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I've recently started playing this game and I wanted to ask the more experienced players about any tips and tricks they can offer a newbie player. Since SE IV seems to be somewhat popular I hope I've come to the right place.

Certainly. I'm sure Brian will show up soon with pages of advise, but I'll give you my general tips.

A popular strategy is to expand as quickly and as far as you can, colonizing only one planet in every system and building a shipyard on it. This will help you grab a lot of space (obviously), and it gives you lots of buffer room should an enemy invade. Just be careful not to extend yourself too far and start running a huge deficit.

In vanilla SEIV and most mods that I'm aware of, missiles suck. Go for torps or beams, but not missiles.

If you can conquer a neutral who breathes a different atmosphere than your people do, do it. They'll let you take full advantage of more planets. Also, trading colony tech with neutrals is very useful, though it's considered cheap, especially in multiplayer games.

Troops=good. Having troops on a planet, even if they're totally unarmed, will increase planetary happiness, usually all the way to jubliant. And you don't pay maintaince on units, so it won't break the bank.

Half the battle is knowing how to spend your racial points and creating a powerful empire, if you're not taking one of the ready made empires. You need to know what factors and special traits are important and which aren't. Basically, anything that increases the research rate, build rate (construction aptitude), the defense or attack of your ships, or resource extraction (especially of minerals) are good. Political savy (increases amount gained from trade agreements with other empires) is okay, but if all the empires you run into are hostile and won't trade, it won't help. Maintaince aptitude is also a good trait to give points to, as it allows you to have a larger fleet.

IIRC, in vanilla SEIV, none of the special tech trees (i.e. temporal, psychic, etc.) are really worth it. I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong.

Don't bother too much with intelligence centers and projects. One empire can fend off sabotage and espionage from another with many, many more intelligence points, so long as they've got a high enough counter intelligence tech level.

Asteroid belts can be made into planets with much more resources than the normal planets, though the tech is very time consuming to develop and build.

In the early game, minefields are pretty much impentrable, especially if dropped on a warp point. Later on, though, empires can build single ships which can sweep away the maximum number of mines allowed on one square.

Just one... play people.

Max/min guide here and other things like list of gamey bugs and bugs. Some people use all of them like retrofitting, some none, some cherry pick.

We could do real-time client and get through 100 turns of stock in a couple hours Stofsk. What's your time zone?

Brian

I'm new, but I'm doing pretty well in the STMod game we're playing, so I feel confident in giving advice.

Aggressive expansion is not only important, but the most important thing you can do. And be willing to back up your territorial claims. By pushing your borders out quickly you gain more of everything. More planets means more research bases, more shipyards, more resources--which translates into bigger, more powerful, and more numerous ships. You also gain buffers between you and your enemy, which means more mines, fighter forces, and wormhole battles to whittle down your enemy.

By grabbing a lot of land and not allowing anyone else to settle within your borders you can also control the avenues from which you can be attacked. If you can force your enemies to travel down a few bottlenecks instead of anywhere you want, the early-game minefields will basically make it impossible for anyone to attack you, and you can build up into a monster.

Don't bother colonizing each world early on, you want to grab the good ones, expand outwards, and then head back. I find that developing border systems is important--small little crapworlds are easier to knock out than a big monster planet that can pump out hordes of troops and mines and which can basically build their own defenses during peacetime and can build ships during war. Later though, grab basically every planet you can.

When designing races, know that everyone will take combat bonuses, maintaince bonuses and contstruction bonuses. While intel may not be particularly useful against a well developed foe, I erased an entire system's population by running fourteen intel operations at the same time, primed to go off all at once. It's an impressive first strike, and forces people to build intel buildings. If they never do, they might find themselves completely unprepared for the horrific raping you'll drop on them. Intel's good early to midgame.

You'll want to make a gamefile of the "high tech" settings, just to poke around and see what's useful. While there's fun techs down each tree, there's always ones that are BETTER. You'll want to know what these are. Wasting research points may not kill you, but there's no pain like the pain of being attacked by someone who rushed for one ridiculous technology when you're still mulling around a few systems with a grab bag of low level technologies.

This also shows you what may be a problem now or later or what. You may not want to build an offensive strategy around fighters if, midway through the game, the "ULTIMAX GUN SYSTEM" does 1000 damage to fighters and fires at a range of 10 or something dumb. You never know! It's like playing the game without knowing about Wormhole openers or Starkiller devices. If you don't know to expect them, you'll be in for a shock.

The biggest mistake I often see is bad resource use and bad ship design. I like efficency. Cheap ships that provide a good punch. Since price translates into build speed and build speed translates into fleet size, you want to be able to make a good competitive ship design in a reasonable amount of time so that you can not only have the ability to rapidly create a defensive fleet if you're attacked, but so you can get a good-sized attack force in space before that. A big fleet is a nice deterrant. And once they get outdated, try to refit them. That's part of the efficency. Find a shipsize you like and stick with it. You can't refit a 520kt ship into a 550kt one, so try to have all your ships be of a few specific sizes.

Tip 1. Keep Alert. Always scan your systems and such when you take a new turn in PBEM.
Tip 2. Trust No One. A trade alliance lets ships pass through your borders. Do it with people you KNOW won't attack, or people so far away that they can't send a warfleet through your lines.
Tip 3. Keep a laser handy. Use ships as your main defense, supported by unit based defenses (mines/sats/turrets/fighters/drones). Unit defenses don't cost maintenance, but they cost a lot of time and aren't as flexible or effective as ships. Mines are great early on however, and stop pesky cloaked ships.

