Hello everyone.



So I need some enlightenment here. I manage to beat a guy over an hour of skirmishes since he decided to colonise every goddamn systems available right from the start. I manage to invade 2 worlds and block another right at the start. I then decide to end this quickly by invading his home planet. All of this took me quite a few turns but nothing crazy (around 40 to 50 maximum). It is a 8 players game. The guy quit in the middle of that and the computer is at serious difficulty.



1 turn after I manage to conquer his homeworld what is not my surprise to find nothing less then about 7 to 9 fleets of 4 to 5 vessels each with a force value suddenly a bit higher then mine. A few turns pass and I realize there is absolutly nothing I can do.



Is this normal!? Cause I just wasted my time playing a game to have the ai spank my ass in just a few turns. To say that I'm piss is a very small word but then again wtf happened? The cpu at serious is way too strong? The mix with his custom race (wathever it was) suddenly turned out to be uber in just about what? Maximum 20 turns even if I was kicking his fleets ass all the time?



I'm not interested in playing against custom races at all anymore and I don't understand why the cpu is so stupidly strong once another player quit. Also some players have a rating 3 times higer then anyone most of the game. I've played only a few game in multi but already I'm wondering: How the hell can this be called balanced?

It is perfecly normal

especialy if it was a game where you were orange and host was dark green, so it was my game

If not, you tried to beat other player with same situstion.



I will try to explain what happend.



you tried to beat fast expansion player, you took 3 of his planets, but he had much more.

While you have only 2 planets +3 after battle actions, you had very limited resourses, so you build fleets.

You foe did not make good fleets, just something to slow your rush.

He put all power for reserches and got teches superior to you.

When he left, it was just a moment when his ships arived to his lost homeworld ( it is easy and fair to assum that almost all plantes was set to produce ships)



OR ships which already exists, was just upgraded just after some tech was was descovered.



AI dos not create ships from nowhere, but it might upgrade for free.



Still first or second variant happened. However, i belieave, thet both situation took place

AI at impossible is perfectly beatable, despite it reciving some bonuses.



Your situation either means that the player rage-quited too fast and would`ve rolled you due to his superior number of planets, or that the AI bonuses did the difference between the win and the loss.



THe number of planets metters little. the amount of population and quality of the planets metters a whole lot more (in early game especially), if the player had setup for very, very fast pop growth, it could mean that you were very badly outnumbered in terms of population, and thus, outproduced.



Then, if we speak about turns 20 turns, a single well developed in industry planet can build a battleship every 2-3 turns, or a number of cheap destroyers every turn, so nothing really wrong with creating huge amount of fleets very fast.



In fact i would go as far as to say that standing fleets metter little, while the industrial and techmological base metters a whole lot.



There is a number of possibilities for very fast expancion, namely:

Piligrim afinity+legendary heroes+tolerance,administrative hero, that allow explosive growth of well-developed colonies,

amoeba afinity +plan for growth+tolerance+optimism,

Sophons due to their fast reserch allow to colonise faster, ex.

Many thanks guys. I understand a bit more now.



So basicaly going for an aggressive military race is pointless if the guys colonise faster and a bit more then you and quit early. Kinda sad to see so many options obsoletes.



Thanks nevertheless.

An Agressive military race DOES work, you just have to have either the dust gatherers or knowledge gathering traits. This allows you to steamroll. What happens is:

you invade him -> he builds fleets to defend -> you kill those fleets for profit -> that profit speeds up your tech, production and levels your heroes -> increases your fleets power. Rinse and repeat.



When dealing with a fast expansionist with that method he is ahead in both production and population early on. What you need to do then is start an invasion to force him to build fleet. Pick your battles to wipe him out and start the steamroll. If he realises he'd just feed you and tries to shrug it off then keep making fleets and blockade him like crazy. Either way, if you start blockading his systems he'll be a lot weaker, as blockaded systems produce no science, and you should be able to slowly get ahead in tech. Absolutly DO NOT start off with the weak systems. Go for the larger ones, the ones more likely to produce a lot of tech. They'll hurt him a lot and force some form of retaliation out of him, especially if he has no means of further expanding because you keep killing his colonisation ships.



The invasion isn't the important part early game, it's all about the blockades.

PinkDino wrote:
Hello everyone.



So I need some enlightenment here. I manage to beat a guy over an hour of skirmishes since he decided to colonise every goddamn systems available right from the start. I manage to invade 2 worlds and block another right at the start. I then decide to end this quickly by invading his home planet. All of this took me quite a few turns but nothing crazy (around 40 to 50 maximum). It is a 8 players game. The guy quit in the middle of that and the computer is at serious difficulty.



