Please Help a n00b

[SpaceBadger]

Hi, CareyB. Are you playing your game in turns or simultaneous? If in turns, do you use strategic combat or tactical? Simultaneous games won't let you do tactical, but you can click the replay combat button when you get a combat log report, to see what happened in the combat, and try to figure out what went wrong.

Dropping mines in warp-points as you expand helps slow down any hostiles who might try to follow you home, at least until they start researching mines themselves and using minesweepers.

I hate the Evil Empire thing, but you can easily switch it off in settings.txt - just open it in a text editor, do a Find for evil, then change the value for "AI Uses Mega Evil Empire" from True to False.

Picking strategic systems to defend is important, controlling routes into your most developed systems - even better is to try to keep the fighting in the other guy's real estate.

I'm pretty much of a newbie, too. One thing that has worked well for me (against AI at least) is to research fighters as early as I can, and then base most of my combat ships on the Light Carrier until I have researched my way up to something better. The Light Carrier is big enough to let you use a good mount for your direct fire weapons (to increase range and damage), plus even if you only go with the minimum required number of fighter bays that gives you room for 28 small fighters. The Light Carrier can even be a pretty decent assault ship for planetary invasions, loading up with shields, PD, and a couple of cargo bays to add capacity in addition to what you get from the fighter bays (I usually cram these so full of troops that they don't have room for any fighters, but the bays are still there to give you some flexibility if you don't need a full load of troops).

Hope this helps.

SpaceBadger

PS: Merry Christmas, y'all!

[Slick]

CaryB, welcome to the forums. This is a great place. The people are friendly, knowledgeable and very helpful.

Mele Kalikimaka.

Slick.

[Taera]

An idea, try to avoid creating partnerships with aliens - for the reason that once they see your colonies, they're almost sure to declare a war on you pretty soon. Its a problem with almost every single AI that had only recently been identified.

Also, are you playing with bonuses? If you do, try first playing without the bonuses. Even experienced players often find medium bonuses, with good AI's, a challenge.

What AI's are you using? Any mods?

And, welcome to the forums!

[Puke]

i am generally too lazy to manage mine layers, so i usually just launch mines over planets. they are cheap, dont cost any resources to maintain, and can be constructed and deployed very quickly. not as effective as using wormholes as chokepoints, but alot easier.

you might try taking advantage of cloaking. ARMOR level 4 gives you access to cheap stealth armor, which provides a low level of cloaking, that does not drain any supplies. The AI does not defend against it very well, and it will let you strike at their core planets and bypass their fleets.

It took me a while before i found out about MOUNTS, (the button seems to be invisible, unless you know that its there) and they really do make all the difference. in the un-modded game, there is no reason to ever not use them.

Try turning off the Mega Evil Empire setting, as described below. Also try lowering the AI bonus, as described. Dont lower the AI difficulty, as it makes the AI even dumber and gameplay becomes totally predictible and monotanous.

but even on high AI difficulty, one of their biggest drawbacks is that they dont make the most effective use of FLEETS. the first rule of fighting, in any circumstance, is not to fight fair. your fleets should be bigger than theirs, which should be very possible given that it sounds like you have no problem developing your industrial foundation. Fleets also allow you to gain 'fleet experience' which stacks with your 'ship experience'

and speaking of things stacking - a quick note on ship design: you cant have multiple ECM, it does no good. but you CAN have 1 ECM, 1 stealth armor, and 1 scattering armor. there is no real reason to have multiple pieces of stealth or scattering armor, as its not as effective as regular armor, and a single piece gives you the bonus.

about racial technology, there are lots of tatics with these, and they will generally let you pound the AI to pudding. here are a couple:

Organic tech is great. if you research organic tech to get organic armor, you wont have to worry about researching shields or regular armor, unless you want the stealth / scattering bonus. you can use organic weapons, which include the "best" seeker weapon in the game, and have swarms of missiles that will overwhelm the point defence used by the AI. the Enveloping Acid Globule is nothing to sneeze at, especially on larger mounts. the greatest advantage, is that organic tech allows you to design ships that are ballanced 50% mineral cost and 50% organic cost, effectively halving their build time - since most ships are normally 95% minerals.

Religious technology. The talisman. it takes some research to get to, but your weapons will ALWAYS HIT. many people argue for or against it for various reasons, but if you want to get out there and kick some ***, this is one good way to do it. since your weapons will ALWAYS HIT, you can sit at max range with long range weapons, and the enemy's range penalties will make you a very hard target. did i mention the part about the weapons ALWAYS HITTING?

[ December 25, 2003, 21:05: Message edited by: Puke ]

[Atrocities]

Game set up and racial point allocation is as important as how you play the game. Puke makes some excellent points.

You can max your racial points as well. I think Fyron wrote a help page on this, but I have not been able to find it.

[Taera]

yes, he does have a min/max techniques article on his page

[Fyron]

It is in the SE.net Tribune content Category on http://www.spaceempires.net/

Organic tech is great. if you research organic tech to get organic armor, you wont have to worry about researching shields or regular armor,

Higher level shields are a lot more powerful than organic armor. In fleet combats, ships usually get destroyed or crippled in a single round once they start getting fired upon, so you want as many raw hit points as you can get. OA doesn't get much of a chance to regenerate. Incidentally, this is what makes Shield Regenerators not very useful. Your ship has to survive for some 7 rounds (with the highest level) after starting to take damage for 2 shield regenerators to provide better defense than having a phased shield generator V instead.

[ December 26, 2003, 01:32: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]