The finer points of scouting?

[Panopticon]

My main question is this; Are there any drawbacks to maximizing your scout coverage in the early game? I'm an information junky in strategy games. Information is a potent weapon, especially when facing down an AI opponent as flexible and ruthless as this one. So going into the midgame, I want to have as much information as possible. That means a scout on every planet I can get one into position.

I've already (I'm still really new to this game) triggered some early game insanity by having a scout 'sploded upon detection by a Guard Post in the same system a Dyson Sphere was occupying. The system was three or four jumps out from my starting world, and I'd only captured another two or three planets around it. My defenses at that stage were meager and the Dyson Sphere's forces quickly found my little cluster of planets. Queue a desperate three sided battle right next to my homeworld, complete with masses (relatively speaking for early game) of Z Bombers responding to the Dyson Sphere's aggression. My game went from probing and bootstrapping my forces to a knock down, drag out battle for survival. Totally awesome, and it got me thinking about other possible repercussions to my early game scouting strategy.

Also, any tips on scouting in general are welcome and appreciated.

[Fleet]

Currently I play with Dyson Spheres off, because they like to eventually group up and not go anywhere. I have just seen too many bugs with them for now.

So assuming no Dyson sphere, I can offer some random scouting advice. My typical scouting pattern goes like this.

1. Send all Mk I scouts on auto-scout. Eventually these reach planets with tachyon beams.
2. Send all Mk I scouts on a specific path, to scout farther.
3. Send all Mk I scouts in a transport which I send off past the tachyon planet, and then go to step 1 or 2 depending on what I see.

This gets my quite a lot of scouting coverage quickly, especially if I stay on top of my scouts, sending them away when they are built. Depending on your economy and how quickly you take planets, transports can be hard to come by, since they are expensive just to send on scouting.

I can't mention any drawbacks to maximizing scouting coverage. Sometimes its even nice, because it aggros a few ships from AI planets (ever-so-slightly slowing down their buildup).

Guard Posts, at least in the latest Beta, don't have tachyon beams. I wonder if they still do in the latest official (you mentioned detection by a Guard Post)

Hi Panopticon! Hope you have fun playing this game. I've worked my way up to Diff 9, but I'm having trouble right now. Sooo much replay value in this game. I keep coming back. Find a friend to play with, it makes it soooo much better! Especially if you can have voice chat.

[Panopticon]

I'm playing 3.120 and the Guard Posts have Tachyon Beams in this version. I've been unlocking the scout line pretty quickly, since they are cheap and information is king in my book. I like to leave a scout at as many planets as possible so I can monitor the AI's troop buildups in real time.

I didn't even know there is an auto-scout option. I even do a little bit of micromanagement of my scouts, mainly to avoid Tachyon Beam equipped units.

As for the Dyson Sphere bugs, I guess I'll wait to see what's going on there later in the game. I have seen (and gotten a chuckle out of) the Dyson Flower screenshot that's hanging out somewhere on the boards. At the moment though, I'm loving the guy. Now that I've pacified him, he's a great benefit to me since he's so close to my core planets. The AI isn't teched up yet and doesn't have a lot of units so he's keeping my portion of space pretty pacified.

Also, that event has driven my enthusiasm for the game up by an order of magnitude or two. I love emergent gameplay stuff like this. Scripted events rarely match this level of awesome.

[Spikey00]

Currently I play with Dyson Spheres off, because they like to eventually group up and not go anywhere. I have just seen too many bugs with them for now.

That has been fixed for the most part in the latest version.

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Auto-scout:  hold x + right click for context menu.  It's not as effective as when you do it personally.

Glad you're enjoying the game, Panopticon!

[Panopticon]

Currently I play with Dyson Spheres off, because they like to eventually group up and not go anywhere. I have just seen too many bugs with them for now.

That has been fixed for the most part in the latest version.

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Auto-scout:  hold x + right click for context menu.  It's not as effective as when you do it personally.

Glad you're enjoying the game, Panopticon!

Is that the latest version as in the official 3.120 or the beta version, 3.189?

edit: Also, what's an effective use for Scout Starships? At the moment I'm looking at them and asking myself "why for should I unlock 'em?"

[Lancefighter]

Counterspies.
Seriously, my first game of AI war involved a counterspy AI. Annoying as hell.

Otherwise, I bring a scout starship with my fleet for tachyons and countersnipering.

[HellishFiend]

Context menus and auto-explore are not in version 3.120.

[Diazo]

edit: Also, what's an effective use for Scout Starships? At the moment I'm looking at them and asking myself "why for should I unlock 'em?"

For me, I seed the Scout Starships in my main fleet to give it counter-sniper coverage and to have a tachyon unit with my fleet in case I run into a mine field.

So the Mk I Scout Starships are pretty much must builds for me. Having said that, I'm not sure I'd ever unlock Mk II or Mk III Scout Starships, they have more HP and give you more total units but don't give you anything else as they are unarmed.


D.

[Panopticon]

Thanks for the info guys.

Feels like a nice community here.

[Diazo]

/wave

 

D.