Intel? Take it or leave it. Don't ignore it however. With zero counter intel, your empire can be brought to it's knees by spies. If you don't want to offensively operate, keep the highest level of counter intelligence you have running, which multiplies the points invested in it as a form of shield against enemy sabotage.

Actually in stock refitting is a terrible idea. Mostly because it costs 150% of the money to refit and it's usually not worth it unless you use retrofit series. Ripping out a component costs 50% IIRC so ripping out components is generally a bad idea. Keeping a big fleet around to retrofit out is generally a bad idea in stock. If you're building a war fleet, you should be preparing to attack.

Bigger ships in stock are better. Always build the biggest ship you can. Never fall behind on ship hulls.

The main thing in stock is you start with either 20k, 50k or 100k research points. So you open either one theoretical area or two. Theoretical areas are the bottlenecks in research early game in stock.

I like military science for torpedoes and point defense. I like physics for shields. I like construction for fighters, troops and mines. Certain theoretical areas are complete losers in the beginning like astrophysics and industry.

For stock it's best to use "the clone" or the max/minned Empire I showed in the link. There's variations like getting religious trait, but not too many. With that empire you can build a colony ship on one turn with emergency build. Expand, expand, expand. If you see an enemy plop down a colony and build weapons platforms and mines. Try and establish a front line as soon as you can. Build the "outpost", the sole building at the front line that'll serve to mark your territory as soon as you encounter an enemy ship. If the ship is an armed scout, kill it. How? Ram it. All your colonizers should be set to ram. If you see a scout on the far edge of the system, plop down a colony and build a weapons platform. You'll beat it. The colony is now your outpost. Later colonizers should colonize the systems behind.

Satellites are good in the beginning but only on warp points. Fighters are good only on an unprepared enemy. Mines are good early to mid game. Later on, when fleets get into the hundreds or thousands the only way to stop enemy fleets will be fleets of your own. You may be tempted to research larger starbase hulls and fortify a wormhole. Don't. 50 bases on a warp point will stop 200 ships, but you have no offensive capability and offense wins.

The "optimal" ship sizes are the sizes just big enough to access the larger mounts. For example, light carrier can run large mounts and often when someone goes fighters it's an effective strategy to have a hybrid carrier/battleship that can use the large mount and skimp on the hull research. If you're not going fighters, time your contruction and research to coincide so you pump out the optimal ship hulls. Mounts rule in stock. Always use mounts if you can.

Try and avoid stockpiling a huge fleet in peacetime because maintainence kills. Do not build warships until you reach at least destroyer because anything smaller just doesn't have the room. Scouts to harass and explore are okay as are transports to carry satellites or mines to fortify warp points. The fortification should be one system behind your "outpost" system. Colonize, colonize, colonize, first colonzing away from your home system as fast as possible. For the first ten turns you should have a colonizer coming out every single turn from your homeworld if you built your empire right and set on emergency build. They should head away from your homesystem as far as they can. The juicy worlds they pass by can be filled in by your second wave of colonizers. Around turn 5 your fifth colonizer should colonize a world in your home system and build a space yard, for when your homeworld goes on slow build. Resist the urge to build orbital space yards. Orbital space yards have maintainence and maintainence in stock kills.

Missiles suck. Fighters against a seasoned opponent usually suck, no matter how many you build. Get Depleted Uranium Cannons up to Level Five, then go for Phased Polaron Beams. Armor is better in the beginning, but once you get around shield IV you'll be fine.

Try and husband your forces. In SE:IV, when you attack you go for the throat. Usually, rushes do not work on seasoned opponents. But it depends on who you are playing and whether it's a multiplayer. Usually people ally with the first person they meet, so they share with trade and research alliances. Because if they don't and it's an 8 player game, you lose.

Use small planets for storage facilities and space yards. Use big planets for resource facilities. Use low value planets for intel and research. Use high value planets for mining. Try and match the kind of planet and specialize... a planet with 150 organics should go organic all the way. Small moons are good for building space yards since there's no population penalty in stock.

That's enough to win you a lot of games in stock anyway. Oh and untrained fleets are next to useless. Combat Sensors and ECM are essential technology, because everybody'll put one or two point defense guns on all their designs that basically renders their ships immune from missiles and fighters. So you'll have to rely on direct fire weapons.

Oh and play people .

You should also be aware that there are certain very gamey tactics like trading colonization technology and population (another reason why people usually ally with the first person they meet), using 100 police troops with no weapons to raise happiness to jubilant, etc., etc., that even if you don't like you'll have to live with or do yourself. Also a lot of people outright trade technology and there's no in game mechanism to stop it.

When you master stock or get sick and tired of trading population and trading colony tech, then come the mods. Most mods fix some of the exploits to a degree, but once you try the dark side at least once at least you'll know what other people are capable of, even if you don't do it yourself.

When you do master stock and you will very quickly, there's a pro league called King of the Hill on the Shrapnel Games forum for competitive, 1v1 play with stock. Their forums are really the best place to look for information. There's a FAQ that goes into a lot more detail than I ever could. A lot of what I do's become intuitive after so many games and I could go on and on for a few pages and still miss some crucial bit of information. And because the game's been out for awhile whoever's left playing it online will be veteran and will know every single trick in the book.

It only takes one mistake to lose.

Brian

Another place where you canget tons and tons of advice is here. The Space Empires boards of the Shrapnel official boards are some of the most active and should give you plenty of stuff to read. They'll also fall all over each other to help you out.

Edi

Edi wrote:Another place where you canget tons and tons of advice is here. The Space Empires boards of the Shrapnel official boards are some of the most active and should give you plenty of stuff to read. They'll also fall all over each other to help you out.

Edi

Thank you Edi. And thanks to everyone else.