No useful planets in sight

[BobTheJanitor]

Started playing a game on a concentric map style the other night. I started scouting around as I usually do, and once I got to the limit of my mark I scouts I had found absolutely nothing useful. So I took the planets on either side of my homeworld, because I always do that regardless, and scouted further. No luck. So I started packing scouts into transports and got a few jumps further. I found a factory, which is great, but hardly an important focus in the early game. So I unlocked mark II scouts, and started sending them and the MkIs out in transports. And what have I found? Nothing. I've circled the outer ring, and gotten as far as I can into the inner rings, and I haven't found a single fab or ARS. Just a couple of AIP reducers and that one factory.

What would you do at this point? I'm starting to capture more planets in the ring my homeworld is on just for kicks. I can't find a goal to drive towards! Would you just give up at this point and try a new map seed, or keep pressing on? And if so, any advice about how to proceed? Should I pick the softest looking direction and just send a mass of transports over and take a planet to keep looking for goodies from? I'm kind of at a loss here, I can't say I've ever started a game and spent this long just looking for a target to take.

[Shrugging Khan]

Make a beeline for the AI homeworlds, take as much knowledge as you can on the way, bomb them out of existence, and have the satisfaction of having won a game without any high-tech gimmicks.

[BobTheJanitor]

If only I knew where the AI homeworlds were... Although being a concentric map, and with me starting on the second outermost ring, I wouldn't be surprised if one of them is right in the bullseye. Maybe I should just go for that and see what happens. The map being so linear makes it easy for defense, but rather hard on offense, because you don't have many options for directions of attack. It's left or right, and that's it. I'm trying to break myself of the bad habit of taking as many planets in a row as I can, and I figured this would help. I was just hoping to have some goal to jump towards instead of being lost in the wilderness.

[Red Spot]

I tend to just take an area of 6-12 planets in a cluster surrounding my homeplanet, no matter what is there or how much resources it may give.
Plant mk3 Econ-CCs on them and you have your base-economie going. After that deepstriking and such becomes a bit easier as you can actually rebuild your fleet and dont have to worry the first released foe might hurt your home-CC

[zebramatt]

In that situation, yours is the goal of exploration! Intelligence gathering is probably the single most important goal in the game, in fact.

Why, just yesterday I spent almost an hour and a half trying to track down an elusive shard planet!

[BobTheJanitor]

I did finally set off in a random direction and take a planet, and was able to scout all the way around the two outer rings (finding nothing) and then in towards the center, where I found a nice string of planets with an ARS, a fab, and a factory. Then I got distracted playing spacechem, so I'll be back to conquering those planets later. 

[zebramatt]

I know the feeling! Been playing through the SpaceChem demo myself - s'pretty good, eh?

[orzelek]

SpaceChem is actually quite nice approach to puzzle games genre. I like it

[Sunshine!]

Clearly you need to try a Lattice type map.  Also, mk2 nukes are your friends (kind of) on lattice type maps, keep that in mind.  Sometimes you just need to take out 18 planets at once...

[Red Spot]

Or a snake map, and play it as I did .. take each and every planet on your way to the (eventually) second AI-Homeplanet.
No need to check what you need next or what might be interesting, just take it all 

As long as you keep the momentum up it can go rather fast as well, took about 6hours to take 120 planets.

[BobTheJanitor]

I've often thought of trying that to see how far I could go. At some point the AIP is going to eat your lunch though. I guess you won't have to deal with too many reinforcements if you move fast enough though. Did you stop and build turret defenses whenever a wave warning popped up, or what?

[Red Spot]

I always break of my mk1, and later also mk2, fleetship and form them into a fleet of their own.
Combined with a fleet of siege-towers and other spirecraft, that makes 3 fleets (mk1+2 // mk3+4 // spirecraft).

Doing this on a lower difficulty, it left me with 2 fleets to take care of any trouble, including the few counterpost-waves.

I've taken all planets on an other game though, see the after-action forum for that game. Doing it on higher difficulties takes a bit more than 6 hours though

[zoutzakje]

I've done this on difficulty 1, just for some achievs.... taking every single planet on a 120 planet snake map made the AI progress go up till about 2500 (including some effective use of the AI superterminal, data centers and co-processors). I rushed forward really quickly but even then enemy planets would sometimes reinforce with 400+ ships near the end... and that on difficulty 1. I don't see how you could survive on the higher difficulties. Maybe a botnet golem could be usefull, I didn't find one on my game. And finding the dyson sphere early in the game could be helpfull too instead of finding it 15 hops away from second AI homeworld.... but even with the odds in your favor, it would still be impossible I think at let's say dif 7 (or at least a massive lagfest near the end).

[Red Spot]

Did a 100planet map with 2 8.6 Assassins
Look here for details, dont say it isnt possible

[zoutzakje]

haha awesome ^^
well, it would defenitely be impossible for me, I'm still struggling on dif 7.3 40 planet maps lol. besides, I don't think my laptop could handle waves of 12k ships