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I'm sure this isn't the first time a newbie has entered the forum and shared his experience, and I'm sure at this point the excitement of reading about it has worn off, but I feel like sharing, and you guys would seem to be the most suitable audience to share with.

So, my experience? It starts out well enough, in that at least the game loads. That's always a good start, isn't it? But wait, is that 3mm tall line supposed to be tooltip text? So yeah, count me in as number 142,741 who had a font readability problem.

In my case, it turned out to be a mixture of font choices (color, shape, background color, size) and pixel scaling. I'm playing on a 22" 16:9 monitor and my desktop resolution is 1680x1050, since the monitor's native 1920x1080 makes everything a bit too tiny. 1680x1050 is a 16:10 ratio, however, so to fit the entire screen, the picture ends up getting stretched slightly out of it's usual aspect, and it turns out that the gnarly fonts in DW doesn't like to be stretched at all.

So it took me a bit over a day to experiment back and forth with different options and eventually use 12noon's resolution change thing to make the game run in 1365x768, which results in very little stretching as the picture is scaled to fit on my monitor, while also keeping the text size itself quite high. Add a touch of brightness and gamma increase from the Nvidia control panel and suddenly everything's actually more or less eye friendly and I can play without needing a nap every ten minutes. And that res change tool doesn't even nuke my desktop icon placement.

Moving on to the game, everything was quite a lot nicer now that I could read the text. A tutorial? That sounds sensible. I've read through the hundred page manual but still, why not? Unfortunately, it turns out the tutorial mostly repeats what's in the manual. It's really just a pop-up thing with some 30 instructions that I couldn't remember ten minutes after having clicked through all of them. And so, despite playing in a tutorial game, I found myself mostly on my own, in a massive universe, trying to survive.

On the positive side, this really isn't my first 4X game so I did have some ideas. Unfortunately, so did the game. The normal thing in a 4X is to secure your resources, expand, and do research. Well, in my tutorial game I started out with very little money, two colonies, one space port, and practically no supplies of anything. I thought I was being smart in loading up on colony ships right away but it turns out that I merely managed to stall the production because of a lack of resources.

So, lesson learned: Next game, I'll look in the design screen, edit my colony ship design, click on the summary button, and write down what materials my colony ship needs. I'll probably do the same with constructors and explorers. Then I'll go through expansion planner and queue up mines for those resources. Well, I'll do that next game. This game I'm lagging way behind because I spent a year or so getting my production sorted out.

Anyway, slowly but surely I think that I'm getting things on track. I manage to get one colony ship off and then another. Big progress. Of course, at this point I've run into another 7 factions and a matching number of pirate groups. Okay, not the biggest problem. The AI factions aren't *that* aggressive just yet and the pirates are mostly wimps. Granted, the other factions are way more powerful than I am and they're ahead in terms of colonies but as long as they don't care to squish me just yet, I'm sure I'll catch up.

And then it happens. Legendary pirates. Bleh! Turns out that a long forgotten pirate faction lives in the sector right next to where most of my stuff is located. They've got themselves a nifty little base with 240 firepower and their total firepower, according to the diplo screen, is 4000 and rapidly rising. I can build size 320 ships and with a bit of supply luck I might be able to use shattering lazers, but for now I'm relying on regular destroyers. Things that have 320 shield, 100 armor, and 42 firepower.

That's not what made me take a break and white this story, though. But these damn psycho-pirates have started taking offense to me having mines scattered about. "Mining station under attack" tends to be only clue I get before a whole bunch of pirates are blasting away at my poor stations and it seems like the firepower of those raid groups is increasing. First it was a mix of escorts and frigates, next time it included a destroyer complement, and the last attack included capital ships. What the hell can my pitiful destroyers do against raging capital ships?

Oh well. At least I know where their base is. If I can somehow manage to take that out then hopefully the rest will stop being such a damn pest. It's worth a try, I think, and I can't imagine that my odds will be worse than if I tried to duke it out with those raid fleets. If anyone's interested, my entire "massive navy" consists of three fleets of 12-15 destroyers each and a wing of all the tinies I started with that I use to crush regular pirates. I'm not sure if 12-15 is a good fleet size but I guess I'll find out.

Well Spidey let me start with a welcome.

