Gameplay tips & tricks

[Fyron]

That would definitely be a cheating exploit, as cloaked minesweepers do not sweep mines for balance reasons... You should definitely email the bug exploit to Malfador if it works.

[Alneyan]

A small thing perhaps worth mentioning: red nebulaes grant you the best kind of cloaking, which cannot be bypassed by *any* sensor. This can be used to help your natural paranoia, or to have a nice secure system when striking against another Empire.

On the topic of game mechanisms: happiness is one of the most important factors of your Empire, and keeping it as high as possible should be one of your priorities. Happiness works as follow: all your planets have an happiness value (from 0 to 1000) expressing the number of unhappy people on this planet. If you have an happiness value of 0, nobody is angry on this planet, whereas a value of 1000 means everyone is out asking for your blood. These values are expressed in tenths of percent, so 540 means 54% of the inhabitants of this planet are unhappy. From the Happiness.txt file, the various levels of happiness are as follow:

Population Anger (in %) Descript. Resource Modificator
75 - 100 Rioting 0%
60 - 74 Angry 80%
45 - 59 Unhappy 90%
30 - 44 Indifferent 100%
15 - 29 Happy 110%
0 - 14 Jubiliant 120%

So what modifies happiness? The following means can be used to reduce your population anger values, thus improving your happiness. Note that most of the values are given for the Peaceful happiness type, by far the most common. For other happiness types, please replace the numbers as needed.

*Empire wide positive changes:
- Colonising a planet decreases unhappiness by 1% per planet colonised.
- Likewise, capturing an enemy planet decreases unhappiness by 3% per planet captured.
- Enacting certain treaties (Trade Alliance and above for peaceful) decreases unhappiness, from -2% for a Trade Alliance to -10% for a Partnership. This bonus is only applied when accepting the treaty, regardless of any previous treaty you had with the particular Empire.

*System wide positive changes:
- The Urban Pacification Center, the Fate Shrine and the Temporal Vacation Service improve happiness within a whole system. At levels III, the UPC and the Fate Shrine reduce population anger by 3% (a value of 30) per turn, and the Temporal Vacation Service reduces unhappiness by 6% every turn.
- Having ships in a system decreases unhappiness by 0,3% per ship. Having a big fleet within a system is thus an effective way of quenching unrest.
- Winning a battle in the system decreases unhappiness by 2% per battle won.

*Sector or planetary changes:
- Winning a battle over the sector decreases unhappiness by 5% per battle.
- Every troop on a planet decreases unhappiness by 0,2%, regardless of the strength of the troop.
- Friendly ships decreases unhappiness if they are over the planet(s) in question, by 1% per ship.
- Building ships and facilities should decrease unhappiness by 0,5%, which only affects the planet in question to the best of my knowledge (this bonus is fairly weak, and I have yet to see it play a major part, so I gather it is only planet wide).

And now the more annoying part, why you are losing happiness. It goes as follow:

* Empire wide happiness losses:
- Losing a planet (where the planet is destroyed from orbit) increases unhappiness by 5% for the whole Empire. This is the main reason why happiness collapses if you are fighting a defensive war (where your planets are being glassed). Losing your homeworld thus increases unhappiness by 10%, which may or may not stack with the regular happiness loss.
- Losing a ship increases unrest by 0,1% per ship lost. I believe it applies to the whole Empire, but may be wrong on this one; feel free to correct me if required.
- Having a planet captured increases unhappiness by 3% per planet captured.
- Specific treaties lower your happiness, such as War, Non Intercourse, and Subjugation/Protectorate when you are the dominated party. Again, this is only for the Peaceful happiness type.

* System wide happiness losses:
- The presence of enemy ships increases unrest by 0,5% per ship.
- Losing a battle in the system increases unrest by 2% per battle.
- Every ship lost in the system increases unrest by 0,2%.

* Sector or planet happiness losses:
- Losing a battle in the sector increases unhappiness by 5%, while having a battle without a clear victor increases unhappiness by 1%.
- Every ship in the sector increases unrest by 0,8%.
- Every one million settler killed increases unhappiness by 0,1%.
- Enemy troops on the planet (in the case of long ground battles) increases unrest by no less than 20%.
- Having a plagued planet increases unrest by 20% as well.

The following can improve or decrease happiness:
- Points above 100 in the Happiness characteristic gives you a small increase of happiness for your whole Empire, whereas points below 100 decreases your global Happiness. Note that this effect has little impact on the game, because of the Natural happiness decrease.
- The Natural decrease is of 2% every turn, regardless of whatever else may happen. This will push happiness towards the Indifferent level if you are between Jubilant and Angry, by 2% every turn. So if you have a planet with a Jubilant status, this will be a decrease, whereas it will actually increase happiness for an Angry planet. Natural decrease does not allow you to "undo" a riot on a planet however.

Since the 1.91 patch, there is an effective cap for happiness changes each turn. This is set at 20%, either positive or negative, and means you cannot increase or decrease unhappiness by more than 20% every turn. So if all your planets were Jubilant, you could not fall immediately to Riots in a single turn (you would need between four and five turns for it to happen). Before the 1.91 patch, this cap was indicated in full percents, and so was set at 200% (twice as much as the maximum anger value), hence resulting in immediate massive riots if you had lost enough planets in a single turn.

[Slick]

Imperator Fyron said:
That would definitely be a cheating exploit, as cloaked minesweepers do not sweep mines for balance reasons... You should definitely email the bug exploit to Malfador if it works.

