I've spent quite a while doing achievements and it was usually all against
many hard AI players. I saw no quality guide on AI yet, so I thought some
people could use one. It's for medium and big maps where you have time for at
least 6 planets before you have to fight a war. Smaller ones are boring and i
don't play them. Find a different guide telling you how to spam LRMs on those
and you're all set.
Anyway, here it goes:
1. Knowing your enemy.
Try to remember against whom you're playing. Play all the races, get to know
them. You need to know which AI ships are carriers, which have repair ability,
which hit hard and which are most durable. Without knowing races and their
ships, you've already lost. So do learn.
Scout ahead and see what planets they have, where they are, how hard they are
defended, how many and what type of ships they have. It's funny how people
neglect such basic stuff. With this knowledge, your offensive will be very
easy. So go and scout.
Knowing their personality helps a lot too. The worst guy is called defensive.
He expands slowly and keeps fortifying his interior planets. Do not waste time
playing against this guy. The best AI (the most annoying one!) is aggressive.
Researcher will have little but elite ships. Piece a cake. Cash guy will have
loads of light frigates. Pick your favourite. Or go random, it's somehow more
fun this way.
2. Building up.
This is a long one. But you have to DO IT RIGHT in order to get advantage over
numerous AI players. If you don't, you're dead.
Start the game. Buy 200 crystal as fast as you can.
You have a green planet at the beginning. The first thing you do, you should
upgrade taxes on it. AI won't do it and it means you have 40% more income for
first 10 minutes. It helps.
Second thing, build cap ship factory and crystal extractor. Queue the capital
ship with colonization ability. This is your second early advantage over dumb
AI which 90% of time takes some other ship.
You need to know one thing. Colony frigates are damn slow at colonizing
planets. Jumping burns their antimatter and they need to regenerate it for
like 10 minutes. If you don't take a colonizing cap ship, your colonization
will be damn slow. Trust me. Do not waste this early advantage for a Kol.
Next step, build scout frigates. I build as many as I have phase lanes from my
home planet but never less than two. I send them in all directions and when
they are on their way, tell them to autoexplore.
When the cap ship is ready, create a fleet out of it, build a squadron of
fighters, tell it to jump with all the fleet, set the formation to close and
jump to a nearby asteroid. There's always an asteroid.
When you're there, you will see two frigates. Kill the one that can bomb
planets, the siege one. Your fighters excel in that. They make up for you not
having a fancy battleship. They really do. When siege frigate is down,
colonize the asteroid right away. Second frigate can be killed after you have
the asteroid, saves like 2 minutes of time.
Build taxes, build mines. You've doubled your resource income.
2. Looking around.
By now you should have most of nearby planets explored. Build two civilian
labs. You need to invent ice or volcanic colonization for your next planet.
There's always an ice or volcanic planet nearby. Always.
After labs, build 5 to 10 light frigates and send them with your colony cap
ship to take the planet. Send cap ship first, let them gather around it and
start shooting at it. After that send in your frigates. This way they pound
you capship's huge shield while your frigates stay safe. You save a lot of
cash due to this trick so do use it. This is your third huge advantage over
reckless and losing dozens of ships AI.
At this stage you should start thinking about having like 5-6 planets all with
trade ports. This is one more thing AI fails to learn. The one who goes for
trade earlier is the one who can muster bigger fleets in mid-game. AI doesn't
do that and is sad and poor for a longer while.
Also you should invent better shields and your long range frigate. I like TEC
one even despite overusing it is very lame. You should also get your second
capital ship, this time it should be the best and toughest bitch you have in
your fleet. I mean Radiance, Kortul or Kol. Two caps with a bunch of long
range frigates in this stage is all you need.
Last thing to do, find your first victim.
4. Choke points, it's all about choke points.
See what route this AI will have to take to reach you. You need a point AI has
to fly through to reach your home planets. When you find it, colonize it. It
has to be close to that AI. If the map is sane and you're fast, it should be
no more than 3 jumps from his home planet.
Build two repair bays there. They should overlap so they heal each other. Also
build a crapload (3 to 5 at this stage) turrets. I know they have low damage
and their range sucks. You don't use them to fight back. You use them to delay
or scare away the AI.
