(v2.5) Tips for new Players (and old ones)

[captainwolfer (OP)]

I didn't see an up to date thread for tips, so I figured I would make a thread.

My tips are:
1. Dedicate a civilian shipyard to building fuel harvester stations. This massively reduces how much you need to worry about fuel consumption.
- I usually go for a 100,000 ton design that has about 30 sorium harvesters, 5 ultra large tanks, and a refueling system. A single slipway can build like 1.25 per year, and I pair them with a single refueling hub design that is built via construction factories, since the refueling hub costs 2,400 to build.
- Make sure to set the refueling hub station to have a higher refueling priority than the harvester station, and to set all the harvesters to "refuel own fleet tankers". This way, the harvesters will automatically transfer their fuel to the refueling hub.
2. Equip every survey ship with sensor buoy deployment equipment. Every time you order a ship to go to an unexplored jump point, have the ship "launch Ready Ordnance" at the point first. Once you go through the point, launch a 2nd buoy on the other side.
- I use a size 10 sensor buoy (check the no engine box, remove all the fuel and warhead, put the biggest active sensor you can plus a token amount of EM and TH passive sensors). A 30% size 10 launcher is only 150 tons, plus around a 500 ton magazine and the smallest missile fire control possible (5 tons).
- This is the easiest way to keep track of neutral ships moving through your territory, and what systems they are in. And if the sensor buoys are destroyed, you know that the race is hostile towards you now. You can even place the buoys in neutral NPR systems, allowing you to keep tabs on what ships the non-hostile NPR has (although it does spam you with contact change notifications).
- Just make sure you set up the ship combat settings for your survey ships. It doesn't warn you if it fails to deploy a buoy because you haven't set the launcher to be loaded with buoys.
- If a contact shows up in a surveyed system, but you didn't see it at the jump points, that usually means there is a dormant jump point in the system (Or its one of the spoiler races).
3. If you are fighting an NPR, it can be worth it to equip some of your designs with an emergency cryogenic transport module.
- Its only 50 tons, and any lifeboats you pick up will have the extra crew be placed into cryostasis, reducing the strain on the ship's life support. Capturing prisoners is a good way to gain intelligence, or to deny it to an NPR by rescuing your own lifeboats.
4. The Combat Information Center works for both missiles and beams, including point defense.
- For example, against enemy AMMs, my AMMs from my destroyers had a hit chance of 7%. But my battleship, which had a tactical bonus of 35% thanks to its captain and tactical officer, had a hit chance of 10%.
5. You can design sensor probes to scout suspected enemy locations without needing to risk a ship. Build a missile with no warhead, sensors, and long range.
- You can then fire the missile at waypoints via the ship combat screen (you assign the waypoint like how you would assign a target to a missile fire control, except there is no max range aside from how far the missile can travel)
- Generally you want the sensors on the missile to have greater than ~3 million km range, as that will usually outrange enemy AMMs

[Ulzgoroth]

2.2.5 isn't a real version, is it?

[captainwolfer (OP)]

2.2.5 isn't a real version, is it?

You saw nothing 

[Pedroig]

re: 1:  Why not make them stations and then just have a couple of jump capable tugs to take them where ya want them?  Factories produce them faster than shipyards and they only need to move every decade or so depending on quantity.

[nuclearslurpee]

re: 1:  Why not make them stations and then just have a couple of jump capable tugs to take them where ya want them?  Factories produce them faster than shipyards and they only need to move every decade or so depending on quantity.

This is a valid approach, however building stations with factories is not superior to building them with shipyards. The reason is that if you build with factories, there is an opportunity cost as those factories could be doing something else, while a shipyard once you have built it is only good for building ships and self-expansion (which are mutually independent actions and do not conflict except for if your mineral stocks run low). Of course, on the flip side a shipyard could also be doing something else, that is, building a different class of ship. It depends which is more important at that time, building other ship classes or using your factories for something else.

I usually prefer to build my fuel harvesters out of shipyards. In a TN start it is no problem to have a shipyard for every important class anyways, and for a conventional start your first harvesters will probably have engines and require a yard anyways until you get the tractor beam technology, so you can easily have the shipyard by the time you need it.

[M_Gargantua]

Yeah my take on #1: Make everything you can into a space station and tow it into place. Asteroid mining, Terraforming, Sorium Harvesting, Repair Stations, and Ark Modules for R&D on inhospitable Ancient Construct planets, et al.

Making a commercial shipyard big enough to support the required station sizes is a large resource sink, can only produce one type of station at a time, and suffers additional retooling costs. A station to support one research facility is already over 2.5M tons, and thus a shipyard to build it would be almost 30x the cost of the station itself.

[nuclearslurpee]

Yeah my take on #1: Make everything you can into a space station and tow it into place. Asteroid mining, Terraforming, Sorium Harvesting, Repair Stations, and Ark Modules for R&D on inhospitable Ancient Construct planets, et al.

Making a commercial shipyard big enough to support the required station sizes is a large resource sink, can only produce one type of station at a time, and suffers additional retooling costs. A station to support one research facility is already over 2.5M tons, and thus a shipyard to build it would be almost 30x the cost of the station itself.

Yeah, Ark Modules I would usually recommend to build from surface industry, since they are impractically large for a shipyard and extremely cheap for their tonnage anyways. Other station types are fine in the 100k to 250k tonnage range which is much more reasonable for a shipyard, especially since your normal commercial ships can easily approach the same sizes anyways.

[captainwolfer (OP)]

re: 1:  Why not make them stations and then just have a couple of jump capable tugs to take them where ya want them?  Factories produce them faster than shipyards and they only need to move every decade or so depending on quantity.

I do build them as stations, but I generally start with about 1.5 billion population, and that usually gives me more commercial shipyards than I need at the start. And using a shipyard means that the factories can be used for building other items.

I don't recommend using shipyards for most other space stations. Fuel harvester stations are the one that you basically always need more of and as long as you don't include a refueling hub the stations don't have to be excessively large.