[CubaLibre]

[Tulpa]

tell me what it is because I was doing good until end game where I blew it and ended up in second place by a wide margin, and I was only playing on normal. I don't even know how I fell behind (nor why all my ship designs sucked, need help with that too)

I'm playing the disharmony version fyi, haven't bothered trying classic yet.
_________________

[CubaLibre]

i assume you were playing humans? economy/war is the easy route, if you want to play diplomatically you really have to play a specialized race or everyone will just hate you for being ahead and you'll never have peaceful relations with anybody.

at this point in my normal game i own half the galaxy and am at war with three factions and don't give a fuck. the second place has about half my score and the only reason they're so far ahead of all the others is i haven't met them yet. all of my wars have been defensive - i'm content to peacefully consolidate, but my neighbors always freak out about how huge i am and declare war like idiots. then i pump out superior ships and blow them all to smithereens.

it is on a ring galaxy which is the easiest setup to be fair. you have a guaranteed peaceful start because your little sector will be locked off by wormholes and you have easy chokepoints to sit fleets on for defense or in wartime. things get a lot messier when there are more connections between people.

the best way to play the game is mostly "evenly" - start with all the basic non-military techs, focus a little more on colonization so you can get expansion underway, pick up military as you go. even as a warmonger military is always my most neglected tree because the ai is kind of stupid with its fleets and is really bad at keeping up with military tech for some reason (they seem to hugely concentrate on the science/industry tree - they also neglect colonization a lot, you'll find their systems with a lot of empty planets). there's never any reason to beeline and invest heavily in one tree at the expense of the others (unlike say civ where there are tons of strategies that revolve around doing just that) except in a very few cases.

the very first thing you should spend your money on is hiring all three heroes you can at the start. they're hugely beneficial to your systems and more than worth their maintenance cost. there's never any reason not to have a full college. obviously admin/corporate is best in the early game, fleet type guys aren't much use until you start warring later, but any hero is better than no hero - plus you can let your fleet guys level by building stuff but give them the military-oriented skills so they are awesome when you do start fighting.

never ever give your heroes the food skills, always the production skills followed by science skills. you can use production to buy food (via building food buildings) but not the other way around.

choosing planets to colonize is usually pretty obvious. you want to stay away from nasty planets with happiness negatives or bad anomalies until you have the tech to deal with them, there's no reason to colonize every planet just because you can. the happiness drain will kill whatever gains you get by colonizing the planet. shitty one-planet systems with a crap planet type are a tossup. if you don't colonize them they'll spawn pirates which are kind of a pain, but usually not that hard. i usually choose dealing with potential pirates over colonizing such systems before i'm truly ready.

unless a system has a completely full happiness bar there's no reason not to build happiness buildings. every happiness gain makes the system more productive and efficient and it's always worth the maintenance cost for the building.

when choosing planet specializations you should always choose the one that's effective for the given planet type. the only exception is when there's no good food planet and it's your first colony in the system, you should usually go ahead and give it the food specialization.

don't go nuts with food buildings. it's not like science or production where you just want to build all of them. build them selectively in places with slow growth. remember that they become a complete waste of money once a system hits max pop.

speaking of hitting max pop, remember that once that occurs you should go back through and change any farm planets to some other specialization. as far as i know there is absolutely no benefit to producing surplus food once a system is full (excepting a super late-game tech in the science tree), and there's no food maintenance required to maintain population. if you're really anal you can even go through and sell off any of the food buildings you made, but i usually don't bother/keep them around just in case i lose pop for some reason (build colony ships, invasions, random events)

a large amount of the buildings are just always good to build, everywhere, all the time. the only question is usually the order. exceptions are: money buildings relating specifically to trade routes, since if everyone hates you you won't have any; food buildings, as discussed; military buildings. the shipbuilding ones should only go on your industrial centers. the defensive ones are arguably useful on border planets that you think are likely to be invaded, but invasions take so long anyway in endless space that i usually don't bother (this may change on harder difficulties, i dunno)

explore all your moons once you get the tech to do so. it doesn't take much production and even empty moons produce bonuses with certain buildings.

