I don't think I'm great at this kind of game. It took me 9 hours to clear the Skirmish Tutorial ~_~

But I'm playing a real game now, 15 planets, level 3 AI, no expansions to experiment and play around with things.

I don't understand how to utilize certain strategies/units. Like...

Hacking
-----------------
I don't quite understand Hacking. For instance, there's one hacking thing that can take down Ion Cannons. How can you even use it, if you have to somehow defend your Hacking-in-Progress, and the whole time, the Ion Cannon is murdering your fleet for a whole minute?

To me, it seems like if you have the luxury of creating a hack in enemy airspace, and defending it against waves, you've pretty much have control (or are on your way) over that planet anyway.

Am I missing something?


Missile Silos
-----------------
I never had the patience to wait for this one. I tried building a level 3 thing, and the ETA was like an hour and a half w/o engineers, but still a good 30 minutes with engineers.

Do warheads work just like Hacking, in that you have to build them in Enemy planets? It just does not seem feasible to wait for the build and defend for that long.


Anti-Sniper Turret
-----------------
I'm not sure what situation you would use this turret for.

If you're on your space, how would they be building snipers on your planet?
If you're on their space, how would you even have the luxury of building turrets? (And on top of that, I don't think I've even seen sniper turrets at enemy planets.)


vs. Ion Cannons
-----------------
What hope do I have against any planets with Ion Cannons?! it's almost like it's better to leave that planet alone. (Probably in most cases, it is.)


Those are my questions so far. I'm sure I'll discover more as I go along.

Well I am also a bit of a novice but I think I can answer your questions

-Hackers are naturally invisible so they can usually just sneak into the planet and do their thing. Usually if they get hit by a Tachyon sentry then they will be revealed and then they will probably die from the attention. A good way I found is to load up a hacker through a Transport and just make sure that at least the hacker can get away from any invisibility revealing units so you can set up a good hack. Usually you don't need to defend the hacking module unless the AI has tachyon units as part of the response, of course you do have to contend with the mass of units that will appear on your systems as a result of the hack so don't let your guard down.

-Missiles in the game act like any other unit, they can move around but to activate them you must scrap them or let them get killed. Also I don't think you should focus on missiles till you are at the end game.

-While sniper turrets and units aren't common they do exist and they can pose a problem (I once had a sniper command station at a Nomad world that would basically whittle down all but the biggest of fleets), of course it is very situational so if you don't need it then you don't have to build it but when you do need it you'll be glad. I do think there is a way to build turrets in enemy space but I can't remember how at the moment.

-Ion Cannons cannot instakill units with a greater mark than themselves (An Ion cannon II can kill MK1 and MK2 units but not MK3 and beyond). Also starships are immune to ion cannons regardless of mark I believe, try building a starship and go on a suicide run to try and kill the cannon.

for great fun leave the ion cannon alive and capture the planet. that ion cannon is now your ion cannon. I use severial fully loaded assault transports for this. they do great damage and protect the fleet inside from cannon blast.

Thanks for your replies, both of you!

That was very informative.

Regarding the Ion Cannon thing... I've heard this is a great strategy, and I believe it would be.

But let's say you stick your fleet in transports. But you'll have to unload in order to destroy all the guard stations and finally the command center in order to take ownership of it, right? How would you protect your fleet against that slaughter? You're still in range of the Ion Cannons when you attack the enemy structures.

(I guess all starships and only high-level units might work, although your army would be a lot smaller.)

assault transports shoot with power based on how many ships are inside them. I usually can clear all the enemies out without unloading them.

The best ways I've found to use a hacker:

Step one: Get scout(s) on the planet first. That's key to make sure that the Tachyon Sentries (because there's always Tachyon Sentries) are that planet's only detector and to get an idea of how the AI fleets patrol the planet.

Step two: Kill any Tachyon Sentries at that wormhole. A quick pop-in with a reasonably powerful attack starship can do it and then retreat without taking too much damage.

Step three: Pop the Hacker in and move it to the safest spot nearby the entry worm hole. Ideally, you don't want any AI ships nearby. Spots near the planet border are usually best. Finding this safe spot is the major reason for Step One.

Step four: Place whatever hack you want in the safe spot and pull out your hacker.

As to what you should use your hacker for, I rarely use the 'Destroy megaunit hack' on anything less than a Superfortress. It's far better I've found to save your hacking for Design Backup Servers and Advanced Science Facilities.

Another thing that I wish to report

It is possible that during a hack the AI will send a tachyon pulse that will uncover your probe though that only happened once in the several times that I've hacked so you might want to still keep an eye on the probe in case you need to place a probe again

And yeah I only hack for Design Downloads, ARS picker (if I feel that my current set of ships is lackluster, otherwise I don't bother as much) and Nomad Beacon hacking

I just completed my first win against 2 AI opponents last night in just about 10 hours!

