Hi!

[athros]

Ship reference? The charts that are on the wiki with the amazingly shocking amount of information? Or is there another place I'm missing?

If you click on the "Stats" button in the lower left hand corner of the screen, it brings up a window with a number of tabs, one of which is called "Reference" and has a fair bit of info on the ships in the game

Ok whew. I thought there was something I either missed in the tutorial or on the wiki

[keith.lamothe]

Ok whew. I thought there was something I either missed in the tutorial or on the wiki

The tutorial sends you to the stats window to look at the objectives tab, I don't think it mentions the other tabs.  But they're worth a look

[athros]

The tutorial sends you to the stats window to look at the objectives tab, I don't think it mentions the other tabs.  But they're worth a look

I'm naturally curious, so I flipped through all of the tabs when I went to the objective screen in the tutorial

[Shrugging Khan]

On the issue of expansions, I suggest you take a dive and turn on everything. Then set the difficulty to 7 or 8. You will probably die, but believe me - you will learn much.

[keith.lamothe]

On the issue of expansions, I suggest you take a dive and turn on everything. Then set the difficulty to 7 or 8. You will probably die, but believe me - you will learn much.

The main drawback I can think of there is that you probably wouldn't be able to even figure out why you died, which information is usually necessary for improvement   But you'll probably learn a lot along the way.


I've noticed a number of players playing with everything on (minor factions, AI plots, etc).  This isn't actually the way we intended   It's fine if you enjoy that kind of thing, but it's almost guaranteed to be brutal.  Really brutal.

[danando]

Up to you... 'better' is hard to quantify. They all interact in different ways, so a CoN/TZR game will be different than a LotS/CoN game, and so on. I usually just turn them all on, but you'll get a different experience out of them each time. None of the expansions will make the game harder, exactly, just more complex. The only problem you'll have with starting out with everything is that you'll probably be spending a lot more time looking at the ship reference or the wiki to figure out what's going on. If you don't mind the idea of pausing to research things every few minutes, then just turning on everything won't hurt.

Ship reference? The charts that are on the wiki with the amazingly shocking amount of information? Or is there another place I'm missing?

I think I might just go with All of the expansions + just Golems, and work my way up with all the mini factions. I want there to be more in the Galaxy. For some reason, it seemed empty with just Zenith and nothing else turned on, but I don't want to overload myself with too much.

So many decisions!

beware though DO NOT ADD THIS INTO GAMES unless you will die

[BobTheJanitor]

Counterpoint, if you manage to befriend a dyson sphere, you barely have to build any defenses on any worlds that you have connected to it. The dyson gatling patrols will clear up almost anything that comes in.

[keith.lamothe]

Capturing the sphere's planet will generally result in "Mike Dyson's Punchout", however

[danando]

Capturing the sphere's planet will generally result in "Mike Dyson's Punchout", however

NICE ONE  problem is dyson are to predictable not like AI it just obliterates all near it

[Shrugging Khan]

Oh god, the pun, it hurts!

I haven't found Dyson Gatlings to be very useful. Maybe it's because I always do 120 planets, but they just don't seem to reach past about two hops around the Sphere. Their spawn rate is too low to overcome the AI's defences. Of course, it's probably far more useful if the Sphere sits just one hop away from a high-value planet, but so far every time I found it it was surrounded by wasteland, and usually it sat somewhere in corners or dead ends where not even the location itself has strategic significance.

But that's just my bad luck, so what.

However, Golems.
(Hard) actually is the new easy. The Strike Forces that threaten you are pitifully weak against mobile defences, and the Golems you can find are so ridiculously strong that you can really afford to have half your fleet on strike force interception duty. And once you have several golems, using them with a small fleet screen to minimize damage to them (and repair costs) means you can take on just about anything - winning the game is just a matter of going through the motions.

So be wary of the Broken Golem minor faction. As long as your game is somewhere in between medium- and long-length (as opposed to short, low-planet, high AIP/min), you can really take the challenge out of things by picking up those beasts.

And never, never, never ever research Scout Starships mkIV or build Scout Drones mkIV. Destroys all suspense, really.

[keith.lamothe]

However, Golems.
(Hard) actually is the new easy.

Oh yea?  That can be changed

[Shrugging Khan]

Yeah. My suggestion would be to make the Strike Forces spawn further away, all in one blob, with one additional large ship of one mk level higher than the others, and to have the location from which they approach announced. In that way, it becomes a real interception effort rather than "oh, let's wait till they come close so we know where they are, then send the bombers".

[danando]

starships are mostly essential

[BobTheJanitor]

I haven't tried hard golems yet, but medium is pretty challenging. It's a more interesting sort of challenge to me, though. You have to actually weigh if the AIP gain is worth it for some of them (like 40 for the botnet, ouch) and you have to build a seriously massive network of energy reactors to keep them rolling. This in turn makes you inclined to take more worlds just to get more energy output and increases your AIP even more. I find that more of an interesting dynamic than just having the AI throw angry waves at you all the time. I'd almost be inclined to argue that the score weighting should be changed to not be so harsh on medium golems, if I actually cared about the score at all.

Also, on the gatlings, I'm not sure why they wouldn't be reaching very far away for you. Mine will literally travel all over my wormhole network. They don't cross worlds that you don't own, though, so maybe that's what you're seeing? I don't know if you are skipping AI worlds around the dyson world. In my game they will travel as many hops away as you have planets, as long as they're all connected. I'd almost like to see their numbers dropped and their power increased to compensate, because all those gatlings are really lagging me out!

[athros]

The main drawback I can think of there is that you probably wouldn't be able to even figure out why you died, which information is usually necessary for improvement   But you'll probably learn a lot along the way.

That's what I worry about. If I don't know why I lost then I can't improve for later, then I'll get frustrated and quit. If I enable all of the expansions, and just the Moderate version of Golems, I'm assuming I'll see a lot of different ship types, but not necessarily all of the insanity of having so much running around that I'm confused. I figure I'll slowly build up to having multiple minor factions active at a time, though not all of them.

As for Dyson Spheres...maybe on the next game and I figured Starships were essential in any game?