Beginners Guide, HELP!!! (Please Read And Post)

[Suicide Junkie]

Basic Empire Operation:
- A red scrunchy popcan icon means You need to build a spaceport!
- Send ships back home before they fall below half supplies. Once the yellow fuel barrel icon appears, its too late.
- Recovering crippled or out-of-fuel ships. (use of tenders, repair bays and solar collectors)
HowTo: Decide what type of colony to make.
- Are you running out of some resource?
- Are you falling behind in research/Intel?
- Special-effect facilities.
- And how these apply to the value/size/conditions of the planet and your empire.
HowTo: Build some basic, legal ship designs
- Test them in the simulator!
- Test ships against common enemy designs, not just against each other.
HowTo: Coarser points of politics.
- What each treaty type actually means.
- Trade resources to keep the ecomomy running.
- Tips on how to not unduly upset an AI.

Generic tips:
- Build weapon platforms/sats when your planet finishes facility constrution.
- Emergency build colonizers, take breathables first, then explore.
- Never bother with funny-shaped wormholes unless its your only choice.
- Defend chokepoints, not planets.

EDIT: formatting

[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 28 October 2001).]

[dumbluck]

you know, this sounds a lot like the tutorial scenario that is included w/the game. Maybe it would just be easier to flesh this out some?

[Atrocities]

Good point.

[ratster]

I've probably spent more time reading this forum than playing the game.

I think the most overwhelming thing to a beginning player is deciding what to research(since it is so critical to successful play), and in what specific order.

Is there a visual representation of the tech tree anywhere Online? Like a line chart?

[Andrés]

What would be useful is a list of newbie FAQ and put easy to find links somewhere so we don't have to answer the same questions over and over.

[Taqwus]

Some random stuff.

- Exploration is vital. Sending a single unarmed ship w/ extra supplies (especially solar collectors, once available) works well. Multiple ships don't reveal more information, and single armed ships are both a) still rather vulnerable, and b) expensive. Find your neighbors before they find you.

- Don't build too many ships early -- watch the mineral count. It's easy to build too many pop transports and strangle your economy; if you do, mothball or scrap.

- Ditto for the build-n-construction-bases-at-start method for cranking out ships. It's fast, but gets pricey -- once you've got some colonies and need to build facs on them, consider mothballing until you can afford to keep 'em building.

- Missiles are nice early, with the longer range, slow ships, and relative rarity of large amounts of point-defense. Beams tend to work well later.

- Defend in depth. One needs recon layers (say, spy satellites in neighboring systems), some front-line defense forces, and reserves to handle breaches. Well, at least until the age of Warp Warfare...

Mining warp points is often a good idea. Thankfully, the mine minister does this decently well if you build the minelayers and keep them fed with mines.

- Track what your opponents have for tech. If you need it, maybe you can trade for it, demand it, steal it, or steal a ship with it.

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[dmm]

Right away, get a cheap unarmed escort and send it on a one-way exploration mission to the far reaches of the galaxy. Use it to find as many alien empires as possible. Run it almost out of fuel, then either gift it to an AI ally or put it into a storm (either as a spy or to destroy it). It will quickly pay for itself in trade revenue.