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[Jacob/Lee]

They erratically issue/lift trade sanctions on my empire and blockaded a mining station in my home system. They were expelled with maxos blasters and epsilon torpedoes. I'm currently training my intelligence agent in the art of sabotage and building a fleet so I can crush their pitiful empire and take their taxpayers and resources.

[motorbitch]

I just don't get how I can possibly make meaningful decisions with SO much message spam

In the options menu you can disable certain popups and such to reduce (or eliminate) the spam.

i only played the game a day or something, and i did not try the last expansion.

however, i had the very same problem. the thing got so spamy, that later in a game i virtually got paralyzed as whenever i tried to do something, the spam distracted and stoped me from doing it. i hardly ever played any other game, where shuting down the game was giving me such an intense felling of relieve.

i dont think that the option to disable the spam can save the game in this regard.
if its useless spam, it should not spam me in the first place.
if its usefull spam, i would not want to turn it off.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

there's no useless spam in the game.
There is spam you want to turn off.
If it's REALLY, REALLY spam-y, then you should rethink your imperial infrastructure. Even though you CAN go entirely micro, it really isn't fun for reasons of said spam. There are some things you want automated.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

I automate my non-fleet navy, so raiding, escorting, and cruising is left to the AI. I also have the building of mines automated (for the most part, sometimes I need a couple of extra to get the economy going). I keep my fleets firmly under my control though, as well as all diplomacy.

[Jacob/Lee]

The war is over, finally. The last weeks of it was spent bombarding their homeworld and killing five billion of our brothers before storming it with dozens of infantry formations. They had almost no opposition, free to stake the flag of the Gizurean Collective into the ashes. With the war against the Gizurean Conformity finished, my empire now has thirty billion people split between five colonies. My combat fleet is seventy ships strong with a cumulative firepower of 6898. My population and strategic value is at the top of the known galaxy and, aside from the ancient guardians, my economy is as well, although I hold seventh in territory and my military strength is fifth, out of ~25 empires packed into this third of the galaxy.

It was quite the war, however. The first blockade started 2150.07.07. Their homeworld was invaded and taken 2161.10.05. War was officially declared maybe six years in, but there was a number of skirmishes and covert operations beforehand. It was a bumpy ride. I very nearly stopped the war only two years in, but, just before I assaulted their homeworld (defended by a weapons platform and a port) they retrofitted their medium spaceport to a large one, which had sufficient additional firepower to repel my forces.

After that, I spent my time building my fleet, expanding my economy, and fighting off the seemingly infinite swarms of pirates coming from all directions. I reached the point where I was seriously considering throwing money at all the nearby pirates and hoping they would attack the Conformity for me. Nobody wanted to take my bounties on their defenses. I eventually improved my shields, maxos blasters, railguns, and ground forces, then made my move.

The Conformity had been in and out of conflicts with other empires and were actually in a state of war with two when I officially went to war. For no particular reason, empires completely unrelated to anything going on would smack me with worthless trade sanctions or give me meager amounts of credits. There's also apparently a pirate faction by the name of the Fire Gang that people are scared of, going so far as one of my long-time aggravators, the Ugnar Corsairs, merging with my empire out of fear. These bogeymen have roughly half the firepower of my empire between thirty ships.

With so much of my fleet thrown into that one attack, pirates and the few Conformity ships that escaped made a mess of outlying mining stations and took out a construction ship or two. Still, we're free now. It's time to rebuild what was broken and aim outwards once more. Let's see what the rest of the galaxy has to offer the Gizurean Collective.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Very awesome, speaking of war, the 2nd Invasion of Albis (The name of my human empire) is finally coming to a close. I've got the slukens on the run. Massively outgunned, invasion forces largely defeated, and general ne'erdowells killed I pushed them back to their home system. Unfortunately, my feudal empire does have its morals, and I do not have any bombardment weaponry. TWO invasions have failed to take the homeworld, and I fear I will have to resort to bombardment before making the 3rd AND FINAL invasion. I WILL crush the Sluken, and they WILL pay for their crimes.