Spread them and try to cover the whole half of the gravity well to which AI
will be jumping.
And DO upgrade escape facilities on that planet/asteroid.
Of course research repair bay first. Research hangars to. Build one or two if
you have enough cash, all fighters.
4. First victim. Coward.
Why did we secure that planet? Simple. When you attack AI, it jumps to the
system you came from with siege frigates. If there are no defenses, they kill
the planet and go further into your territory forcing your fleet to turn
around and chase them. Now when they see you built a crapload of turrets, they
turn around (80% of time) and fly away. If they don't, you should hope your
turrets will hurt them.
This strategy is cheap but for a newbie player is deadly and extremely
annoying. So plan ahead.
Do not turn back your main fleet. Start bombing his planet as fast as you can.
Leave buildings and minor fleets to your frigates. If he has capital ships and
doesn't run on seeing you, target them first with all you have. You kill his
cap ship and he runs away. He runs away and the planet is yours. So instead of
pounding frigates, kill his cap ship and you've won the day.
Proceed with this strategy until you have wiped him out.
5. What we have so far.
We have invented basic defenses, we have i don't know how many but a decent
number of planets, at least two of them being terran ones. They are the ones
that give real cash. Two or three cap ships. Better shields. A bunch of
Secure your borders. Every border planet should have max escape facilities,
two repair bays, a hangar or two and a bunch of turrets. Move your capital to
be somewhere in the middle of something you consider your future territory.
Move your firgate and cap ship factory there. Scuttle those on your home
planet and build trade ports there instead. Invent and start spreading
culture. Start thinking about resources inventions too.
Mass your ships together, add 3 or 4 new capital ships. I usually build one of
each type and after that mass what I like. For Vasari I have 1/2 Kortul, 1/2
Sikantra, for TEC 1/2 Kol, 1/2 Sova Carrier, for Advent I usually go full
7. Mid-game offensives.
Here you have to remember that AI is a coward. It will run away if it's not
his last decent planet and if it sees you have more cap ships and advantage in
fighters and bombers. Use it. Do not spread you capital ships
Also, colonize and fortify each planet you take. Proceed slowly but in the
fashion that ensures your rule over this planet for a while. Two repair bays,
two or three hangars, a bunch of turrets and it's considered secured.
During battle, leave your cap ships on the wild but focus all frigate fire on
his cap ships. Start with weaker, support ones. Dunov is my favourite first
target. So is Advent mothership. They are soft but have powerful abilities you
want them to stop using. So kill them first. And remember, AI will eventually
run away even with a big fleet. It's just scared of capital ships of yours.
Invent max shields, improve your weapons too. Mass cheap frigates, especially
light and long range ones. Quickly go towards 16 cap ships in your main
Never think "i'll sit back and turtle for a while". Always stay on the
offensive, always keep your fleet busy. You are safe when you're moving
forward and reducing htem in size. WHen you let them to mass their fleets and
come to you, you are dead. If they hit a planet far away, just build frigates
and send them there.
For your main fighting fleet you need 40-60 bomber squadrons. I don't care how
you do it. Can use capital ship carriers. Can use your little carriers too.
When a battle starts, alt+click them to get them all under your command and
use ALL of them to hit one cap ship of teh enemy at the time. Start with soft
ones, you should know which ones those are by now. This amount of bombers
kills cap ships in one or two hits. Without cap ships, they run away 90% of
time. So hit them with that much of bombers and the battle is over in half a
minute. Of course stay sane and add some fighters to that fleet and some long
range frigates too.
9. Late game offensive.
Now it's wild. You know what to do already, just use twice more ships for
that. Have fun. Research everything.
Don't kill them in their base. Never. They are too useful. Keep sending them
on AI that seems to be the strongest. And do not let others send them on you.
Even if you can beat pirate fleet, it's better to have AI spend time and ships
on it instead of you having to fight them for ten minutes.
11. Saving cash.
Do not explore your planets. Waste of cash. 90% of time you find nothing, 5%
it's something useful a tiny bit, 5% it's something useless or a penalty. Most
of artifacts are crap anyway and finding the one or two you consider useful is
almost impossible. So do not explore planets, colonize more of them instead.
