well to start off with just take a small hull, plop 1 or 2 offensive weapons on there, some engines and a defensive weapon.... just experiment a bit, and you'll get the hang of it quickly enough...

Heh, one learns quickly that the stock ships suck... Sure they look cool, sometimes, but they are rather worthless for combat since they don't maximize available space since I am guessing they were all designed with the possibilty of having no miniaturization bonuses.

My thing is, I see what the A.I. starts building, 95% of the time that is, they do missle offense and defense. I usually start out with beam offense, missle defense, then switch to mass driver offense and adjust defense to work against what A.I. is mostly using. Finally, just play it by ear from their.

If your ships are too slow, put on more engines. If they're not killing things well enough, put on more guns. If they don't travel far enough, put on life support. Really, it's pretty simple to figure out what modules to place.

For example, a fast interceptor designed to pick off troop transports in your territory probably needs engines and guns but no life support (as they won't be leaving your planets by very far).

Problem with the ship editor is there's very little documentation on it. I think the game is a bit lacking in that department. It needs good documentation and a built-in help system because it's a pretty complicated game, at least compared to other genres (like popular FPS games). But, I think I got a handle on it now. So far I've scored one influence victory, one alliance victory, and one military victory. For the military victory, I actually had quite a bit of fun building and using a killer war ship.

When learing how to use the ship editor, one problem I had is that it's not clear that things have to be placed exactly on the little red arrows before they'll stick. I got a little frustrated until I figured that out. Another thing that got me is the check box in the options menu that strips a saved ship everytime you open it. It should *not* be checked by default. I couldn't understand why ships were not opening the way I saved them. The list of items doesn't seem to sort at all. It would make it easier if the most advanced item was highlighted at the top of each list. When you click on a mounted item, the editor doesn't tell you what it is other than showing a small icon. It should have better indication.

Well, thanks for the great tips. Learning ship setup and combat was pretty straight forward. The main problem for me was the ship editor. Hopefully they'll make it more user friendly in future updates.

- Craig