WAR: never put invasion modules on your combat ships. you should have invasion fleets filled entirely with ships that are filled with nothing but invasion modules. i've never seen any reason why you would not do this. you just have to make sure you protect your invasion fleets with your combat fleets (make sure that only the combat fleet is locking down the system so the invasion fleet doesn't get into fights - the game usually does this by default)

kinects are best in melee, beams in medium range and missiles at long range (sort of). disharmony mixed this up by allowing you to specify effective ranges for all the weapons. as far as i can tell, these aren't specializations but rather maximum effective ranges, i.e. picking long range doesn't make the gun worse at melee, it just makes it effective at all three ranges. in other words long range is always best, but it is also the most expensive in tonnage and production.

i don't see any reason to make melee specific, kinetic-heavy ships. the ai LOVES doing this and it never works. even kamikaze missile boats with no defenses (an effective option in the early game) will obliterate such fleets before they get in range where the kinetics do the job.

i basically always go heavy on long range beams with a decent amount of missile backup and maybe a few kinetics to fill in. it's worked against every enemy i've faced. try to always fit one armor module on your combat ships if you can, the hp boost is huge. defenses are also very important. again, they work best when balanced with a slight emphasis on deflectors (i.e. anti-kinetics) because the ai loves kinetics so much.

fighters and bombers are pretty awesome. worth building "carrier" type ships once you unlock the tech for it, not as your primary attacker but one or two in every fleet really helps. bombers are absolutely brutal against capital ships, but take a while to get deployed. fighters are slightly faster and do mediocre damage; their real specialty is anti-bomber. the ai is bad about using fighters/bombers so i would only take one fighter module and fill the rest with bombers unless you are specifically facing a bomber-loving ai (which i've never seen).

disharmony added a whole other invasion mechanic that involves using bombs and troops. basically bombs destroy infrastructure and system population. then your troops go in to battle the remaining population. it's potentially a lot faster than normal invasions (if you win the battle you instantly get the system) but has a huge downside: each troop is actually a population point from your planet, so if you build too many troop ships you will empty your own planets. also, softening up a system with bombs leaves it a lot deader when you do capture it. personally i've never seen a reason to go this route, maybe if you had a superfood race that reproduced quickly it would be efficient. i'll take my nice slow 8-20 turn invasions that leave me with all the buildings and pop.

midgame you'll start unlocking fleetwide support modules like repair, engine power, and weapons power. it's worth building a dedicated support ship and sticking one or two in every fleet, especially for repair. your ships will not repair at all in enemy space without repair modules, and the modules are super expensive and not worth sticking on a combat-specific craft. a lot of times you will lose ships to simple attrition as the enemy throws ship after ship at your power fleet, a support ship with repair will prevent this from happening.

the biggest thing is to take your time and not go too fast. this applies to expansion and war both. invasions take a long time in endless space even for someone who knows what they're doing. the ais will sit on your system with a combat fleet for like five turns before they even bother getting an invasion fleet in there. also, they almost never penetrate into your space and start causing problems all over, they'll methodically try to slowly eat you from the outside in. so if you get a surprise war declared on you, even if the enemy is sending big scary-looking fleets and you don't have much of a military it's not the end of the world. take your time, build good ships on your inner planets even if they take 2 or 3 or 4 turns apiece, get a nice full fleet of top of the line stuff and then go attack. i've never seen the ai not let me get away with this.
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.

[CubaLibre]

holy fucks that was a lot of writing
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.

[Tulpa]

should be noted I had a handle on pretty much all that except ship design but I played a non-human race (I played the scientist race, whatever they were called) and got matched up with the harmony and two other super non human races.

like endgame I had a 40% tax rate w/ 100% empire approval and 100% per-planet approval on literally every planet (and I did do the mistake of colonizing every planet eventually) and I still lost. I was making 1000 dust a turn, had one system knocking out over 1000 beakers (with most others giving me 400-600 beakers) a turn and still trailed behind in tech.

The enemies were also super beam/missile happy so the advice I've seen of designing anti-kinetic didn't apply and beam and missile defense is way more costly so I always ended up with underpowered ships. I did figure that making invasion ships different from space combat ships would make sense.

Man we gotta play this multi some time so you can explain where I'm fucking up because I really was in the lead by like 100 points for 3/4ths of the game and then like after a dozen turns I was trailing by 1000 points and lost 50 turns later. Fuckin harmony and their total lack of upkeep costs and tax balancing is ridiculous, I couldn't even trade properly with them but they were the only ones that were peaceable w/ me.
_________________

[Tulpa]

I did notice what I assume is a bug in disharmony, two of the factions wouldn't make invasion type ships at all so when they'd besiege me they'd just sit there doing nothing so I could build up an army and wreck them (I'm actually decent-ish at the space rock paper scissors stuff, usually getting a win or a draw to my advantage with a worse fleet)
_________________

