Hey guys,



Vet of 4x games here. Im playing on hard difficulty and after the initial colony grab I cant keep up with enemy fleets. Ill have wars on 1-3 fronts and just cant do it. This is without even grabbing all the uncolonized that I can.



I suspect the solution is to end the first phase earlier. How many do you grab? I am thinking 10 may be the magic number. Any insight and advice would be greatly appreciated.



I play a custom race , sophon affinity, morale science and money bonuses.



I start getting the production tech, then the bottom branch to be able to colonize the systems around me. then some low cost military. Home planet gets the industry tech and starts cranking out colony, second system gets industry tech and bangs out military. Both of course using the food exploits. I dont colonize planets in my systems until after the colony grab to keep the expansion morale negative in check. Every system beyond my first two is just building the techs i unlock such as research, more prod, money etc so they can become productive members of society later on. Should I maybe designate two more systems as busting out more military?



Am i missing diplomacy perhaps? They never seem to want to deal with me. And I cant make peace with them as theyre usually taking over my outposts, which makes their aggression perfectly legal.

I don't think the number of systems is that important, more the quality and the resources.



If you colonise poor quality systems the negative approval that your empire suffers can often drag down your FIDS more than the gain from the new outpost/colony. The same also goes for large scale war, if you invade a lot of systems in a short time your whole empire can get very unhappy very quickly.



So it's important to pick colonies selectively, but also just remember the AI will hoover up anything it can colonise and afaik they don't have half the approval issues players do (can't remember off the top of my head what modifiers different difficulty AI get).



Diplomacy is usually a number of things, high score and weak fleet means AI will attack you and not be very open to diplomatic relations. It's important to be able to defend yourself and your systems. Always have a reasonable mixed attack general defence fleet to deter enemy advances.



Always try to specialise your systems, don't always build every upgrade, only build what's needed. The higher the diffuculty you're trying the less you can simply build everything and hope for the best. Also remember to convert farms to something else once planets populations are full, you can always change back quickly later if needed (often not if they have moons or aren't all barren/lava/gas giants etc). Your home system will generally want to be dedicated to growth early on and producing your colony ships second or 3rd system should be your production/military system. Later your home system will probably become an economic centre (depending on it's planets and location), so be sure to switch your heroes around (specialise those too, early on).



The first 20-40 turns are the ones that really matter, if you are struggling in the later game, chances are it's all because of what happened much earlier.

Yeh, I used to colonize everything, but now I very carefully pick and choose systems and blockade the good ones with early warships. I don't even get the tech for planet colonizing until I've found systems good enough to be worth sending a colony ship.