mathguru

I'm estimating... but it might actually be lower. The whole game though can take several HOURS... which is kinda crazy... cuz at some point my victory or defeat is a forgone conclusion and the AI should surrender. Drives me nuts. But you think the all around beginning strat is pretty sound? The idea that I have is that I should colonize as many planets as I can reasonably defend as quickly as possible to get a good econ base from which to fleet up... can you also talk

Okay, so this is where I am right now in my prep for going into online multiplayer. I'm playing against 3 "hard" AIs on the Medium map Tempest. I don't know if you guys know that map, but basically each player gets a spiral of planets that go towards the star in the middle. A couple of things... first of all, I have NOT finished a game against the AI yet because, even though I may have wiped out all the other players, the one AI left will NOT surrender, no matter how hopeles

Darvin, you're my hero. Thank you so much for that response. That is a ton of great info that I'll be putting to use. So basically what I'm going to be doing is forgetting trade ports early game. I'll be concentrating on expanding with my colony cap and a few light frigates, while building a secondary defense fleet to fend off the pirates (and maybe even an early enemy advance). What do you guys think about fulfilling missions? Sometimes going out of my way

Thank you for the continued replies, they have really helped me. I bought Entrenchment, but now I'm having to relearn the tech tree... not that different but still... even playing against the computer, you have to make decisions in real time about research, so i need to know the tech tree by heart. Sometimes I feel like I'm haphazardly researching stuff... like I feel like I need to get 2 civic labs up right off the bat so I can get trade ports... but when I do that it means some

Also, can someone plz explain what posters are referring to when they talk about "starbases"? Are these some sort of new structure that has been added with patch? Or is it in the tech tree and I'm just not seeing it? Thanks!

Thank you much for your replies. Another problem I seem to be having is managing my scouts. How can i quickly go to them? Do you manage them from the empire tab? I normally have been leaving them on auto explore, but this is not going to viable I think for multiplayer.. I am going to need specific intel. So I need a better way of managing them.

Hey guys. I've got probably around 10 hours into the game so far, and I've pretty much got the basic controls down and am consistantly beating normal to hard AI. So I have the all around process (I have been using TEC)... and other than figuring how best to do research, what to research, what to build, etc, I'm doing okay. The problem I'm having is fleet management. I've figured out how to make fleets... this isn't covered in the instructions and I dont' remember it in