Matrix Games Forums

I'm new to the game, and started with my empire at max tech level because I wanted an easy run through.

I am having trouble building ships because it says I am missing resources.

I'm guessing because my ship designs are using the high level technology, which require a lot of special resources.

Is there an easy way to automatically create designs that I can build with the resources I have?

It seems like a lot of work to go through and manually redesign every ship type.

Start with the 'default game settings', the TL+ starts may not be your best choice as a new player. Hight tech means higher costs ... you have to tinker with the new game settings to find the right balance of settings.

I agree with arvcran2. As a new player, it's probably best to start at "Starting" for expansion, and, for tech level, at either "PreWarp" or Level 0. This will introduce you slowly to different aspects of the game, making it easier (not necessarily easy though) to understand what's going on and how certain game mechanics work.

use game difficulty easy + starting at prewarp or 0 (or possibly 1).

limit your opponents so you have lots of time to play & experiment and investigate to figure out what the game's about and what the mechanics are.

Unlike a lot of games -- this game is closer to a sim, not an extravagant war-game like a Stellaris -- and most of what you must learn is how to balance your economy & expansion and how to set policies to serve your play style & how to manage the automation so it isn't working against your goals but is instead working with you to accomplish your goals.

None of that is trivial -- and all of it takes place w/o any "enemy" to worry about.

Once you've got a decent flow going - then you can bump into enemy civs and learn all about how to structure your fleets - how to balance automation of fleet management with your own play style so again, all of that serves your goals, and you're not fighting the sim.

Leave the tech tree visible if you wish to be able to see what lies ahead & evaluate it - but don't try to give it to yourself - as that just creates precisely the problem you've noted: your econ cannot possibly handle T3+ tech for at least 30m to 90m of play, as you just won't have explored & setup mining to exploit enough of the galaxy to support any of them.

This is really a problem with the AI Ship designer. It does not consider lack of resource sources when designing ships. It just shoves on the best components. Which is funny because the game warns humans players with a "defect" when you lack the resource to construct the ship.

Ran into this when I acquired Kaldos Drives without a source of Hexo. The AI designed every single ship with the drive which completely prevented any ship building at all.

There needs to be two things added to the AI Ship Designer.

1) A filter to prevent the AI from using specific ship components.

2) The AI needs to consider resource sources when designing ships. This isn't just a human player problem, AI empires also get completely stalled when the AI designs ships it doesn't have the resources to build. Until traders get around to getting you the resources. Which can take a few decades from the beginning of the game to happen.

KaiserTom wrote: Sat Dec 10, 2022 9:16 pm This is really a problem with the AI Ship designer. It does not consider lack of resource sources when designing ships. It just shoves on the best components. Which is funny because the game warns humans players with a "defect" when you lack the resource to construct the ship.

Ran into this when I acquired Kaldos Drives without a source of Hexo. The AI designed every single ship with the drive which completely prevented any ship building at all.

There needs to be two things added to the AI Ship Designer.

1) A filter to prevent the AI from using specific ship components.

2) The AI needs to consider resource sources when designing ships. This isn't just a human player problem, AI empires also get completely stalled when the AI designs ships it doesn't have the resources to build. Until traders get around to getting you the resources. Which can take a few decades from the beginning of the game to happen.

Yeah, it seems like an oversight.

Especially obvious when starting the game at a higher tech level.

Maybe the AI can be improved to handle this better.

Seems like the groundwork is somewhat there given the warning in the ship designer.