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Bold Robot posted:How do I build a colony ship? It's not there with the rest of the ships in the Build Order screen. Am I missing something? They need to be built specifically on planets (right click on a planet to see it's build menu). Some other classes of ship are also like this, such as construction ships.
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Aug 24, 2012 08:18
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I just bought this yesterday and completed an age of shadows game as a smuggler. One thing I noticed is that only a tiny fraction of my freighters actually did anything, the rest just kind of sat around. Near the end I was taking a lot of smuggling missions, but I had something like 40 freighters and maybe 5 of them at most would be doing anything. Some of them didn't even take on fuel after being built. I don't know why this is, maybe I was playing too violently? I wanted to try out raids and stuff, and mostly terrorized the independent worlds until they started emerging as empires. Maybe there's an "independent" faction you can't piss off too much? I know I was on really good terms with at least one empire due to doing missions for them (you'll pay me *how much* for destroying the pirate fortress of my hated rivals, who routinely get into brawls with my fleet and raid planets I'm trying to build hidden pirate bases on? don't mind if I do!), but they were far away and nearly everyone else hated me. Or maybe it's a bug or something else. In the end I suppose it doesn't matter. Even though the vast majority of my income came from planet control, I still held the most smuggling mission income victory condition from early on (smuggling lead for a bonus of 5 per lead). Eventually my fleets got good enough and I had control over planets with 50% of the galactic population, that's what tilted me over into victory, I guess. Blowing up the two nearby pirate factions that were both competing with me for planet control and directly fighting with me probably helped. Lowen fucked around with this message at 22:43 on May 26, 2013 |
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May 26, 2013 22:38
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Oh nice, loading up the savegame not only made all my freighters refuel, but they actually started working and I started pulling in cash.
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May 27, 2013 02:41
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Sankis posted:I do this but then these stupid fucks just cancel my order because they decide that not attacking the homeworld of the enemy is a better move and instead decide to gently caress off in the middle of deep space. I don't even know. I just had my last game ruined because I couldn't properly wage war with them counteracting all of my orders, even though I thought I had it off. They should never cancel your orders unless something really high priority comes up. Not even if they're automated, they'll still do the thing you told them to do before going back on automatic. Like civilian ships will always run away from attackers. From the sound of it though, I'm guessing your military ships are trying to escape from combat after their shields got below 50%. If so that's by design, it's the default behavior for military ships. You can change that in ship design to 20% shields or a few other options if you want. The AI ship designer tends to think the latest thing you got is the best thing, even if it's lower in the tech tree. So you might want to tweak the designs you get. The escort/frigate/destroyer/cruiser classes are arbitrary, in that you can design them whatever size you want. The ship design AI will typically design cruisers and capitol ships larger than you'll be able to build with starting tech.
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May 27, 2013 03:58
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Sankis posted:In my most recent shadows game I seem to be stuck in a loop. I need ~9k to colonize a nearby planet, but once I get to about 5k I suddenly lose it all on something. Is there some kind of budget to see where it's going? I have all of my constructors off so the AI isn't building mining bases. Weird, after I did the Age of Shadows smuggler game I went to an age of shadows empire game on normal settings, and it was barely even a speedbump to my empire building. I kind of like it though, it has more of a fresh start feel compared to the old one where you already had a bunch of mining bases in a nearby system every time. The empire report (F6) shows your budget, but you might just want to try just taking everything off automation while you save up? That means constructors, troop recruitment, anything that could spend money. You could always put them back on. Also make sure you don't have any missions going, if you have a smuggling mission for lead or something it could easily cost you 5000 per load. I remember getting that first colony was a big deal financially, the moment it got plopped down my private sector decided it needed to double the number of ships it had, giving me a huge cash influx. It's not any different than it was in legends mechanically, except you have a lot less when it happens. PS! 1.9.0.2 is out, I got it with the patcher in the launcher. Details here.
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May 28, 2013 04:42
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I've been playing for like 4 hours and I always get stuck in some loving loop where I can't do much of anything. This is even with the difficulty lowered similar to that newbie post. I have no idea what's up considering I had like 3 other games that I did decently in at the start.