With respect to the tutorials, I fully agree they are lacking. What you will find more useful is to go through the various After Action Reports in this forum which includes some videos and stories. There are also plenty of useful posts around which are well worth Mining.

With pirates, there are a number of threads around discussing it. Do a search for "Pirates" at the bottom of the main forum screen and you'll quickly find some good ideas. But a word of warning there will be a lot more Pirates bases around. Early game your explorers will help find them, but Long Range Scanners (as a minimum on Spaceports and Explorers) are worth their weight in gold. I also use fleets of 12-14 ships and go with protection agreements (promptly cancelled after the Pirates leave) until my fleets are strong enough to go on the offensive. With Mining Stations, try to keep them close to home in the early game. I tend to focus on building in a couple of systems so defence is not spread too thin. Ensure you have defense ships on hand. Upgrade both the ships and bases over time.

And most importantly, the reward is worth the effort ...

A rewarding and rambuctious read.

Thank you guys. Icemania, I definitely agree, both on the scanners and the tutorial. It covered the basics but I picked up a lot more from actually reading up on things in here. But it sure does take a lot of reading to figure out what exactly is going on, and it really doesn't require effort much to make a royal mess out of your supply lines.

I suppose I might as well jump straight into a second episode of rookie ramblings at this point. I sent my pitiful basic destroyers after the base and they got hammered really quickly whenever they were in laser range. At missile distance, the base did practically nothing but unfortunately there were only two missile pods on each ship. New plan: Retrofit to a faster missile-spamming design and avoid getting battered at close range.

So to implement the new plan, I queued up a bunch of new ships and sent the old ones retrofitting. I also loaded up construction queues on all my construction ships to stay ahead of the demand curves on resources, my colonies are busy building more construction ships, the bigger colonies are building colony ships, and I'm trying to get as many starbases up as possible on top of things. You can probably guess what came next. The inrastucture fell apart, resource shortages were everywhere, nothing got done. And neither the manual nor the inferface nor the galactopedia told me anything about what was wrong. Fortunately, this forum did. Lesson learned: Avoid queues, take your time, and check your inventory levels before major shipyard activities.

So I stopped everything but the destroyer retrofitting and the colony ship building, and then the legendary pirates were kind enough to junk a few shipyards that I apparently didn't want anyway. Slowly the glaring alarms died out and the civilians got their act together. Wheels began spinning, things began getting done, and suddenly I could actually build again.

I then finally managed to get something done about the antiquities that used to be my navy. I've taken the solar panels off my ships to reduce Chromium bottlenecks and save space, all my warships are pure missile and point defense for offense, and I'm mostly relying on shields with armor really only present to soak stray shots from stuff that bypasses shields. And a mere 15 of the second generation destroyers took on the legendary pirate base like it was nothing. Unfortunately they'd spread by then, but at least they're now down a base.

I also managed to run into legendary pirates' group of heavies and while it wasn't exactly pretty, the casualties were at least entirely one-sided. Apparently the AI doesn't care to focus fire while I was throwing everything after the nearest capital ship, which then in turn melted away pretty fast. The pirates ran soon after, but at least I now know that I can take them on without getting blown apart, despite having no capital ships of my own just yet.

I was also bossing some brand new long range scanning explorers about, and it turns out that there's a bunch of abandoned ships right next to my territory. Unfortunately it's smack in the middle of a landgrab the Mortalen just made while I was busy trying to figure out my anti-piracy response. Then again, their landgrab looks rather carelessly overextended so I'm thinking that a bunch of landing vessels with an even bigger bunch of troops onboard might be an excellent way to solve these kinds of territorial disputes.

As it happens, I'm actually pretty well boxed in, so some form of major conflict has to happen eventually. So far I've encountered no less than 12 different regular factions and seemingly a matching number of pirate factions, and since I'm located right in the center, the supply of empty sectors and colonizable is getting a bit low. The good thing is that my persistent colony ship building has lead to me having the second most colonies, and I won't need to grab that many from the previously mentioned lizards to make the top spot. Their ground units are supposedly pretty strong but I'm hoping it's nothing that pure numbers won't cure.

