okay, let's get that solved won't we
. Below is another screenshot of a game I played yesterday. You see me (the dark blue coalition player) in an alliance with the omega alliance (pretty fun at the beginning because they really got hot ships (mainly the Sajin battleship class that is one hell of a ship) that qualify as superships though they are beatable if you know how and that's what I'm gonna try to show you in the following). This game you see is one of the most stable ones I ever had. Nearly all empires are allied with each other, only Khaoron and Rotharians are maverick-type warmongers:
I've uploaded a series of save games of a game I played a while ago here:
http://birth-of-the-empires.de/phpBB3/v ... 710#p12710 . I played that one on HARD but you can have a closer look at what I did cause I saved pretty often. Download all the attachments and extract them to your bote folder. Now you can load up each save game and see my progress. You can also start with turn one on BABY and try to play some turns and then compare to one of my save games. If you then got questions on how I did it I'll try my best to remember
. You'll see that I do not have many ships at the beginning either. On HARD it's not possible to keep up tech development with the AI and simultaneously produce a lot of ships. That's why I kept away from their borders and din't colonize too near to enemy territory. Sometimes it's just luck that a big enough gap of next-to-no star systems, i.e. empty sectors, lies between you and the AI players. On BABY, EASY and NORMAL, that's another thing, I'd play different then. But the first 50 turns always remain the same so there you can have a look at how I use to do my early expansion moves.
Again just to make sure, if you handle the game right, it has real diplomacy.
When integrating minors into your empire, try to wait until their population level reaches 80% of their max system population or turn 100 at last. The advantage comes from the fact that minor systems get their buildings once they are incorporated and accepted membership with your empire and at that turn, those buildings are calculated and you have the more buildings the more population in that turn the minor system had. So you don't need to build a minor system up yourself if you wait long enough with membership. There's nothing more to be done wrong in the game than too early membership and too early means when for example the current minor system population is 15 billion whereas the max system population would be 40 billion. Then you get only very few buildings and are struggling to build the rest of the needed buildings just like with a regular colony. Generally, the longer you wait with membership the better cause not only the number of buildings is higher but also their tech level depending on the type of minor (a middle-age minor won't advance much in tech levels compared to a research minor). But beware of waiting too long cause other empires are not sleeping and might get the minor for themselves
. You will experience the effect of waiting a little longer quite soon I'm sure of that.
It mostly appears that less ships have attacked you than actually have since scan strengths are mostly too low since only planetary scanners and scouts are actually contributing enough to having a nice scan value. When you build ships, try to have 5-10 scouts in there too per fleet and don't forget to mix your fleet. 24 cruisers alone are not as effective as 24 cruisers with 50 destroyers and 15 scouts (that seems obvious but I refer to the effectiveness of the 24 cruisers alone in terms of how many hits they perform). That has something to do with the AI building lots of smaller fighters that are harder to hit for those clumsy cruisers. In order to keep them away from your bigger ships, you need destroyers and in fact more of them than you have cruisers. But if the enemy has only 50 fighters against your 24 cruisers, then the cruisers of course win. But you've got more losses than otherwise with more "escort" ships for your heavier fleet.
After you've taken a quick look on how I play we might play a quick one as two allies against the AI on any difficulty level you choose
.