[CubaLibre]

well i dunno how to diagnose that specific situation of an endgame runaway ai. i mean i'm not a huge expert on the game. like a lot of 4x games, sometimes the only way to prevent a runaway ai is to stick your nose in and prevent them from running away. if you don't or can't you may not be able to stop it (see e.g. continents maps in civ). fwiw i picked random opponents in my game and got two harmonies, they weren't my immediate neighbors either so they had a nice long time to work on their own, and i'm at war with both of them simultaneously now and crushing them.

as the game wears on the ai does tend to mix it up with ship design, the kinetic thing is usually for like the first half of the game. it's absolutely worth counterdesigning ships specifically to suit your opponents' strengths and weaknesses. if they have massive amounts of beams and missiles, who cares how expensive shields and flak are, you gotta get em on there. a dead fleet can't shoot back. actually that might be a good situation to use a lot of fighter/bomber carriers, you can just slap the modules on there and then fill most of your tonnage with defenses instead of weapons.

i totally forgot talking about the little mini tactical combat thing with the cards but you say you're pretty good at it so cool. my general advice there is don't worry trying to guess what the ai is going to choose and counterpick specific things to block them, they're too unpredictable for that. just pick cards that will actually be good for you in that phase relative to the enemy fleet. if they have a lot of melee and medium range weapons, start out with a brutal offense and then go defensive. if they have lots of missiles, make your first card the lower missile damage one.

also don't forget fleet heroes and their unique battle card abilities. they're almost always superior to normal cards and don't have any tradeoffs, they're pure benefit. only thing is you have to pay a little dust for them but by the time you're far enough that your guys have leveled up that much you should be rolling in dust.

colonizing every planet eventually isn't a mistake, it's exactly what you should do. you should just wait to do it until you have the tech and happiness to support it. mid to late game, you should also consider terraforming. important buildings come pretty slowly so you're likely to have a decent number of systems sitting around doing science or dust conversion and not building anything, may as well put that production towards terraforming into superior planet types. other option of course is to build ships like a fiend which it sounds like you could have benefitted from so you could safely attack that runaway ai before it got too late.
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.

[Tulpa]

yeah I guess what happened was I didn't build up my fleet at all except when I was engaged in wars, kinda getting that that was my big mistake early on.

when terraforming should I focus on making every system a particular kind of system (like a research system and a dust system, etc) or should I focus on making every system self sustaining?
_________________

[GrimmSweeper]

Early on you want to focus on food production, as having a big population will make up for not focusing on industry and you can use the excess to spread quickly. In that regard you want high pop planets in favourable conditions to start off systems and then expand further with them when you can mitigate happiness loss. Also keep in mind that your empire influence can prevent neutrals from occupying systems you've deemed less important unless they have an Open Borders agreement. As long as you have colonized key chokepoints, you can keep systems barren until your tech level can make places better (though you risk pirates appearing where you don't have vision). Unless you're grabbing territory it is better and cheaper to develop your big systems you've already colonized; less maintenance cost across the same population and you don't have to build a colony ship.

Once you've established yourself, you can start changing focus to industry (mainly for ship creation), economy (to keep yourself in the black) or research (if you need to play catch up).

[Pijaibros]

i thought i walked in to a civilization 4 thread based on the walls of words above and got excited for a second. then disappointed that it was not civ4 talk, but then kinda excited because there is a space game similar to civ4.

[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

[Tulpa]

I figured those late game techs were so you could conquer planets but then just kill the planet so it doesn't even stay in your empire. I'm gonna try another game today-ish to see if maybe what really was the case was staying up all night to play a videogame and just making dumb mistakes.
_________________

[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

won by science. i was literally in a position to win by any victory condition i chose (see "horizontal empires are always best" critique above), and science seemed the fastest so i took it. i could easily have accelerated it as well but just kept plodding along with my generalist horizontal tendencies instead. i actually allied with the second-place faction that was also at war with the two remaining tiny factions, lol.
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.

[Tulpa]

I actually think what did me in, after going over my own game was allying with the harmony, since I believe they had some of those techs that actually benefit from alliances and were able to leapfrog past me at that point. Damned my super-peaceable turtling strategies.

EDIT: Oh also I completely fucked up early on because I didn't understand luxury resources had in game effects so I traded them more than a few times to the AI that eventually won, that probably had something to do with it.

Can we port Endless Space talk to an Endless Space thread?
_________________

[CubaLibre]

uhh k
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.

