Finding pirate bases

[Jeeves]

Once I have the Dhayut warp drive I go for 100 explorers and always have the galaxy fully explored before the fifth year ends, playing as a regular empire in the classic age. Do move to star system unexplored star rather than explore star on the early explorers and only check resources for colonizable planets. Moving to systems more quickly rather than slowly working your way across the galaxy fully exploring everything pays off. You find the ruins which give you lost colonies, and usually can find a nexus of the red claw and hidden fortress to give the super weapons. You also need to find the seven debris fields asap and send a military ship to kill the kraltors so that your constructors can start repairing ships to scrap for technology.

Lonnie Courtney Clay

[Icemania]

Jeeves, haven't played Classic age for many moons! Your guides getting into the game were fantastic.

It's arguably a bit more difficult, but also still very possible, to get many of the goodies in a Shadows Pre-Warp, Extreme Difficulty, Expensive Research game ... when there are other things to fund without much delay like Pirate Extermination Fleets and defence!

Classic just seems waaaaay too easy these days! I really want to know how your Strategies change on completely different settings to your norm ... ?

[turtlefang]

I haven't been playing classic for a while but cut my teeth on Jeeves guides.

I usually do apply a second wave of explorers to get up to 100 by that is in the a later stage.

If you putting 20 fuel cells on 50 explores, how do you NOT run out of resources to build those fuel cells? Especially when building your other stuff.

My number one issue in prewarp is running out of one or two critical resources so I try to take a more balanced approach except for steel, lead, and gold which I can usually find plenty of if I mine the asteroids even though they are low grade mines.

[Icemania]

I normally have about 30 Size 300 Explorers in my first Gerax Exploration wave. They are normally progressively built up over a couple of years between Warp Field and shortly after Gerax, when Gerax is research I'd normally doing much more retrofitting than building. During that time I'm also very aggressively searching for Strategic Mines outside of my home system.

I go with about 60 Explorers later but tend to find 30-40 is enough on the first wave. I never go to 100 as I normally have LRS/ULRS on bases, which mid-game I'll distribute through the map via Gas Mining Stations, just need the Explorers to fill the gaps.

Running out of minerals I don't find to be a problem except sometimes on a Harsh start and I don't mind some Smuggling if I need to early.

I just put up an AAR where I got plenty of the goodies early with that initial fleet of 30, although note that was Excellent Home System Start as it's based on my "fun" settings, so resources are never a problem.