Hi guys, I'll post some screeshots of my current awful newbie play:







(United Empire 5041, Me 1039)









What do you think?

Two questions



1) What turn is this (can't seem to see it in the screenshots)



2) Why are all of your planets converting industry to science?

1.)

MrPyro wrote:
2) Why are all of your planets converting industry to science?

That! It looks like you don't improve your systems with buildings (for example you have no trade routes).

2.) Try to hold the consenso-graph above 80%

3.) Don't colonize another planet in a system if the first one is not filled.



Edit:

4.) Galtur is losing population, that should never happen, fix it! In general focus on population growth at the start.

Kcyrion wrote:
1.)



That! It looks like you don't improve your systems with buildings (for example you have no trade routes).

2.) Try to hold the consenso-graph above 80%

3.) Don't colonize another planet in a system if the first one is not filled.



Edit:

4.) Galtur is losing population, that should never happen, fix it! In general focus on population growth at the start.

In fact, why is Galtur so unhappy? If you mouse-over the happiness graph for that planet it should tell you the factors affecting it; given that it's only one system I'd guess either over-population or some bad planets. Building happiness upgrades might help that.



In general, it looks like you maybe didn't expand enough early game.



Hang on, just spotted the turn counter: 210!!!! Your FIDS scores are dreadful for such a late turn. Instead of investing in Science on your planets you should have been building improvements to up your infrastructure; this will in time lead to much better Science scores than just trying to directly place Industry into Science.

Thanks for the replies, today I play a few hours while "working" and now the situation is better. Like you suggeste I added a lot of improvements on every solar systems, colonized every planet and yes, everybody is happy now. (Next game I will try as you said from the beginning)

But still not reach 2000 while the Empire is over 6000 (not sure), is that for its bigger fleet and number of systems? Forget about it...i'm gonna check the final report and than I'll share it whit you.



p.s. isn't there html spoiler?





edit:

I feel I'm doing right, that's ok...but, for god sake, how the hell can the UE being so insanely high!?



/#/endless-space/forum/34-faq/thread/14639-endless-confusion nice thread









Really need spoilers there...





BTW I'll fight them all when I'll be ready, maybe at round 1000

One thing I notice is that you could balance your tax better to keep your population happy.



Ideally you want your empire "happy" and ideally not have any fully owned planets unhappy or lower (content is mostly fine if income is limited. A happy empire researches and grows faster, this adds up quickly.



So while you had most systems at one point converting production to research, because they were unhappy you probably would have had better results lowering tax right down and having a few convert production to dust depending on how low you want your reserves to get



I regularly ride bankruptcy on the higher difficulty settings; a tip for this situation: because unhappy/striking systems are so unproductive (there are some variables here I don't fully understand as to why some systems FIDS hit 0 earlier/later than others), if your whole empire needs to be that highly taxed to avoid bankruptcy, just set tax to 100% for a turn or two, get some dust built up then you can drastically lower tax again and keep them happy for several turns and get much better results than hugging a tax balance.

The biggest thing I noticed is that your planets are nowhere near maximum capacity, so I would personally focus entirely on growth to cap the populations and THEN convert or expand further (depending on your goal). If you are going for a Science victory, it would make the most sense to grow pop and researching the +Science system upgrades as soon as possible. Additionally, to maximize output I may have a Hero assigned in a system to help grow it at a faster rate (population-wise) or I may stick the Hero (depending on Hero type) into a system with highest out-put (usually the highest pop) to get a much larger increase due to the %-based increases of the Hero stats.



In fact, if you give your system over to AI control and focus on Science out-put, you may notice that it will first focus on population first and Science upgrades only after. The AI is pretty smart sometimes.



Of course if your whole goal is to win at any cost, then just building Destroyer missile fleets with defenses for whatever weapon your enemy uses the most and capture the strongest oponent's systems as quickly as possible regardless of Happiness. At that point just focus on Happiness tech and weapons/defense modules for your ships, and the game is yours.



