Newbie Strategy Guide

[Emperor Zodd]

My crews prefer Hooter girls and beer over lime Jello in my cargo holds.

It works great to prevent crew insurrection!!!!

[taterbill]

"3. Ignore the remote miner components. Ships with them are costing more in maintenance than they mine, satellites, while they have no maintenance, still need to be transported to the asteroids or uninhabited planets, and that is time consuming and nets little (you need to pay maint. of the trransport ship!). Save your mouseclicks."

I totally disagree. Yes, if you put one little remote mine (minerals) component on a frigate and send it to an asteroid, you probably will spend more in maintenance than you can mine. But if you are short of organics or radioactives, remote mining, even at the lower levels, can be a life saver.

But once you have discovered larger ship hulls, put three or more remote mine components on a ship and send it to a location with 100%+ minerals, and you will more than recoup maintenance.

And choose your spots. The best place to remote mine is at a planet with multiple moons, all of which are strong in the desired resource. The percentages are summed for remote mining. Remote mine a planet with two moons, all of which are 100%+ in some resource, and you will be wallowing in resources.

Bill

[taterbill]

"8. I have yet to see my own defense satellites and weapon platforms on planets put to good use. In the event of a stray light cruiser or two, fighters are better than defense platforms or satellites."

In general, I agree with this. The one problem with this is that the computer often builds missle cruisers that can't fire at your fighters. In theory, that is good, but that means the only target they can engage is your planet. If even one slips past your fighters, your planet can be wiped out. Your fighters are left in orbit guarding a dead planet.

To prevent this, I design a small WP that has nothing but point defense weapons and some armor or shields. You can build three in one turn on emergency build, or three in two turns by turning on e-build, selecting one turn's worth, then turning e-build back off.

The only place I tend to use satellites is to guard my end of a waypoint. I use many different satellite designs, as that ensures that they don't all get clumped together. I deploy them in a waypoint sector, and incoming ships exit the waypoint surrounded by my satellites. Especially deadly if some mines are sprinkled in as well. Have fun.

[taterbill]

"1. Build your largest available ship (up to Battlecruiser) with full engines and lots of supply components, and maybe a weapon or two, and the best sensor available. These are your scouts and explorers. Send them as far as fast as possible. Follow with colony ships."

Once solar panels are available, use them and forget the supply components. Then your scouts can keep going forever. (Or at least until they meet some race that blows them up. Or they get damaged in an unstable worm hole and fall into a black hole. Or whatever.)

[Taqwus]

More on scouts:

Scouts definitely could use solar collectors to greatly extend their range, and thus utility; in addition, solar sails will be helpful in making them go faster and faster. Both of these two useful techs are found in the Stellar Harnessing tech area, which is available upon researching Astrophysics I.

Other components worthy of being on a scout include a long-range scanner and a non-combat sensor, and cloaking.

By non-combat sensor, I mean *not* the Combat Sensor that's available via Sensors I-III. Instead, there are five types of sensing:

Active ECM. Most objects have Level 1 Active ECM by default. Tachyon Sensors, found rather expensively via the Sensors tech area, provide three more levels.

Passive ECM. Again, Level 1 by default for most objects. Hyper-Optics give this, and are found in the Advanced Military Science tech area.

Gravitic. This is not present by default, and is granted only by Gravitic Sensors in the Gravitic Technology tech area.

Temporal. Temporal sensors are restricted to Temporal Technology, and therefore to that particular racial trait.

Psychic: Psychic sensors are just as restricted as Temporal, only to the Psychic racial trait.

A scout ship with a Level 3 sensor device of any type will generally be able to detect everything in a system. Against a human opponent in a huge galaxy, if all players tend to delay and build up for a while before war it is very possible that large war fleets could be skulking about cloaked...

And one application of having numerous scouts is that of an intelligence spotter. Namely, anti-ship and anti-colony intelligence operations can be directed at specific targets *if* you can see them. For instance, if you station a spotter in a 'no man's land' system -- perhaps one with only an asteroid belt, say, so nobody has a colony base for resupply -- you can use Crew Insurrection to snare passing ships. Not only is this a fast way of gaining new technology, since these ships can be returned to a shipyard and analyzed, but it can cripple a small attack fleet by turning its best ships against their brethren.


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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[taterbill]

A question regarding scouts and damage:

I just had a thought while I'm here at work pretending to be working. Those dang unstable wormholes can sure put a crimp in any scouting expedition. If you say, built a cruiser-level scout with its own repair bay, would it be able to repair itself? (Assuming the repair bay did not get damaged, of course.)

Bottom line question: Can ships with repair bays repair themselves?

Bill

[Nitram Draw]

Yes, ships can repair themselves if they have or are with a ship that has a repair bay.