How to?

[Mr. Losing]

Alright fellow Endless Spacers, i recently got back into playing this game, and have gotten completely caught up in it, i have leart all the basics, and gotten a good feal for the game overall. My question is, a rather large one, how do i get the ultimate empire?, to explain, whenever im playing against an AI even normal or easy, they seem to be so far ahead. they are getting like 20 times the dust im getting per turn. and are expanding to squickly, but still are superior in combat, i just dont get how its possible, cause looking at other guides i can see that im doing "the right things" but they are just SO far ahead of me, any help would be fondly received :)

[Sentient_Toaster]

Does your racial build match the strategy you're trying? Cravers would play very different from Sophon, for instance.

Are you expanding your way into mass unhappiness (every additional system reduces happiness; some techs reduce expansion disapproval), or suffering from overpopulation disapproval? Suffering from colonizing too many low-tier planets early on or with nasty anomalies, for lower happiness?

You're always getting exploitations up ASAP, and keeping maintenance more manageable by not building improvements that you wouldn't benefit much from?

[Zloth]

We've got to have more details. A lot more details. Maybe you could tell us what turn you're on, what your tax rate is, how many planets are unhappy/content/happy, what improvements you put on all your planets, how you decide what planet exploitation to use, and so on? Right now there's nothing for us to go on.

[Mr. Losing]

Alright, first of all thanks a bunch for replying to help me out, really appreciate it :)
Sorry for being vague earlier, i took around 12 screenshots of a random game, fitting the description, in this game it was the Automatons that won (orange) they controlled somewhere around 55% of the galaxy (you cant see it all), also feel like i need to state that i am by no means a great player, just recently started playing again, also i am playing a custom faction, that have the Sower alliignment, will post screenshot aswell.

PS: tried to get the screenshots in this topic, but couldnt figure it out, so for now they are just on my profile, publicly visible, thanks again!

[Mr. Losing]

Hope it's not too much of a hassle by the way :)

[Matthypaspist]

I would say increasing the happiness would be key. Im playing a game where I started off number 1 on everything(on normal) and started expanding and my happiness on my key systems sharply declined and im now 3rd for FIDS 4th for science and Im still top on combat but im getting swarmed and im having trouble building ships because my production systems are unhappy. Basically happiness seems key to whats happening to me and my decline.

[Affinity]

If your goal is to improve, I suggest you spend some time learning how some the mechanics work, and how to use them to your advantage. Here is a quick list of tips off the top of my head:

Like everyone has said, happiness is important. Optimistic is possibly the best trait. the reason is that a happy (light green) system gets +10% FIDS, and a ecstatic (dark green) system gets +20% FIDS. If your empire's average approval on the empire screen is ecstatic, then all systems get an additional +20% FIDS.

Be sure you understand how food works. More food = more population = more FIDS = more everything. But, as populations increase, you need more and more food to keep growing.

Understand dust! Dust income is sometimes hard to balance, and even harder to maximize. Things to consider: Dust is sliced in half if the system is not inside your influence. and is further reduced by low taxes, so that dust upgrade you got might not be giving as much as you thought, since it is cut in half twice.

Science: you just have to play more to get used to which upgrades are good to get and when. Most games, it is ideal to get all the cheap techs (N-way fusion plants espcially, +10 industry will likely double a systems industry) to start populating, and then rushing for casimir effect to get through a wormhole, or magnetic field generators for an incredibly good 40 sci per system (OP as hell, get this upgrade asap)

Exploits: almost always you want the food exploit for the first planet in the system, and be sure to research the better food exploit fairly early in the game (it also comes with the approval upgrade, good deal!)

Combat isn't always easy, if you don't know what you're doing stick with missles until you understand what is happening more.

I would suggest reading the wiki and/or forum on any topic that you don't understand.

[Mr. Losing]

Thanks so much for the replies! really appreciate it, i'll look into it, i was having a hard to figuring out what to actually do with Dust for most of the game, as far as i see, it's only for healing heroes, and getting an economic victory? also, with my affinity i was going for mass productions seeing as how 40% of my productions goes straight to my food supply, should i change my traits? and also, what i was having a very hard time understanding was how the Automatons were doing so well that game, i mean they had more of the galaxy than me, and yet had a Dust income of 13.000 per turn, which is ridiculously high in my view, at the same time, were equal to me in combat, and must have had alot of approval, seeing as how they could keep pumping out near infinite navies.

On a side note, anyone here feel like teaming up and maybe grabbing a game sometime? i'm desperately trying to get my friends to play it, but they are reluctant to the genre :/, so if anyone wants to play, i would love to :)

[Mr. Losing]

Also, it's a small issue, but i always enjopy having strong administrator and wit heroes where i can, but i'm having a hard time figuring out when to switch them around, in terms of, should i keep them on one of my "main planets" where they give massive boosts to overall economy, let alone DUST, or should i move them around to increase the rate new systems grow, and then lose all the bonuses on my other planet? tough choices all around :)

[Matthypaspist]

Usually I find that switching them around works best on new systems because the heros stats will usually benefit the system they were on but the trait for +15 industry and +20/30 food is worth a lot more on new systems. Also I would like to try and do a Multiplayer game. Ive only played single player on normal so far so playing against humans would be fun to try. Send me an invite and I might join

[Sentient_Toaster]

Excess Dust saved up can also be used for finishing builds so you get the improvements or ships next turn (it's the icon to the right of each item in the build queue. Note: you can buy multiple items in the same system in the same turn, so long as you have enough Dust to afford them all), for retrofitting ships to their newest versions (in the Fleet view; cost depends only on the cost of building the newest version from scratch; it does not get cheaper if you only had minor changes...) and certain hero-specific combat cards also cost Dust to use.

The food bonus speeding your pop growth will make it more important to get those techs which reduce unhappiness, since both accumulating much pop in the same system or spreading it around to many systems hurt happiness (as does colonizing less-hospitable types of planets). That said, there's a late-game tech which lets you build an improvement which convert all surplus food into production -- eventually making your affinity bonus a massive production bonus for systems where you don't care about increasing the pop any longer.

[Johari]

Are you the same fellow that made that thread a while ago stating something along the lines of "the UI is so unintuitive the ships are confusing galac-civ should still be alive!"?
If so, then welcome to Endless Space! Glad you got to know it and enjoy it.

I can't help you though since I'm exhausted and probably won't write anything intelligible, but I'll probably revisit soon with some tips.

[Jeruzalem]

ive recently had such a match, where i had a normal ai strenght, but 2/3 ai's were expanding so quickly and were so far ahead of me, i could never get to the same level as they were. after that i did another normal match, and this time ive attacked one AI as quickly as possible, while i expanded alot.

[Jeruzalem]

in the end, the match was won by me, because i owned half of the region, and the other 2 ai's had to share their half. ive built so many ships, they couldnt keep up and lost because of too low tech.

[Zloth]

When you want to post a screenshot, go look at the screenshot and you'll see a link at the top of the window. Just paste that link into your post and it shows up! (I must have spent an hour playing around with image tags before somebody clued me in that you just put the plain old link in and Steam figures it out.)

For example...

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=129826183

[Jeruzalem]

you only do 2000 dust/turn? kinda low for such an empire.