new player question

[Zirce]

Hey all, i've started a few games yet havn't got very far as I allways come to the question? where to expand?
All the guides i've read say not to capture all planets, to keep your AIP low, I get that, but what do I do when there is 2 useless planets adjacent to me and then beyond that very valuable planets?
What do I do with the useless planets as they are stopping my supply/attacking me/ruining my bottleneck.
Having planets A-D then several enemy planets in the mix then planets D-F seems odd.

Thanks

[Tridus]

You can hop over those planets using transport ships or just flying through if they're lightly defended. Cloaker starships work too, if you clear the tachyon guardians. If you go past the bad planets, you can use a colony ship to set up a base on the good ones, and that will spread supply. You don't need supply on a planet to take control of it, just a colony ship.

You can neuter the bad planets by taking out the guard posts and warp gate, which really limits their ability to attack you. It doesn't eliminate it,but it slows it down. Be sure to leave one warp gate near a defended world alive, so the Ai will attack that one with waves.

[LaughingThesaurus]

No planet is completely useless, if you're on lower difficulties. ARound difficulty 6 and 7, you can actually afford to take quite a few lemons. If you intend to get better, you will need to hop past useless planets. Otherwise, you can always take them for knowledge and a little more income as well as a bit of a buffer. That's about all they'll be good for, though. As long as all of the guard posts are dead, you should just be able to fly by them and still be mostly safe.

[TIE Viper]

Also you don't need to take out the Wormhole Guard Posts.  Not killing them does make the system reinforce slightly more so than it does if you kill them, but killing them is normally very tedious and time consuming until the later parts of your game (implying a huge fleet ball here and/or a crap load of bombers) or if you have an Artillery Golem.  Under most (nearly all, really) circumstances leaving the WHGPs alive will not negatively impact your strategy in any significant way.

[LaughingThesaurus]

I like to kill them because I have a science fleet I move around. A couple errant fighters guarding a wormhole post will wipe those out in moments.

[TIE Viper]

Do you use mk. II Science vessels?  If you kill the Tachyon Sentinels your Science II's should be able to move around unnoticed since they are cloaked.

[LaughingThesaurus]

When I say science fleet I mean like 50 science ships. Mark IIs are nice and awesome, and really expensive in bulk.
Mind you my science fleet really is completely unnecessary. It's just fun to gather all of the knowledge in like 20 seconds.

[TIE Viper]

I build a fleet of 5-20 Science II's.    I don't even bother with the mark I's really.

[LaughingThesaurus]

Yeah, but I always just mass up Science Is and stash them under force fields. Saves money. It's also just cooler to have a lot of infinite cap ships.
One of these days, I want to build 1500 Science Is and move them all into one planet at the same time. Can you guess why?

[TIE Viper]

LOL!  You'd be hard pressed to get all of them through the wormhole in unison to get the 3K all at once.

[Kahuna]

It would help if you posted a screenshot of the galaxy map and/or the save file.

Only capture planets that give you something useful (in addition to the 3k knowledge) and/or are good chokepoints.