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^^^ You have a source of one of the super rare luxury resources, there should be a checkbox at the very bottom of the diplomacy summary for that race for each super rare luxury resource you have. Tick the boxes to authorize trading the resource to them. If it doesn't show it might be because there's too much crap on your diplomacy window. Unfortunately I don't know of any way around that. Sankis posted:Okay, so is there any kind of in depth economy guide? Even after having the basics explained to me, I just can't understand how to make money and keep making money. Even controlling my taxes for all of my planets and adjusting it based on population, it's just constantly fluctuating. Even with automation turned off, it's fluctuating. One moment I was making 40k per whatever period of time the next it sank all the way down to -120k and I was constantly in the red. I've looked over the in game "How does my empire make money?" poo poo many times and as far as I can tell everyone is trading. I also have hundreds of little private sector ships buzzing around and dozens of mining facilities all over the place on a variety of resources. I'm guessing I'm just expanding too much but there's no feedback if that's the case. Well, except the falling income but it's not exactly telling me why. I feel like I've finally got a grasp on starting out okay but this games economy is just so confusing and poorly documented. This is a really neat expansion pack for a really neat game, I feel bad that you're having a hard time with it. I hope I can help. Trading actually doesn't make you that much money. You need to do it in order to secure the strategic resources you need to build stuff and the luxury resources you need to bring your world development levels up (which leads to more happiness/higher growth or more taxes), but once the resources are secured you'll generally just build up a buffer. The trading income itself though is very small and tends to fluctuate a lot besides. It's also possible to drive maintenance costs up if you have shortages or sudden surges in demand for commodities. Check the expansion planner screen (F3) and sort by the "unfullfil" column in the middle and compare that to your stock. If the stock isn't much larger, then the cost of that resource can easily double. When the price of a resource changes, the cost of maintaining designs that use that resource change accordingly. I have a late game empire with an extremely strong economy and steel is at 1.7 from an apparent resting point of 0.8 simply due to the sudden demand for new spaceports around all my colonies. Resource shortages like this also make colonies unhappy. That's a lot easier to do early in the game because you might not have things like necros stones or dilithium crystals, but you might do research on new ship systems that use them. You'll also have smaller stockpiles of things you do have source for, so even a small surge in building can tax your existing supplies. Anyway, if you do have a strategic resource shortage consider issuing a smuggling mission. Also consider smuggling missions if you don't have 10 different luxury resources. The missions will cost you money in the short run but may also save you money by decreasing your maintenance costs. Also check your ship designs and try not to use components that use resources you have shortages in, they'll be highlighted in yellow. Try not to build in surges. Speaking of revenue - maintenance, the number you should be looking at is your colony tax income on the empire summary screen (F6). That's the only thing you can count on to be about constant. Compare that to your maintenance costs. If the maintenance costs are bigger, then you need to reduce the amount of maintenance you're paying. Retire some ships, bases, or troops. You probably won't want to retire any spaceports though. If you've captured any ships, definitely retire those first, because taking apart foreign ships will generally give you huge tech boosts. Even if they aren't bigger than you can build or have components you can't build, you'll generally get something from them. Sankis posted:Also Pirates feel really overpowered in Shadow. I get that it's the entire point, but even after crippling a faction (or so I thought) they'll send in a dozen ships to harass my colonies. It's also really, really, REALLY loving annoying that as soon as you colonize anything they'll raid it about 12 times. Is the AI just cheating? I know previous iterations had some pretty egregious examples of AI rubberbanding. If they still have ships, they aren't crippled. I guess you killed their spaceport? Pirates start with a constructor, they can have as many bases as they can afford. They can lose their first spaceport and build another elsewhere. When they park ships near colonies they get influence with the colony, which gives them passive money, like tax income. Sometimes they randomly get new constructors from worlds they have influence with (they can't build