Gameplay tips & tricks

[LGM]

Carriers that fight in combat should be classfied as Offensive Ships or Troop Carriers so they will not get the Don't Get Hurt order by default from the Carrier class. This avoids the pitfall of forgetting to change their orders, especially when you upgrade designs.

[LGM]

While someone mentioned that Small Fighter stacks are less vulnerable, they can get in the way of your warships and block them from getting into battle. Large stacks keep your movement lanes open.

[LGM]

Putting all (or most) of a systems warp-points into a cluster makes defense more efficient (one fleet will do). However, there is a pitfall to this strategy. If there is a way to attack them without going through one of the warp-points, several warp-points in a battle can bottle up your fleet so you do not have room to move. I've lost a fleet of Talisman dreadnaughts in such a situation. I was shocked when I lost the battle, but the replay showed my ships fighting piece mail as they wiggled their way out of a 9 warp-point cluster. Besides the 9 warp-points, a bunch of CSM V drones did not help (they just sat there blocking things up even worse).

[LGM]

When building Ringworlds, use the slow build turns of your Mobile shipyards when you are done building the RW parts to build weapon platforms, satellites, troops, and mines to place on your new ringworld. Never waste ringworld construction time buildng units - you build those buggers for the high facility limit so don't waste time building units or ships.

[LGM]

Warp Weapons on Heavy mounts are a nice way to break up an enemies fleet so they fight piecemail. However, such a strategy makes your unarmed ships that run to the corner much harder to defend. I suggest you spread out your mine sweeping capabilty if you use these. You also need to spread out minesweepers if they target weakest in case you put one weapon with max range on your minesweepers.

Repulser beams are better at pushing enemies in a consistent directon, but they do not work against bigger ships like Warp weapons do.

[LGM]

Ringworlds remove the star from a system, so solar collectors on drones will no longer collect supply, so they will quickly run out of supply. I would assume that would apply to Crystalline faclity that produces resources per star as well (they would no longer produce).

My next post will be some reason why you should not use drones.

[LGM]

You can deploy drones in space with two solar collectors III so they do not run out of supply. However, they are managed as single units so they quickly make your empire hard to manage. If you use the space bar to move to the next ship without orders, it will stop on drones. Since drones cannot be grouped in a fleet, you will keep coming back to the drone stack as you cycle looking for ships to give orders too.

If you hit the ship limit and feel you must build units, build fighters instead of drones. They are easier to manage and can be recovered and can be grouped in fleets.