Hold your horses. I said I'm testing it. I also assure you that, if this does in fact work, it is NOT an exploit and I will post the method here. At this point, I won't say any more. It may or may not acutally work. The person who told me about it is a newbie so I wanted to test it before posting it. It does sound to me like it might work though.


Slick.

[capnq]

* Sector or planet happiness losses:

- Every ship in the sector increases unrest by 0,8%.

Every enemy ship, that is.

[AgentZero]

When I'm playing as an evil empire, which is most of the time, one of my favourite tricks is to ally with two (AI) opponents who are sharing a system with each other. I then park a small fleet over Empire A's planets, and declare war on Empire B. When Empire B's ships attack mine, I destroy them, but first capture the planet belonging to Empire A (my ally). Obviously this doesn't work against human opponents, but you can sometimes get quite a few planets this way.
I once had a game where I had fleets parked over 10 huge planets across 3 systems that belonged to my 'ally'. When I declared war on the other empire, he attacked all 10 fleets in the same turn (with 2 destroyers against 15 DNs. Go figure). I went from being ranked 6th in that game right up to 1st in one turn. Pure evil sweetness.

[Fyron]

Let's keep things that are obviously bug exploits, such as conquering an ally's planets, out of the list...

[AgentZero]

Well, I dunno. Last game I played against a human (which was AGES) ago, I did something similar to one of my friends and just told him the enemy conquered his planet and I took it back. Course things got ugly pretty fast when I decided not to give it back. ;-)

In terms of 'legitimate' strategies, I've put quite a bit of thought into fighter combat strategies. One thing I find works quite well for keeping your fighters alive is to have your carriers escorted by a few Missile Ships. As the name implies, these are ships (usually CRs or BCs) loaded to the gills with CSMs (With my modified ships sizes a CR carries about 18CSMs and a BC does 30). When in combat, I have them spread their fire across as many targets as possible, and send my fighters in about 1-2 squares behind them. The AI uses up all their PDCs on the missiles, and the fighters can swoop in to attack unmolested. Each fighter usually carried 4 Rocket Pods so 400 damage potential per fighter (again, modified sizes, but the principle is the same), and a Heavy carrier can launch about 250 fighters. So 250x400=100,000 damage points. And that's a lot of hurt in anybody's books.

Using this tactic, I usually send out hunting packs of 2 heavy carriers, 3 Missile BCs and one spaceyard ship with cargo comps to ensure my carriers are always fully loaded. It works brilliantly against the AI, but not so well against humans, since I haven't figured out how to use the 'Missile Screen' tactic in Strategic Combat.

[Makinus]

Just a small trick, that while obvious, i did not see much people using it:

When colonizing distant systems, create a fleet with the Colony Ship and a small ship full of supply components and solar panels (an escort or frigate is enough) so the colony ship can have the supplies needed to reach the system...

I normally retrofit my old escort and frigate ships to these "booster ships" when new hull sizes make them obsolete in the line of battle...

Other use for obsolete frigates is to add a repair component to them and make them repair ships that still can be useful in the line of battle.

Another use for obsolete escort and frigates is to add cargo components and use them as troop transports or faster trasnports for units, since they can have more engines than the traditional transports (while the traditional transports are more cost-effective, these "fast transports" can help you to transport badly needed units faster to the front)...

i don´t know if these hints are really usefull against human players, since i mainly play against the AI, but i just wanted to add my 2 cents....

[tesco samoa]

I like to make the all in one support ship

A ship that has cargo for troops, Mine sweepers and Repair all built into one. ( Plus it is also the EM scanner ship ) This helps with making the ship very useful in 3 rolls... Add a q.r. or some supplies as well to finish it off. As all ships should have spent 20kt on the supply bay.

[Grandpa Kim]

Another small item:

You don't actually need fighters on a planet to issue the "launch fighters" orders. All you need is one unit of any sort. (For me, this usually mean riot troops.) This allows you the issue the build order and launch fighters order at the same time thus avoiding the eventual "no storage available" log entry.

2. Ok, so how do shields fit into this?
I'm glad you asked. First, don't mix phased and non-phased generating components. If you do, you get non-phased shields. That is, until all the non-phased shield generating components are destroyed; then suddenly, in the middle of battle, your shields will become phased.
Ok, otherwise, shields work just like you expect. Damage from weapons gets taken off your shields first. However, remember above where I told you extra damage is added to your weapon's damage before being applied? That happens before your weapon's damage is applied to shields. That means, hit a ship with normal shields and some Armor III with a PPB (skips non-phased shields) for 35 damage (not enough to destroy a piece of armor) and then with a Meson BLaster (normal damage) for 30 and the extra damage (35 from the PPB) is added to the Meson's 30 for a total of 65 damage delt to the target's non-phased shields!!!
This gets even more fun with shield regeneration. See, if you get some damage passed their shields without destroying components (so it's still extra damage), but the regenerators bring the shields back up, that damage you got passed their shields gets pulled back out and has to go through the shields again next time the ship gets hit.
As an added bonus, destroying a shield generating component drops your current shield value to your maximum shield value (assuming your current value was greater than max value) but it does this before the component is destroyed! This means, with 3 Shield V (900 shields), if you get hit by a PPB that kills one of the generators, your shields will be 900 out of 600! If a second hit kills another generator, your shields will be 600 out of 300.

Does this mean a ship armed SD, NSP, SD, NSP,... would be an awesome ship?!