TEC Playstyle for someone new.

Ok, not to hurt your feelings, but you have to start slow, take over a few planets at a time. Be sure to keep your research up as well, if you go carefully, you will be fine.

hows that hurting feelings?

i asked for advice and you gave it - of which i am grateful.

I think you are building your planetary defenses too early.  You need ot have a good fleet first and foremost.  Also take note of what ships the AI is building.  All ships are not created equal.  30 cobalts are not as menecing as 15 Assailants.

Well, of course Cobalts are different from Assailants - they belong to different factions!

The key is to take advantage of the types of ships your enemy is building. It forms a sort of a rock-paper-scissors effect when you consider which ships are effective against which.

For instance,
Long Range Frigates are effective against Light Frigates
Fighters, which are built by and dependent on Carriers, are effective against Long Range Frigates
Light Frigates are effective against Carriers

This is a very simplified version, since there are other ways to kill any of the four ships mentioned in that chain (example, Heavy Cruisers are very effective against Long Range Frigates, which in turn are easily killed by Bombers).

The AI recives a income boost vs player.

The ammount goes up as the AI is set on harder lvls.

Hard I belive is 1.5x vs player

They are more important early in the game since you can set them to explore and have them fill out the map for you.

Unfourtantly, even tho you can give them upgrades through the tech tree they quickly lose value as a game plays along. 

This is how I feel how the TEC play, 

As far as playing as TEC it tends to be quantity over quality.

Ship for ship, (with a couple of execptions) TEC is not as good vs the likes of Advent or Vassari ships of the same class or type. The military tree only has so-so upgrades for the TEC ships.

As for capital ships only one stands out, Marza. get it to a high enough level (6) and you may get accused of cheating.

For the rest well of the capital ships.

Early on captial ships are your work-horses. They do almost everything. But late game they tend to lose alot of value. When you have fleets of a couple hundred ships per going at it, your cap can be focused fired on and killed in a couple of seconds. This is very true in multiplayer since nobody wants to see a lvl 6 Marza and other players know how frustrating it is to see a lvl 6 cap ship evaporated. I usualy left a cap ship with a small fleet on fringe worlds to stop hostile culture and for defense. Armistice is particulary handy for buying time. I chose to have my main fleet engage first and have my caps engange afterwards, seperatly so I can control them more directly.

Buying XP is a waste of credits early on since there is a ton of XP to be had taking over worlds. And late game it is still a waste of credits.

For super weapons, the TEC had (arguably) the best one for a while. Its a "fire and forget" weapon. Leave it on and it becomes a "fire a regret". Its just straight up power, plain and simple.

As fas as economy and building are concidered, this is where the TEC standout.

Fully upgraded the TEC slash building costs to a fraction of thier original cost, can build structures faster, can build ships faster, can upgrade faster, can mine more, can earn more credits per planet, can reduce the ammount of credits recived by other players and can passivly cause insurections.   

I play the more "classic sins" so I cannot give you any adivce on the entrenchment since I am not playing beta.

Thats just my opinon tho, I would recomend finding SageWon's posts. he is much more experianced than me playing TEC. (you will know this just be reading his posts). Particulary read the "Need some advice as TEC" post and the "AI receiving unfair credit boost?" He goes into great detail. Also check out the "nube looking to play other nubes" post. You can find other multiplayer newbies like yourself.

Don't waste RU on research labs and defenses early on. Build fleets and take planets, then upgrade them.

The economic side is very important. Usually a fleet twice as large wins, so you see where I'm getting at? You can try reading eg. https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/334748

Cobalt battle ball

thanks for the advice so far its been good.

i guess the moral is to just build attack forces and get most of the map whilst the can.

also people talk of the marza as a super force -  i have about 5 marzas in my game one of which level 6+ whilst the missile battery (or whatever its name is) is very good i wouldnt say it was overpowered.

at the moment im in a random small map (14 planets) and almost hit a kind of stalemate with the cpu who is not really attacking in great numbers and i also need to commit a force to take one of their main planets (i think we occupy half the map each) but each time i do im getting cut down pretty fast.

guess i just need to be patient and build build build.

also are small maps supposed to take 6hrs to do? im still nowhere near finishing the game and iv played that much already?

SP takes ages - MP is much quicker. The main reason for that is that 1) humans know to quit as they are beat - CPU fights it out and 2) people can work together in MP.

Few tips (some have been stated above, but here goes anyway).

1) Don't bother building defenses early. You are wasting resouces. Until you are close to the enemy, they won't help you. And if the enemy gets to them later, you are already in trouble. Put that money into research etc...

2) When you start out, send out 2-3 scouts so you know which planets are the best to take. Roids are easy to colonise and can help you start to get some resources in (though little credits). And make sure that you can upgrade the planets before you take them - the -ve income you get can be a killer and is a noob mistake seen to often. It is better to clear a planet and wait a bit to get the credits/resources to upgrade it then to "own" it and have lower income. They only benefit to owning a planet early is if you lack the resouces to upgrade, but have the credits to start construction the mines AND still be able to do the upgrades when the credits arive. What I mean is having 1000 credits, 135 metal and 100 crystal and needing 150 metal to do the upgrade - you have the credits to start building the mines while those last 15 metal come in.

3) Capture neutral mines if possible to help

4) Build first free cap ASAP and start building ships

5) Work out which planet(s) to colonise once your scouts have revealed them. Some have more defenders then others, so go for the lightly defended ones while you build up your fleet

6) Get LRMS and carriers researched as soon as you can and into production - I don't fear 10-15 cobalts as much as I do 15 LRMS (more likely to kill my cap) or even 7-8 carriers with all fighters....

7) Get trade ports up - this is a advantage TEC have as it is lvl 2 tech vs 3 for advent and 4 for vassari.

8) Build more ships

Not sure if this helps but I just started playing , played the larger maps first and got decimated by the ai within about half an hour, played a small map and my first game took me 10.5 hours. this was the first game that I got anywhere in. had the same prob with the ai as you but found that they had all there ships at 1 planet finally got past the stalemate by dividing my ships and attacking 2 planets at once. Lost alot of my force at 1 planet but took the other and rebuilt my fleet as they died.

thanks guys,

ok i quit my game that took 6 hr's i could see it wasnt going anywhere and started afresh on a 14planet 1v1 map and actually beat it easily and took about 2 hours!

the best tips are defiantly build miltary first and get as many planets as you can, i just built 10 frigates with the cap ship and easily took 5 planets.

i researched that fast ship with the missiles (LRMS?) and built those up and found that a whole bunch of them destroyed a cap ship pretty easily - the rest from there was a matter of building up civ and mil to take the map.

think i had 4 cap ships , around 40 LRMS and 20 Carriers by the end of it.

il probs do a bigger map next time and see how far i get.

Start learning cap and support cruiser abilities, knowing and micromanaging those is a big part of the skill of playing a given faction. Kol's flak burst is important, and hoshiko's can repair so you take fewer losses...

BTW if you go online you can always look for co-op games against cpu - maybe you can hook up with someone who can give a few tips or another newb that is looking for similar challenges.

Like a multi star map? Before you try you may want to lock teams before so the AI does not gang up on you. It sucks to find yourself 10 min into the game and find that the AI has allready made alliances with itself.

FYI, The logic of the AI dictates that it must be at war with at least one other player. So if all the AI make alliances with each other, you won't be able to make any at all. 

Its not "over powered" it just seems that way when you use it and clear out a 60+ ship fleet. The cause of which would be that the ships were underdevoloped, so you can destroy pirate swarms real easy with it.