The guide will be pretty much obsolete in 1-2 days. ^^



Don't think the suggested ship-design will be able to do a whole lot against AI-fleets that make use of their full-tonnage.

Interesting, I picked up the expansion and updates and to my surprise this strategy still works with some minor tweaks (build an invasion fleet, chase a few techs). Still a great game but the AI is horrible!

I played a game on Endless difficulty today (huge, disk, 8 players, econ/wonder victory disabled) and achieved a science victory on turn 139. The omnitank dreadnought still works pretty well, but it's not always unbeatable. Sometimes, the AIs will make dreadnoughts with the same weapon type for 2/3 or so of the hull area, which might be enough firepower to kill a ship or fleet. A fleet with a hero is virtually always unscathed, though, and the AI does not tend to make full fleets of its best ships. The only thing that was terribly critical to the victory was making sure to trade with the AI to keep up in the tech race.

Ail wrote:
On endless? I'm really curious if there's someone who can still win there.

I still haven't had time to play.



I did play a quick game after the patch on normal difficulty and the AI was alot better with its ship-building designs.

leeleatherwood wrote:
This was right before the patch. I am playing another game today and I will see how it goes.

On endless? I'm really curious if there's someone who can still win there.

I suspect the result will be different after the patch.

Ail wrote:
Was this against same-level-AI-ships AFTER the patch on Endless? Could you upload a savegame?

This was right before the patch. I am playing another game today and I will see how it goes.

This was before those patches and even before the weapon balancing patch, the general idea is still good but you need to be much more flexible now and allow room for adjustments. The game has changed by a lot and the AI adapts now but you can still outsmart it and counter if you play properly.

Was this against same-level-AI-ships AFTER the patch on Endless? Could you upload a savegame?

I followed this guide as Sowers (so I had to modify it a little) and I can say this is much better and funner than glass cannon destroyers like everyone else says to play.



My ships RARELY die, its funny how futile the enemies attempts at taking me down are. Even if I cant kill the entire enemy fleet in 1 battle at least I kill most of them and they are easy to mop up the next battle. So a draw is still a win. Glass cannon destroyers take way too much micromanagement of the fleets, normally when I play glass cannon destroyers I end up quiting the game because its just too tedious.



I research my way to +4 command cap which gives me lots of +Happyness too, I have my tax rate at 55% and all my systems are 100% happyness. I also get the +Tonnage research so I can superstack my Dreadnaughts with 15x Shields/Deflectors/Flak and 15x Armor, the rest is weapons. My Invasion ships are 50% weight in shields/armor, the rest in invasion power. My invasion ships are basically invulnerable even though they cant fight back. lol

Endless difficulty victories are remarkably easy to achieve without having to resort to min/max micro strategies. This guide will step you thru a grognard's way of winning with only a few starting parameters tuned for victory, once this is mastered modify to your liking for more of a challenge. My basic strategy is to reduce micro thru standardization, overwhelming superiority,



First an overview of some of the poor mechanics which allow easy EV's:



1. In hostilities the AI is extremely simple and easy to predict. The main AI strategy is to build endless stacks of mixed ships and hurl them at a target relentlessly. We'll call it Stack Warfare and counter it with a Slack Warfare which includes stack busting fleets and flanking maneuvers.



2. Of the four commodities research is vastly superior, all the others are easy to come by (and modified by tech) so we'll want to stay ahead in all areas of technology. You can't win with food alone!



3. dreadnaughts vs destroyers. While it's true a stack of DD's can reach 90k MP and pretty much plow thru anything they do take a lot of micro to replenish and manage. In stack warfare this can become tedious. Impervious DNs are the way to go. Also I'm not a fan of the card game unless it becomes meaningful and for that to happen the AI would have to be a lot smarter with fewer stacks. Maybe some future patch will address this pacman like AI.



OK let's set up a game keeping in mind we want massive DNs for tanking AI stacks.



In order of importance a good custom race will include:



Bonuses

Legendary Heroes (must have to expand early game)

Optimal structure (+30% hull size)

Optimistic (+20 happiness on systems)

Scientists (+10 research on system for every level, I only get 1 or 2 levels of it)

Dust or Huygens ring (starting planet upgrade, you'll want the extra credits to hire the administer hero)





Maluses

Dust impaired (50% ability dust cost on hero) we won't be using abilities

Sloppy sawbones (50% healing cost on hero) as if it's not cheap already

Feeble warriors (-10 defense on system)

Isolationists (-1 trade CAP)

Deep Roots (+/- ownership gain/loss on planet) I only take this one if I have to fit one of the above bonuses in, it's a downer in late game.



