Matrix Games Forums

Don't worry the ai is so simple easy that even if they are near you can take them.

It does take awhile to get outside of your area if you don't have hyper jump drives yet. It seems like an eternity and therefore I don't play many games with it. I start everyone out post hyper drive era so everyone is on an equal start exploring and colonizing.

It's important to get colonization as early as you can. Forgetting everything else but maybe some weapon advances. Nothing that takes a long time though.

Usually I get out there pretty fast with 10 to 20 explorers and about 4 to 8 construction ships. The more you find and the more you mine the bigger you will grow.

Of course the pirates will always give you a hard time but if they want too much just don't pay them most of the time they are just bluffing. Every once in awhile they will send a big ship to destroy your mines and colonies. Just mount a counter offensive and blow it to bits. Nothing really ever happens. You might lose a mine or two but after you kill it it's usually over between you and the pirates for awhile.

If you can make friends fast and go for the mineral rights vs trade in the early game. The ai never seems to make a good trade partner anyways but being an ally and letting you mine and get gas from them is a good way to go. It's what I do and find the game too easy still.

Thanks for the info.

So, the blue and white circle that indicates fuel goes away. I guess it needs to recharge or something?

ORIGINAL: SteveG700

Thanks for the info.

So, the blue and white circle that indicates fuel goes away. I guess it needs to recharge or something?

Fuel (and all other resources) are actual units in this game.

If you look in station/base storage you see a number of amount (amt). This is the number of that resource in store. In addition there is a number for reserved (rsvd?). This is resources reserved for building, colony use, reserved for an incoming freighter, or for refueling of incoming ships with a current refuel mission.

Colonies and spaceports wants a certain amount of fuel, so they will get freighters to bring them fuel if they are missing. So the mine has some fuel, the colony gets hold of a freighter to bring it 2000 fuel from the mine, 2000 gets reserved on the mine until the freighter has picked it up.

If there is enough unreserved fuel, the fuel circle will be there. If all fuel present is reserved it will be gone. Mines generate resources each tick, so a caslon mine will of course get a refill all the time at a rate decided by some tech and most importantly the caslon percentage of the planet/cloud.

If you have a proper fuel shortage, free fuel is likely to be reserved as soon as it is generated, so no refuel circles for you...

You can see storage in the ship or colony list, the quick way to access it with the ship/base/colony selected is to double click the selection panel.

Building your own mining stations is key. Build bottomless pits of storage facilities on them and plenty of docking bays. The more ships that can land and the more resources you can gather the better the whole game. I've yet to see a popup that says I've run out of resources on a planet or moon I'm mining. If it's not in the game it should be and there should be limits on resources on certain planets. I've yet to see one.

ORIGINAL: aaatoysandmore
It's what I do and find the game too easy still.

Play with the AI Improvement Mod on Extreme. Extreme difficulty is similar to Serious difficulty on Endless Legend so it has nowhere near as high AI bonuses on max difficulty as some other 4X games.

start a custom game but make sure you start in starting technology era not pre warp
this is why you started without anything

There is no pre determined starts for custom starts they are going to be the way you setup them
as for default game well nobody ever actually tried to even press that button so we don t know what exactly is the problem there



here is what i recommend for first game
start custom game
level 1 technology
few pirates
few space monsters
normal research
spiral or elliptical galaxy
700 stars
normal difficulty
1.5 colonization enforcement range its the second window you get
normal amount of independent colonies
random 11 empires
no giant kaltors
maybe turn off return of shakturi events
and random or human race for first game