Feedback appreciated on my first defense fleet!

[AlmightyTaz (OP)]

Thanks for your suggestions - I'll definitely try some of those strategies.

To be honest, I'm really enjoying the more epic feel of playing on 0. 20 research rate.  I find myself caring much more about my choices, and every time a tech completes feels like a major accomplishment or milestone.  It's also fun to work around the limitations and find new ways to solve problems. 

I'm putting much more thought into my ship design and logistics because I know it's going to be 20 years before my mining rate or underway replenishment techs complete - so I need that new colony online ASAP, and I need to position a fuel base in a defensible location nearer the frontier. 

I highly recommend you give it a go at some point.  Super satisfying.

[kenlon]

To be honest, I'm really enjoying the more epic feel of playing on 0. 20 research rate.  I find myself caring much more about my choices, and every time a tech completes feels like a major accomplishment or milestone.  It's also fun to work around the limitations and find new ways to solve problems. 

I absolutely agree - I'm doing a 20% research, 8x starting minerals conventional game right now, and each new drive or weapon generation feels revolutionary. I'm actually building generations of ships, with each tier feeling like a order of magnitude increase in power over the last.

I had been worried that I would be able to overpower the tech slowdown by just building more labs, but that hasn't happened, fortunately.

[liveware]

Fighters shouldn't be overlooked as a tool against a superior enemy. Especially when pumped out in large numbers and maintained at a colony they can bring a lot of ordnance to bear in one go and they remain useful when you transition into a "blue water" navy.

+1 vote for early fighters. They are much cheaper to produce individually than large ships and are quite customizable. I find they add significant variety and capabilities to my low tech fleets. Plus, having lots of fighters incentivises the development of carriers, which in turn benefit from escort ships similar to what you've already designed.

Fighters can also help launch missiles from longer range than your larger ships, which can be useful.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Thanks for your suggestions - I'll definitely try some of those strategies.

To be honest, I'm really enjoying the more epic feel of playing on 0. 20 research rate.  I find myself caring much more about my choices, and every time a tech completes feels like a major accomplishment or milestone.  It's also fun to work around the limitations and find new ways to solve problems. 

I'm putting much more thought into my ship design and logistics because I know it's going to be 20 years before my mining rate or underway replenishment techs complete - so I need that new colony online ASAP, and I need to position a fuel base in a defensible location nearer the frontier. 

I highly recommend you give it a go at some point.  Super satisfying.

I also have a recent conventional campaign where I have 20% research, 5% survey and 50% terraforming rate. Even if I started the game with 2 billion people on Earth everything moves along at a snails pace and every decision I make needs to be carefully weighted. As I also usually give humans only a gravity tolerance of 33% (which I think is more realistic) there are no real suitable planets to colonise in Sol other than Venus which really is not an option.

This turn every decision you do into so much more important and every decision for new technology research is so much more important. I also have some rules for how labs are distributed as well as I never allow labs to just switch fields on a whim so every lab build have to be assigned and then stay in that field... so I can't just focus on one field and then switch to another.

There never really will be a perfect opportunity to build the perfect ship or fleet as technology is so slow to tick in that you will have to live with what you got for so long. As you say... every new research becomes something interesting, new and fun to explore... how can you best use this new technology and how will it change your general goals. Every technology I start planning for is a major investment in time and effort, every lab I produce is a choice into which field I will try to further next as it is a long term choice.

Every project that I undertake in this game have to be planned for many years forward as new technology does not come along very often to boost production, mining productivity and the like very often to help with shortcomings. You will have to live with bad fuel efficiency as you expand your border in space far beyond Earth, that means you have to really plan for fuel distribution to support everywhere you plan to expand and send survey operation. Surveying is really slow and often take multiple vessels many years to perform if systems is large, this is another source for burning lots of fuel etc... and on and on it goes... 

I'm just lucky I did not meet any hostile aliens close to earth in this game. 

I'm really thankful for Steve to include these options of slowing down research, surveying etc.. so I can play a truly Epic game of Aurora in the future.