Scout III and far exploration

[Grok]

I just brute force my way through everything!

Eco/Military/Efficient Defenses > AI Progress/Extensive Scouting

How can you form the most efficient economy without knowing where the best resources are?

No force can be considered truly brute unless it is directed against the weakest point.

Knowing where strike will come from makes defenses efficient.

Truly, there is time enough in this game to do both. The investment is small, the return, even if small, is worth it.

Finally, on larger maps, simply expanding until you find the AI is time consuming, dangerous, and expensive.

[Ragnol]

I just brute force my way through everything!

Eco/Military/Efficient Defenses > AI Progress/Extensive Scouting

How can you form the most efficient economy without knowing where the best resources are?

No force can be considered truly brute unless it is directed against the weakest point.

Knowing where strike will come from makes defenses efficient.

Truly, there is time enough in this game to do both. The investment is small, the return, even if small, is worth it.

Finally, on larger maps, simply expanding until you find the AI is time consuming, dangerous, and expensive.

i agree. its like trying to hammer a nail when your blind. its a pain to find the nail(or homeworld), and finding(producing) the hammer(fleet) is hard too.

wouldn't the lack of scouting and just plain rampaging through enemy territory, generally result in the AI progress getting so high it'll be nearly unstoppable? maybe a good beachhead(as in, force fields, space docks and counter stuff.) at the homeworlds would work if the progress gets really high, but i could see that as ineffective.

[darke]

I'm another who's given up on exploring despite the fact that's usually the part I like about games.

The AI homeworld locations are pretty obvious after having played a few hundred games, and when playing on high level AI's the AI planets just have too much defence to get anything other then the MkIV scout onto more then adjacent planets reliably. I ended up just scouting with the Armoured Missile until His X-ness nerfed that.

Not to mention you end up having to wander around most of the galaxy if you want to get a number of the advanced science labs anyway. It just means that you have your fleet nearby when you discover one, rather then on the other side of the galaxy.

[Ragnol]

I'm another who's given up on exploring despite the fact that's usually the part I like about games.

The AI homeworld locations are pretty obvious after having played a few hundred games, and when playing on high level AI's the AI planets just have too much defence to get anything other then the MkIV scout onto more then adjacent planets reliably. I ended up just scouting with the Armoured Missile until His X-ness nerfed that.

Not to mention you end up having to wander around most of the galaxy if you want to get a number of the advanced science labs anyway. It just means that you have your fleet nearby when you discover one, rather then on the other side of the galaxy.

oh, i think i get it. its faster to take important planets because your fleet is already there, and you just don't destroy things that raise AI progress unless you want the planet. you'll destroy its defenses and possibly the warpgate, but not actually finish it off unless its worth something. is that it?

edit: ok, i feel like a bit of a noob now. if i had read the first response to the strategy advice thread, i would have understood immediately.

[Haagenti II]

Ofen you don't even bother with its defenses (which the AI will replace for free anyway) apart from the wormhole defenses where you enter or leave: you just grab the knowledge and move on to to the next planet.