Darvin3

The common mistake (I was making it too before I came to these forums and read the general strategy tips threads) was putting one trade port in every planet. I implicitly believed that trade ports didn't stack, which is wrong. Two trade ports in the same planet means double the trade income. Now imagine five or six. Hence, you want to max out logistics upgrades and fill them with trade ports. You'll have a crazy amount of income going before long. <

Seems to me that if you invest in 20 (twenty! We're talking about an investment of about 15k!) siege frigates and your enemy doesn't scout to see that [i]AND[/i] your army is still comparably strong enough to survive the counter-attack, you deserve to take out multiple planets. Attacking civilians should be a valid, if morally reprehensible, strategy.

I actually prefer the ambiguity created by the sparse details. The sense of unknown gives each faction more character and also morally ambiguous. Is the Unity a utopian society or a depraved mind-control regime? Is the TEC a coalition determined to defend its people, or a fascist regime in the making? Are the Vasari a nomadic people struggling for their own survival, or brutal dictators repressing all in their wake? The lack of details provided leaves the player

Culture is more defensive than offensive. You won't kill your enemy with it (most of the time, anyways), but you could suffer if you don't have any of it yourself. Most of the time you only need one broadcast center for every four or five planets, so it's not exactly an expensive proposition. As well, culture will raise the loyalty of nearby planets, which can help your income somewhat. That said, there are a couple of cases where offensive culture is

The flavour text for factions and units is interesting, I will admit that (we're all nerds here, I suspect), but it's not actually relevent information for the game. The useful info (like fleet logistics) isn't anywhere near as interesting as the background info.

I don't think the manual is confusing, just poorly organized and often sparse on details. The information in question is in there, and quite clearly stated, but you'd probably need to read the manual page-by-page to find what you were looking for if you didn't know where to look, and that's boring.

Customized win conditions: Allow players to select what the win conditions for the game will be. Like "last two players standing", "capture and hold all pirate bases", or "get 1000 population between all your planets". Obviously not all settings would work well on all maps, but more options would be nice. Better Piracy: Right now, pirates are too predictable and therefore more of an annoyance than a danger. It would be nice if we had sm

You need to purchase fleet logistics upgrades. These will increase the maximum size of your fleet. You'll find them in the science menu (the beaker button at the top center of the screen) under fleet logistics. Page 36 of the manual, by the way.

[quote] Isn't pirating improved in 1.12. They used to attack the same planet over and over again. Now they seem to randomly pick from any of the closest planets. They were purely experience givers before that. [/quote] That's dubious, since there are still dead giveaways as to where the pirates are going. First of all, you can always send a scout to see where the pirates are going. You can usually hazard an accurate guess to their target b

I find the only units worth focus firing with are long range units and strike craft. Everything else does just fine if left to its own devices, and you're better off micro-managing cruiser special abilities. Strike craft have a nasty habit of, say, focus firing a Kol with adaptive shields on. BAAAAD idea, especially when there's a fragile Hoshiko sitting next to it. Fighters tend to prioritize other fighters, which is what you want them to do, but once those are neutra

I don't think new features are needed, the unit just needs to be stronger. It's expensive enough that a siege rush isn't viable, which I agree is a good thing, but if you're going to pay for a force of these wickedly expensive units you deserve to have something that's a [i]threat[/i]. Really, just a survivability buff would be great. Keep 'em weak to bombers so hanger defense counters them, but otherwise they should just take a lot more beating before they go down.

I usually play with pirates off. It's an interesting feature, great in principle, but it brings surprisingly little to the game. Frankly, I find the bidding wars every 15 minutes do more to slow down the pace of the game, and this is a game that's slow enough as it is. Pirates are too predictable to be dangerous. You know where they're coming from, who the target is, and you usually can predict where they'll hit, and even a small fleet can usually minc

The big problem with civilian tech is crystal. Unless you're on a map where you can procure multiple ice planets early and plant refineries on them, you just can't get this to work because you need many techs all with very high crystal costs. Moreover, like any booming strategy, if an aggressive player bypasses your frontal defenses you can be crippled before this pays off. If you can't get loads of ice planets, you'll be spending so much money on the black market that your

I love to have a group of bomber-laden carriers to harass enemy worlds and quickly take out orbital structures. If a bunch of fighters pop up, that's your signal to retreat. This command is invaluable for getting your bombers out of trouble, while your fighter squads can continue to cover your retreating forces.

It's the AI surrendering. I've found the AI tends to surrender when it has no capital ships and has lost its homeworld, but that's a general observation and not the rule. I've had AI's sitting on a couple of fringe asteroids the entire game because it still has a level 1 capital ship prowling around somewhere, and another time I saw an AI surrender even though it still controlled seven planets after I killed its last capital ship and captured its homeworld. That said, I had

I recently got the game, and got a similar impression about siege frigates. They seem way too expensive and too fragile to justify investing in them. Maybe if your opponent doesn't scout, and has multiple undefended fringe worlds, then they'll be a useful part of a small harassing strike force, but I've found that even a tiny amount of defense (like, the amount you put in to damage passing scouts...) can ward off unsupported siege vessels, and even if those siege vessels hav