[CubaLibre]

yeah luxury resources are awesome. did you get the monopoly mechanic? basically every unit of luxury has a small global effect on your empire, but once you have 4 units you get a huge global benefit. so if you have 3 it's worth going out of your way to trade for the 4th, but if you have 5 you can pretty safely trade away one for a reasonable benefit. also worth keeping in mind for colonization purposes, i.e. if you have 3 it might be worth colonizing a crappy planet for the 4th even if you otherwise wouldn't at that point.
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.

[Tulpa]

yah I got that. I watched a let's play of the game before embarking on my own game

I feel like 4x and grand strategy games should just have some like developer made let's plays or something but I'm probably just dumb with the genre after getting pretty good with civ 4 and never bothering with anything else. All my civ 4 habits are useless!
_________________

[CubaLibre]

yah watching an lp of a 4x game is easily the best way to learn about it. it's like playing yourself except there's a guy there explaining all the background mechanical shit you didn't know about it
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.

[armed police catrider]

Grabbed this on account of the sale/you guys talking about it.

This game makes me feel dumb. Maybe all that Civ V destroyed my strategy muscles. I know that AI bonuses are stacked against you as low as Easy difficulty and I'm really feeling it, I've only been able to make it to around turn 40 before I start feeling like I'm just making random panicky decisions while a fleet of destroyers bangs down my wormportal.

General consensus seems to be expand, expand, expand, but I always feel like I'm stretching myself way too thin. taking shitty systems for the sake of further expansion, always running into approval vs economy problems, etc. Are there any good guidelines or rules of thumb to early game expansion so as to avoid making a big mess?

Also is there some kind of mod that adds hotkeys because boy could this game ever use them.

[GrimmSweeper]

Your tech should not be going towards opening up colonization on other planet types but rather boosting your food focus (left side) and getting industry buildings unlocked (right side). Those two things play a major role in bootstrapping your empire and keeping ahead of the AI. Of those currently colonizable, you want either beneficial bonuses or planets without any modifiers. And the further away you are from Terran/Ocean/Jungle, the less happy your colonists are initially going to be. Take shitty systems later on, when you have happiness buildings or ways of removing negative modifiers. Explore rampantly then decide what planets to take; you want your home system to be near full before you start thinking about expanding with colony ships.

[CubaLibre]

[Lucaz]

I too noticed there aren't to many different ways to play the, but at least playing with different races rally changes what you should do. Like how playing with either Hissho or Cravers leads to continued warfare, although in different ways, and Harmony and Sowers changing the production mechanics. Too bad the races are pretty unbalanced. Not MoO unbalanced, but for example Hisshos bushido bonus is pretty overwhelming, Amoebas full map too, while the Sowers have an only meh special bonus, and have most of their trait points wasted in the useless tolerant trait.

I'm quite fond of invasion modules, specially late-game when I can spam them and take half an empire in a few turns. In my last game I won by expansion after taking on the last remaining opponent with three pure invasion fleets and their escorts encroaching form different directions, took my like a dozen turns take half of the systems.

On ship design, if I undersootd things well, weapons are at their strongest when your chosen range and the weapon type's range coincide (like, medium range beams are better than long or short range beams). On the cards, it's worth noting some oponents have favorite cards. In every game I've seen at least one opponent that always uses sabotage, every battle, every phase, which was heavily exploitable.

[GrimmSweeper]

[CubaLibre]

beams still seem to be the best if only because they are most consistent. missiles have the highest damage but their damage is "spikey" and not til the end of the round so you're just eating damage til then. and kinetics are only good close up.

actually though i've had the most success putting all weapon types on each combat ship as much as practicable. they just all cover each other's weaknesses and make your feet very robust since it can't be countered by one kind of defense. i've found that the ai eventually does "counterbuild" in making ships with balanced defenses but that's what you want anyway, them all spread out.

i think it's still true that you'll fit more guns on 2 2cp ships instead of 1 4cp ship, but the 4cps are just so survivable. a dead ship causes no damage. but i think mixing up ship types is always the best course. in my current game i have a 16cp cap right now, my standard combat fleet (which has been brutalizing people) is:

2 4cps
2 2cp gunships
1 2cp carrier
2 1cp support ships

again, in pretty much every aspect of this game it's best to go horizontal and generalist. getting a little of everything almost always seems superior to getting a lot of one thing.
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.

[CubaLibre]

Arisen from axe detritus.