I would recommend using the Amoeba affinity. Sowers and Sophons are also good, but anything will work. Amoeba's start with the galaxy known which is helpful in expansion but more importantly you won't waste your time on a really bad galaxy roll.



Roll up a spiral-8 large/huge galaxy with 8 players. low density, few constellations and remotely connected, few wormholes, few or average star connectivity. What we are looking for is a galaxy with eight individual arms (4 arm with 4 players if you wish) connected by wormholes to a center mass of stars. This with give you an guaranteed choke point at your wormhole. Later you can increase the number of wormholes or play a 'normal' galaxy with several choke points but for now let's work with one.



Set to endless difficulty! it's no fun to play without endless stacks of AI ships. The only time I re-roll is if i end up without an administer hero or a really bad galaxy where all i've got is a wormhole.



Expansion - The early game



Super easy with Amoeba affinity, colonize your entire constellation which should be 4-6 systems. You will only make two kinds of systems, research systems and production/research systems, your homeworld will focus on growth early to fuel expansion but will also become the sole trading hub later on with exploits going to tech. When landing your first colony in system set the exploit to farms chose the biggest planet with the most potential for agri-growth, all others will be exploited for tech eventually. What's important is to identify a system with the most production capability, this will most likely be a system with a few large deserts, but a decent mixed system will work (jungles, terran, planets with anomalies +'s towards production). hopefully it's located near the wormhole since this will be your ship producing system. Also have a alternate production system in mind. This system will have all the ship building upgrades as the primary producing system but in all likelihood you will only have one administer hero to specialize in production so the primary system will be producing the bulk of the early fleet until late game.



Hire your administer hero on turn 2 or 3. This guy is going to build your empire once you spend his points on civil engineering. Keep him in the home system churning out colonists until you have the whole constellation settled plus one colony ship for the system on the other side of the wormhole. Once he has done that job you can keep him at the homeworld to finish up the starter buildings but move him over to your production system as soon as you can which will be about the time you can hire your second hero who is hopefully a corporate guy who can manage the home system trade - train him up thru the director tree before switching to the negotiator every bit of labor helps. As for the administer hero boast him thru Efficient Schooling and the Director 2 for the food upgrades. you'll want your production system fat and 'ecstatic' in order to build the fleets.



In terms of research you are going to want to research everything about equally, never go to deep in the early game as you need a little of everything. Que up the techs for tundra and arid, then the two techs for science and dipo/trade and finally the two on the warfare tree. go back down and get the Destroyer tech and Casimir Effect to open the wormhole. Queuing all those techs sort of gives you a timer and a goal to be fully colonized before the CE tech is researched as that is about the time pirates start to appear and your buddies next door will start flying recon into your constellation so you need to be prepared to block them



Once you get both the weapon techs researched modify your scout with 5x plating, 5x slugs, 5x armor, the engine and repair mod and whatever else. you want end up with something around 150 MP. that will be more then enough to dispatch the early AI scouts of around 40-60 MP. The scout needs to be upgraded and sitting on the wormhole before CE tech is finished. Once you get the destroyer tech build a DD with 200+ MP, add some missiles to throw off the AI and drop the engine/repair kit if you need to. Build up this fleet and feed it to you scout fleet sitting on the other side of the wormhole. You are going to turtle up a little bit once you send the colonist down the wormhole and secure your foot hold. Have a look around find out about your neighbors. If you are lucky and like to turtle you may find your wormhole system is not directly connected to another player in which case you'll get the occasional scout to chew up (by now you should have the third hero, the one who likes to shoot, if not level up that trade hero). Don't expand beyond that frontier system, that's your choke point and stack magnet. You can take another system only if it's NOT in the direct path of an AI.



If you are lucky enough to find another wormhole on the frontier system, or one close by, be ready with that DD fleet because you have just met you first victim. You will still need to hunker down for awhile but you will receive a cornucopia of XP for your heros and ships, bask in it and level up. see stack warfare below if you want to try an earlier takeover of a hostile constellation.

Thanks for the guide, very interesting for a casual spacer like me!

I dunno, I liked his ideas. I have done similar. Having the AI pay me for everything does tend to keep them happy. Not have multiple craver factions makes an endless game a lot easier. However the problem I have with this difficulty level is the level of micromanaging my diplomatic relations I have to do.

Bentley wrote:
This thread is actually very helpful. Once you have uber fleets - say 4 dreadnaughts - you can lock down large stacks of enemy fleets at their systems, so they cannot blockade your systems (which used to be their systems). However, they do not usually attack my fleet until they are down to two. Is this a change in AI behavior, or is the difficulty too low, hard in this case?

