^Exactly as the title says. I try to avoid conflict, but if it does arise I just get crunched.

There are two ways to help keep the Sophons capable in a fleet fight,



The first is the Sophon's saving grace, science. They aren't gifted builders and are far from top notch fighters or sailors, but incompetence and experience can, to some extent, be replaced by technology. You'll have to spend a lot of your time alternating between scientific research and weapon's research. You may wish to pick a specialty and stick to it for offense and cover the field for defense. Missiles are a great way to end the battle at the long range phase and you just need your ships to survive until that first volley can get off. With missiles though, you want more ships than you do bigger ships. More ships means that the missiles will go to more targets, a big ship typically just unloads on one target and not diversifying that assault will kill you (not that we as players have great control over that, but we can nudge them to play it by our rules).



The other thing you can do, and is infinitely more effective, is get a pilot hero and immediately rush their defense and tactician, and then offense trees and right after that take Tinkerer to go down the modder trees. If you spec out a commander you will have quite the monstrous fleet, even with old, outdated equipment. You can be two weapons behind and still be doing fine. Experience and ability can more than make up for lacking technology.



Last, but not least, and this is something you'll need for either strategy: Have spares. You need to always keep a spare fleet in reserve in a hangar so you can quickly send out ships to replace what is lost and you would do well to dedicate a planet to industry and ship building (it'll be the heart of your war operations) and build ships there as much as possible (if you can, just buy the upgrades for the sector with dust, but if you have a big enough reserve fleet, begin building things manually there).



To keep your system protected? Be sure to build the defense bonus upgrades to give your fleet the extra punch it needs (like the uniform shielding upgrade). Only put these where you perceive much combat to be (establish line of defenses and rush for identifiable choke points). Once the races evolve beyond string/wormhole travel and into warp travel, try to have a fast response corvette fleet to stop the pesky scouts and lone ships from blockading important trade planets.



I hope that helps.

Thank you so much for such detailed information! I'm going to try it today!

settling on all battleship fleets later on will also give you an edge, since they can be build so much faster and if you stick to missiles you get numbers and still have durability.

+ the battleships get a bonus to defense gear weight.

Ignore dreadnoughts.

LordReynolds wrote:
settling on all battleship fleets later on will also give you an edge, since they can be build so much faster and if you stick to missiles you get numbers and still have durability.

+ the battleships get a bonus to defense gear weight.

Ignore dreadnoughts.

I really recommend staying away from missiles, especially on ships with a CP higher than 1. Kinetics and Beam weapons will allow your ships to destroy more than 1 enemy ship every phase, while missile ships can only destroy one.

If you find that you are getting crushed by the AI, the reason probably isn't choosing Sophons as your race. The problem is probably population. Please take a look at the 30-turn challenges to compare your results against others in the early game. I found that I was getting crushed, because my population was 2-3x less than it "could" be. Here is the first challenge:



/#/endless-space/forum/27-general/thread/8097-30-turn-challenge-help-me-learn



Here is the challenge group; or you can search for the text [challenge] in subject lines using advanced search.



http://forums.amplitude-studios.com/group.php?groupid=80



@ Arrowlance, I think there is still disagreement on missiles. Many other people feel missiles are the best, because they are fired early, so you can load a bunch onto destroyers. If a couple of destroyers get killed there is little economic impact. I don't think many people agree that kinetics and beams will destroy more than one ship per phase. But I admit, a lot of our information is based on viewing the cinematics, which do not necessarily track the real combat resolution.

davea wrote:
If you find that you are getting crushed by the AI, the reason probably isn't choosing Sophons as your race. The problem is probably population. Please take a look at the 30-turn challenges to compare your results against others in the early game. I found that I was getting crushed, because my population was 2-3x less than it "could" be. Here is the first challenge:



/#/endless-space/forum/27-general/thread/8097-30-turn-challenge-help-me-learn



Here is the challenge group; or you can search for the text [challenge] in subject lines using advanced search.



http://forums.amplitude-studios.com/group.php?groupid=80



@ Arrowlance, I think there is still disagreement on missiles. Many other people feel missiles are the best, because they are fired early, so you can load a bunch onto destroyers. If a couple of destroyers get killed there is little economic impact. I don't think many people agree that kinetics and beams will destroy more than one ship per phase. But I admit, a lot of our information is based on viewing the cinematics, which do not necessarily track the real combat resolution.

I know that kinetics and beams will destroy more than one ship per phase. Load a dreadnaught with nothing but one of the two and you will destroy 3-4 ships per phase easily.

ArrowLance wrote:
I really recommend staying away from missiles, especially on ships with a CP higher than 1. Kinetics and Beam weapons will allow your ships to destroy more than 1 enemy ship every phase, while missile ships can only destroy one.

you can use 3-6 missiles of the best kind and have decent firepower and then just stack up o ndefenses. your BS become very, very tough and will simply outlast anything.



You can even go for an omni tank setup.







Call it the lazy philosophy of ship design. ^^

Thank you so much, everyone!



I had to print this page out to remember it when I start my next Sophon game.