Beat my first Serious game as Amoeba. I swore at the beginning to play peacefully and stay in my little spiral arm. It was not ideal, no really great systems but I figured I'd make do. Allying people is a super long-term game. Once you ally someone reasonably powerful, it's almost impossible to ally anyone else because no one else maintains their diplomatic relationships so everyone either hates your ally and refuses to join the alliance or your ally hates them and will leave the alliance if you let them join. I never did manage to be allied to more than one person at a time.

Initially the Pilgrims were the problem, but they expanded too much into the core and pissed off literally everybody and got picked apart. Then the three most powerful factions were me, Sowers, and Automatons. It was pretty clear the Sowers and Automatons were headed for a showdown but they kind of played fake nice for most of the game. Initially I was allied to Automatons, but dropped them for the Sowers because they already had an alliance with the Sophons and I thought it'd be better to get a three-way alliance instead of a two-way. Well, Sophons hated me for absolutely no reason and dropped the alliance when I picked up the Sowers. Idiots.

Because Amoeba can (very unfairly) see the whole map I could see that Sophons were stuck on like three systems in their arm and never colonized the whole back 2/3 of what they had. Later I realized it was because they were constantly blockaded by pirates and could never work up the wherewithal to build any ships to kill them, which is pretty hilarious.

Anyway, my allies would get into wars and I just couldn't resist taking a few systems. I tried to do so judiciously, far away from the power players but it just didn't matter. My diplo negatives from "expansion" made allying everyone impossible. Diplo victory down the tubes, I abused Amoeba's ridiculous trade route bonuses and ended up gunning for econ.

The three weak factions all declared on me more or less simultaneously for reasons I will never understand, other than that I bordered their space. Sowers said fuck that and left my alliance. The wars weren't hard but I was very afraid of Sowers and Automatons growing on their half of the galaxy (they were ahead of me in points the entire game). They started fighting, which I figured was a good thing as they would put a damper on each other's point growth. Automatons courted me hard for an alliance, which I kept declining because Sowers were still powerful and right next to me, it would enter me into the war against them, and I still had my wars against the leftovers to fight. Well, after declining twice I look over and see that the Automatons are ripping the Sowers to shreds - taking another system every five turns or so, just completely ripping into them. Soooooo I said hey Automatons, how bout that alliance you wanted. I got them to give me a couple techs and like 2000 dust/turn for it too.

I was pretty sure Automatons were in love with me and would honor the alliance until the end of the game. Here was the problem: they owned all of their space as well as former Sower and Pilgrim space, and now as my ally they were helping me in my wars with the leftovers and taking systems faster than I could. I realized all of a sudden that they were going to win an expansion victory just by taking all the remaining systems and grab victory right from underneath me. (The other possibility is that by wiping out all other factions, me and the Automatons as the only factions remaining and allied = diplo victory. But I was pretty sure they would win by territory a couple systems before the coup de grace. Academic question: what if the final system of the final unallied faction is also the final system required for expansion victory? Which victory takes priority and who wins? Anyway.) Started sweating bullets.

But then - out of nowhere - the Automatons peace all the factions just short of an expansion victory. Now I have a 25 turn cease fire to crank cash to max. An incredibly stupid move by the AI - I don't think they're programmed to seek particular victory conditions viciously enough. He was just playing like you would in the midgame, taking favorable peace deals instead of continuing grinding wars. I hit the magic dust number like 2 turns before the ceasefire was over (not that I was confident Automatons would immediately redeclare anyway). Automatons were at 50% econ victory themselves by the end.

The whole game was pretty tense. There's not a whole lot of direct ways to play powerful neighbors off of each other (I would kill a man for a basic "trade to faction x in exchange for war declaration against faction y" diplo option, something that's been in Civ since like 2), but you still get that feeling of being ruthlessly Machiavellian without being a military or industrial powerhouse. It was a fun game.
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.

[Tulpa]

So I beat the game on Hard w/ Pilgrims, economic victory (though it was actually a close call between that, science victory, and diplo victory, I let the game run for another 10 turns and got the achievements for the other two victories)

The game kinda falls apart once you learn how abusable the AI is (at least on this difficulty, but the trick I picked up was from an endless difficulty let's play, and I'm surprised it was never patched)

Basically, once I got the trading tech, I leapfrogged past all the AIs. I traded lots of cheap techs and resources for good techs (and preferably dust per turn) until I had a huge headstart on tech, then I just started trading my resources for dust per turn with as many AIs as I could. Here's what happens: the AIs don't prioritize how quick a tech is to learn or how useful it would be to learning other techs. So, in 10 turns the AI learns a single expensive tech, I learn 5 or 6 cheap techs. I trade half those techs away with some resources and the AI gives me their expensive tech and some dust per turn. The AI is stupid and bankrupts itself almost constantly so the deal gets broken, I get my resources back and I immediately trade again, resources and maybe a tech for any other techs they have and dust per turn until I have caught up to the AI headstart. The luxury resource bonuses are nowhere near as good as high dust per turn, because I can just buy system improvements and bootstrap all my systems way faster than the AIs (especially now that I'm draining all of them of dust). No one ever declared war on me because they all loved me, tech trading is a great way to up my diplomatic score with my neighbours, even as I aggressively expanded into the core of the system. I didn't even build a fleet until turn 100 and that was just so I could pick off an isolated weak neighbour that happened to have Auriga.

