Initially I avoided tutorials and guides. I like to play a game without knowing how to "game" the system. It quickly became apparent that I wasn't grasping Endless Space at all. Now I've read dozens of guides and watched hours and hours of videos, and I still can't seem to make it happen.



I'm not even looking for a victory at this point, simply looking to survive past turn 150 or so. I've tried three or four of the races.



Generally I can keep up with the AI (watching the score at the top left of the screen) through round 50. After that, every 20 turns or so, the AI's score doubles mine (turn 90 he's at 4x my score). I am trying a large galaxy, no pirates, one AI.

• Turn 1, start roaming scout and look for decent/close galaxy for my colony ship. Turn taxes to +0 dust and research resource exploits (mushrooms, mining, etc.).
• Turns 2 through 10 (or so) keep taxes to gradually gain enough to hire a hero, watch population so that when it maxes out on the first planet of my two systems I either colonize another planet in that system or build a colony ship.
• Around turn 30 I build three or four colony ships on each system and send them to close/useful planets.
• I'm continually monitoring taxes to keep everyone happy and start to research +thumbs up stuff and expansion bonuses (so I can keep everyone happy and start to gain dust).
• Somewhere in here I try to get a combat hero hired and also research missiles and flak defenses.
• Around turn 150 or so, I have maybe 1000 score and AI has anywhere from 4000 to 7000
• AI launches fleets, declares war, eats my lunch.
  
  

I would upload a screencast of me playing, but I'm in Italy and upload speeds here are around 0.10mbps, so it would take days.



Help!

You should ignore score, its pretty irrelevant. Ships are the highest modifier for score, and the AI builds loads of pretty crappy ships.



It sounds like you are expanding very slowly. By turn 30 id have probly 5-8 colonies for example. Pump out those colony ships. I start building ships as soon as I can. I usually get heavy isotope refineries and then knock them out from whatever planet can. Do you use food exploits and improvements? These are pretty vital.



You should be researching all defence types, not just flak, and fill about 50% of your ships with all 3 defences. Omni-tanking we call it. It works very well. Or else you should be looking at what they build and researching the right defence or offence. Beams are usually better than missiles. Missiles are slow. Beams fire much more often allowing you to take out missile ships. Sometimes even switching to kinetics is a good idea. They are surprisingly good at higher levels. Sometimes its good to just build a quick suicide fleet with just weapons to take out something, other times best to build a proper defensive one.



I actually like to push my taxes to max to get my hero on turn 2.



Do you manage your economy with ind-dust on high industry planets and do you understand how taxes work for dust production?



What kinda industry levels are you getting your planets up to at turn 150?



What kinda population do you have in systems at that stage?

I use whatever exploit fits the planet. So if the planet is Barren, I used the exploit for Barren planets (can't recall which exploit is which without looking). Is this the right way to do it?



I research the ship defense that go along with which ever offense the AI is using. I watch for him to attack my scout and see what they are using.



I will try switching to beams.

Do you manage your economy with ind-dust on high industry planets and do you understand how taxes work for dust production?

I don't think I understand this question. Dust is used to buy hero's, buy ships, build planet buildings, etc.

You should just build industry or food exploits on planets, no matter the type. At least early on. One food exploit, rest industry is a common one I believe. I prefer to go all food at first until the pop gets up a bit then Ill switch some to industry. In the mid game I often change loads of the planets to science, but I play a heavily science focused race, if your a war type, keeping on industry is probly better.



A good discussion of planet exploits here recently: /#/endless-space/forum/27-general/thread/9422-exploitation-strategies





This is what I mean about taxes affecting dust production: /#/endless-space/forum/33-strategy-guides/thread/14057-understanding-dust-production-and-income-in-a-system



The gist of that is, if you want to actually get the amount of money it says on the tooltip for an exploit or improvement, you actually need to be running 50% taxes. At 25% taxes, you only get half what it says on the tooltip for example, and at 0%, you get nothing at all. This means generally its not wise to build any dust exploits in the early-mid game. Later on when you can crank taxes they can be very uesfull though.



This means that to manage your economy early the best thing to do is pump industry, set a system to ind-dust conversion and let that handle the negative income from low taxes, so you can keep people happy easily without having to build improvments to soon. I usually use the admin hero with the industry bonuses on my home world, that covers most of my planets early on



Edit: bah I mix up planets and systems sometimes, set high industry systems to ind-dust conversion is what I mean in my post above

As long as the systems still grow I always build the food exploits. This way you can save yourself the industry and maintainance to build actual food-buildings and still simply change the exploits into something else once the max-population is reached.

If you really want us to find what is wrong with your strategy, post some save games...

Make people ecstatic, go science and capture planets with ocean, terran, jungle terrain. Keep your taxes on 40% or higher and earn a lot, capture planets asap, and block with it enemy expansion. In first 30 turns it is not necessary build any battle ship, if you have science, population and production enough, you can start build ships on all good producting colonies and rape one of your enemy. Till turn 60 computer is very weak in army, select the weaker and destroy him, with others keep piece its necessary, give them what they demands. You cannot war 3 or more races at one time, its suicide. 2 wars are acceptable if you have ally.



The big necessarity is to build your own race, if you want i can give you specific advices, try build your own race its the best for beginner to understand how all things works together, focus more on economy than on fight race.

First population is the key, so food +, science +, product is not necessary in race you can boost it from people and science + heros.



Try newbie 3races no pirates. You have to win with this what you know.

Be glad the AI has yet to eat your dinner.



Jokes aside, the biggest problem I see is expansion. I typically try and get an admin hero, along with n-way fusion reactors asap. Once I build heavy isotopes which gives a massive produciton boost, I pump 3-6 colony ships, depend on how many viable systems there are. Furthermore, make sure to keep taxes low. Once you buy your first hero, you don't need dust early game. Turn the tax slider down until you get your population freverent. This will give a massive boost to food, industry, dust and scnece, or FIDS. In addition, focus on food exploitations both for systems and planets, though make sure to keep your production in good shape to.

As far as I can already tell, the Automatons are nice, userfriendly class - perfect for testing/learning/experimenting.



Give them a try