Raban

man it is easy to invade the pirate base late in the game. the trick is to use the fleet engagement option and set it to "HOLD POSITION". once that is set for your fleet move them to the pirate base and they will sit on the edge of the gravity well and won't get chewed up by all the point defense cannons take 30+ carriers with you... the more the better. fighters for taking out the individual pirate ships and the bombers are good on the tactical cannons. with the hold position tric

if you lock the teams they won't ally... lock teams is an option you set before creating the game

simple solution: don't chase them ... have decent tactical defenses and some ships at the planets they are coming to... the only ships i chase are cap ships cause i can gravity beam/ion cannon them from jumping and destroy them... remember the enemy will stop running when you've chased him back to his home planet and are bombarding it

you probably didn't lock the teams... its a very important option you select before creating the game... with the teams locked and the AI's each on different teams they likely won't gang up on you

are you playing VS the AI on hard ? cause i have never experienced what you're talking about. if you want a challenge put the teams on unlocked and go vs. two hard AI's each on seperate teams... so 3 players 3 teams ... due to the teams being unlocked the AI's will likely join together and attack you in force... unless you are quite good and can split their force and destroy one then the other. another fun game i had recently is the map gateway 3v3 all hard ai's.... lock

i use the empire tree to see which cap ships leveled and have a new ability to select... thats about it...

agreed... its a very strange system which seems to be tacked-on rather than fully developed.

lol i didn't believe you at first but i just had a game and this situation came up.. was a 2v2 me and 1 hard ai vs 2 hard ai ... i tried your "trick" and it seems you are correct. keeping bounty's on the two enemy ai's me and my partner ai never got a bounty. i think the other team was actually placing bounty's on eachother too cause the numbers got quite high. this is definitely an oversight cause the AI should never bounty a teammate...

as you play more games you will learn how to manage your economy better... so even if you think you had a decent one now you will look back after a bunch more games and understand what was going wrong. playing vs. multiple AI's is a tricky thing. i agree diplomacy is no good, i don't like it either. but without it you will run the definite risk of the AI's joining together and coming at you, at the same time ! i'd suggest you try 1v1 on a medium size map and perhaps bump t

when i enter the fight i point all my ships at the cap ship they have closest to me. if i have a cap ship which can disable phase jumping i keep all its auto casts off cause i wanna micro that when they run. i ignore all smaller ships and just focus on taking down their cap ships one by one. when they start to run i chase down the weakest cap ship and repeatedly disable its ability to phase out and destroy it. the vasari have a cap ship with a area effect repair ability whic

check the diplomacy window when playing against the comp ai's ... its all there. they ask you to do/give things and you see what you'll gain in return... i basically ignore everything they have to say and just go about destroying them

I find myself routinely ending up with one huge mass of ships at a planet... and seeing the AI's coming from different directions i know i need to split it and defend two hotspots quick. yet i've found no easy way to accomplish this other than click/dragging and selecting a few here a few there and just hoping they were divided equally. who knows if i got any missile ships in there or flak boats... just keeping my fingers crossed it will work out cause its way too many ships to sort

ya i too have been picking the "colonize" cap ship first... it has a fighter wing right off the bat and its just TOOO convenient to be able to fly one ship to a sector, conquer it, and then colonize the planet all in one ... it may not have as much punch as the bigger battleships but the air wing sorta makes up for that...

[quote] I spend up to 2000 credits Right now pirates are some sort of harassment-eBay-auction. I could just as well spend the bounty on a harassment-fleet myself. [/quote] thing is ... you couldn't "just as easily" build a harassment fleet yourself at that price. not for 2000 credits and not to mention it costs credits + resources to build attack ships. my last game on a 1000 cred bounty i won i spotted the pirate raid that was sent against the AI. i counted approx 12 ship

well i just posted this in another runtime error thread so i'll post it again cause i was getting this runtime error until i remembered i hadn't installed any of the vista hotfixes... once i installed hotfix 940105 i never got the runtime error again.. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940105

are you running vista ?? if so have you installed the 940105 hotfix ... make sure you have its very important http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940105

the # of civil and military research centers should be displayed right on the screen at all times... somewhere out of the way but always visible... i hear it was like this is beta but was removed for some reason. the way i compensate for this right now is by going into the tech tree and mousing over some of the later techs... when you see a red "Requires 4 military labs" you know you don't have 4 ... then if its not red for "Requires 3 military labs" you know you have 3 ...

had a huge fleet vs fleet battle in a sector where the AI(hard) had a planet. the battle went on a very long time and i took over his planet while it was happening. the AI was very quick to destroy any tactical cannons I built so i figured why not try some factories? the battle was still raging on and the way things were going i was likely to lose... i was surprised the AI didn't care as i was constructing 3 frigate factories and a capital ship factory. which i was able to use to re

yes i agree the game is great and very addictive

I am confused... my capital ships seem to get to level 3 and then stop. Is that the max level they get by experience or is there a way to increase it higher than i'm missing thanks in advance.

ugh i just crashed with a runtime error ... playing singleplayer and right about to have a big battle ... and the last autosave was 15 minutes before the crash!?! arghhhh !! please tell me there is a way to make it autosave every 60 seconds .... by god . . .. not good not good

yep i used paypal... stardock will never see my credit card info that way . . ..