I tried a lot of the stuff you guys mentioned (Assault Transports, Capturing planet with Ion Cannon intact, Hacking, etc) and had a blast learning more about the game and the options available to me.

Some of my observations:

* It seems as if gaining control of the AI's planets w/fabricators gave me so many options. I couldn't get level 5 units any other way, and that really helped swing the balance towards me.
* I've gotten obliterated, reloaded my save, adjusted my strategy, and then successfully mounted a defense. It's amazing that even with 1-2 minutes of time, what you do can mean the difference between win and lose.
* I love that assault transports heal on their own. Very good for pop-up, destroy and retreat tactics.
* When I captured an AI Level 2 Ion Cannon, it became a Level 1 Ion Cannon for me. Considering how much effort it took for me to capture the planet with Ion cannon intact, it totally wasn't worth it, especially when the enemy was throwing level 5 units at me. How come the Ion Cannon dropped from Level 2 to Level 1 when it transferred to me?
* Even on AI Difficulty 3, the game can be very hard. Particularly, when I got to the near-end game, even though I controlled all but 2 planets, the AI gave me such a hard time in trying to fight off its waves, and gain ground. I may just suck though.

Now to try another game with the 1st expansion enabled and difficulty bumped!

I don't know why the ion cannon did that I don't think it does for me but then again I almost never check so I could be wrong.

as for the difficulty that is probably because you decided to take all the planets. usually you have to use island hopping like strategy to win mixed with gate raiding. the more planets you take the angrier the ai. in an 80 planet map its usually recommended not to try to take more than 35 planets. you want to keep ai progress as low as you can.

I believe that the progression is every level of unit is worth 2-4 of the same unit one level lower, so level 5 units are massively powerful (and have a consummate Metals cost, though the energy cost does not scale in that way for most units, thankfully). Yes. I honestly 'play' the game paused and planning almost as much as I play the game. Sometimes, that even helps. I have a feeling I am under-utilizing Transports. I rarely use them until the extreme end game. This is new to me. I have not heard of this and I can not recall it even happening to me. Are you sure the planet only had the one Ion Cannon? Multiple Ion Cannons are common at certain difficulty levels and/or AI Types, and I've never seen them be the same level. Something that I find tends to be very hard for new players to wrap their head around, since no other RTS does this, is that the AI has infinite resources, and that taking planets only empowers you. It does not weaken the AI (barring, of course, the two Homeworlds). Yes, it is probably best to learn the expansions one at a time. I kinda wish I had done it that way.

Well I want to give my two cents on capturing planets.

Capturing planets both enpowers you AND the AI, capturing planets will incur at least a cost of 20 AI Progress (of course if you find a data center then it is basically a free planet). While in the lower levels you could get away with capturing every planet in the galaxy in later levels it is basically suicide since the AI response will be great due to the progress.

Make it a habit to think why you should take over a planet, does a planet have a structure that would help you out immensely (ARS, Advanced Factory, Fabricator, etc...), does the planet have a large amount of metal nodes, is the planet a choke point and good for defense? Then capturing is a good idea.

Another way to control the AI a bit is to neuter planets instead of capturing them, kill the Warp Gate but leave the Command station intact which incurs a 5 AI Progress cost instead of 20 and the AI can't reinforce the planet anymore. Note that at high levels of play even just neutering planets indiscriminately is still a bad idea and will raise the progress too high.

You must find the sweet spot of planets that will benefit you immensely before it gets to the point where it benefits the AI more than you to capture the planet.

And I want to give another tip as well.

If you wish to scout effectively try finding an Advanced Constructor as soon as possible, when you find one you can build a Scout IV if you have unlocked Scout III (which costs around 2.5k knowledge total to get there I believe), the Scout IV is immune to tachyon rays so it is effectively permacloaked and can basically scout the entire galaxy. You can also build a Scout Starship IV that is also permacloaked and doesn't require that you have an advanced Starship constructor but requires 3k more knowledge to unlock plus an exponential cost in metal, the only upside is that you can build 2 starships while you can only build 1 normal ship so you can scout faster with the starships.

As for neutering the planets: this WILL NOT prevent AI from reinforcing that planet. Every AI command station has "reinforce" type gateway built in. If you return to that neutered planet later, you could encounter significant force again. What it does is prevent AI from launching attack at your planets from there. In my current game (second real game), I neutered all AI planets directly bordering my territory, except for one, and now normal AI waves only hit single, heavily fortified planet and always come through the same wormhole. This frees my hands and army for other tasks. I have yet to try what happens if you neuter all access points to your territory, but I suppose AI will start hitting random planets again. And cross-planet waves are still a problem too, they hit random planet, even if if happens to have warp jammer and no non-neutered neighbours. I already had to defend one of my spire civilian leaders deep in enemy territory against about half of entire cross-planet force, with my fleet too far to reach there in time. I managed to win with only turrets in the end, but it took a lot of reloads and good chunk of research I had reserved the 50k research achievement.

