another quiestion

[moondog777]

How do you keep from going broke? I mean if you build any kind of defense at all just the maintence alone will bankrupt you.
the only way i can see to avoid this is to keep expanding your colonies and building minerial colonies.... but sooner or later your gonna run out of places to build, then that's not even looking at when you get into a war with someone and have to start building fleets!

[chewy027]

That's something your just going to have to learn Yes you have to keep building mineral colonies and storage to keep your excess for when you do go into war. But it also forces you to look ahead. Keep playing you'll get the hang of it

[Suicide Junkie]

First thing to do is spend some racial points on maintenance reduction. It helps a LOT.

Next, only defend wormholes leading into your systems, not individual planets. Find chokepoints, and defend those only.

Use units. Fighters, mines, satellites, weapon platforms are all zero-maintenance, and will be quite effective.

Don't build resource storage. They just eat up planet space. Build another mineral miner, even if the planet is only 50%. Either that, or build a research facility.
income is better than a savings account with no interest.

Last, learn to build more effective ships. No matter what you're doing now, there's always a slightly better way.

Work with your racial traits. If you have great offence, add more guns. If you have great defence, add shield regenerators to boost your shields in between the occasional hits.

Learn to use tactical combat effectively, or work out the best strategic battle plans. Either way, use the combat simulator lots design two ships, and let them fight it out. See which one wins. Modify that one, and start another combat. Darwinian selection will get you a pretty darn good ship. Don't forget to be sure it can fight the enemy, and not just your own ships.

I once defended my 6-system empire with a mere 4 Cruisers for 10 years.
With one finely tuned, legendary ship blocking each warp point leading into my empire, and making pre-emptive strikes against any opponents who showed up, they worked wonders on very little maintenance.

[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 09 April 2001).]

[Jason2]

The best defense is a good offense.

I have a game going right now in which I'm fighting two different empires on both sides of my empire.

My race's culture is warrior, and I have trade set to 50% - although the only treaties I will make with anyone is non-aggression (to roleplay my race correctly).

I do not have any battle stations or weapons platforms. In some systems I have fighters (no maintenance ) but mainly I have three primary fleets. Two fleets are defensive and protect the choke points leading into my empire. The other one is an attack fleet - which I use to take out the weaker planets of the two empires (since they both have fighters out the wazoo at their main planets and would paste me)....

My suggestion is this: research Mineral extraction II quickly. Build fighters at first (I use the initial set-up of 100000 points to get fighters right off the bat) to protect your systems. Then focus your research on producing weapons, shields, armor etc so that you can create ships that are fairly well-equipped.

Just my .02

Jason2

[Nitram Draw]

Remember, if you try to defend everything you end up defending nothing as you will go broke.
Units are definately the best planet defense.
Early in the game mines on planets can be effective for protection, they are cheap and don't take up much storage space.
Fighters become a better option later in the game but can be countered by a few dedicated PD ships.
Sats are good in worm hole defense but are not so good defending planets as you usually are on ther wrong side of the planet to defend.
Bases are good. They pay half maintenance and have extended weapons range.
WP are also good, espescially if you play with the mod that increases their range too, but they take up a lot of space so you usually don't have many except on the green cross planets. They also re usually more expensive to build.
Like SJ said defend the wormholes to your system and use a variety of things. You really don't need a big fleet, in fact most of my fleets have more support ships than attack ships. Rarely do I have more than 25 attack ships at any one time. Build wisely and you can get by with a lot less.

[Taqwus]

And if you're trying the Good Offense/Strike First choice, try going for Stellar Harnessing to get the solar collectors so that your ships have a much greater effective striking range. You're much better off if you can confine a war to the other guy's territory because he can't reach *your* systems with any supply left.

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night