1 turn after I manage to conquer his homeworld what is not my surprise to find nothing less then about 7 to 9 fleets of 4 to 5 vessels each with a force value suddenly a bit higher then mine. A few turns pass and I realize there is absolutly nothing I can do.



Is this normal!? Cause I just wasted my time playing a game to have the ai spank my ass in just a few turns. To say that I'm piss is a very small word but then again wtf happened? The cpu at serious is way too strong? The mix with his custom race (wathever it was) suddenly turned out to be uber in just about what? Maximum 20 turns even if I was kicking his fleets ass all the time?



I'm not interested in playing against custom races at all anymore and I don't understand why the cpu is so stupidly strong once another player quit. Also some players have a rating 3 times higer then anyone most of the game. I've played only a few game in multi but already I'm wondering: How the hell can this be called balanced?

Had a game recently with an arch rival "you know who you are :P" and he managed to make 10k fleets after I took his homeworld and that OP new planet with 842375893456576% system production even before you colonise the actual planet in question. I had 3k "Wasps"... 3rd lvl ship with aLL KINETIC PROTECTION & BEAMS. HE WAS UNABLE TO KILL MY 3K FLEETS VS HIS 10K....... Caps <- sorry cant be bothered updating.

DMT wrote:
Had a game recently with an arch rival "you know who you are :P" and he managed to make 10k fleets after I took his homeworld and that OP new planet with 842375893456576% system production even before you colonize the actual planet in question. I had 3k "Wasps"... 3rd lvl ship with aLL KINETIC PROTECTION & BEAMS. HE WAS UNABLE TO KILL MY 3K FLEETS VS HIS 10K....... Caps <- sorry cant be bothered updating.

Sir, everyone knows you win every battle if you sit making "Pew pew" or "DAKKA DAKKA" noises during every battle. Belief only makes it stronger!

It's just getting better and better. I'm doing well and then around turn 20 there are 5 pirates fleets that appear over my homeworld AND a galactic plague. I didn't discovered a new system so it was really both random events that just killed my empire right at the start in one turn.







Edited:



Ho-ho look at that.



Ok so here is the gig: taking into account custom races+ the ai take over + random imbalanced evenments that can ruin your game inside 20 turns is simply not appealing to the average player. Without a campaign or at least a few missions that could resume well a few of the aspects you took the pain to develop you won't find tons of peoples ready to waste so many hours at hitting a wall.



Keep up the good work but it's not noob friendly I'm warning you. As such, good luck with your sells.

Had that proplem too with pirates plagues and system balance, killed my empire too coze the pirates block you and they had 7000 fleetpoints at round 20 or so .

Got them out with a litle time but didnt get back in game ...

Happened to me before, seems as if you underestimated the enemies military strength. A pretty common strategy for rushers is to wait for the first enemy they encounter to push back a delaying force and so they think that the enemy is weak. Then, when the enemy is approaching the home planet, they counterattack with a group of fleets saved up during the time the delaying fleets were pushed back and annihilate the enemies almost at the home planet. After the saved fleets wipe out your fleets, you have very little to defend against this force that supposedly came out of nowhere. My advice, advance slowly and only go for the home world when you know for sure the enemy is nearly dead.

PinkDino wrote:
It's just getting better and better. I'm doing well and then around turn 20 there are 5 pirates fleets that appear over my homeworld AND a galactic plague. I didn't discovered a new system so it was really both random events that just killed my empire right at the start in one turn.







Edited:



Ho-ho look at that.



Ok so here is the gig: taking into account custom races+ the ai take over + random imbalanced evenments that can ruin your game inside 20 turns is simply not appealing to the average player. Without a campaign or at least a few missions that could resume well a few of the aspects you took the pain to develop you won't find tons of peoples ready to waste so many hours at hitting a wall.



Keep up the good work but it's not noob friendly I'm warning you. As such, good luck with your sells.

This would very rarely happen to anyone, let alone someone playing for the first time so the probability of someone leaving because of something like this is very slim.

Roflrocket wrote:
This would very rarely happen to anyone, let alone someone playing for the first time so the probability of someone leaving because of something like this is very slim.

Actually that did happen my first game, but that's how it goes. The randomness is part of what makes the game exciting, even if you do get screwed over occasionally. Nobody wants a game that is sterile enough that everything always goes right.