constructors themselves, without planets). Raids also increase influence, in addition to all the loot. They make money and get resources by raiding with their ships. If they have ships to raid you with, then they are in no way shape or form crippled, they're making money and potentially getting constructors. Bottom line, cripple the pirates by defending your colony and killing their ships. Even if you can't stop the raids for whatever reason (you need some troops for this), if you can blow up or capture one of their ships you hurt their bottom line in the long run. Another thing to check is the colonies screen (F2). Look for any colonies with facilities, then look at the list of facilities. If you see any pirate bases, drop a bunch of troops (I think as of 1.9.0.2 you need more than 100k strength for the first level of base) on the planet and then attack the facility. If you've colonized any independent worlds you may be suffering from a massive loss in income if pirates have managed to build any bases there. Pirate income drains money from you! Lowen fucked around with this message at 23:10 on May 29, 2013 |
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May 29, 2013 23:05
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Sankis posted:Thanks a ton! That's really helpful. Should I be building space ports as soon as I colonize? What about size? Should I just make the smallest and retrofit later or are the maintenance differences not that extreme? What about systems with multiple colonies? One spaceport per system or should each have one? You definitely want 1 spaceport over every colony, and you definitely want to start out with a small spaceport. It's also a good idea to design an even smaller, small spaceport than the AI likes to design itself. Just clear all the red items off to start with a basic thing that just qualifies as a spaceport, then make sure you add a medical center and a recreation center, unless you're doing age of shadows and haven't researched them. After that consider adding some basic defenses and extra docks. If you don't mind the micromanagement you can gradually update this in steps. Space ports in orbit around one of your colonies don't seem to need cargo bays at all, I wasn't sure about that so I just tested it with an age of shadows start. Of course, you'll want at least one medium/large spaceport over your homeworld and other important worlds with plenty of construction yards, manufacturing plants, labs, and defenses. Sankis posted:I didn't know about the pirate income taking away mine. That makes a lot of sense. I'd been taking out pirate facilities when I saw them, but I'm sure i'd missed quite a few. I don't know how much troops cost upfront, I usually leave that on automatic myself. But I do know from looking at the empire report that troops can be a significant maintenance cost drain. Usually my empires maintenance costs seem roughly evenly split between ships/troops/bases. Be careful about skimping on troops though, remember that no one HAS to clear out your fleets or bases from orbit before invading if they have durable enough troop ships, so you'll probably want to have a large army on your homeworld at all times. Oh, and one thing I forgot to mention that can help a lot with economy is changing your government type. You can do this whenever and it doesn't seem as risky as the warning that pops up indicates. You might want to dip into something with higher colony income or lower maintenance costs depending on what the empire summary screen tells you will give you more money. Corruption usually doesn't matter much unless you have a very large far away world without a regional capitol.
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May 30, 2013 07:31
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EchoBase posted:I just picked up the full game (base + all expansions) seeing as it's on sale. I started it up and tinkered around a bit and it seems slow/unresponsive. It takes like a second for anything to respond to an input (scrolling, zooming, selections). Is this normal? Nope. I just started a huge/huge game, zooming/scrolling and selecting stuff is instant. Make sure all your game and video drivers are up to date and post in the matrix tech support forum I guess?
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Jul 3, 2013 20:01
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Tindahbawx posted:Thanks guys! I'll give it a shot I think. Nope, the latest public version of shadows is 1.9.0.11, which you can get via the games autoupdate. The beta patch is 1.9.0.12, you need to register your game with the Matrix Members Club in order to get it.
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Dec 14, 2013 19:50
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Shima Honnou posted:I'd never heard of this game before. Seems interesting, but is it actually worth the $50? I payed a hell of a lot more than $50 for it and I think so, but YMMV. e: because it's a new page V for Vegas posted:Unlocked on Steam.