At this point in time, right here and now, I actually feel fairly confident in my ability to avoid getting crushed like a bug. My economy is doing well enough, my space navy is looking fairly competitive, my infrastructure is slowly but gradually improving, and while pirates are buzzing about like sugar-rushing kids in a candy store, they're not really doing any harm at a faction-wide level. Still, this game strikes me as one that has a certain potential for being extremely mean at times, so I suppose this feeling could be quite fleeting. We'll see, I guess.

By the way, I have to say that despite this being without a doubt the slowest real time game I've ever played, with me spending loads more time paused than unpaused, it manages to be quite fun all the same. It's too bad the learning curve makes one think back on university classes with fondness and the interface is more than a bit clunky. The good thing is that it probably wouldn't be too hard to make a "logistics manager" version that could be passed off as an educational aid around the various business schools. The manic worker bee civilians in this game are a fabulous abstraction of how agents tend to operate out in the real world, after all.

Edit: And as a PS, I'm terribly sorry about constantly writing these rather long posts. It's a bit of a bad habit on my part, I suppose, combined with me having all this fuzzy energy to talk about this game and absolutely nobody in the offline world with whom it would be the least bit meaningful to share it.

Sounds like it is almost time to ramp up the difficulty! [8D]

Yeah, I think I'll take things a nudge upwards next game, but for now I still need to actually win this one. Though I'm quite honestly feeling somewhat stupid for being confident yesterday, because my harddrive went on to die on me just a few hours later. It's not a complete burn since I can still complete a boot sequence but there are definitely very dead sectors on the harddrive and Windows crashes every single time it tries to read them. I'm hoping that I can copy stuff over once I've reinstalled on a new HDD, but I guess we'll see.

Ironically, your posts are far more interesting and engaging than the stories in the ARR section.

No need to apologise for a "long" post that is sharp, succinct and is written well.

I agree, don't mind your rambling at all. I am a relative newbie myself. I found watching lets plays very useful, if somewhat dry.

I manage to micromanage most things without looking at whats needed to build what by simply being conservative with building, using the colony/resource planner screen to assign construction ships (and having a reasonable sized construction fleet) and watching the building stalled messages. About the only inventory level I every really check is caslon. Works for me!

NB: I refer to the unfulfilled (not sure of name?) column a lot in the planner screen. I read that this is fairly broken? is this the case? it does seem to help.

The 'Unfulfilled Demand' column gives you an idea of what your empire needs, but the actual number displayed can be wonky. In one game the unfulfilled demand for one resource was insanely high, but the stock never seemed to really change. What I took from this is that certain spaceports were waiting for enough resources in order to fulfill private ship orders, so while I may have had good stock of that resource on one colony, the trade route to the other colony simply couldn't keep up with the demand, so the number of unfulfilled demand on the empire planner steadily went up.

So my harddrive sort of died on me, leaving me in a hairy spot for a while. Turns out it's not entirely dead, it just craps itself whenever it reads certain sectors and it just so happens that Windows was installed on some of those sectors. Oh well.

Fortunately I managed to salvage most of what was on it, including my tutorial game, which means I've been pressing on over the last few days. Anyway, to make the story as unrambly as possible, I spent a few minutes putting together a picture, since they're worth probably several thousand of my words.



I'm the Teekans in the middle. Last time I posted, the Mortalen held the red-hued systems that are now pleasantly blue on the map. The Legendary pirates were around as well, and they were quite keen on blowing my attempts to build starports to kingdom come. The Haarkons, presumably related to the Harkonens of Dune-fame in mind if not in body, didn't like me too much then and still don't. The map makes it look like I've got a rather dense cluster of systems but last time I really didn't have much expansion that far south, and the top right corner of D6 contains some fairly poor systems as well, so I was feeling a bit vulnerable and claustrophobic.

So that's where I was, more or less. To get from then to now, I obviously needed to push back some reptile redcloaks only the buggers didn't want to declare a war on me. They hated my guts and wasn't too fond of them, but they didn't care to agree on an honorable bout of fisticuffs to settle the dispute, which made me impatiently give them an ultimatum, either give me these here bases or face a war!! Well, truth be told I just wanted to saber-rattle a bit but apparently this constitutes an actual declaration of war if they say no. Sort of annoying when one of the Teekan victory conditions is to declare the fewest wars in the galaxy, but hopefully the factions less warlike than me (66% at this time, apparently) will get wiped out in time.