I'm not sure of what prompts the AI to attack on lower difficulty levels, on endless they will still attack down too twice the size of your stack, ie they always try to keep a 2:1 ratio.

This thread is actually very helpful. Once you have uber fleets - say 4 dreadnaughts - you can lock down large stacks of enemy fleets at their systems, so they cannot blockade your systems (which used to be their systems). However, they do not usually attack my fleet until they are down to two. Is this a change in AI behavior, or is the difficulty too low, hard in this case?

gamingalife wrote:
Sorry to burst the bubble but this is not new news currently the difficulty difference is the players disapproval ratings and the AIs bonuses. The AI algorithms need to change as the game is not that challenging. I am playing on Endless on Tiny galaxies with 8 empires to make it more interesting, bigger galaxy means more room for you to expand and more time to tech up as you want.



Good guide but the turtle phase can be skipped entirely if the correct tech path is chosen and you are using throwaway ships to scout the AI and update you fleet as necessary. Anyone that I currently trying to get past serious/impossible should read this as the basics remain the same you only get less time to execute the strategy on Endless.

Coming from Civ V my impression of the game difficulty vs AI is lower.. And its mostly because the AIs are not very aggressive towards the player EARLY when then they could cause headaches due to their superior building capabilities (guess with tiny maps you can force the AI to stop being so passive) ... Because once the human player has a bit of room to expand (big maps) and time to research some critical technologies ....With a few fleets you can butcher endless numbers of AI fleets per turn nullifying its superior production capabilities ...Also diplomatically there seems to be very little consequences for declaring war (the dreaded Civ "Warmonger" diplomatic penalty)...



After my first contact with the game - when I've started to document myself about it - reading each of the stock faction abilities//bonuses - and really for each of them I was like - Wow - those guys are awesome - they'll be unstoppable ... And after playing the game for a bit .. (won on immortal huge twin elliptical with cravers) - I feel that unless you want to rise the difficulty like gamingalife does by playing tiny maps - all the stock races are perfectly overpowered at this point to take down endless ... No need to cook the settings for handpicked traits, map ..

The best hing any player can do to beat the AI is to play multi player for about 2 weeks.



Come back to the AI on endless and laugh for about an hour, then become entirely too depressed on how horrible the AI is.



Seriously you will find few people who are is bad as the AI, the only thing endless difficulty gives the AI is more resources this doesn't do it much good if it constantly picks possibly the worst decisions.

Sorry to burst the bubble but this is not new news currently the difficulty difference is the players disapproval ratings and the AIs bonuses. The AI algorithms need to change as the game is not that challenging. I am playing on Endless on Tiny galaxies with 8 empires to make it more interesting, bigger galaxy means more room for you to expand and more time to tech up as you want.



Good guide but the turtle phase can be skipped entirely if the correct tech path is chosen and you are using throwaway ships to scout the AI and update you fleet as necessary. Anyone that I currently trying to get past serious/impossible should read this as the basics remain the same you only get less time to execute the strategy on Endless.

Endless stacks - The late game



The late game starts once you unfold your first DN fleet. My mid-late DN ships are setup like this:



10x beam weapons (more if you can fit them)

5x either missile OR slugs



10x kinetic plating

10x shield

10x flak



1x accelerated magnets

10x best armor HP

1x best or second best engine

1x intelligent tools

1x smart cargo



make two classes of this ship, one for missiles and the other slugs, produce and deploy them equally. A third class is the support DN which is the same but with no weapons, instead fill it with the unique fleet mods (heal, +crit, +engines) and all the invasion kits you can throw on it. These ships are built for tanking and completely invulnerable with a hero and some XP.



What about 60 fleet enemy stacks? no problem you won't even scratch the paint.



Read the section below for how to deal with AI stacks. On the other fronts I normally convert the spoils of war to more research. The AI is so simple (did I mention that already?) it will generally build all of the same type exploits in all systems, no rhyme or reason it's just one turn it will decide to make everything farms and poof the entire constellation went agricultural use that to you advantage and scout ahead to pick the right commodity you need, or just go for the closest hostile. by now your constellation is humming away and it really doesn't matter what you get, you just want to double your size to increase research. also if you are in a dust pinch start scraping all the useless buildings the AI builds. At this point you want nothing but research and dust from your spoils. why the AI builds some of those esoteric buildings in system they are of no use are beyond me.



Watch for the different victory conditions the AI is going for. They love economic (since they cheat so much) and wonder building. target those civilizations which are making more progress then yourself.





Stack Warfare



Forget the card game, forget endlessly micromanaging destroyer/mixed fleets and enter the realm of Slack Warfare.



