Finished first ever AI Fleet wars game (2 humans)

[greyhoundgames]

So my friend and I, after having purchased this game way back, finally got down to play! I wanted to summarize our game and hopefully get some things cleared up for us.

We played a smaller galaxy because we wanted to finish in one sitting. I think it was 20 stars or so.
We are experienced RTS players but had only minimal info on this game(couple of tutorials)

We played as 1 team(via the helper menu item). Not sure that this was a good idea, but from past RTS experience we hoped it would let us delegate jobs(battle and economy).
We had all 6 expansions enabled.

Since playing this, I have read a bunch of the stuff on the wiki so I will be putting some questions inline with things we did if anyone can lend some aid.


We started off a few games which ended poorly before our 4th try where we managed to win. We were on difficulty 5 for both AI.
In our winning game we immediately teched metal harvester tech (in the tech guides nobody talks about getting these but they seem a huge advantage. Please speak up if these are bad to get).

We did not have to do any scouting because for some reason the whole map was visible at all times.. not sure whats going on there. In some of the previous games I could not see everything but the other player i think (the host) could always see everything.

We started grabbing territory left and right without really any planning about it. I have read a lot more now about this and in a higher difficulty game this could be bad. At our difficulty our ai progress never hit the first threshold by the time we had won so it wasn't a factor.

We cleaned out all the systems without roman numeral tier markings on them. My friend could not see these on the starmap for some reason. Shortly after we got started the ocasional enemy wave warning would come in. One thing confusing here is they seemed to be able to arrive at any system, even our homeworld, despite them not being adjacent to enemy stars. Based on what I read, this only happens if they have no warp gates. However we didn't even know about warpgate raiding and only after fully destroyed a system so we never should have been in this situation. Also we were on difficulty 5, so that special thing after #6 where there is nothing adjacent and they hit anything should not have applied.

Throughout our play through, we seemingly randomly were getting new ship and turret techs. We have no idea where they came from. A few made sense like when we captured an ARS but we got so many, that it had to be something else. We wondered if this was related to the racial icons we saw at the beginning of the game on the map. Do capturing their planets provide a new ship design? How does one see this when you scout a system before you capture it. In all we picked up every single tier 5 turret(the ones on their own tab) without researching them, we picked up about 6-7 ship designs as well.

We then bee-lined towards the homeworld of one the computers. Bringing about 1300 ships of tiers 1-2 mostly with some 3+4(thanks to the advanced factory) bombers and fighters, we went through the warp gate and shieled+turreted the heck out of it while the ships did their thing. Once most of the ships died off we were able to hold thanks to the 100+ turrets and we started streaming ships in via warpgates. I wasn't sure if you needed multiple warp gates to handle large output of ships so I built a bunch.

We built the giant fortress guy in this system at the start of the invasion, but by the time he was finished the battle for the system was over and he cannot use the warp gate, so that was a waste

Finally it was time to hit the homeworld! We sent our size 1800 fleet in and found some special ship that had 3 sources of invulnerability. We figured out at this point that it was coming from core shield generators we had left unkilled. So we called a grand retreat after defeating the blackhole thingies that block warping. We went back to kill them and after killing 2, the rest just poofed. We returned to the homeworld and slapped the hurt on. Clearly we had it way to easy

All in all it took 3.5 hours to finish our game. We learned a lot but were also confused by a lot of things. Especially after having read the wiki, here were some things that stick out:

1)Where did all these free ships and max tier turrets come from
2)What are crystals vs metal? We just took every planet and it auto built harversters. Thought they were all just metal. There was talk about a ratio for these too. No idea on this one
3)We had more energy then we could have possibly needed.
4)Is there no effect of spending time. It seemed like with infinite metal, we could rebuild our fleets very fast after a total defeat and just "zap branagin" wave after wave of our men at the enemy.
5)I read something about finding weapons:You might want to capture some large weapons, like stuff from Fabricators, or Golems, or Zenith Reserves. I have no idea what these are if we got any without knowing.
6)What is the significance of the 2 colored rings in each system(green and yellow). Something about supply? Didn't catch that one.
7)I read about capping systems so you can research harvest the adjacent systems. However you cannot research where the AI is and they were everywhere. Are there empty systems on bigger maps?

Thanks for any feedback on any of the various things

[Alex Heartnet]

Ask a question, be a complete idiot for a day.  Don't ask a question, be an idiot for a lifetime 

1)Where did all these free ships and max tier turrets come from

Max tier turrets comes from capturing the Core Turret Controllers the AI has scattered around in a few of their systems.  The turret controllers don't benefit the AI at all and are there just waiting to be captured.  The turret controllers are irreplaceable, and as such should be defended against attacks.
Max Tier turrets happen to have a per-planet unit cap and not a per-galaxy one.

Most extra unit types are obtained in similar ways - explore strange new worlds, meet new alien life, see if they have nice things on their planets, and if so blow them up and steal their stuff!

