Home » Stars! 2.6/7 » The Academy » Tricks of the Trade (long)
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| Re: Tricks of the Trade (long) |
Fri, 07 November 2003 16:58   |
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| Orca |
 | Chief Warrant Officer 1 |
Messages: 148
Registered: June 2003
Location: Orbiting tower at the L5 ... | |
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A few other tips and tricks that can be quite handy:
Don't be afraid to overdrive engines that aren't capable of warp 10 safely if it provides a tactical advantage.
Don't be afraid to overgate if it provides a tactical advantage. (Yes, you CAN gate 20 missile battleships through a 300/500. Or a cruiser through a 100/250.) While it can prove expensive, there are times when it's rather useful. Just be careful never to exceed the limits by 5x.
Lots of little minefields rather than a few large ones. They're harder to sweep - which can provide an extra turn to you unless your opponent chaff sweeps. Highly cloaked galleon-based minelayers (if not SS) can be annoying to sweep, and allow you to more easily lay mines in space. Note that when you do this, you should move immediately after laying any mines to prevent your ships from being shot down when the minefield gives away their location.
When chaff sweeping (assuming you're using frigate chaff), set the speed at warp 10, and send the chaff *past* the target for a better chance of hitting a mine. Picked this one up from LEit. 
Build your ships so they're easy to gate. Mobility provides you with enormous flexibility in choosing where and when to strike or defend - as well as makes gathering your production much faster.
Mineral packets: Unless you're a PP, do not use mineral packets for mineral distribution (unless you're distributing them to your enemies at warp 13). Though it's a good idea to evacuate minerals via packet if a world is about to come under attack and you don't have enough freighters to pull everything out. Mineral packets eat 10% of the minerals that are put into the packet - can you really afford a 10% tax on each transfer?
There is no such thing as too many colonists. Even when your empire is maxing out its planets, keep at least a few at 50% to have extra colonists available when your master plan works and leaves you standing over the remains of your enemy's empire.
Scout aggressively. You can't counter a threat you don't know about. A corollary is that you shouldn't trust scan data from penetrating scanners until you've sent a ship to verify there are no cloaked ships in orbit.
Fork enemy planets. If they can't guess where you're going, they can't counter you easily. Which leads to...
Sweep aggressively. Ideally keep all the fields along any point of contact with your opponent swept down to nothing (or as close as you can manage).
Avoid the more expensive standard engines whenever you can - and especially when they're mated to an otherwise cheap vessel (any warship smaller than a battleship, fuel transports and minibombers/b17's. And freighters, though there the flexibility can be worth the cost. But it's something to consider.)
Never EVER leave a base unarmed and unshielded.
Always build a fort over new colonies as soon as you can to prevent casual pop dropping.
When building on a base, rather than splitting like weapons among multiple slots (like the starting starbases), make sure you max out a slot before moving onto the next one. This makes incremental upgrading cheaper.
Make sure your freighters are shielded sufficiently to survive a mine hit (this isn't possible with the medium freighter and you should never use the small freighter).
If you're lucky enough to get the MT Cargo pod, congratulations! Your B17's can now be mine-resistant when stacked.
Race tips:
Never ever reduce the efficiency of your mines. It's just not worth it.
Never have mines more expensive than 4 (and really, they should be 3 unless there are major mitigating circumstances).
Unless you know what you're doing, consider the population efficiency to have only two settings - 1/2500 and 1/1000. Any point gain you get with the intermediate values between those two is outweighed by the loss in speed, and dropping the pop eff below 1/1000 is incredibly expensive.
When you're a JoAT early in the game, planet-hop rather than moving between worlds. And throw at least a bat scanner on your scouts - it shou
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[Updated on: Fri, 07 November 2003 17:10]
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Tricks of the Trade (long)
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Re: Tricks of the Trade (long)
By: LEit on Fri, 07 November 2003 10:01 |
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Re: Tricks of the Trade (long)
By: Orca on Fri, 07 November 2003 16:58 |
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Re: Tricks of the Trade (long)
By: Kotk on Fri, 07 November 2003 16:21 |
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Re: Tricks of the Trade (long)
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Re: Tricks of the Trade (long)
By: Robert on Wed, 12 November 2003 03:20 |
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Re: Tricks of the Trade (long)
By: Kotk on Wed, 12 November 2003 06:35 |
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Re: Tricks of the Trade (long)
By: Robert on Wed, 12 November 2003 08:49 |
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Re: Tricks of the Trade (long)
By: iztok on Wed, 12 November 2003 07:45 |
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Re: Tricks of the Trade (long)
By: Orca on Wed, 12 November 2003 11:29 |
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Re: Tricks of the Trade (long)
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Re: Tricks of the Trade (long)
By: iztok on Wed, 12 November 2003 09:16 |
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Re: Tricks of the Trade (long)
By: LEit on Wed, 12 November 2003 10:45 |
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Re: Tricks of the Trade (long)
By: Hetzer on Wed, 12 November 2003 19:01 |
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Re: Tricks of the Trade (long)
By: Zathras on Sat, 15 November 2003 14:02 |
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Re: Tricks of the Trade (long)
By: Zathras on Sat, 15 November 2003 14:12 |
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Re: Tricks of the Trade (long)
By: asimov on Sat, 31 July 2004 02:22 |
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Re: Tricks of the Trade (long)
By: alric on Fri, 06 August 2004 08:11 |
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Re: Tricks of the Trade (long)
By: Altruist on Wed, 25 April 2012 09:11 |
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