The concept is simple, you have few but invulnerable fleets which are simple to produce/replace, easy to track, and are universal in terms of armor, etc. The enemy AI has infinite stacks of mixed garbage. Quality>Quantity - All things being equal the fleet with more MP will always win. even a quality fleet with a little less MP will win 9 out of 10 times. Don't trip yourself up with trying to match weapons to armor - Just armor up for everything equally. Your fleets will survive and your ship XP grows way too fast with all those stacks.



The AI with its endless resources produces mixed fleets of rabble ad nauseam, thus lowering it's MP per fleet. MP is the only thing that matters on auto...



let's look at an example:



You've got 4 DN fleets the enemy has a stack of 60 fleets one system away. Send your best hero fleet into the stack and lock them down. The AI will attack until it has exactly twice the number of fleets remaining in system then it stops. Your fleet is invulnerable and makes short work on the stack killing 58 of them (yes hit the auto battle key 58 times). You can then attack again so now you are down to 1 vs 1.



Send in a second fleet to dispatch the remaining fleet and start your siege. Now use the two remaining reserve fleets to fly deep into enemy territory and lock down the planets and lay siege. rinse and repeat.



Always lock down planets to stop the flow of stacks 'downstream'. Never use more then one DN fleet per planet. Should an enemy stack land on a system under your siege with more then one DN fleet then the enemy stack has now locked down 2 of your stacks, which means it will stop attacking you with 4 stacks left. You'll be able to further dispatch two more fleets however 2 more enemy stacks will remain which if you wanted to clear, say to move up your DN fleet to the next available planet, you'll need 2 DN fleets instead of one. The problem could cascade if you keep feeding the enemy stack and there is no way around it unless you have a reserve stack equal in size to your 'stuck' stack. just don't let your stacks create more AI stacks!



Various:



On Strat/Tact hero's it's my understanding in auto battle they don't use cards such as "300% efficiency to next battle phase", etc. Therefore I only upgrade those abilities with +'s to offense, defense, labor, etc. which dramatically improve a hero in auto combat. it's possible to get +30 on off/def/melee with the right hero combo. that will basically double your base MP.



It's appalling simple to win on endless with this type of galaxy setup where the choke points are so easy to identify and defend. Try more wormholes or other galaxy configurations which may test your ability to manage more then 1 or 2 stacks.



I heard you can play the first card game in a stack and the remaining battles will auto resolve (saving endless clicks!). I only had that happen once when my huge stack got stuck against an AI stack but I can't seem to repeat the "feature".

Turtle - The mid game



Your border is locked down. People are happy. All of your tier 1, many tier 2 planets are colonized. it's time to consolidate.



In general go round robin thru the tech tree picking up anything within 1-3 turns of discovery, with preference towards research, terraforming, and happiness. Don't go into the weapons tree unless until you have the next tier of ships researched. But when you do get everything on the tier plus a more advanced beam tech. All my ships up to DNs are uniformly shielded from all three types (5 or 10 stacks) with either 5 or 10 beam weapons and plenty of HP armor. Sensors, engines, and invasion mods serve no purpose in a defensive posture and lower your MP rating. Always keep an eye on your neighbors fleet MP rating, even at peace, if you are falling below theirs then it's time for a new class of ship or some fleet command points. Honestly though the next fleet after your starter fleet (cruiser or BB) should be good enough to get you to DNs with a properly leveled up hero. An upgrade of weapons/armor to that highly advanced fleet is all you will need. I've done it with only upgraded DDs peaking at ~2500 MP going against 5000 MP stacks



Your planets should be churning out research points. be smart about upgrading them. Trade is sort of fickle so I don't upgrade any planets except the home system which was gifted a extra trade route. I might let my production planets trade if they have nothing else to do. Influence and sight radius are useless. Planet defenses should only be on your frontier system, ship HP and XP bonuses on your production worlds. research/dust/happiness production everywhere. Food... lots of food. Shoot to have all your planets terraformed down to at least barren but preferably Arctic before you get DNs. On research systems convert deserts to arctic/tundra. On a rich production system tundra will do fine, actually your production systems should also have the most research points, if not you must have got really lucky with a backwater system. research all you can as fast as you can, tech is the great equalizer.



On the diplomacy front agree to ceasefires and peace (should you want it) but nothing else. sometimes i'll do open borders to explore some trade routes but never to a neighbor, just the guys on the other side of the galaxy. use your outdated ships to explore nearby foes. If you find yourself unprepared for a wardec or they made it past your wormhole system en mass then settle for peace. The AI can always be bought out for a few Hexaferrum or a terraforming tech, you are only helping yourself later when you give them terraforming tech. Never get into an alliance, you will get thrown into a war you don't want or worse once you start taking systems the AI will leap frog in front of you and take the juiciest systems.