Gameplay tips & tricks

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

When you have "Players can see all systems" on at the game setup, do NOT choose Ancient Race as a racial trait

No, but seriously.

In stock SEIV, research troops quickly while still keeping an eye on other research, so your weapon/construction/whatever technology doesn't get too outdated. Once you have strong troops, create a couple of hundred (or thousand, if your economy allows) and load them on cargo bases in orbit/in a specific location like an obscuring storm or nebulae.

Here's something I always do:
Create bases with ONLY cargo storage (as soon as you've met the requirements for B/CQ/LS by placing those or MC) and build one/a few in orbit around your Homeworld. Then, whenever your population gets above a certain level, place a set number of pop on those stations. That way, you can have billions of people in orbital stations, even if you start on a Tiny world. The reson for this is that this way, when you colonize a new planet, you can immediately fill it up to max pop to speed up its growth tremendously while not emptying your HW this way. Also, when an important colony has suffered severe population losses, you can replenish the pop. Or, when an important colony has been depopulated with - what are those things called again? Neutron Bombs? you can immediately repopulate it completely so you get the full income again after just a few turns, instead of suffering perhaps crippling losses to your economy over the course of perhaps several years.

It pays to have decoy drones. They can draw fire away from, say, your heavy fighters. Seekers can also perform this task, and don't need to be produced. Make your drones contain nothing but a computer, engines, and armor, and set their strategy to something like Point Blank.

Do NOT underestimate the power of heavy fighters stored on a planet. I've had multiple occasions when, in strategic combat, my heavy orbital bombers were suddenly destroyed by massive streams of fighters from the surface of the planet.

Also, do NOT underestimate the sheer defensive power of a Large Weapons Platform design containing nothing but shields, regenerators and armor. Place a few of these on your planets and orbital bombers will have a hard time bombing as they're up against heavy regenerating shielding AND armor, while WPs keep pounding away at them from the surface.

It's always handy to have at least one WP on a planet full of long-range weapons like the WMG, while others are packed with heavy short-range weaponry. The WPs with the WMGs (or other heavy long-range weapons) can probably get off at least one shot at an enemy fleet before they can fire on you. If they're unshielded, it's even better - you can cause severe damage to their internal components, perhaps you could even eliminate crucial comps like the command comps, engines, heavy weapons or orbital weapons.

[Suicide Junkie]

StrategiaInUltima said:Also, do NOT underestimate the sheer defensive power of a Large Weapons Platform design containing nothing but shields, regenerators and armor. Place a few of these on your planets and orbital bombers will have a hard time bombing as they're up against heavy regenerating shielding AND armor, while WPs keep pounding away at them from the surface.

Oddly enough I just tested this.
Platform: 1550 shields, 140 hull, 2500 regeneration.
Ship: 100 damage per shot, spread over many turns.

Result: 33rd hit dealt -1350 damage, killing the platform plus 10m people @ 10 hitpoints each.

Conclusions:
- The platform did not absorb any damage from the shot that killed it.
- This implies that the platform had an effective strength of between 3200 and 3300 hitpoints.
- 1550 of the hitpoints were not accounted for by the hitpoint meter on the planet.

-----

The same test was repeated with 3 ships, capable of delivering the entire volley in one combat turn. Identical results were achieved.

-----

The same test was repeated with the shield regenerators replaced with inert PDCs.
Identical results were achieved.

-----

Overall Conclusions:
- Shield generation counts double on platforms.
Presumably once as shields, and again as hull structure.

[Spoo]

Shield regeneration doesn't work on units, right?

[Suicide Junkie]

Or planets, yes.

For the most part, it dosen't really matter, as units are often killed by the handful and would never have a chance to regenerate.

[Atrocities]

QUESTION BY: Smolf

I'm playing in a star system where not all system are connected to each other. I have just researched stellar manipulation to lvl 3 and got Gravitational Quantum Resonator I. It states that it can open a warp point out to a system 100 light years away. Is their any way to measure the distance between one of my star systems and the closest neighboring system?

ANSWER BY: Fyron

When you order a ship to open a warp point, you can see the distance between the systems by selecting the source system, then hovering the mouse over the target system.

