Some questions regarding to the game

[iCarus]

Here is a few questions I encountered as I play through my first game (Against 2 lv5 AIs)
1. How did warp-jamming CMD station work? It does not appear to jam border-harassments/exogalactic strikes against me. Does it only jam cross-planet attacks, waves and reprisal attacks?
2. How do you instantly select your champion? It's a pain to find it in a mess of ships or the sidebar.
3. If you hacked an advanced facility from AI, THEN capture the planet, will AI still destruct the unique building when they have the opportunity?
4. Does operating every planet with automated defense works in harder difficulties? It took me 600 turrets and a martyr to defend a decent wave of AIs without mobile ship help (Either from minor faction or myself), and 600 turrets cost TREMENDOUS amount of energy to operate on every chokepoint.
5. More of a strategic question: Do you prefer to place CMD station beside an unique building to protect them both(Or simply place CMD station away from wormhole), or place CMD station in the way of two wormholes to jam exogalactic strikes and project nearby planets?
6. Is amassing a 3000 fleet for every takeover (mid-late game) worth it? Even though it gives me strong force to take over a planet, gathering/constructing them takes fair amount of time and relocating them to different chokepoints is a clumsy work.
7. Instead of deep-striking with transports, I normally just destroy the facilities of the whole planet in my way and the warp gate. Is it worth the effort (Or even usable) in higher difficulty?
8. With spire civilian leader minor faction in play, will it worth it to just chill for a hour for it to reduce AIP when I am controlling many of them (Currently 7) and the next threshold is close, but to risk another exogalactic strike or gigantic waves against me?

[shiverczar]

A couple of disclaimers:
I'm not an expert by any means, I'm very casual, but I have a decent grasp of the strategies (I think)
I haven't played many games to completion because I usually have basically all minor factions enabled and it gets very... interesting... at times XD - Plus I enjoy the early/mid game more than the late-game.
Take what I say as it's meant - my opinion, some of it may even be terrible advice, not good at all

1) It basically has the AI treat that particular planet as if it is nonhostile. It does not cause threat even though it has no AI Command station, and the AI will not send wave-attacks against it. It's great when you need to capture a planet in the middle of a mess of AI worlds either for stuff on that planet, or as a staging point for further offensives - the AI will (mostly) ignore the planet and you can keep a small task force there to deal with whatever does show up

2) At the beginning of the game select your champion, hold control and hit 0. Then press 0 to select it (it's now control-group zero .. this is unfortunately reset whenever it dies, but you always know where to find it then :P) if there's a better way I don't know of it.

3) Not sure

4) Depends on the way you build your turrets, but usually you're going to use mobile ships to assist in defense - turrets usually aren't able to deal with everything.
One trick I like for VERY IMPORTANT locations is to place three shields at a certain distance away from the wormhole so that they overlap to create a single triangle around the wormhole that's *not* defended, so the enemy ships are all stuck there, and then have a lot of larger-ranged turrets firing upon them - this will stop anything for a little while that's not immune to force fields [even the bigger ships that are immune to tractor beams can't just push their way through a shield]

5) Depends on the situation. If I have captured an advanced factory in enemy space, I'll put a warp jammer next to the factory and shields/defenses around it, with a small ship taskforce there to deal with special forces / whatever wants to ruin my day, and a stand-down warpgate so that if stuff does start happening I can activate the warpgate and my ships will start reinforcing the planet immediately.

6) You should always either have or be constructing a fleet to your maximum capacity. You probably don't want them all in one big blob, but they should always exist somewhere in the galaxy. If you lose a bunch taking a planet, that's fine -- you should only be taking planets when you want them for something, not simply because it's there [if there's 1 metal and no useful structures and the location isn't super important, it's not worth touching].

7) Generally if you're only crossing a few planets, neutering the planet as you go isn't a problem [though you may consider leaving in the warpgate since killing it increases AIP and reduces the AI's options for sending its reinforcements (i personally don't mind if a random useless planet has twenty extra ships for me to kill every now and then -- means they're not adding to a big stockpile on the homeworld or something)]

[shiverczar]

8) *shrug*

There are benefits and drawbacks to both waiting and not waiting. If you wait, the AI will place more reinforcements, potentially buy more structures from the merchant, harass you more, make progress on its exowaves etc. On the other hand, if you bump it up to the next level, the AI will reinforce and send waves with stronger ships, which may be unpleasant.

If you do choose to 'wait', my recommendation would be that you only 'wait' on destroying AIP-increasing structures.

Go to town wiping out guard posts, clearing AI ships that have gathered in planets, and generally making a nuisance of yourself without destroying anything the AI considers *important* enough to warrant an increase in AIP {Everything that increases AIP should be listed when you highlight it with the mouse, so you shouldn't be able to accidentally destroy something that does}

*) Have fun even if it means losing

[iCarus]

Originally posted by shiverczar:

8) *shrug*

There are benefits and drawbacks to both waiting and not waiting. If you wait, the AI will place more reinforcements, potentially buy more structures from the merchant, harass you more, make progress on its exowaves etc. On the other hand, if you bump it up to the next level, the AI will reinforce and send waves with stronger ships, which may be unpleasant.

If you do choose to 'wait', my recommendation would be that you only 'wait' on destroying AIP-increasing structures.

Go to town wiping out guard posts, clearing AI ships that have gathered in planets, and generally making a nuisance of yourself without destroying anything the AI considers *important* enough to warrant an increase in AIP {Everything that increases AIP should be listed when you highlight it with the mouse, so you shouldn't be able to accidentally destroy something that does}

*) Have fun even if it means losing :D:

Thanks for the replies! It should prove helpful to me. So if I place a warp-jammer on a planet, but in between the wormholes, the exogalactic strikes/cross-planet attacks will still damage my CMD center regardless... Right?

Also it seems like I have infinite metal supplies at basically all times only when I'm wasting metal on mercenary ships. The production is always 10k~20k when I'm idle. Is that because my difficulty is too low (5) or it's just they way it is?

[shiverczar]

Originally posted by iCarus:

Thanks for the replies! It should prove helpful to me. So if I place a warp-jammer on a planet, but in between the wormholes, the exogalactic strikes/cross-planet attacks will still damage my CMD center regardless... Right?

Yeah, if it's between the wormholes any ships the AI sends through will attack it automatically on their way through. Even if it's out of the way they still might with Special Ops forces or whatever, and when ships that spawn drones go through the drones will go after it definitely, but if there's a Jammer the planet will not cause the adjacent planets to go on alert (when planets are on alert they get more of the AI's reinforcements sent to them) and they will not send waves to that planet (ordinarily they will send waves to any planet they have a warp-post next to )

Originally posted by iCarus:

Also it seems like I have infinite metal supplies at basically all times only when I'm wasting metal on mercenary ships. The production is always 10k~20k when I'm idle. Is that because my difficulty is too low (5) or it's just they way it is?

If you *ever* max out on metal you're doing something wrong. You should be using your ships as much as you can, and while constantly rebuilding your fleet you may have some times with positive metal and some with negative, if you ever go over about 60% of the maximum stockpile, consider building something very expensive or mercenary ships just so that you don't run the risk of wasting metal due to overflowing.

That said, if you're below 100k or so you should probably not be building mercenaries; if your fleet suffers lots of losses you'll want to be able to replenish them quickly without running out of metal.

You should have the maximum number of ship docks possible at all times, so when you do lose ships they get replaced as fast as possible. If you only have one dock building ships, that's a problem.


Again, I'm not an expert at this game but this is what I have come to understand