Other random info/strategies:

Expansions: my first game was without, and I found it a bit boring. Champion added a lot of fun. One of the expansions places something called "spire civilian leaders" on 8 random planets in the galaxy. If you manage to capture and hold those, they will each reduce AI progress by -3 every hour of game time. If you don't mind a long game, this looks like a good way to win with completionist approach. In theory this should let me capture the whole 120 planet galaxy without ticking off the AI too much (I'm at about 15 hours and 1/3 of the galaxy, with AI progress 490). With time acceleration it shouldn't take even that much real time and you could do other things in the meantime - like level up your champion. Most of expansions only give you more options at start of the game, after one game you should know enough to read through their description and decide if you'd like that - worked that way for me.

Ion cannons: so far I didn't have too much problem with those. Now I have sniper units, and if they aren't under a shield, they are a toast after killing maybe one or two of my ships. Even before I had snipers, I just rushed them with some of my faster ships. They have fixed rate of fire, and if you bring fleet with few hundred ships, they can only do little damage before they are vaporized. I still consider them to be priority targets, but not something to fear if the planet is desirable in some way.

Don't forget to research mobile space dock. I find these to be insanely poweful tools. Build all 9 and put them in the same control group as your fleet, set to autobuild all your ships and repeat. the good part is that newly built units are put into the same control group as the MSD - in enemy territory I just have to press 1 from time to time to maintain almost full force. Combine with few Engineer drones III for better effect. The bad part is that they are vulnerable and pretty fast, when you move your fleet normally they rush into combat and die - don't forget to deselect them with Alt-leftclick before ordering the fleet, or leave them on the other side of the wormhole if it is safe there.

Building turrets in enemy territory: you have to bring a mobile constructor, and you can do it only when you have supply on the planet (one green wormhole and no AI coprocessor). But the anti-sniper turrets didn't seem to do anything significant for me when I had problem with enemy snipers. I sometimes build turrets at enemy planets as support, when hacking design backup or advanced factory. Clear the planet of everything except command station and the factory, build full set of turrets and then defend the hacker with force instead of stealth until it is done. I didn't notice that hackers are cloaked until I read it here, but in my case AI seems to love the tachyon pulse anyway (one of them is 7 and it shows I guess).

I have seen AI suddenly send out new units from the Command Station after I wiped out the entire force sans the Command station but those usually just tend to be next to the Command Station and never really went out in retaliation, I gave a wide berth when I passed my ships through their territories and they never attacked

. And I've seen Command Centers just sit there all alone no matter how long time has passed. Of course I bet cause you are a higher level AI player than me so I bet what I see as a rarity you see it as common place.

Spire Civilian Leaders are definetly a good reason to take over an enemy planet, the only bad thing is that the AI gets +1 Progress whenever they are still under AI Control, you will have to scout and take over those planets (One Center spawned in a Nomad world complete with a SuperFortress defending the place and three forcefields shielding the command center). Also I would like to add that no matter how low you can reduce the progress the AI will still have a floor value built in, I think it is .2 increase in floor for each point in progress but I am not sure so don't quote me on this. Of course the floor value will probably be much lower than the current value so getting those reductors can still be good.

I also like the Champion but I like it better with the alternate progression than the normal one, I found that I have to micromanage my Shadow ship in each mission or it would die easily, which is kinda bad as I am waging a war with the AI outside. Maybe if I had someone who only wanted to play as a Champion then I would put it on

Some other observations/questions:

* I previously said that I captured Level 2 Ion Cannons, but they became Level 1. My mistake. It said AI 2 Ion Cannon, which is not the same.
* I ran into my first Minor Faction, but it seemed like they couldn't be attacked? What's going on here?
* Like I said earlier, I started a game with 20 planets and with the 1st Expansion enabled. I was expecting the whole Golem thing to play out, but I've scouted everything and don't see Golems at any planet. Are those randomized?
* Likewise, I was looking at the features of the 1st expansion where they introduce a bunch of new units. But so far I've only seen 2 of them. Is there a maximum type of units per game? Does it depend on how many planets? Does it just depend on initial setup which I really pay attention to?
* Is there even a way for you to go back and view what game settings you made when you created a game when it's in progress?

If you see a minor faction ship and you can't attack it then it means that it is your ally and will attack anyone that is hostile to you. No point in attacking someone on the same team, right?

Note that if you enable an expansion you don't enable everything that the expansion has, rather you unlock extra options under AI options so that you can fine tune if you want certain things from an expansion or not. You had to go under the AI Option tab before starting a game and picking the Broken Golem options which puts broken golems on the AI worlds for you to repair as soon as you capture the planet.

Also ships are randomized per game, you will not definetly see every ship in a game although it also helps if you choose the Complex option in the Ships tab pregame.

I don't know if there is a way to check which options you have selected after the game has started.

Also I would like to add that some options do not turn on if you have too tiny of a map as well.