Are there NEVER any empty planets? AI is ALWAYS there!

from Sins Forums
I bought this game yesteday and played a small map last night to figure it out.

Today I started a huge map, with 100+ planets and 3 AI races.

Scouting around the planets in my immediate vicinity every world had at least 2 and as many as 6 or 8 ships around it.  So I'm forced to immediately pursue a heavy military build-up just to get an initial footprint going.  I guess I had assumed that with 4 total races spread among 100 planets that I would not even come across anyone else for an hour.

Are there ever an unexploited planets?

I also can't figure out how the AI could have spread out so far in minutes.  Does every planet automatically populate with AI ships when you start a random game?

The forced inital rush for military build-up is a little too RTS and not as much 4X as I expected from the reviews.  Did I just get a weird random map?



strategy
3,491 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
My guess is you found ships that always guard a planet, but do not own the planet. These ships just pose a minor obstacle, and you can take the planet when you take out the siege frigs, if there are any.
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
Those are neutral races, planetary militias and space pirates, not your enemy empire. They won't rush your base or anything, but you should kill them off before you can safely establish imperial control over the planet.
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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
I would say 90% of the time the first capital ship is enough to take them out.
However if you find a teran planet usually they spawns are much larger.

One other thing I have noticed is some times the spawns are much worse then other. Case in point I played an online game the other day and it took my cap ship almost 3 trips back to my homeworld to repair to take them out.

Other times I was able to take even a teran planet on the first trip so the amount of NPC's do change level to level.
Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
Your first capital ship is free. Build one and you can easily take on the milita around planets.
Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top
The ships you are encountering are pirate ships that spawn round all neutral planets at game start and will not respawn after you kill them. This is to stop players sending out a bunch of colony ships at game start and claiming everything they can as fast as they can. The pirates will spawn groups of attack ships every 15 mins at thier base (which is heavily fortified BTW) and pick either a random target, or the player with the highest bounty (see Black Market screen for timer and bounty levels).

My strategy at the start is to build a cap ship factory, one cap ship (if you have no cap ships the first will be free) and 6-12 basic frigates (i.e. the TEC Cobalt). This gives me a strong enough force to clear out any planets I want to control and fend off any pirate raids that might come my way. I recommend leaving the pirates round neutral planets that you don't want untill you are ready to take them because the AI will sometimes send lone colony ships to try take neutral planets.

Hope this helps.
Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top
Someone never played Warcraft 3. Those are neutral ships, they exist principally for you to kill them with your capital ship thus gaining experience and levelling it up (a process known colloquially as "creeping").
Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top
Thanks everyone. As I got deeper into it I realized that these were either pirates, or ships that we're not part of the AI players. (Local militia?) I was all worried early on that the combined AI had 100 planets under control, and I had ONE.

Now that I'm four hours into this huge map - I can't stop!

I was going to put it away for the day, but I have all these voices in my head telling me what strategies I should be implementing to finish conquering my home system and head out through that wormhole.....

Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top
highlight the ships and read the details. It usually says they are militia or some other smalltime group. This is meant to represent unaffiliated colinist planets ships.
So you are actually taking over an un-attached world with limited power. they probably only have a small pop and an even smaller settlement.

The advantage here is that:
- its not too easy to expand
- it gives your ships XP
- it gives u something to do until u hit the real enemy

It would be cool if u could negotiate them into your empire though.