SCampb29

To expand on this; once you've got some miniaturization, you can take those small and tiny ships you buy off the AIs for ridiculously low prices -- often just a bit of influence -- and upgrade them to colony ships or constructors. In an extreme case, you can buy a small planet and some warships from a distant AI, upgrade the warships to colony ships and out-colonize him in his own backyard. [quote who="negadeath" reply="73" id="2779821"]A personal early game

I've gotten to the point where I just take the mines, blockade the planet, and wait for them to be willing to talk and accept their peace offer. There might be a diplo hit for starting the war, but I don't destroy their civ, so it's not so bad.

I haven't had the Thalans as much of a threat recently. Can you override that preference by dumping missile tech on the Thlans, or do they persist on using Lasers when they've been handed Harpoon?

It's much better for you if all of them do focus on the same weapon type; that way you only have to research one defense line, and your warships are good vs all opponents, instead of having upgrade or change designs for different fronts.

[quote who="Sole Soul" reply="11" id="3000685"] No, they don't. I can't recall ever seeing them build miners, actually, although it has been some time since I've actively played a complete game. A large number of players ignore the mines-they're not particularly useful (except perhaps in early game TA as Thalans), and although some people have incorporated them into their playing style, not having mines isn't something most of us would notice-no

There are several ways of knowing how the enemy is equipping ships: 1. As stated, check in the diplo screen; look at the latest, largest warship the opponent of choice has. 2. Once you've got some level of intelligence, you can directly click on enemy fleets and see their stats. 3. The best way of all, though, is to determine what 'tech your enemies use. either develop one line yourself and trade it to everyone, or wa

If you get a really dreadful setup like that, you can use ctrl-N to restart automatically using the same parameters you originally set in all those startup screens. Ctrl-N and repeat 'till you get something you can live with.

I've never ended up in the end-game with the Doom weapons and all, but in the early and mid-games defense is vastly superior; well-chosen defenses properly deployed can make your combat fleets nearly invulnerable = invincible. Extra HPs, which take up nearly as much space as the defenses, just mean you last three battles instead of two.

Interesting work; please keep us up to date!

If you like that strategy, close-pack the starbases for -9 (4x-2 plus racial) in each sector. Interstellar mud.

I haven't gotten above 'tough' in difficulty, but at my level: I never spend resources fortifying planets. I tend to play huge and above galaxies and the number of ships to fortify versus the resources to build mobile offense-defense fleets doesn't make sense. Ships are for fighting -- and deterrence until you're ready to fight. Fleets sitting in orbit and not fighting are a waste. If I can beg, borrow, steal, or

By the time I've got the advanced structures available, I try to have my economy developed to allow me to rush-buy the recruiting center; then social-focusing the colony allows the buildings to be coming online as the population builds to a level to support the production. If the population is getting up to 2B without that first production building, I'll rush-buy what's left of it to bootstrap the colony.

When I'm doing late-game mass-upgrades of whole classes of warships, I always use the long-term lease option. No way I'm going to take the corruption losses to save up 100K bc to warp-equip my battlefleets.

Does the warp-bubble ship have at least one weapon in addition to the defenses? I've never had the tactical screen target anything other than the warp-bubble baitship as long as it was armed; but one time I forgot and left off the laser and then my fleet got wiped.

I like buying out miners. It means I get production bonuses, and it deprives the AIs of those same bonuses; seems like a win-win that's worth some cash to gain a fairly meaningful long-term benefit . I just sail 'em back to my own space before turning 'em loose.

So, I'm playing my first all-factories game, on Painful with the Krynn. Actually, I'm only sort of playing all factories. In my last few games I've played a sort of bastard all-facs, where I only build factories except on the bonus squares, and also keep the sliders at, like, 60% research, which is, I believe, completely goofy from an all-facs-strategy perspective, which relies on the efficiency of production keeping the ol' sliders heavy on soci

It's still on Tough. The Krynn are on the ropes; it's a gigantic map so it just takes forever, but I'm eating them up steadily; they just couldn't compete militarily with my large ships with strong missile defenses. The Thalan have a great endgame with those factory matrices and everyone else's industry techs to max out resource mines.

So, a cheap lunch!

So, I assume the answer is 'no', but thought I'd ask. There are tons of ways to bump production; asteroid mines and economic starbases come to mind. But, I assume you have to pay for that production -- right? All the shields from whatever source drop into the pot, bcs get deducted, and stuff gets made? Just askin'

Thanks! My retry with the Thalans is turing out very exciting; it's down to me vs the Krynn, with the Korx left with 10% of the map or so. The Krynn have 60%, roughly, so it's going to be a good endgame, though they're on the wrong end of the attack/defense tactical missles/drivers/beams game, so I think I'm going to put 'em down.

TOA -- sorry, I forgot to specify. Weirdo tech tree and all.

So, I was just mopping the floor with the AIs on Challenging; both as Drath and Terrans; and it's time to move to Tough games. And, impressed by the Big Pink Blob of Death in previous outings, I decided to play Thalan. It's not going well; my first try I was a bit stuck in a corner and the Terrans went wild and by the time I really got going they owned half the map, rather more because than in spite of my attempts to embroil them in conflicts. I'm on the

I'll have to check on the 'team' setting. I've had an alliance early in the game every time I've played so far, one I didn't seek, once with the bloody Dreghin. Go figure.

Do you start the game off with one alliance? I seem to have, or acquired it early anyhow, in recent games.

I've been playing for a month off-and-on, and I'm getting a handle on economic theory, military affairs, and even diplomacy, though I don't know where some of those alliances have come from. What I don't have a handle on at all is the turn / movement system. Who moves first in a turn? How do you know another week is about to begin -- it's the greenlit turn button, right? But how can I track whether I've moved everything? I'm sure I&#39