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May 24, 2014 00:51
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Here's an interesting new thing you can do in the expansion: play in an existing galaxy map. My first game with the expansion I just did the pirate random quickstart and played as some Ackdarian age of shadows balanced pirates. I thought it would be a quick game because I was playing on the smallest galaxy possible, but I must have played for at least 15 hours. That's 4x games for you. I only stopped because I had met all the balanced pirate victory goals, had a criminal network on the backwater world of Ackdar 1 and had completed the process of using my mighty new planetary army (consisting of 4 infantry units) to invade any nearby independent or colony worlds, because my punny army sure as hell aren't going to invade any homeworlds, and when you're a pirate you're constantly at war with anyone anyway, so why not. But then I thought, why don't I just go completely legit and become a totally regular empire? Turns out that isn't really possible with the game editor. You can't magically convert a pirate empire into a regular one and there isn't any easy way to make a new empire and transfer colonies over. So I started a new game as a regular Ackdarian age of shadows empire and choose my old savegame as the galaxy map, also choosing to randomize basically everything in the hopes that it would balance things better. For extra fuckery, I had changed the theme to DW Extended while my original game was unmodded. It worked! Sortof. I've played for 7 hours, activated the Shakturi beacon, have yet to fight the resulting war, but met my victory conditions. I started on Ackdar 1, in the Ackdar system, so that aspect was a 100% success. I guess it just picked the largest world with Ackdarians on it. The first empire I met were the ancient guardians, who didn't exist in the pirate game. So it's good the game knows to put them in. There were some Keterov nearby but their capitol was one of the Ikkuro colony worlds I had captured in the pirate game, so that aspect got scrambled. My guess is the game just wanted to place some Keterov on a suitable swamp planet and didn't care if there were Ikkuro there. There were some Keterov in the pirate game elsewhere, but they were apparently replaced with one of the extended mod races, the Terrapin. My guess is this was another instance of the game not finding any existing population, and then looking for any marshy swamp planet. The new Keterov empire even had the maxed out population of 128M Boskara on the 10% quality lava world in the same system. The only reason that exists is because I found a Boskara colony ship as a pirate and wanted to put it somewhere I had control over rather than somewhere actually good. I'm not sure if that world started as independent and got cultured, or if the Keterov started with two worlds since they were both in their starting system. It was still nice to see one of the most notable landmarks from my pirate game, Ultimate Shithole Lava World. I ran into a few outright glitchy things though. I found a planet belonging to my old pirate empire, which was nice to see because it's one of the ones I conquered, and the pirate empire had my old flag and name and everything. Sadly they didn't show up on the diplomacy menu, didn't build any ships or do anything, and kept spamming a report about finding the new empire as long as I had ships nearby. So I had to conquer that for my sanity. I also found a world belonging to an Ikkuro empire roughly where the Ikkuro empire was in the pirate game, but they don't show up on the diplomacy menu either and don't seem to do anything. Their star system also showed up as being controlled by the new Keterov empire even though it wasn't anywhere near any of their colonies. I've seen zero independent colonies, and I've only seen a single independent cargo ship. There don't seem to be any pirates either, even though I had them set to few/respawning. There was a Securian empire near Ackdar in the pirate game, which just disappeared during import - they didn't turn into independents or a glitched empire or anything, their entire civilization just vanished leaving a completely empty uncolonized desert world. I don't know, maybe I accidently set pirates to none and independent worlds to none or too few? Maybe all the independent worlds are placed elsewhere in the galaxy and it just ran out. I haven't explored everywhere yet. So yeah, I'll probably finish this game by trying to win against the Shakturi, once their war events kick off. I have a doom star being repaired, that will help. After this game, my next will probably be giving the ancient galaxy scenario another try. After that, I'll start another shadow age empire using my ancient galaxy scenerio save, from after the galaxy shattering war  .
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May 27, 2014 11:12
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The Moon Monster posted:I seriously have no idea how to deal with these things. I started a new game, created a fleet of 10 destroyers that it still tore through instantly and now it's huge again. And of course my automated ships are still trickling out to fight it. I guess my new plan is to build no military ships until I get warp and then try building twenty at once, making them into a fleet, and attacking. It seems like only the first one or two attacks land and then it just sits on top of the ship and destroys it with impunity without taking any damage. Dealing with the space monsters in your home system is easy with a little know how and micromanagement. Take a look at the speed of the space monsters. Design a military ship which is faster than they are, with your longest range missiles. Make sure it turns quickly as well, this is important! Don't worry about shields/armor at all, the space monsters can't hurt you if they don't get right on top of you. If the AI freaks out later due to not having shields you can change that setting for the design anytime. Set it to "standoff" both weaker and stronger opponents so it keeps range. Make sure you have enough power generation to both fire all the weapons and run at sprint. The ship design screen tells you your excess energy near the reactor bit, your cruise/sprint/hyper speed and power requirements on that little graph thing, and the weapons energy requirements down near the weapons summary. Then it's just a matter of sending your ships in and watching them kite the space monsters to death. I usually micro this a little to make sure they end up in front of the monster and going the other way quicker, but if your design turns quickly enough you shouldn't need to do this.