Unfortunately, at the time I still had not fully sorted out those damn legendary pirates and the last thing I cared for was to send off my fleets and then have a bunch of marauder heavies go on a rampage in my barely defended core systems. So despite having started the war weariness timer, I decided to push a fleet up to kill off a third pirate base, which turned out to be the last one they had. My fleet took it out well enough, but of course those scurvy scummers took that as a cue to race into my core systems and start blasting away at everything. While my fleet was away, killing their base. Yeah.

Rather amusingly, the very thing I did to avoid something unpleasant actually triggered that unpleasant thing I was trying to avoid. Lesson learned: Safety first. Never assume that enemies with warp drives will respect your borders and stay out of undefended core worlds.

I did manage to reign in all their bigger ships but not until after they'd taken out my second large space port in a system right next to my capital. So much for having expanded my retrofitting capacity. And the war weariness is of course slowly adding up while I'm spending the time at war fighting a group (and rebuilding and repairing) that I'm not technically at war against anyway. Sort of AI-level brilliant planning, coordination, and general exeuction on my behalf, I suppose.

It wasn't all bad, though. I also managed to build a pair of troop transporters and recruit some troops. Unfortunately, I may have gotten a bit overboard in my troop recruitment because all of a sudden, my cashflow is going down faster than a female protagonist in a James Bond movie. Well, I know of that link between troops and cashflow problems now but back then I thought it was the war weariness. Oops.

The situation deserves a bit more description, if only for nostalgic laughs and whatnot, so here goes. I'm seeing increased war weariness, I've been banged up a bit by the pirates, and what was left with no damage by them got banged up a bit in early skirmishes against the Mortalen. Suddenly I'm hovering at 0 cashflow and I'm thinking "What the heck is this? Dammit, I'm nowhere near done yet. Gotta rush, gotta rush!!"

So I get some troops onto the transporters, get them going towards the invasion area to the left, kick massive amounts of reptile butt, and then shift my attention towards the upper part of the area on the right, which is about a quadrant and a half away. And while I'm focusing everything on taking over those two systems (involving three planet invasions in total), I'm suddenly getting a message about a general getting killed back at one of the invaded areas.

Apparently the general and a few friends had stayed behind on the planet as my troop transports moved on for greener pastures and other invasions, with the flock of a secondary fleet circling above for protection, and apparently the flock were about as useful as sun lotion in a snowstorm in terms of preventing a Mortalen troop transport from landing a force on the planet. We're talking about one freaking transport and the damn snot-for-brains failed to take it out. *sigh*

So I'm rushing another pair of troop transports along with more combat ships, rushing troops to put on them, feeling decidedly stressed by being down to -20k cashfl, wait, what? MINUS TWENTY??! HOW CAN IT BE DOWN TO MINUS TWENTY??! And while I was rushing and doing anything but thinking straight and being calm and rational, the cashflow dropped lower and lower.

Despite my panic, the war was actually going quite well. The Mortalen are supposedly fierce but they weren't putting up much of a fight, at least not once I got reorganized from the pirate problems. It really came down to their fleets and strike forces being too scattered and way too small. I was using size 320 ships at that time, and I had them in groups of 15-20. The Mortalen managed to put together a few cruisers of a comparable size and beyond that destroyers and frigates, but never in any serious kind of numbers. The attrition did end up wearing out a few ships but my casualties weren't anything too severe.

The real problem was ultimately the negative cashflow. As it turns out, it really didn't have anything to do with the war dragging on per se, but rather with me building a massive amount of ships and a truly ridiculous number of troops. I found this out after my cashflow hit 60k red, at which point I had finally managed to take over the red-hued areas in the picture above, and at which point the Mortalen had very little left to fight with. If I'd known better, I'd probably have killed them off, but I didn't. So I asked for peace and they laughed at me. I had to trade them some old crappy tech for peace in order to make it happen. Wonky diplomacy much?

And then came the peace and... Nope, still freaking sixty thousand negative cashflow. Then I finally pulled my head out of my butt, looked at the empire summary screen, noticed that my troops had about as much upkeep as my entire fleet, and managed to figure out that I probably could do something about that. Turns out that having hordes of ground forces everywhere didn't do much good at all and it costs a fortune as well.

Lesson learned: Be careful with your troop recruitment and don't feel bad about disbanding troops if you're not going to use them in the near future.

