In my very first game, I was fortunate to choose the simple 1v1 game with pirates. I developed my world, filled tactical and logistics slots and expanded to a radial asteriod and repeated development. I moved in the direction toward the rest of the system to another asteriod. I colonized it and moved on. The AI started placing bounty on me and the pirate attacks began. I learned to counter the bounty to get some relief to the attacks. The pirates were one phase jump from my second asteroid and they came in and destroyed my development, except for the construction frigate. They always returned to their asteroid after these attacks and never attacked my home planet. I slowly accumulated wealth and tried to build fleets to stop the pirates. My problem is I didn't understand how to research increased fleet capacity until I had 650000 credits, 65000 metal, and 6300 crystal.
When I discovered this research, I quickly built a huge fleet and went to the pirates lair and wiped them out. This was a major mistake. I had expended tremendous resources to destroy pirates and then, the AI started attacking me. I finally realized my mistake had put me at such a disadvantage that I couldn't recover; concequently, i surrendered and abandoned the game.
The someone on the forum asked about how to deleted saved games. I started investigating and found all the autosaves. I went back to autosave 40 and started from there. I have now built 4 maxed out fleets and believe I am in a great position to access the rest of the system through the pirate stronghold without trying to eliminate them.
Autosave provides a great way to go back and try different strategies.