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May 28, 2014 21:34
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The official patch is out on steam. I loaded one of my old games and played for a little bit. All my automation settings were reset to defaults  . When I exited the game I got a bunch of steam achievements... They aren't all the right ones though, it looks like it may have switched a few of them around between the game and steam. Blinks77 posted:If one thing does confuse and kind of amuse me about this game. It's ship roles not, really, doing anything. I can call something an escort and have it be larger than a capital ship if i wish. If you leave ship/fleet automation on, the different ship roles will get different assignments. Escorts and frigates tend to get escort missions, everything else tends to go in fleets and get offensive missions. Also cruisers and capital ships get rad automatic names like "Rotal Firestorm", destroyers and under get boring serialized names. But yeah, I'd like to see some sort of enforced difference between escorts/frigates/destroyers/cruisers/capital ships.
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May 29, 2014 20:52
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Xoidanor posted:This has yet to happen for me. The game will sometimes set them to defend remote stations but that's it. To deal with space slugs/beetles I had to manually create a fleet, enter every capable ship into it and select them as a target. The automatic AI just didn't want to bother despite civilian cruisers and builders getting hit. I don't think space monsters and single enemy ships are considered valid targets for fleets, though I've seen single ships attack them. Fleets and bases of pirate factions and enemy empires you're at war with are valid targets for your automatic fleets. Also every time you give your fleet a manual order it disables automation for that fleet, you might want to immediately press a after you give the order. It'll still do the thing you told it to do first, before getting another mission.
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May 29, 2014 21:20
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Phlegmish posted:I just tried another Age of Shadows game and the same thing happened, finances in the red and pirates constantly attacking me. Either I try to pay most of them off and then I have no money or they capture/destroy my mining stations and disrupt my shipping, and then I have no money either. It was the early game and I'd already encountered more than twenty different pirate factions, I'm not kidding. I can't believe this is how the game is meant to be played, it's loving impossible. Even if it's possible to eventually get the upper hand, it's just tedious to constantly be bombarded with attack messages. I think I'll stick to custom games from now on. Age of shadows isn't how the game is meant to be played, it wasn't even an option until the 3rd expansion came out. It makes the game harder for normal empires and easier for pirate empires. Don't do an age of shadows start as an empire until you have more experience playing one in the classic era. There are a number of tricks I habitually use that make an age of shadows start easy. But I had played the game for 100s of hours before the shadows expansion even came out. Likewise don't to a classic age with a pirate empire until you have experience playing pirates in AoS.
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May 29, 2014 21:44
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Popular Thug Drink posted:I haven't played much with the new expansion, so vets - did they remove the old game customization options? How do I turn research speed down and put myself on the edge of the galaxy? You used one of the quickstart games. If you want to go through about 6 screens of game options before starting the game then try one of the two "Custom Game as ..." options.
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May 31, 2014 03:03
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Gwyrgyn Blood posted:I'm a tad confused at how you start a custom scenario, if you wanted to start a custom scenario in say Legends or Classic, do you just disable the story events for Shadows or what? Gwyrgyn Blood posted:Couple other minor questions. - The steam overlay works for me. The system view with the ships and stuff uses directx and you can capture it with fraps, most of the other stuff is wacky windows gui and won't get captured though. - The autorun also gives me a black box. In previous versions it was fairly useless, you could use to to launch the game, check for updates, or look at the manual. Just use steam to do these things now. - The soundtrack for Total Annihilation is pretty neat, it's similar to what's in the game except it's by Jeremy Soule and uses a live orchestra. Alternatively roll the dice and try gbs.fm
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Jun 2, 2014 07:28
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Gwyrgyn Blood posted:Thanks for the answers so far, couple more quick ones: The base will have some defenders, but not as many as it would when completed. You don't need many troops to take a pirate base, but you do need more than one. Also yes a single warp inhibitor stops all ships in an area from warping away, put it on a strong/fast/agile ship for best results.
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Jun 3, 2014 06:43
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victrix posted:It's not the learning curve, it's that you can seemingly automate the game and win? Why not, one of the AI/player empires has to win. It might as well be the one the player is watching.
