Ok...

[Arkcon]

Col. Mustard said:
What do you mean retrofiting? Why not just build them with the best sensors in the first place?

'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.