New player struggling

[Andy Watkins]

Mac,

Still early in game, I haven't built battlestations yet. Do I build them and carry them in a very large cargo hold? Or do I build a ship with a spaceyard on it and build them in situ?

I presume the latter

Andy

Andy, also build several Med or Large Battlestations at your critical wormholes along with your sats and a small to average minefield.

[mac5732]

Andy, use ship with space yard to build your BS, then once its built both your BS and shipyard ship can both build at the same time at same location, also build BS over your primary planets and use those for shipyards, this frees up space on your planets for better facilities and if you have several, you can build multiple ships at the same location close to the same time frames. Remember they are expensive to maintain, so pick your locations carefully, also by having 2 or more together you can upgrade them 1 at a time without taking away all your defense.

just some ideas mac

[tesco samoa]

Battle stations have a reduction in Maintance by 50%. (Then again it could just be the mod I am playing.)

So build them and use them.

A good stag is to build some space yard stations 500 kt size with the command units ( non computer core ) 1 ship yard and 2 point defences.

Then use these to build the larger space stations ( for defence away from planets or in conjunction with planet yards)

That way you can que up these yards and let them build away.

[Gryphin]

Yes do keep fleets stratiegicaly placed. I guess I should have said build as few ships as possible.
mac makes some good points.
Here is my view of Space Stations at warp points;
Note: I hate a static defence so the following should be taken with that in mind.
1) Major investment that must be protected and can't be moved when you expand.
2) They take a lot of time to build so you will need a fleet there to protect the Ship Yard Ships
3) If you play tactical combat a Satellite carrier backed by a small ship can be very effective. The Satellite carrier can dispence the sats in smaller Groups so you can select your targets. I have actualy put "walls" of sats in front of my missle ships. The ship acts as bait to get the AI to come through the sats. The sats can inflict a lot of pain before the AI reaches the ship. This type of defence can expand as your empire expands. When deploying sats in tacticle put the older ones out in front to get chewed up first.
This defence will not work well in stratiegic mode.

[Andy Watkins]

Back again,

I have got to the point where I have military alliances with everyone. They appear to fight amongst themselves and send me threatening Messages if I continue to be allied to their enemy.

I of course just ignore all their Messages. They then do nothing and pretend they hadn't sent them....

In MOO2 and similar Civ games alliances can be a nightmare, your allies start a war for no reason, get you involved and then make peace 3 seconds later leaving you in a war you never wanted in the first place.

SEIV seems to be at the opposite extreme? Any explanations.

Andy
PS Fighters are very good aren't they?

[Growltigga]

quote:

---

Originally posted by oleg:
Yes, it is 10 minutes walk from UMIST to Deansgate ! We should meet sometimes.

---

Zumbar or Revolution, Tampopo or any dodgy boozer faraway from Canal Street and you are on - clutch your copy of SEIV gold!!

[Growltigga]

Andy, I suspect this argument will go on and on and on.

Personally, I have only played against the v1.49 AI and a particularily daft friend (sorry khanuk). We all know the AI is a bit lacking sometimes so I make a point of not using fighters or mines or massed warp point defences against them - it just gets a bit sad

I dont use battlestations or even space stations at warp points for a lot of the reasons Gryphin goes into. A static defence is no way to win a war and you need mobile units to win the fight anyway.

I research advanced military science ASAP and build a sizeable fleet of say, light cruisers, which actually have very few components in them. When war breaks out, I retrofit these ships to the design spec I need (PDC heavy versus the Krill or Norak for example) and bingo, you have a modern, sizeable, hard hitting fleet.

The advantage of building the hulls first is that you can take advantage of your ships/fleets being trained up as per the ship training/fleet training facilities you have built by now.

Mac is right too, you need to diversify your construction capability and also expensive, spaceyard equipped spacestations over your planets are extremely important if not vital!!
I generally will have say 4 spaceyards orbitally Growltigga Prime before 12-15 turns have passed!

Back to defence, fighting the AI, I dont defend warp points, I defend planets with weapons platforms, satellites, defensive troops etc, sometimes fighters too if the enemy is using them. Make them a hard nut to crack and also you can continually upgrade your fortresses to the latest tech with your planet and space-based building modules

I do built bases in planetless nexii as you can use these guys as resupply depots (bases have infinite supplies)

[Andy Watkins]

Growltigga,

Thanks for the reply you have raised a few points and I have learnt a few things...

Building empty ships and then retrofitting them. I don't understand this, how do you retrofit or upgrade an old ship??

I am building them and then afterwards scrapping them and building newer models.

I haven't built and spacestations with ship yards near planets at all yet this seems important to you, what do you tend to do with them, I normally have more ship yards than I need because of limited mineral mining.

My one clever thing I am doing which someone here told me to do, I have built two ships with space yard facilities. taken them to a system full of asteroids and am building robo miner equipped space stations over each asteroid. Currently bringing in over 20,000 minerals per turn, probably costing a quarter of that or so in maintenance etc.

Biggest problem I have with fighters and in fact building in general is that I have one space yard on EVERY planet and about 25 planets. Plenty of capacity but it is all over the place so difficult to remember where everything is, particularly when you have to build fighters and carriers on seperate planets and bring them all together

Andy

[Growltigga]

Andy,

To retrofit a ship, highlight the ship on the main system screen, then click on the 'green triangle' like icon on the order bar and this should bring up a list of spaceships in that sector, together with a list of options, the main ones being scrap, retrofit and mothball.

Retrofit allows your ships to be remodelled and upgraded to a different design. The only caveat is that you cannot retrofit to a ship which costs more than 50% of the base design.

So, what does this mean? - as soon as I have advanced military training and have built ship training facilities, I will build light cruisers/destroyers with my current tech. When I have reached a major milestone in tech development, or bump into something 'orrible on the starlanes, I will upgrade my base design to incorporate all new kit and will then retrofit existing ships to that design.

Also, you can swithc designs should you rapidly need escort cruisers or planetary assault ships or whatever

makes repair modules very important

With regard to your management problems, try using waypoints (from the empire status window) for setting where newly built vessels marshal once you have built them, re the rest, it is probably just experience

[PsychoTechFreak]

@Andy, note to retrofits: In simultaneous game you do not get a confirmation in the retrofit screen, you just can see what is going on in the next turn (vehicle retrofit log).