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Jun 3, 2014 21:56
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My best advice with the weapons tech tree is just decide what sci-fi race you want to Want to be the federation from star trek? Research phasors and epsilon torpedoes. The Kzinti? Missiles. The rebel alliance? Just put maxos blasters and fighter bays on everything, forever. It works fine. You can get away with only picking one weapon, if it's a long ranged one. Short ranged weapons are fine for ships that move around but will make your defence bases and starports useless. Do have something for point defense though, even if it's one of the default guns.
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Jun 4, 2014 01:06
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Kjoery posted:No it didn't? Yes, it's the present beta patch that was supposed to change that.
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Jun 6, 2014 06:42
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Huskalator posted:The AI simply will not upgrade my military ships. I'm not sure why it is happening. Bug? It didn't delete the design. What probably happened is it upgraded the design to use a newer, larger component and you can't see it anymore because the new design is to big, and the old design is now obsolete. Change your filter to show all designs rather than newest buildable ones. Also if you have ship design on automatic you don't need to tell it to upgrade things ever.
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Jun 6, 2014 23:18
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WYA posted:How do you bring an independent colony into your empire? Either colonize it (there's a dice roll based on race relationship of colonizers/vs natives, if you fail the colony ship is wasted but you can try again) or invade it with troops (will hurt your reputation a little).
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Jun 7, 2014 21:14
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Rakthar posted:I picked this up a few days ago. I'm feeling my way around the first automated game after a few tutorials, and hit my first snag about 1 minute in. You can build a colony ship at a planet any of the ways you build military ships at a shipyard. Either right click and select build-> or use the icon at the bottom of the selection window or go into the shipyards screen and order it or double click the selection window and go to shipyards etc... If it's not showing up it might be because your colony is too small to build a colony ship, try building one at your most populated world.
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Jun 7, 2014 21:56
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WYA posted:There's an empire in my game called the Sefokhe Utopia which is absolutely dominating. Is it just an AI faction like Ancient Guardians, or are they a legit race that has somehow quadrupled everyone else at everything. Building more research labs isn't always better, no. You have a research potential based on your population. You want enough labs so that research in all 3 areas adds up to that number. If it adds up to more than that number then the research areas are capped, proportionate to how much of each you're doing, which is a handy way to specialize in energy research during prewarp starts. I think modifiers from wonders and anomalies add to your research potential without actually changing it (they allow you to research more than your potential says you should) though I'm not sure. You can see the research potential, research from labs, and final research on the research screen, on the 4th tab. As for that AI empire, it's not an AI faction. They probably just got a lucky start.
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Jun 8, 2014 02:59
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PittTheElder posted:So I've finally got enough of a handle on the game that I'm starting to expand. But I don't think I'm doing particularly well, because my private sector is crashing left and right. I noticed that my first colony was short on fuel, but my private sector was out of money, so I couldn't build a gas miner in the sector. I have a mercenary supply mission running, but it doesn't seem to be working very well. But my private sector was definitely trying to deliver to it, but then they'd want to refuel, but the only place to do that was a neutral world that had about 50 pirate vessels just hanging out above it all the time for no discernible reason. I'm really confused by players that get private sector crashes. Typically in my games the private sector balance just grows and grows... You're not running a corporate nationalist government are you? Check the net income and balance on the empire screen. If your private sector has a negative or close to negative balance then you really should fix that by lowering taxes. Unless it's the lategame it's likely only your homeworld generates any money by the way, so leave taxes at 0% elsewhere in order to encourage growth. You'll get the money back anyway since the private sector pays your state account to buy new ships. If you can't afford to lower taxes then you probably have serious maintenance issues due to overdeveloping your military or due to supply shortages. Either way those issues need to be addressed. Anyway if it's really a problem with the private sector accounts, try going to the design screen, find your gas mining station design. Copy it, change the type to a starbase and rename it to something like "State Subsidized Gas Mining Station". Now you should be able to build the gas mining station space station with state funds. You can do the same thing with regular mining stations if you want. PittTheElder posted:Since I managed to salvage some capital ships from out in the void, I gathered them all up and sent them to clear this place out so at least my private sector wouldn't continuously suicide themselves there. I've got control of the planet's orbit now, but there is a non-stop wave of new pirate ships warping in, and getting continuously massacred by my fleet. It's hilarious, but I don't understand why they're doing it. My best guess is because there's an unfinished Hidden Pirate Base down on the surface? Whatever it is, I'm watching the military power of those involved drop like a stone. You should always colonize independent worlds if possible, they're much better than colonizing an entirely new world and there's no downside. Having played the pirates myself, world control can easily be the biggest part of their income, and they get it by parking military ships in orbit. So the reason they keep trying to get you gone is simply because you're costing them all the money they could be making at that colony. By all means wipe their base out, as long as it exists and is complete they can't go below 50% control. They aren't going to stop trying to control the colony though until they run out of ships, and they can keep making more ships at their hidden bases. So in addition to killing whatever ships come in and fight you at the colony, also look around for their pirate starports, mining bases, and gas mining stations. The nice thing about pirates is typically they have only one construction ship, so any base you take from them will cost them a lot. You probably won't be able to completely destroy the pirates since in order to do that you have to kill their last starport, resupply ship, and construction ship. The last ones are pretty good at not being seen and running away. But if you just kill all their starports and military ships then they won't be building any more for a long, long time.
