Matrix Games Forums

I wanted to know what starting setting people enjoy the most. Large galaxies, small ones. Advanced tech? Pre-warp?

I enjoy the pre-warp, but I find that my prioritization of research puts me way ahead of the other species by midgame and it's easy to develop an insurmountable technical advantage.

However, the AI doesn't do well with later tech starts as it doesn't have the resource development to balance the tech needs and handles the resource deficient very poorly.

What are everyone else's thoughts?

Ben

I usually use 2000 stars start, at Prewarp, single colony, near the center of a spiral galaxy. I dont mess with colony settings besides putting independent prevalence at very rare.

I place 15 AI empires at tech 2 with 1 colony

And then use the custom settings to place 10 more AI empires.

5 are given 3 colonies and tech 4, 3 are placed at random distance and 2 nearby

3 are given 5 colonies and tech 6 at random distance.

The other 2 are given max colonies and tech 8 at distant distance, with a superb home star system.

That usually gives me a decent challenge, with enough time to expand early on but getting more difficult as the game proceeds.

It's good to think about the possibilities for AI expansion. My main competitors are going to be the custom AIs, and the other 15 starting ones are basically fodder for their expansion. That way they can get really decent planets early on through conquest. I avoid placing too many independents, because most of the time the AI will try to conquer them right away (instead of colonizing them through diplomatic means), which ends up weakening their economy as the planets are still underdeveloped and the AI focuses too much on building up ground forces to keep them occupied.

Once I meet an AI, I will usually go in the editor to touch up their colonies a bit to give them an extra edge.

I've also experimented with modding the Orbs.xml file to increase the prevalence of basic resources used for building and fuel. This seems to not fix the problem of the player overshooting the AI. But at least the AI becomes better at expanding and building up a stronger navy.

This sounds good, I just go with smaller galaxies because mostly manual play becomes impossible when large 2k galaxies grow up into big galactic pizzas.

One thing of note is the colony influence range and the colonization range. I like to put these pretty low to avoid border gore and keep the occupied territory compact.

Regarding colonizable worlds, average setting seems to be where it's best balanced. The AI really struggles with less habitablility giving the player too much of advantage through tactical research and other strategies. With more habitability there is often too much and too fast expansion.

Has anybody played with scarce resources? It might be micromanagement hell. On the other hand what is the point, if you always have enough of everything?