Well I think the A.I. cheats after normal levels in the income rates and research speed to make up for being a dumb brute. The A.I. has been improved but once you learn the basics you will be playing on hard in no time. If you are playing on easy it sounds like you need to re-think your strategy. I typed tec strategy  in the search field. Also Tips and Tricks on the SoaSE wiki

Are you upgrading your fleet sizes with research? This is costly so do not upgrade your fleet sizes beyond what your empire can support.

 

I routinely am rushing unfair difficulty AI's by the 15-minute mark, and I have never seen them have level 6's (or even level 5's, for that matter) that early in the game.

I want you to double-check your replay or post-game timeline to confirm whether this is the case.  If so, there's a high probability that this is a bug.  More likely (we've unfortunately had this problem quite frequently lately) you're either exaggerating how powerful that capital ship was or how early it appeared.

There's always the freak incident where a capital ship manages to tank through some heavy militia and gain a lot of levels early on, but level 6 within fifteen minutes is somewhat absurd.




Even on slow game speed, it should take you no more than three minutes to have your first capital ship completed, and by fifteen minutes you should have colonized three or four planets. Defeating their militia should take you to level 3, meaning there is no need for you to purchase level upgrades at all.

You're clearly doing something wrong here.  Remember that your first priority at the start of the game is to build your capital ship, and the moment it's finished construction you should send it to colonize the nearest planets.  If your capital ship is sitting idle in the early-game, you're making a huge mistake.



How long into the game is this?  I have a feeling that you're omitting a very relevant and long timeline here.  The last time a player complained about massive AI fleets like this, it ended up being 4 and a half hours into the game and he'd spent much of the early game recovering from a catastrophic military defeat.

I strongly suspect your problem isn't in the late game, but rather the early game, and your empire-building is too slow.  On big maps with few rival empires like the you're playing, it's all about how fast you're colonizing.  Colonize too slow and your opponent has a bigger and stronger empire before the first shots are fired, and you shouldn't be surprised at all that you're out-gunned.

Honestly, I use to build my fleet up slowly and explore slowly, but that was back when I was playing version 1.05. Since the upgrades, I came back in and have read up on different tactics and stategies. Yes, the very first thing I do is build my cap sation and then the cap. While this is going on, I've built 3-5 scouts and 1 colony ship and 5 light frigets. Like everyone else I want to see the entire picture of what's around me, so the scouts are set to auto and I just look to see what's what when the discover a new planet.

Back at home, while the cap "dry dock" and cap are being built I can usually send those 4 light frigets to that astroid/planet that is usually near buy with only two defenders. Once they're taken care of, I can send in the colony ship. Meanwhile I'm also doing planet upgrades. Don't want any of my planets costing me income. Once the cap dock is built I'll build the metal/crystal refiners at my home planet.

By now my cap has come out and is ready to go out and do some colonizing. As quickly as possible I want to get 2 civ and 2 miltary reseach stations built. This way I can get space ports, ice and volcano planet colonization, fighter/bomber, jarvis and gernade all reaseard asap.

While this is all going I'm looking for some defendable choke points that I can get established using my cologny cap, for planets that have more then five defenders I might have to send it some light frigates, but usually no more then 10 or so, I want to upgrade my fleet capacity and number of caps, while at the same time start researching some better weapons and such.

I do agree, grabbing as many planets as possilbe is the key to the game. However, I once grabbed too many planets. I attempted to grab 20 planets, and was burned by over extending myself so much.

This is why now I look for choke points first, get established there, then "clean up" any thing between those points and my home planet. Of course if I see an oppertunity to snatch another planet from one of the other factions, I'll do that. I'll also send out some light frigates with colony frigates to set up refineries in uncolonizable astroid/space junk areas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Always a hazard; honestly, I consider an experienced player more at risk of a rush on a medium map rather than a small one.  On a small one, they anticipate full-out attack and respond in kind, on a medium map, they want to build a powerful economy first and it's just so easy to get a little too greedy.

Other that that, it seems to me that you've got a solid plan and easy AI's shouldn't be giving you any trouble if you're executing it well.  As Carbon says, the AI has been improved, but it shouldn't be giving you this much trouble.  I think we need to see a replay to get an idea of what's going on, because this isn't making sense.

You seem to be doing all the right things, and against an easy AI that should be a trivial win.

Automatically, actually.  If you played the game and it didn't crash, a replay file was saved when you quit (note: if you save and load, you will have two incomplete replays rather than one complete one.  Obviously we need the complete picture, so review your replays to find the right one).  You can check your recorded games under singleplayer auto-record and review your matches in-game.

The files themselves are stored in an odd location on disk. 

C:\Users\<User>\AppData\local\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\AutoRecord-Singleplayer

Note that "appdata" is a hidden folder and you will need to go to folder options in the control panel to make it visible.

 

23-24 planets per player is positively gargantuan.  As I've already said, the map you're playing on is uncharacteristically large for the number of players you're using, and the key to victory is to build a superpower economy.  It's entirely feasible, if your enemy start positions are far enough away, for you to have over 100 credits per second income before the first shots are fired. 

 

You certainly should be colonizing faster against easy-difficulty AI's, so we need to see what's going on to make any judgments.

 

That strategy is quite risky, since capital ships need to level up to become powerful, but if capital ships are sharing experience points they will level up slower.  Generally people only do this with carrier-class capital ships in the early game, and even then they back them up with frigate power.

 

Speed is indeed the key, but you should be able to balance your budget with frigates.  If you're losing large numbers of frigates while colonizing, then you need to re-evalulate your methods, because you shouldn't be losing more than a one or two unless you're taking on very powerful militia (in which case your capital ship should be leading the onslaught[/i]). 

yes they cheat, but that isn't one of the AI's cheats, that a TEC research (tier 8 ) ability called insurrection

a good defence can at least slow the pirates down but heavy fortifications can stop the pirates in their tracks. one time i was playing some lan with some friends and i noticed something very peculiar. the enemy jumped in a massive fleet to attack my ally, we had to load the game at some point back their, cant remember why. but when we lowered it, i lowered the difficulty of the enemy ai and their fleet was about half the size when it jumped in. i dont know where all the other ships went, but i never found them