I am getting owned. WHY?

Hi!

Ummmm, perhaps because the other guy has more ships?

In MP games you can't play the way you want. You need to adapt to the actions of your opponent, or you'll keep losing badly. In your case you've simply being a victim of a LRM rush (check this thread for more info on that.

BR, Iztok

Your first mistake is trying to secure enough planets to get going - you need to balance building a fleet and colonising
Second one I see is that you are building turrets - turrets are good at defending structures, but not planets. Put that money into ships instead. You complain about the size of the enemies forces, but think about the cost of 3 turrets at colonised 3 planets (plus your homeworld) - that is just about the cost of the second cap there (without the research for the extra crew).

The other person has possibly gambled on no econ first up to get that fleet and if you can hold off you may have the econ to wear him down. On the other hand, while you are pumping resouces into fighting his fleet, he can be upping his econ and pumping out more ships - it's all about balance.

The one bit of hope I can give you is to remember to keep at it - everyone gets owned at first - MP is different to SP. You must unlearn what you have learned...

Welcome to the Sins online multiplayer community.

In this game, at least early on, you always want to be expanding the size of your fleet at least until you've done the second fleet supply upgrade. The basic strategy early on is to spam out LRMs and try to have more than the other guy (which involves some strategy itself).

May i suggest expanding less quickly?If you expand too quickly then your economy will be strained building ships,upgrading planets etc.Stay with your home planet until you have a fleet of 3 or so ships.At the beginning all you need is 1 capital and 9 light frigates,that should be enough to fight any militia.after that start colonizing planets.Good luck.  

Make sure you upgrade your planets to atleast level 2 before or you'll lose money and sometimes its best to make a colonizer capital ship just for that little extra speed when dealing with other players.

Yes, each planet you get in Sins is just like buying a "Fix'er Up'er" house. You loose money until you "fix them up" with investments of credits.

And, sadly, ignoring most the technologies, except key ones like LRM's, is good :/

Watch the replays of those games you are getting worked in - see what the other person does and learn from it.

e.g. Did he send out scouts and you didn't? If so, he knows where you are and that you don't have a fleet and builds a fleet to attack you at the cost of expanding..

Did you try and colonise the wrong planet first and that took all your time while he did 2 roids quickly and went from there???

etc...

Because your a turtle.

I'm a turtle too, and it upsets me that every game I play I have to un-turtle myself quite a bit if I don't want to loose early.

I'm afraid that with as 2 dimensional as the game may look, you can't just build a smathering of defenses in one area and hope it holds off an opponent. It's far too easy to run away from the defenses and attack other key critical areas.

Most new players turtle , but they suck at turtling. Just like if they tried to rush or do any strat vs a better player , they would suck at that too. Theres no problems with turtling in this game , its just people dont learn how to do it properly because they dont have the fundamental RTS skills such as simple scouting , assessing the risk , location of enemies , tracking of their fleets..etc.

Blindly pouring cash into defense structures at every planet you own is the newb way of turtling.

Making a lesser size defensive fleet with cash going into econ , but not compromised enough that the enemy can run you over by placing repair labs carefully , then gaining the upper hand in econ , whilst the enemy is pondering whether his extra 15 ships can overcome your fleet because you have closer reinforcements and repair labs until its too late. This is the expert way of turtling.

These tips apply to all RTS games equally. I am not a sins expert, but I do well online because this is not my first RTS game experience:

The biggest problems I see in noobs are not bothering to scout, not making fleets, and not using money wiseley. These are things that seem obvious when you look back on things, but are not always obviously important at first.

The first thing you need to do in any game is build at least 3 scouts and set them to explore. You need to know where to make your goals for expansion (finding that one key choke point before they do...), and what your enemies are doing. In this game, there is no real excuse not to keep close tabs on your enemies all the time since scouts are so cheap. You should even go so far as to set your scouts to move back and forth across your enemies' planets, using the "hold shift while giving multiple orders to chain commands" trick.

More important even than that, though, is that people don't build big fleets. If you have a small fleet, and your enemy has a big fleet, you just lost. Simple as that. Economy, research, culture, colonization --they are all secondary to the ability to crush your enemy's fleet, because once you are bombing their homeworld, it's not going to matter who has 5% more laser research. The only reason to focus on anything other than fleet strength is if you have already thoroughly scouted, and you KNOW FOR SURE, that the enemy is not a threat yet. (one caveat: It may be adviseable to skip light frigates and go straight to LRMs, since they are much better in the early game. Therefore, your first goal should be to get a sizeable fleet of LRM. Like everyone else has said, defenses are not that useful, since the enemy can just go around them and attack a different spot)

In the case that you have scouted and the coast looks clear, it makes sense to build an economy, expand, etc. In fact, I would even go so far as to say in that case it makes sense that you would WANT a smaller fleet, since that means you have more resources for expansion than the other guys. As you can see, either strategy completely relies on your knowledge of what is going on elsewhere in the solar system.

One last thing that is super important: Don't stockpile money (of any kind)! There are no high-yield savings accounts in sins! If you have more than you can spend, you are not spending enough, and you are falling behind, because you can bet your enemy isn't just sitting there uselessly counting his money.

One other thing that just occurred to me: Dont rely on getting lots of caps. Caps are very weak relative to their cost. If you have 3 caps, and the enemy spend an equivalent amount of time, research, and money making 40 long range missile frigates, he will kill your caps with about 35 frigs left over!

I used to rely entirely on caps when I played the AI, but I quickly realized that real opponents are too smart to do this against. Nowadays? I use all caps as a fun back-up strategy when I realize I am playing against a noob, just to even things up!

Anyway, you will quickly notice that caps are easy targets (like dead in a matter of seconds easy) for groups of 20 or more LRMs, so if you want to keep your cap and it is being targeted by the enemy ships, start retreating your cap early --like even before the shields are down. This can work to your advantage because if you get away you have lost nothing, and they wasted all that time not hitting the rest of your fleet.

3 Fundamental rules to a 1v1

Don't build defense. EVER
Prioritize Military tech over civic tech
Only colonize asteroids/Terran/desert planets and upgrade the infrastructure(to lessen the credits lost) until you can safely get Fire/Ice(keep in mind the military over Civic rule)

What if there aren't any other 'roids, deserts, or terrans nearby or what if the nearby deserts and terrans have big militias? What if you have an ice planet right next to your home planet and the ice planet has four juicy crystal asteroids orbiting it?

Only in small 1vs1 maps. In a huge 10 player map, you'll need them.

I also tend to prioritize ice planets if they're near enough.

Then you colonize them, duh....