Help with transition from Pre-warp to middle game?

[towerbooks3192]

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Played as the Ikkuros and I am that green coloured empire on the map. Been in a war with Yor and managed to defeat them and beating my first empire. Automation in options is all off and now I started to automate explorers and constructors.

Any advice on which automations to turn on as I never really progressed this far in this game. Also need help with consolidating my forces, and sorting out my empire expenditure so that I will have a huge income? The western part of the newly conquered Yor territories (some were conquered in the first war and the rest was conquered on the last war) and it does not have any Spaceports and I am a bit reluctant to build something as it may crash the economy.

My current goals are to transition from full manual to partial automation, consolidate my forces (i.e merge fleets, build defense fleets, etc.), consolidate my economy, and then I will eliminate pirates along my empire borders and try to absorb in to my ever growing empire the one colony empires close to me.

[Kantay]

Don't forget there is also a third option for quite a few parts of the game, and that is "suggest", where the game will ask if you want to do something.
That's actually what you should do, put "suggest" on everything that you can, and if you see the AI is suggesting good things, switch it to automated, or if you think AI is stupid in that aspect of the game, turn on manual, or keep suggest (so you don't forget about it). I would certainly not automate anything where money is involved, because as a player you can do MUCH better job at it than the AI can.

But thinkgs like exploring, character placement, spying.. that can easily be automated.

[towerbooks3192]

I want to use that option and I have used that but the thing is that I find it annoying at times especially when I am pestered by the AI to build a defensive base when there is no need to do it. I kind of want to do all military operations and research,design, and building. I am worried about the colony policy as the AI might enslave some of the races if I automate colony policy.

[Spacecadet]

If you have any Colonies in the new Territory with Populations over 1B, I'd build at least a Small Spaceport on the highest Population Colony.

You're going to need some advance construction and other amenities as your Empire grows.

[towerbooks3192]

ORIGINAL: Spacecadet

If you have any Colonies in the new Territory with Populations over 1B, I'd build at least a Small Spaceport on the highest Population Colony.

You're going to need some advance construction and other amenities as your Empire grows.

Made lots of progress like annexing an empire or two. Then I felt a bit bored since I disabled shakturi so I place all in full auto, disable pop-up messages then run the game at 4x speed for about 10 minutes. The AI suddenly crashed my economy. I think I should read Bingeling's new AAR on how to do a partial auto game.

[Castinar]

Advisors suggestions are great for reminding you of things that you might otherwise forget. As for the popups, try going into options-->message settings (bottom of options panel as I recall) and you can tune whether to get popups or scrolling notifications. Not sure if those pesky defense base suggestions can be tuned that way, but worth a try (especially if you want to still get suggestions on ship builds).

OTOH, just opening the ship build order menu should also give you an advisor suggestion on what ships to build (first column is ships of a particular class on hand, 2nd column is advisor suggestions for additional builds if I recall correctly)