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Jun 15, 2014 01:30
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Travic posted:Discovered an interesting (infuriating) quirk of the AI. If a world has a Gravity Well Generator and you order your ships to attack that planet the computer will spread your ships around the perimeter. As in you attack from the West you'd think your ships would drop out of warp in a clump on the western side of the bubble. No. They will be spread out 360 degrees around the bubble. So the thing that's supposed to mess up and slow down attacking fleets does exactly that? Seems legit.
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Jul 30, 2014 20:14
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Apoffys posted:10 of each type. Does it need anything else (besides the stuff that gives red warnings if I leave it out)? Your total research potential is 591k (the number on the top right), which means that if you didn't get any bonuses for human population, government type, leaders, research locations etc, the most you could get in any catagory is 591/3=197k. Since you have some bonuses for at least some of those, you're getting a little bit more. Research potential is based on your population (I think, that or something related like strategic value). Its only function is to stop you from just researching everything instantly by building a shitload of labs. e: I should clarify that when I say "in any catagory" I mean assuming you're balancing out your research output. If you build all of one kind of lab you could get up to your maximum potential just in that area.
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Sep 14, 2014 04:54
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 22:35 |
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Apoffys posted:Thanks. Yet another question: is there a better way to deal with pirates than to just pay them? I can't afford to babysit every single freighter and blowing up their spaceports isn't terribly effective. I've destroyed 3 pirate havens so far (one faction surrendered, the other two just got pissed at me), but the number of pirate attacks is just going up and I'm fast running out of places to attack. How can I best use my fleets to patrol and defend against attacks? Losing civilian ships is fine as long as it doesn't send you into a resource shortage - civilians actually pay you whenever they build ships at a space port. The real problem with pirates is when they raid your bases or extort your colonies. Completely eliminating pirates is hard. You need to destroy all their spaceports, construction ships, and resupply ships. They start with at least one of each and are very good at keeping the latter two alive. You pretty much need warp interdiction to stop them from running away and a long range sensor network in order to find them. The cost and player effort probably isn't worth it. Remember that spies can also steal maps and destroy bases. It's also worth noting that with default game settings, pirate factions respawn. The criminal element will always be there. The good news is if you kill all their spaceports they can't build ships until a construction ship builds a new spaceport for them. My approach would be to kill their spaceports and then starve them of cash. Make sure there aren't any pirate bases on your worlds, that locks pirate influence over the world, and pirate influence on your worlds siphons money from you to the pirates. If there are pirate bases then build a decent ground military (at least 4 infantry for the pirate base and at least 8 for the fortress) and then go around and stomp them all. Any nearby independent worlds have to be cleared as well. If you can't colonize and don't want to take the infamy hit for invading the independents it may be worth stationing a fleet there in order to stop the pirates from orbiting the world and gaining influence. My approach is usually to pay the pirates if they offer me a good deal - it's not rare for my empire to have a bunch of pirate protection agreements for less than 100 credits per month in the late game. You can only get deals like that later though, when you have a strong military and they have a weak one.
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Sep 14, 2014 20:44
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