Do not build rafineries until late mid-game.
Do not build culture until you start bordering AI culture.
Do not invent faster mining until you have 6-10 planets.
Do not invent anything that raises bounty, waste of cash.
Do not invent culture spread bonuses.
Do not build propaganda everwhere. Build one for each two jumps, it will be
Do not build defense on your inner planets, AI never jumps inside your
territory anyway. It settles for border planets so keep those secured and
Do not invent bigger fleet capacity until you really need it (ranked 10th in
fleet is that moment).
Do not build super weapons. They cost too much and are worthless 90% of time.
12. NEW: Planet Defenses.
AI doesn't know anything about how to build them to maximize their use. Even
defensive AI can't get it right.
It's one very useful area in which you can make up for their numerical
advantage. Provided you know a few basic rules. Here they go.
The rule is that defenses aren't to kill the enemy. Maybe if turrets had
bigger range and had some sort of anti-aircraft defense on them. But they
don't. So most of the time your defenses aren't there to actually kill what
jumps into the system. They are to scare it away. To deter AI from attacking.
When you have decent defenses, it often happens that AI jumps in even with a
substantial fleet but resigns from the fight and jumps out right away. So do
build defenses, do not rely only on ships.
Enough theory. Now practical stuff.
First of all, repair bays are the best defense you might have. They are better
than anything else you can build there. Always have two or three of them,
preferably overlapping each other so they can heal themselves while enemy
starts pounding at one of them.
Second, you need hangars. Preferably in the area where they can be healed by
your repair bays. Hangars can produce two types of aircraft. Bombers are
better for late game when enemy comes with more capital ships and cruisers.
For early game you should go full fighter. This is because fighters are deadly
to siege frigates. And siege frigates are what you want to kill quickly as
they kill your population and destroy your planet. I noticed AI is very
unlikely to bombard with capital ships. So your planet stays safe after you
destroy all siege frigates. So killing frigates should be your priority.
I build two or three hangars on my planets, sometimes go for four on planets
that are choke points. Helps in hunting scout frigates and other travellers.
Rule three, build lots of turrets. They all have 3000 life, have decent armor
and shoot back. Along with repair bays, they can survive a lot of pounding and
slow down even huge fleets. Place them somewhere in the middle between both
yellow circles around your planet to cover the half of the hemisphere where
the enemy will jump in. In systems endangered by pirates, build one or two
near your trade port and mines. You need many of those cause killing them
takes a lot of time and you need time to bring reinforcements.
Four, culture. All civilizations get some bonuses in their own culture so make
sure that border planets are influenced with your culture. TEC gets only
antimatter regen bonus so is somewhat weak here. But Advent gets better shield
mitigation bonus, making their ships twice more durable. Vasari are the best,
13% more damage in their culture. So culture hepls. Of course each of those
needs research. Do it somewhere in mid-midgame before AI comes with some
Five, defensive fleets. For those I build lots of long range frigates (like
LRM, Illuminator) and heavy cruisers (like Kodiaks). Kodiaks or other heavy
cruisers come close to the enemy and thus take all the beating while long
range frigates keep shooting from behind cruiser line dealing lots of damage
and remaining safe. This fleet also should get one most supportive capital
ship you have in your fleet. Preferably Dunov/Mothership type. The one that
regens shields or repairs. For Advent I spare one carrier with repair cloud.
It needs to be a support ship cause... it will be doing support.
I station this fleet where I think AI will hit me and move it around to where
I'm hit. It usually happens to have enough time to get there before everybody
is dead due to many turrets i build delaying enemy's offensive.
I don't have a huge defensive fleet. This is possible because I keep producing
new ships and sending them to where the fight is.
Phase inhibitors, I build those in choke points to stop enemy from scouting.
Along with additional hangars. Other special buildings I don't really do much,
and usually late in the game. I quite prefer to build more turrets. I also
don't do superweapons, they are costy and not that useful.
Last thing, scout ahead and check what capital ships are going to attack you.
It is is very important. You need to know if they have many carriers. If they
do, you need flak frigates or you're dead. So check this thing out.