Lastly, I don't think you are "so bad"... the games are randomly generated, so the faction that is dominating the most could have had some ideal systems near the starting point, and of course that results in exponential growth compared to a faction that starts in a system with half the planets being uncollonizable/poor quality. I guess that's part of the fun.

Thanks for the advices guy, I understand what you are saying and for sure I will do that way the next game. This one is turning really bad: the empire won for best score so I decided to continue anyway, I was doing even better than the last screenshots but after few turns he declared war to all of us (me, the sophons and the sheredyn) and, of course, the first one he decided to strike was me lol no i'm strugglin like a dying lizard's tail...and of course, the alleance doesn't really help me.



As soon as I'll start a new game, following all your tips, I'll let you know how it goes.

How I want to win? At the beginning I was thinking in a peacefully way, but then I realized that they don't let me buy/trade solar systems so now I'll going for an aggressive way, possibly keeping others faction down while reaching the top of the 4 trees and, when there will be nothing else to do, finally destroy them all

Hi Azrael,



The score is heavily weighted towards fleets, so if he has a lot of ships (and the AI always does) then he'll have a huge score.



Because the improvements give you boosts to industry/science/whatever per turn, the earlier you build them the more benefit you will get, so an empire that built improvements early will go from strength to strength quicker.



Also, if you want to play peacefully, Hishto were a bad choice; their main advantages kick in when you go to war. For peaceful play Sophons and Amoeba are stronger.

MrPyro wrote:
Hi Azrael,



The score is heavily weighted towards fleets, so if he has a lot of ships (and the AI always does) then he'll have a huge score.



Because the improvements give you boosts to industry/science/whatever per turn, the earlier you build them the more benefit you will get, so an empire that built improvements early will go from strength to strength quicker.



Also, if you want to play peacefully, Hishto were a bad choice; their main advantages kick in when you go to war. For peaceful play Sophons and Amoeba are stronger.

Hi! Yes, my first game I played with Sophons, this one I used Hissho because I wanted to take over all the factions with war ^^

And yes, they had a lot of fleet and really powerfull one. Thanks

Now that I have had a bit more time to play the game, I'm seeing the usefulness of AI system management more and more. They seem to build everything I generally want to build, however if I really need a few extra ships or a certain upgrade for a very specific reason, I can do it... however the thing is that I think the AI is smarter than I, so it seems to choose the upgrades in a certain order to min-max better than what I can.



One thing I noticed between my strategy in my previous game (I lost due to the strongest AI building Wonders... DISABLED from now on -.-) and what I'm doing in the current game, is that taking the best (largest/easiest to colonize) systems in the center of the map will generally result in higher scores and much faster growth (due to increase in research points you earn). Trying to grow and maintain a few colonies just to keep everybody happy does not seem to work quite as well as simply owning half the galaxy early in the game. Happiness does suffer a little, however after a few turns they are all in the green again after researching/building the right system upgrades.



So the bottom line seems to be that if you want to win, this game, just get as many large systems as possible, but be prepared to defend against some AI's trying to take those colonies from you.



Oh, and capturing systems near worm holes appears to make AIs mad at you. I blocked one AI in his arm of the galaxy by taking the system on the opposite side of the worm hole that lead to his home planet, and at around turn 100 he declared war on me after trying to take that colony several times.



It seems that war is almost unavoidable.



Additionally, I specifically tried to play a peaceful game last time with the bacteria people, however even though my trade routes were producing more Research and Dust than my top 3 systems combined, I still ended in 5th place. I actually went from half the score of the top AI to 3/4ths and rapidly increasing in about 20 turns around turn 120, however that was the time I lost to that stupid Wonder Victory. I was allied with everybody except 2 of the 8 AIs, one which declared war on me at random and got destroyed by 5 of my allies (1 was destroyed by pirates early in the game LOL), with the other one being neutral and the one that won by building Wonders (also had over 10x my Military Points since I did not intend to go to war with anybody). It would have been interesting to see where that game would have went, and I may return to it, however I'm still not sure how viable a completely peaceful play style is in this game... any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated.

ReaperV wrote:
however I'm still not sure how viable a completely peaceful play style is in this game... any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated.