Unfortunately, the game was a bit boring once I got a huge lead. There was a long time inbetween my gaining that lead and my winning the game, and my lead felt kind of like an inevitable win at that point. The AI is super abusable at least on hard difficulty, but considering I just used the same technique as was used on someone's Endless let's play, I figure nothing will be different past the early game on higher difficulties.

By the time the game was down to 5 of the original 8 factions, the third strongest AI declared war on me. But by that point I controlled all of the chokepoints in the center of the galaxy, and I was able to take his systems in 50 turns with just two battle fleets and two invasion fleets.
_________________

[CubaLibre]

Man, I never realized tech trading was so abusable. I barely trade techs at all, mostly just throw a couple in to get over a diplo hump to get a cooperation agreement or something. I should try Ameoba again and do that and get my diplo win.

I think though that if it's really that abusable you'll have to have a "no doing that" house rule to make the game interesting. Or you could play Cravers.
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.

[Greng]

Got the new faction 'Dwellers' for buying their new game (Dungeons of the Endless). I'm so completely hopeless at this so far but I've only played about 3 or 4 games and never really stick to (or understand) the victory goals you should be aiming for with each particular faction.

Now I've chipped away and become a bit more familiar with the tech tree I'm going to try and work to some more sensible goals. Most games so far I've just pissed off the other factions early by colonising like crazy.
_________________

Steam ~ Be Preying | Resident Evil.net ~ ElSpank

[CubaLibre]

Yeah all the factions are super aggro and will jump all over you if you expand in their direction. It's less about your expansion, though, and more about theirs. If you play a spiral galaxy for example and take the core system that blocks off their arm, expect a war declaration within 10 turns.

Also, "aiming" for certain victory conditions isn't a thing you need to do until the mid to late game, really. As I said, playing a non-diplo-heavy faction you have no reason not to just conquer when you can and go totally horizontal. Normally you get ahead of everybody and by the end you have your choice of victory conditions. As I get into harder difficulties, however, this seems less true...

Playing Automatons on Impossible. They're described as isolationists (and have at least one tech that endorses that) so I'm staying within my arm. The Cravers are a big problem this game. Most everyone likes me though.

I'm doing a lot more tech trading, and it's awesome, but it's not working as well as you describe, Tulpa. AIs don't give a shit about early techs, and they clearly prioritize even advanced techs. They won't care about one with research value x, but a different one also with value x they will love. It's still awesome to tech trade around and it definitely improves your diplo rep but it doesn't seem as abusable as you're describing, actually it seems to be perfectly balanced. Maybe I'm doing it wrong.
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.

[Tulpa]

yeah it's techs PLUS resources that really help you tech trade. give em a tech that they want (it's often a cheap tech but they seem to prefer a specific set of techs rather than techs based on value) and throw in all but 1 of a strategic resource and whatever luxury resources you don't care about (+dust per pop on planet resources are worth more in trade than they are to keep) you should be able to buy out their techs AND get dust per turn. The DPT is important because that's the part of the deal they'll break, enabling you to start up another trade long before you could naturally break the deal.

Straight tech for tech trading won't work at all because they value their own techs way higher than they covet your techs. They also don't really care about dust, especially once they're making more than 100 dpt, which is when you want to start abusing trades anyway. Also, the higher your relation score with them is, the easier it is to trade, (the more willing they are to give you deals that are bad for them), so the easier it is to maintain good relations with your neighbours.

At least on hard difficulty, I didn't have to gun for any particular ending until the end of the mid-game. I imagine it becomes more important on higher difficulties but it's a real change of pace from civ 4, where I had to basically go for a specific victory condition by like turn 25.
_________________

[CubaLibre]

Well there's the problem: I literally only have one of every resource. Thanks shitty spiral arm start.

