long when left to run, not ten. You will only need ten turns to recover though (if memory serves). Yes, I am nitpicking.
- Construction is probably one of the most important areas in the early game. It gives you Mines early on , and Fighters if you need mobile defence and a versatile warship (the Light Carrier can do anything somewhat well, and costs less than researching Light Cruiser).
- You shouldn't be able to empty your colonies when building colony ships; you gain one million settlers per turn per population in every colony having at least one million settlers and 1% reproduction rate. So even if your colony ship leaves only one million of your subjects on the planet, the next one will find three million settlers (assuming you need two turns to build a colony ship). Don't lower your Reproduction too much though, as otherwise you may have a 0% reproduction rate, which means you won't gain these "free" settlers.
- Industry only gives Computers; PDC is given through Military Science I, which is a very useful tech area to pursue early on (Combat Support, Point Defence at level I, and Advanced Military Science at level II, which gives in turn the cheapest sensors to detect cloaked ships (Hyper Optics) and ship/fleet training)
- Polaron Phased Beams only go to level V, and have a range of 6. They are nonetheless very useful weapons for the early game, if you have enough radioactives. It is the Anti Proton Beams (Energy Stream Weapons) that have 12 levels, and go to range 8.

And my usual advice: never, ever, overlook Stellar Manipulation. This field gives you Warp Openers, Warp Closers (choose where you fight), Planet Creators (to improve your economy), Monoliths (a good long term investment, if you can afford it) and other very nice toys later on. The ships themselves are expensive to build, but the research shouldn't take too long.

[Atrocities]

Excellent advise. Thanks for all of it.

I typed that up as my computer was overheating so I rushed and left out a bunch of great stuff.

I hope others will take some time and fill in some more of the blanks.

[Alneyan]

-

Stellor Manipulation (Gives Solor sails, Solor Panels, and Hyper Optics)
Stellor Harnasing (Monoliths however they are bloody expensive. They are best for long term economy though)

It should be: Stellar Manipulation (gives Monoliths and a lot of various stuff including Planet Creators, Warp Openers, Warp Closers, Ringworlds and Star Destroyers) and Stellar Harnessing (Gives Solar Sails, Solar Panels).

- The trick of using recon satellites require Stealth Armour and any kind of sensors (Hyper Optics is the cheapest of all), not the Scattering Armour (which counters Long Range Scanners).

In short, the basic strategy in SEIV can be sumed up in a single word: expand! Then you will have the leisure to toy with ship designs and other parts of the game.

[Intimidator]

Damn, your screwed. Sounds like what is happening to me in my game with Intimidator. He is a great player and has tought me a lot. However the rule of thumb is, expand, research, deploy, repeat.

Thanks