Keep in mind that you cannot retreat into a system occupied by an enemy power. If you're behind enemy lines then you can't retreat and are forced to win the battle or perish.

Cool! Thanks, for the heads up! I did set those planets to innovation and will watch both planets more carefully and micromanage when necessary. Both planets also have a rare metal (starts with "R" I believe) so I have to see if I can take advantage of that also. Yeah, that's pretty common; the typ...

The icon indicates you can build a research institute on the planet in question (even if the planet could not normally support research centers). You should always build a research institute on any planet can support it because opportunities to build them are quite rare. The innovation automation be...

Battles against huge fleets are always long, but I can be almost sure to destroy 100+ capital ships without losses, while 500+ fighters will most likely kill few of my Battleships. The AI almost never gets far enough up the tech tree to get battleships; ultra-late-game fleets like that are practica...

It is quite computation-intensive task and AI creates a lot of trial designs. It's a particularly complex knapsack problem; I can appreciate that it's not something you want the AI doing. Sometimes this gives too powerful designs, but there are downsides as well. For example, it cannot use weapon s...

I took a look at that and found it very interesting. I can definitely see how a lot of common ship designs came to be with those priorities. I also began to think about how the AI ship designs could be improved. Some of these look easy; tweaking each race to prioritize its stronger unit designs (Gav...

Stockpiles have always been capped in every version I've played. Getting a trade agreement with another empire in order to liquidate your surplus resource income is extremely important in the early-game.

Learning algorithms are extremely expensive to create and train. There are people doing really cool stuff with machine learning, but the technology is still in its infancy and is unlikely to see widespread application in a niche like video games for a long time to come. As for the AI's ship designs,...

I've read that designing ships can be a bit frustrating because the systems can't be rotated to help fit. Components can't be rotated. YMMV on whether this is a problem or not; there are some components whose entire niche is fitting into awkward spaces. I'd say the bigger problem is that the game h...

I'm curious what people's thoughts are on the relative strength and weakness of the ten races. I've had the chance to play each race multiple times, and I feel I have a good sense for them now. Let me know if you've had similar experiences, or very different ones. Here's my list from 1 to 10 and why...

I've been playing the Lumens in the new patch, and I've noticed that their planetary automation AI doesn't seem to be working properly. Peacekeepers are not automatically built on planets when the population grows, meaning the planet will fall into unrest and rebellion unless the player manually add...

Interesting; glad to hear the game is still getting support. I don't expect new content at this point, but fixing bugs and making minor tweaks is still welcome. I'll be interested to try missiles after the patch. I've completely given up on missile weapons in the current version (to the point at whi...

I'm not sure if we'll see anything more from Polaris Sector, but it would be nice if the Lumens race was brought up to a playable state. Currently their planetary AI is broken and keeps population controls active even when population needs to grow, meaning development comes to a screeching halt when...

Challenge difficulty, no save scumming (except for bugs).

No point in rushing on standard difficulty, since most of the time you can just tech for atmospheric domes then win domination victory by pumping out colony ships really fast

I've also noticed that ships don't intercept missiles for each other, although I'm not sure if this is the intended behavior or a bug. The most reliable way I've found to deal with missiles is with fighters equipped with missile traps and ideally some shields as well. Because fighters can be built a...

Recently I've been playing around with rushing in Polaris Sector. Rushing is a highly effective strategy because it takes centuries for your initial colonies to grow into economically developed planets like your homeworld, but a quick invasion can give you a second fully-developed homeworld instantl...

the problem is that in such a small galaxy the game might finish before even reaching 60% of the research To be fair, I find the game is usually a forgone conclusion long before the tech tree is even close to complete, even on larger settings. In my current game, I'm sitting at 150 planets (just co...

Okay, I encountered the most hilarious example of this last night. When I first contacted them, I noticed that the Sharatar had stalled at 3 planets colonized and the Gavakens at just one. They were quite distant from me, so sending a spy ship out that way was a low priority. I grew increasingly sus...

however let's look at the other side the coin! Interceptors are superior to fighters in combination with defender structures and stationed around a planet for defense, since in that case they don't consume any space and their somewhat better hull turn out to be useful. Being on the defense doesn't ...

On a related note, do you think the Interceptor has a similar problem? There doesn't seem to be a good selection of weapons to put in a medium pylon, so for the most part it's using the exact same weapons as a Fighter would. There are a few races with bad Fighters for whom it makes sense to pay a bi...