Questions from a Newish Player

Player Questions
1

I’ve played on and off for a while now and never got good at certain aspects of the game. Any help would be appreciated.

  1. Planetary Logistics: Is there any way to automate shipping lines to send minerals and buildings to a colony? I’ve tried the supply and demand feature but it never seemed to work.
  2. Rate of Expansion: I’ve always had trouble in my games with my rate of expansion. How fast should I be leaving my first system on a conventional start? How often should I build ships?
  3. Commercial Ships (followup to question 1 if yes): Should I build commercial cargo ships?
  4. Research: What distribution ratio should I research different branches of technology, and what should I focus on?
  5. Ground Units: What kind of divisions should I build? What size? What should go in them?
  6. Military Ship Design: What sort of weapons should I focus on? What tonnage? What speed is optimal to escape from missiles and fire controls?

I would appreciate it if answers could be more about early-early mid game

Thanks for helping me.

2
  1. Minerals cannot be automates with civilian shipping lines. Installations can be moved with civilian shipping using the Supply and Demand panes in the Civilian / Flags tab of the Economics window.
  2. There is no hard rule about this and every player is markedly different. When I play a conventional start, I usually try to explore my first jump point within 20 years (playing with 50% research speed and Limited Research Admin option on). I would start building military ships once you have at least Nuclear Pulse Engines and at least one decent weapon tech (e.g., 15 cm Lasers or Railguns). Survey ships are the exception as you want these ASAP. Commercial ships are nearly always worth building as long as you can support them with fuel.
  3. Yes. Civilian shipping can take a while to build up and can be unreliable even once built up, plus there are some things they cannot do very well such as moving minerals around. Having a robust fleet of player-controlled commercial cargo (and colony) ships ensures that you always have the capability to respond immediately to urgent needs, and can help you jump-start the early game while the civilians are still growing.
  4. Most people will prioritize power/propulsion and construction/production techs. From there, I tend to balance between what I want the most and what my scientists are good at. Besides these, you’ll want to maintain at least 1–2 good weapon tech lines (e.g., lasers and missiles), your armor tech, and your (direct) fire control techs. Secondary techs include sensor techs in general and important ground unit capabilities like construction, geosurvey, and xenoarcheology units. Everyone will have their own opinions about which techs are most important to keep up with, so feel free to experiment.
  5. I like to build formations between 10,000 and 25,000 tons, depending on roleplay. Generically, I like to have (1) infantry formations that are light, cheap, and decent on defense to serve as colony garrisons; (2) heavy armored formations that are more expensive but have a lot of offensive firepower per ton for invading alien planets; (3) artillery formations to support the line units; and (4) headquarters formations for command bonuses and logistical support. Depending on my roleplay, (3) and (4) may be combined into the same formations. I’ll show some very generic examples below.
  6. Weapons: nearly any are good, my personally recommendation is to start out with lasers or railguns (both are good jack-of-all-trades weapon types) and missiles (because they’re fun and it’s important to understand their mechanics). Tonnage: nearly anything can work, but as a new player an easy target might be 10,000 tons for light classes (e.g., fleet scouts, point defense escorts) and 20,000 tons for heavy classes (e.g., battleships or battlecruisers). These are not gospel numbers but are probably a reasonable starting point. For speed, it depends on tech level, but a good rule of thumb is to have between 1/3 and 40% of your ship tonnage as engines with the base 1.0x multiplier. This will ensure you are competitive with alien races of similar tech levels while not demanding too much fuel. Many players like to recommend going right up to the higher engine power modifiers, but for a new player this is an easy way to run out of fuel very quickly so I recommend leaving that for later once you are more comfortable with the logistics side of the game.

Examples of ground unit formations:

Rifle Brigade = 19,612 tons

  • 2,000x INF+PW = 10,000 tons
  • 300x INF+CAP = 3,600 tons
  • 150x INF+LAV = 2,400 tons
  • 75x INF+LB = 1,500 tons
  • 200x INF+LOG-S = 2,000 tons
  • 1x STA+HQ20 = 112 tons

Armor Brigade = 19,530 tons

  • 240x VEH+MAV+CAP Tank = 14,880 tons
  • 60x VEH+2xCAP Anti-Infantry Tank = 2,520 tons
  • 200x INF+LOG-S = 2,000 tons
  • 1x VEH+HQ20+CAP = 130 tons

Artillery Brigade = 19,672 tons

  • 120x VEH+2xMB Artillery = 11,760 tons
  • 100x VEH+2xMB Light Artillery = 5,800 tons
  • 200x INF+LOG-S = 2,000 tons
  • 1x STA+HQ20 = 112 tons

Corps Headquarters:

  • 1x STA+HQ100 = 262 tons
  • Add a bunch of INF+LOG-S that can be used as replacements to keep subordinate formations in supply
  • Other unit types you could add include artillery, construction, or STO depending on what you like best. Or just fill it out with a nigh-endless supply of logistics units if you like that idea.
  • Subordinate formations: 2x infantry + 1x armor + 1x artillery brigades.
2 Likes
3

This helps a lot, thank you.

Do you know how to get the supply and demand feature to work for colonies? I’ve tried using it before and it just never worked for me.

4

The routine logistics of planets should not be handled with the supply and demand feature.

Instead, for each system that you wish to mine, make a logistic base, preferably a terraformable world which would be eventually colonized.

Spread Automated mines in the mineral rich solar bodies, and one or two mass drivers, targeted to that outpost. That outpost will start to stockpile minerals.

Then you can use a commercial cargo ship, and with a cyclic order, load up that cargo, go to an industrial hub colony / earth.

Edit:

So the logistic chain would look like this:

Automated Mining Outpost —mass driver—> Logistics Stockpile Outpost —national commercial cargo freighter—> Industrial Colony / Logistics hub closer to the capital.

Cyclic orders are orders that endlessly repeat in a cycle. Example:

  • Load up minerals until full at x outpost

  • Transit to sol system

  • Unload minerals at earth

  • Refuel at earth

  • Transit to y system

(Cycle to command 1)

You can set up cyclic orders, by ticking the box in the upper right settings box above the manual moves in the fleet orders window.

You can also add delay to orders, for example, add a delay to the transit to y system command, for half a year, if you do a fuel run from a sorium harvester, to let the fuel stack up before sending a tanker to collect and deposit at a colony.

I mostly use supply and demand orders when I move a lot of cargo, annd can’t be arsed to set up orders to do that, like moving infastructure and terraforming installations to new colonies.

Edit:

So I would build a bunch of installations at industrial hubs, and add a supply flag for them.

Then, when I’m building up a new colony, I think, hey, I probably need some deep space listening outposts. Just add a demand flag, and bang, I now know that in a couple of weeks, the civilian shipping lines would handle that for me. No need to remember which industrial hub I built those on, or the route I need to take, and so on.

I also use terraforming stations, the orders are mostly to supercharge my shipping lines with money, so that they could expand faster.

1 Like
5

Thanks. I’m trying to get back in the game and just needed some help.