The only other way to determine the distance between systems is to calculate it, unfortunately. Each square on the galaxy map is 10 light years. Diagonals count, so 10 squares in a direct diagonal line is not 100 LY, but instead 100 * sqrt(2) LY (at most).

If retorical please excuse, but it is good advice and should be mentioned twice.

[Parasite]

A tactic I am starting to use against deadly foes concerns fleet experience.

I make sure I always put one or two ships in each fleet with "Do not get hurt" and "Break from fleet" orders. If a few ships survive a multi-fleet battle it should be them. This will save the fleet experience for use when it is reconstituted later. The fleet could even gain experience if the only survivor was the one who ran away.

[Atrocities]

Unless they are hunted down and destroyed. I just keep a couple of skilled ships at all my training facilities and have all my construction yards send ships there. (I use the neural net). Share the experience and your off and running while only training a minimal amount of your ships. The most trained ships are heavily armored with shields and armor.

[Slick]

Suicide Junkie said:
Oddly enough I just tested this.

<snip>

Overall Conclusions:
- Shield generation counts double on platforms.
Presumably once as shields, and again as hull structure.

Has anyone tested the "double shield effect" for other units?

[Renegade 13]

The messages problem occurs in multiplayer games for sure. Can create a lot of havoc.

[Slick]

Strategia_In_Ultima said:
Also, do NOT underestimate the sheer defensive power of a Large Weapons Platform design containing nothing but shields, regenerators and armor. Place a few of these on your planets and orbital bombers will have a hard time bombing as they're up against heavy regenerating shielding AND armor, while WPs keep pounding away at them from the surface.

I also tested this and here are my results:

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I started a new high tech game with 2 human controlled empires, turn based. On homeworld A I built Weapon Platforms. On homeworld B I built 2 dreads with heavy mounted APB's. I conducted tactical combat at homeworld A using 1 weapon at a time, checking for surviving WP's after each shot.

Series 1
On Homeworld A I built 6 WP's as follows:
1 small WP with only WP computer core
1 medium WP with only WP computer core
1 large WP with only WP computer core
1 small WP with WP computer core and filled with APB's
1 medium WP with WP computer core and filled with APB's
1 large WP with WP computer core and filled with APB's

Result: the first shot would always kill the 3 empty WP's then the remaining would be successively killed in order from small to large. 20 tries, exact same result in all cases.

This result is what might lead one to believe that WP's are destroyed from weakest to strongest since there usually is a significant difference in WP hitpoints in real games. And at first, I thought I proved it worked this way.

But then I started wondering if my test method was valid. After consideration I realized that randomly applied damage would still show the same results. This is because a small amount of damage would destroy a weak WP while it would "accumulate against" the strong WP without destroying it. So this test series didn't really prove anything.

Series 2
On Homeworld A I built 10 WP's as follows:
1 small WP with WP computer core
1 small WP with WP computer core and 1 PDC 5
1 small WP with WP computer core and 2 PDC 5
1 small WP with WP computer core and 3 PDC 5
1 small WP with WP computer core and 4 PDC 5
1 small WP with WP computer core and 5 PDC 5
1 small WP with WP computer core and 6 PDC 5
1 small WP with WP computer core and 7 PDC 5
1 small WP with WP computer core and 8 PDC 5
1 small WP with WP computer core and 9 PDC 5

The idea here is that there is only 20 kt difference between successive WP's.

Result: 20 runs. The WP's were NOT destroyed in order from weakest to strongest. Weaker ones TENDED to be destroyed before stronger ones. But there were several cases where the stronger WP's were destroyed before weaker ones. This validates the "random damage" position. If you randomly apply damage, you would expect this result.

Conclusion: WP's are not destroyed randomly but are damaged randomly; WP's with less hit points tend to be destroyed first because it takes less random hits to destroy them. [edit] This makes the idea of "shield platforms" interesting. Shield WP's will help absorb random hits to keep your weapon WP's alive longer, but only so far as they add more targets for the random damage - NOT that they get hit before or after other WP's.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------