It actually makes me sad, because I played the same setup first but stupidly decided to colonize the first system out of my arm, which drew two huge wars almost immediately. I had an AMAZING start that game. Oh well. I could have dealt with the wars, but didn't feel like it. So I restarted and got this crappy arm. I consider it penance.
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.

[Tulpa]

luxury resources on the whole aren't worth keeping a hold of unless they have a very specific benefit that you need (like happiness before you can run permanently fervent or industry on a low production system) so you can indeed sell those off, strategic are necessary for fleet construction obviously.
_________________

[CubaLibre]

Well, won with Automatons on Impossible, wonder victory. Stayed in my own little five-system arm the whole time. I built significant fleets to keep people off my back and because the Automatons have specific bonuses for having ships hanging around, but used them hardly at all. Alliances shifted the whole time, as usual.

Witnessed something hilarious that I guess is an artifact of higher difficulties. Basically, because of the blockade mechanic, warring AI would have fleets sitting on contested (i.e. core) systems. They'd be near-equal in power, so neither would want to initiate the attack on the other. So they keep feeding fleets into the system which then also cannot leave. By the end there were like stacks of 30 and 40 fleets sitting stuck on a random core system, staring at each other, never attacking. While hilarious, it was also kind of disappointed. I certainly exploited it - if one of those doom stacks had ever shook loose and decided I looked tasty I probably wouldn't have stood a chance.

I chose wonder victory just because Automatons are supposed to be an industrial race, but as always when you play diplomatically it was actually an economic victory. I actually had to drop my tax rate to 0% near the end so I wouldn't win an econ victory by accident - and I was still getting about 1%/turn just from trade routes.

Tulpa you said in your game you had almost won a diplo victory - can you tell me how? I've never been able to maintain an alliance with more than 2 other members, and invariably they leave you for others whenever it's convenient for them. It just doesn't seem like there's enough diplomatic options to keep your alliances together. For example, there's nothing you can do to influence your allies into accepting new alliance actions. It's just like, you want to ally with an additional faction, but your current ally won't, so too bad. Nothing to do but wait and hope they like each other more later. Am I missing something? Diplomacy and alliances are certainly big benefits in the game and well worth pursuing, but the actual victory condition seems impossible.
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.

[Tulpa]

you're misapprehending what the diplo victory actually is, it's way simpler than that. You just have to reach a certain number of diplomacy points by the end of the game. Cooperation Agreements, long term peace, being in the war the least of all the factions, constant trading, and alliances all contribute to the diplomatic victory condition. For the longest time I thought it actually depended on allying oneself with all the other AIs but that's clearly incorrect (though if you managed to do that you'd probably win anyway just because of how many diplo points you'd gain from that.
_________________

[CubaLibre]

That's actually way awesomer than I thought. Still, I wish there were a whole lot more options when it came to managing alliances. Not to mention how straight buggy they are. Actually, in general the game has a couple of pretty bad bugs. Not counting the actual crash bugs.
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.

[CubaLibre]

Fairly obliterated my first Endless difficulty game as Hissho. I found out later that the Hissho are considered overpowered, but that was before Disharmony nerfed their unique mechanic, invasion bushido. Basically, after you successfully invade a system you get an empire-wide FID (but not S) boost for a decent number of turns. Each system that falls gives you another stack of bushido, up to 4 I think. I had a slow start near the bottom of the scoreboard for the first third of the game - typical of any 4X game on a high difficulty - and a very slow, grinding war for the single core system that was locking off my arm, which had been swiped by the United Empire. After that first system fell, however, it was all downhill.

I tried to win an expansion victory - I really did - but I just fumbled into econ again. It seems like there's no way not to win either science or econ if you expand via war. By the time you have enough systems to win expansion, the very number of those systems will have produced enough dust/science that you win those victories first.

I definitely abused the dust per turn/science trade trick Tulpa described above. The Hissho's whole deal is that they have a ton of amazing military bonuses but they suck at science, and the trading trick almost wholly ameliorated that problem. Again though, it didn't work until midgame when I had enough luxuries to trade. The early game was all my own sweat, and that's the hardest part anyway so I consider it a legit win.

Obviously the trading trick essentially only works because the AI will not maintain their DPT and the game does not either force them to (as in Civ) or force you to renegotiate the deal when DPT drops, instead annulling the entire thing. But it also only works because of a couple quirks of the AI. First, the AI severely overvalues luxuries. Outside of a monopoly they really are not that amazing, but the AI will give you the farm for them. Second, it appears that the AI values DPT trades as a percentage of their DPT and don't incorporate the absolute value of the dust in the trade. In other words, you'll have to give over the same amount of shit whether you're taking 50 DPT from a poor empire or 1000 DPT from a rich one, because in either case it's "all" their DPT. But that's silly because every additional dust you get linearly applies to helping you win by buying stuff and contributing to an econ victory.