[Anvilfolk]

This thread is made of awesome. Keep these coming!

[BFEL]

BFEL has now joined the Distant Worlds community. He has attempted a pre-warp game before realizing "Wow, I REALLY should play those other tutorials" due to his utter failure to do more then build four construction ships that do nothing. Woops.

[LoSboccacc]

about the tutorials:

'pre warp empire tutorial'

build a spaceport: okey dokey!

2 minutes forward: hello, we are pirates, pay or else. ok! will pay.

30 seconds forward: pirate destroy everything.


we are not going to space today.

[BigD145]

about the tutorials:

'pre warp empire tutorial'

build a spaceport: okey dokey!

2 minutes forward: hello, we are pirates, pay or else. ok! will pay.

30 seconds forward: pirate destroy everything.


we are not going to space today.

The same pirate faction?

[Sirus]

It appears that someone updated the Mass Effect mod someone here mentioned to work with Universe.

[LoSboccacc]

how do you handle the mess of ships that mass on your planets?

[Rez]

You need to keep asking for protection until you have your spaceport, then break it.

At which point, they'll shred or board anything that moves outside your homeworld's orbit.  The pirates start with a significant tech lead.  In my experience, they ask for a lot less per month than you would spend on just maintenance to defend your assets, let alone repairs and replacements.  More to the point, you can't even begin to defend your assets until you have shields and warp drives and larger ships, all of which are in the same tech category.

I've found that playing ketarov let's you rapidly catch up to their tech level, provided you get some lucky rolls for your intelligence agents.

how do you handle the mess of ships that mass on your planets?

Do you have private ships set to transparent?  I believe the option is next to the minimap.

[Jacob/Lee]

Most pirates also hate each other as much as they hate you. If you pay one of them off and they loiter around your systems for whatever reason, they'll get into fights with other, probably hostile pirates. There was actually this one time where two pirate bands tried to raid one of my colonies at the same time and ended up slaughtering each other, and a time when the Conformity attacked a colony and the local pirates repelled them. Good luck getting anybody to accept defense contracts or bounties, though.

-----

I underestimated the Fire Gang. I destroyed their last known base but most of their fleet escaped into the galaxy and are still causing problems. Every so often, a capital ship or two will hyperjump into my system, take a few shots at a spaceport, then immediately peace out when the port retaliates. I've managed to stop and destroy a few ships with HyperDeny, but their capital ships have ~700 shields on them that I simply can't overwhelm with my current fleet. I've built a new force of capital ships with HyperDeny modules and posted them pretty much everywhere of interest with some graviton beam-armed escorts to take them out. I'm not sure where their main force ran off to, honestly, and hopefully they won't return to my space.

The Fire Gang scare caused me to A) Retrofit every space port I have to medium/large, B) Build defensive stations around half my colonies, and C) Over double my cumulative fleet firepower. These pirates are actually pretty damn scary.

[Rez]

I'm failing to see the logic of these arguments.   Remember, we are talking about pre-warp/warp precursor stage.  Your fleets won't be able to reach raiders and won't be able to destroy them if they do reach them.

There's a group of pirates in my game that want 218 credits/month (2616 per year).  They have 852 firepower in 11 ships.   They are at least 1 tech ahead of me in every category related to weapons and hyperdrives and I stole most of what I have from them.  To match their firepower, I would need to spend at least 10k credits a year on maintenance, plus the material investment plus replacements and that would not be enough to ensure that they don't destroy or damage my civilian ships.  Another group wants a little more than 5k a year.  I can pay both of them and still lose less than I would trying to maintain a fleet to fight one of them.

IMO, your time would be better spent building an economy and resource base that can afford a few thousand piddling credits a year than micromanaging a high investment war against an enemy you can't eradicate until you get better tech anyway.  By having a small military in a time when I can avoid almost all fighting, I can keep my taxes quite low and spend most of the taxes I do take on finding potential colony planets and important strategic resources to support growth.