2)What are crystals vs metal? We just took every planet and it auto built harversters. Thought they were all just metal. There was talk about a ratio for these too. No idea on this one

Crystals used to be a thing in the game, but now it's just metal.

3)We had more energy then we could have possibly needed.

Tends to happen when you take dozens of systems.  You aren't supposed to be able to take that many normally, but diff 5 is easy and derpy.

4)Is there no effect of spending time. It seemed like with infinite metal, we could rebuild our fleets very fast after a total defeat and just "zap branagin" wave after wave of our men at the enemy.

If you want time pressure, there are several game settings in the lobby.  One of them adds a slow AI progress game over time.  Some of the other minor factions will also force you to be active and not just turtle all day.  (Zenith Miners, Adv. Hybrids, Human Colony Rebellions...)

Large starships tend to rebuild slower then smaller fleetships even with infinite metal.

5)I read something about finding weapons:You might want to capture some large weapons, like stuff from Fabricators, or Golems, or Zenith Reserves. I have no idea what these are if we got any without knowing.

Once you send a scout to a planet, mouse over the planet in the galaxy menu and check the intel summery.  Strategic structures are listed on top - these aren't going anywhere even if the game goes on for hours.  If you require more detail then view the planet itself and click on the buildings (assuming the scout is still alive)

6)What is the significance of the 2 colored rings in each system(green and yellow). Something about supply? Didn't catch that one.

Supply is important!  Basically, if you own a system or the system is bordering the system you own, you have 'supply' on this.  This mostly means that you can build turrets, ship constructors...exc.

If a planet suddenly no longer has supply due to your command stations going boom, then turrets and such stop working.  This also applies to the AI - so if you, say, start a new game and find a fortress in the system right next door to your homeworld, you can work around the problem.

7)I read about capping systems so you can research harvest the adjacent systems. However you cannot research where the AI is and they were everywhere. Are there empty systems on bigger maps?

Some stuff was changed, the hacking mechanic replaced research raids.

No system is empty until you, the player, make it that way

Thanks for any feedback on any of the various things

You're welcome!   

[greyhoundgames]

Thanks for all your answers(And all the fish)

[Aeson]

Regarding your question #5: Golems are something you have to turn on under the AI Plots tab of the game setup menu (there are Easy, Medium, and Hard options; if you turn multiples on, I believe the one with the greatest listed difficulty will be used for the game). If you have Golems or Botnet Golem turned on for a game, you'll occasionally find a 'Broken <something or other> Golem' on a planet, which you can repair to get a '<something or other> Golem' after you capture the planet.

Fabricators are structures present in all games which you can find on some planets which allow you to build the Mark V version of a fleet ship or starship, or which allow you to build a Core Somethingorother, or which let you build an Experimental Somethingorother (experimental somethingorother fabricators are, in my opinion, usually more interesting, because there are no lower-mark versions of the thing it gives you). You can hack these structures to permanently gain access to the ship type it provides, or you can capture the planet and have the ability to produce the vessels for as long as you can defend the planet which houses the fabricator.

Zenith Reserves are a special structure on the map, each of which has a mark level. Blowing up a Zenith Reserve (or scrapping it, if it's on a planet that you've captured) will provide you with a moderate fleet of Zenith fleet ships - Chameleons, Viral Shredders, Beam Frigates, basically anything where the name is 'Zenith Something', as long as it's not a starship. Blowing up or scrapping the reserve I believe carries an AI Progress penalty.

There is an 'Objectives' tab in the menu that you can open by clicking on the 'Stats' button in the lower left corner of the screen. This tab will list any known AI-held fabricators, Zenith Reserves, Co-processors, Data Centers, Broken Golems, and a number of other useful capturables/targets for destruction; additionally, double-clicking the item in the list will bring you to the planet that whatever you clicked is on. There are also filters on the Galaxy Map (hit 'tab' on the keyboard, or click the 'map' button in the lower left corner of the screen to get to the Galaxy Map; the filter options are in the lower right corner of the Galaxy Map screen) which can be used to display the locations of all known structures of a given type, which can be very useful for quickly determining if you hold a fabricator or broken golem or something like that, or identifying locations of good asteroids for building Spirecraft (if you have the Spirecraft game option turned on), or other such things.

[Alex Heartnet]

Basically if you don't know what something is, then click on it and read the description for it.  There is a lot of Fun stuff in the game to find.

It sounds like you two should swap roles for the sake of learning the game better, in addition to upping the difficulty to 7/7.

[keith.lamothe]

Welcome to the forums and to the game

It seems all the questions have been answered here, but let us know if there are more.

On

We did not have to do any scouting because for some reason the whole map was visible at all times.. not sure whats going on there. In some of the previous games I could not see everything but the other player i think (the host) could always see everything.

That's probably from fog-of-war being set to "Complete Visibility" in the lobby.  You're welcome to use that option but if you want to have scouting be a part of the game you can switch that to one of the other settings.