Anyway, the end of the war also marks the end of all the exciting military action, more or less. There were a few regular pirates trying to spice things up but they're so puny at this stage of the game. Numerous, yes, suicidally determined, no doubt, but they're so puny that it's almost impossible to take them seriously. Why are they asking me to pay protection money instead of asking me for permission to pay me to not blow them up?

Aside from pirate jokers, the action has been quite limited. The Mortalen were pushed back and for a period of time, they really loved me despite hating me since we were doing well over 100k trade. I suppose the hilarious amount of trade could have something to do with me taking out a gratifying number of their civilian ships as they tried in vain to pull off resources from a planet that once had a star port. You'd think civilians could figure out that anything able to kill star ports is likely also able to kill tiny civilian vessels, but maybe that's just a Darwinian logic that escapes Mortalen and AIs alike.

On the other sides of my empire, the Zenox were being quite cool about everything, which is how they've acted all game. The Haarkons were giving me on and off trade sanctions. The Shandar are sort of happy on their side of a rather barren quadrant-wide void and the same is true with the Ikkuro. Consequently I've been using the time since the end of the war on organizing and building up. Getting mines on everything. Colonizing. Colonizing even more. Salvaging derelicts. And speaking of those, it really is quite a nice tech boost they provide, isn't it? Perhaps a tiny bit overpowered?

My brief exposure to diplomacy also lead to me noticing the numbers written next to tech names in the trade negotiation screen. Those very large numbers. Almost phone-number like numbers. I wonder if the AI would be silly enough to pay even half that number for my incredibly useless "improved fission"?

Lesson learned: OH MY GAWD! Holy freaking mother of cashcows, what the heck? What is wrong with these clowns?

Well, to skip all the useless expressions of surprise, it turns out that I did have a few techs that some of the AI didn't. Not all of them cared to trade, of course, but I'd managed to make contact with another rodent race, the Ugnari, and we got along really great.

"Cheers buddy. What you wanna do to tonight?"
"The same thing I do every night, Pinko. Try to take over the galaxy! By the way, I've got this old railgun tech that isn't good for anything, wouldn't you like to give me all your money, your galaxy map, and those couple of nice techs in a trade?"

And the best part? They've got the color to go along with it. So until their neighburs squish them, it's literally going to be Pinky and the brain, brain, brain, brain...

That settled, I also took my time to browse what other factions had to offer but none of them cared to trade tech. Oh well. Almost all of them were overjoyed to take improved fission off my hands, though most of them had very little money on hand. Of course, after a bit of trading I had half a mil on hand, so if they didn't have money then I could gift them 200k and then the grateful dunces were happy to trade me back my money for a useless tech. I'm sure this could be exploited even further, but come on?

With my nice bit of cash, I crashed the research on ocean planets that I'd had going for what seemed like ages. It came through. I colonized some more. Colonizing ocean planets made it possible for me to push back Haarkonish borders a bit, since they can't do that yet. I'm not sure that made them like me more, though. I've got by far the most colonies at this point but my population was tiny and my strategic value was in the bottom. So I read up on stuff and I looked through my settings and it turns out that the AI rather stupidly tries to raise money by taxing percentages of really tiny colony revenues. Contrasted with zero tax growth rates, this makes less than no sense whatsoever.

Lesson learned: Kill your AI tax assistant. Kill him with fire. Nuke him from orbit. Put him on a collision course with a supernova. Or you could just fire him, but never use AI tax rates. It's very simple to manage anyway. Just go for zero tax until colony population hits max. The homeworld on high taxes should be able to fund you well enough, perhaps with the aid of some of your oldest colonies, while all the other colonies build a taxpayer base that is actually worth the effort of taxing.

I've put all but six of my ~35 colonies at zero tax and the revenue loss? Maybe 10k or so. Growth bonus at about 30 colonies or a +10k cashflow bonus? It really isn't a hard choice, at least not for me. I suspect the AI factions do things differently, putting them at an even larger disadvantage. If this turns out to be too much of an AI hindrance then hopefully setting ColonyTaxRateMediumColony to 0 in the race policy files will improve things slightly. It's too bad that the policy files don't include parameters for specifying what high or low tax levels are and what constitutes a large and a medium colony.