Trade Ports vs Culture Structures

because each trade port gives you more money while you only need one media hub to get the allegiance bonus, and it's much easier to defend yourself from culture than it is to spread it offensively. You need multiple trade ports and don't usually need more than one or two media hubs.

Many trade ports, few media hubs > lots of media hubs
(just like lrm > disciples)

That's good information to know, but I'm not so sure if a single media hub can hold up against an onslaught of culture. Can it? You are right though, 1 media hub is better than none for sure.

I normally build 3 to 5 culture structures on my outer-perimeter planets and build trade ports on my inner-planets.

Yeah 1 media or 2 media hubs is all you need, if your opponent is going all out hubs then he won't have much money so you can just build a superior fleet and crush him before the culture does any real damage.

With regards to leaving yourself undefended - scouting is your friend, if you see your opponent massing an army you can stop building trade ports and start massing a counter army, the trick is to balance it so you're always ahead economically but are still able to combat whatever they throw at you.

I've found harassment is a particularly good strategy to keep your opponent away - send in a small fleet to one of your opponents less defended worlds, take out a structure or two and then run when he turns up to defend.

The diplomacy window is a great tool to keep track of what your enemy is up to, you can tell whether your opponent has culture yet, has more, equal or less colonies than you, whether you're ahead or behind on all 3 resources, whether your fleet is bigger etc etc.

I neutralize enemy planets all the time when they only have 1 media hub there.

Like you kill LRM all the time with disciples?

Usually one culture hub is more then enough to hold back any enemy culture. If the enemy really goes heavy on the curture hubs (like you seem to do) then one can either build a second culture hub (razing one trade port for it doesn't take long if enemy culture starts to knock at the own systems door) or just use the superior fleet to kill those enemy culture hubs.

Right now culture is certainly not a good tool to win the game. It is useful to give all the planets 10% allegance bonus but that's it. Offensive use of culture can just be countered too easy so you waste a LOT of logistic slots for nothing.

I think the major thing with culture, is that you can not decide where it flows. It spreads out, and keeps dividing up the more it goes out. Even if you fill up all of your space with pure culture, it's not going to flow out of the bare spots any faster than it could before. So, using culture offensively is a royal pain. It's more useful to cover your own territory (where you will likely have a few towers spaced out), than it is to strike an enemy (where you need focused culture down a single phase lane).

Of course, if they don't even build ONE broadcast tower, then everything they have is up for grabs!

Not all the time. Just sometimes. Not against 41 wins and 0 losses players lol!