I've just tried this very thing, playing Amoeba on Serious difficulty, 7 AI (no duplicate races), huge galaxy, all other settings default.



It started reasonably well, my score was low and military power was none existent for the first 100 turns. I possibly didn't expand as fast as I should with colonies and instead grew my population on my starter planets a bit too long. As a result I didn't cap as many nearby systems as I had hoped. The game started to go pretty bad, my score kept dropping and I could see no diplomatic way to remain peaceful. So when an ally went to war I used it to my advantage. When they lost systems to our common enemy I moved my then small fleet in and captured it for myself instead. Doing this I managed to get about 6 systems, deliberately not helping until the system was lost so that I could take it. Oddly enough I eventually won an economic victory while diplomatic victory was still at only 88%. I'm not really sure at the higher difficulties if it's even possible to remain truly pacifist and achieve a victory. It might be something i'll come back to try again, I did enjoy the diplomatic approach... it paid well!

@Topic:

Since I have not seen anybody say this yet, please keep in mind that the "Convert To" system orders should really only be used when you have no other system upgrades left to build that increase population or FIDS. If you are under turn 100 and you have no upgrades available to your systems, then that is usually a sign that you may not have focused enough in th Exploration and Science tree.



@Further game impressions:

I finished playing the game I was talking about in my last post, and to my surprise I got my first Diplomatic victory.



It involved bribing the hell out of and giving to all the stupid demands of every other faction that was not at peace/alliance with me. The end result were about 120 turns to make a very strong alliance with 3 other AIs, with the other 4 making their own alliance and constantly having the noobs (and yes, they were AIs lol) who CONSTANTLy declared war on either me or one of my allies... it got to the point that the last 2 enemy allies standing declared war on me with only 2-3 systems and no ships left, even after I had specifically left them with a few systems and asked for a Truce agreement... only to have them declare war on me for the 3rd time after 2 attempts at peace.



Ironically, my first (and permanent) ally was actually mad at me because of my proximity to his system with my early colony rush, and the last one actually BROKE his alliance with the other noob AIs and eventually joined my alliance by turn 150 or so.



In terms of final game scores, not surprisingly I was last in Military Points, however I had every technology maxed, so the few fleets I had were packing tons of maxed weaponry and Heroes for over 50K MP per fleet (I think I had 3 or something).



One thing that I still can't figure-out is how the heck the War/Truce system is supposed to work when Alliances are added to the equation. I tried sucking-up to the strongest of the enemy Alliance to get a Truce going (they hated me the least), then as soon as that was accomplished, I would then start with the peace offerings to those angriest with me (tech, Dust, and resources), and soon after would try to get a peace agreement going. By the time I was done, everybody would be happy or neutral with me... Next Turn... and one of the weakling noob factions would declare war on me again, and the process starts all over. Actually that seems to have been part of the process that actually made one of the AIs eventually break their alliance and join my alliance (one of the early game aggressors that tried and failed to take any of my systems from me).



Has anybody tried taking and giving back systems from the enemy to prove a point? Is that the one thing that I was missing in my equation for a more "peaceful" solution?



My problem with system trades so far has been the greedy AI's demanding some of the largest/better populated systems with nothing in return... which then makes me for the rest of the game, and eventually leading to the complete decimation of the enemy factions. I mean why in the world would a faction hate me so much that they would declare war on me with no ships or even any decent systems left under their control?



The really funny part? The reason I called the enemy AIs "noobs" in this context was not because they did not want peace with me, but because around turn 100, the AI that declared war the most on me (causing war for the entire alliance) did not even fully colonize the great high pop/resource systems in its own galaxy arm... yet insisted on sending massive ship fleets in the center of my systems in a failed attempt to do something LOL... it was the next best thing to playing a Multiplayer match with an agry 8 year-old that simply wants to see ships go *PEW PEW*.



Does anybody know if there are certain AI behaviors outside of the approval/disapproval factors coded into a game that make them act differently from one another? Or does simply bribing them with tech, resources, and Sytems enough to make them do whatever you want them to?