Never imagined the races to be so different from each other, maybe i'll take you up for that suggestion… on the other hand it couldn't be as bad as meeting the drenghi on turn 5 right? Not that i ever managed to survive that specific encounter before! Each race has completely unique ship designs, a...

Never imagined the races to be so different from each other, maybe i'll take you up for that suggestion… on the other hand it couldn't be as bad as meeting the drenghi on turn 5 right? Not that i ever managed to survive that specific encounter before! Each race has completely unique ship designs, a...

it should be all about calculation right? 1 Ocean planet supports x amount of production research mining worlds That's the idea, you want to use ocean planets to feed the population on other planet types. Occasionally you will get an ocean planet that's good for science, but most of the time their ...

how did those neighbors manage to develop cruisers that fast with the little territory they have in possesion? The Erians and Vagalar begin with the Cruiser tech unlocked as one of their racial advantages. However, this is counterbalanced by the fact that they have below-average ship designs. i'm n...

I'd recommend using specialized carriers rather than including hangars on your combat frigates. Dedicated carriers can just retreat at the start of battle, which avoids the risk of losing them and means you don't even need to bother equipping weapons (one laser just to win vs freighters is a good id...

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...