The upshot of those two factors is that even if the DPT-for-science thing wasn't abusable with easily-broken trades, it'd still be worth selling most of your luxuries off unless you had a monopoly. In fact, that happened multiple times in my Hissho game because there's a bug where the Amoeba maximum DPT trade is actually the number of their banked dust, not their DPT. So if the banked dust number is lower you can't demand their maximum DPT and you might have to wait many turns until they dip below the number and cancel the trade. But even in those situations, I was getting so much DPT I didn't care. Pretty sure this was directly responsible for my econ victory.

War-wise I still haven't found a reason not to build generalist ships with all 3 weapons and defenses, at least on the 2 and 4cp ships. Given the huge stacks Endless AI gets with its bonuses, it's worth directly counter-building in the early game when you only have 1cp ships and no tonnage bonuses, but even then you want 2 defenses and 2 weapons. But every time the game builds highly specialist fleets - thousands and thousands of points in longrange missiles or midrange beams or whatever - my generalist ships always obliterate them. Also, I disagree with the few posts I've read on the subject and think making all the weapons the long-range version is the way to go.

The reason for both of these things is the same: the first round of combat is the most important. It doesn't matter how many missiles the enemy has if you kill half their fleet or more in the long range round. Once you have the numerical advantage, the enemy fleet doesn't stand a chance. First-round damage is the only damage that matters. And going long-range really does help, even on the ostensibly melee-specialized kinetic weaponry. It's beautiful to watch highly-accurate kinetic fire pour into enemy ships during the long range phase, and it absolutely works.

The other conclusion to draw from this is that the most important military techs are actually the command point ones. Bigger fleets will always have an advantage over smaller fleets except in extreme circumstances (e.g. the smaller fleet has the whole next tier of weaponry).

Also, on Endless fleet heroes are VITALLY IMPORTANT. Early on the AI will predictably and rather brutally out-tech you and the only defense you will have is to inflate your fleets' power with a hero. Start one as soon as you can - even killing single scouts in the very early cold-war segment of the game can give them their first few levels, which you will want when the aggro AI inevitably runs out of space and wants to expand into your sector. Pilots are far and away the best fleet heroes and have all the best unique skills, it's actually embarrassing how much better they are than Commanders and Adventurers. On Endless, I'd go so far as to say that if you get an Administrator/Pilot and have no other Pilots, it's actually more worth your while to put him on a fleet than a system. I wouldn't have said that even through Impossible, but the stacks the AI churns out on Endless are unbelievable. The upside is that if you play it right and blow them all up, your guys level super fast and basically imbalance every battle from then on in your favor. A level 20 Pilot makes a decent fleet nigh invincible.

By mid to late game I had four battle fleets with four level 20+ fleet heroes and four top-end invasion fleets to go with them. I was knocking over weak factions in a handful of turns. My two biggest competitors were each allied with a second-place faction and they had a big alliance war going on, so I just picked on all the individual factions left over and won my victory without even having to disturb the big guys - they got diplomatically madder at me as they saw my score skyrocket but they were too busy to actually attack me.

I still don't see the appeal of the troop/bomb direct invasion mechanic. With a decent invasion fleet you can push the invasion timer to its minimum, which is 8 turns. Troop invasions are only viable in the late game once you've established yourself anyway. Is it really worth destroying your own pop, the pop of the planets you are going to take, and the infrastructure that the AI built for you just to save 7 turns? If the AI had some magical superdefensive system where it would take 20 turns or more I would say it's worth the tradeoff, but invasion timers are only that high in the early to mid game before you even get troop/bomb techs. Lategame, invasion tech far outpaces system defense tech and even though the AI builds every single defense building you will still have the 8 turn timer with a single invasion fleet.
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.

[Greng]

I need to learn more about invasion timers, I've never taken an actively hostile action in this game as of yet. Not that I'm against doing so, I've just stuck to pacifist goals so far.
_________________

Steam ~ Be Preying | Resident Evil.net ~ ElSpank

[CubaLibre]

What do you want to learn? It's pretty simple, each system has a defense value that is reflective of its population count and enchanced by defensive buildings. The relative invasion power of your fleet (provided mostly by invasion modules but also a couple other things like bombers) determines how long it takes to complete the invasion.
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.