Gameplay tips & tricks

[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?!

[Alneyan]

I do not know Grandpa Kim; the part about shielding goes well beyond my understanding (a similar idea works fine for Armour, and would be much better if singular armour components were bigger).

[bearclaw]

A minor point but might be of some value.

I found by accident that the ship/base that has a SY does not have to have cargo space when building units if there is any other cargo space in the sector. I use this for warp point defense. Build a cheap base with a sat bay/mine layer and have a SY ship (or base) in the same sector. The SY ship is set to repeat build sats or mines and they are automaticly placed in the launching base which is also set to repeat launch. If needed the SY ship can be moved and return or whatever else is needed. with larger sizes this is of small concern but it does allow for mobile unit production with a cheap SY ship and anything else with cargo space wherever is needed.