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[umiman]

You can get the AI mod to streamline the AI and the advisors.

[Cheedows]

Also regarding ship building, be sure to see the maximum amount of energy your guns will use on a ship and compare it with the energy output of your reactor. If your guns use more energy than your reactor, then the ship will fire 3 shots and you'll watch your entire fleet stand around like dumbasses getting trashed before having to warp out. I've had this before when I first started out, generally because of the mindset "slap bigger guns on nao" but these stronger guns use more energy, and you'll have a worse fleet than if you didn't upgrade. Generally, like most parts of DW, a good ship design is balanced between efficiency and killing power and your research should generally be diversified instead of going all into a single weapon tree. 

[Niveras]

Is there a way to queue (non-research, non-mining) constructions at a location, without manually selecting a specific construction ship, ctrl-right click, and telling it to build there?

I'd like to queue, for example, defense or different flavours research bases in various locations, but there's no easy option to queue a defense base like there is with mining. With research bases, the queue only shows an energy base by default, unless the location has a bonus to tech or weapons.

Can I semi-turn off the automated contructions ships, such that they will only build when I queue something up to be built (or repair if some ship needs it) , instead of running around on their own building mining bases wherever they damn well please the AI decides is useful? (I know their automation can be turned off completely, but I don't necessarily want to do that either.)

[Akura]

The first, not really as far as I know. At colonies you can, but the colony builds it, not construction ships. Besides mining/resort/research bases at the appropriate places, you can also queue a monitoring station at any star, but that's about it - and it's a great use for those stars with no planets.

For the second, I do believe that if you queue a structure at a location(like a research station near bonus place), it's added to the nearest construction ship's order queue, which is carried out regardless of whether it's automated.

[Zangi]

Also regarding ship building, be sure to see the maximum amount of energy your guns will use on a ship and compare it with the energy output of your reactor. If your guns use more energy than your reactor, then the ship will fire 3 shots and you'll watch your entire fleet stand around like dumbasses getting trashed before having to warp out. I've had this before when I first started out, generally because of the mindset "slap bigger guns on nao" but these stronger guns use more energy, and you'll have a worse fleet than if you didn't upgrade. Generally, like most parts of DW, a good ship design is balanced between efficiency and killing power and your research should generally be diversified instead of going all into a single weapon tree.

You actually have an energy reserve... with 3 shots, that is a lot of guns to generator ratio.
Also, your ship will use energy when moving with thrusters, depending on if its going max speed or normal speed.  So you'll want to leave some extra energy for the boats to use for maneuvering.

You can get the AI mod to streamline the AI and the advisors.

Do you mean the AI improvement one on the matrix forums?  It doesn't really do that.  What it does is make the AI smarter about their military and some empire policies, while keeping them unique/playing differently.

.... I made this reply somewhere before.  I'm pretty sure of it.

[umiman]

You can get the AI mod to streamline the AI and the advisors.

Do you mean the AI improvement one on the matrix forums?  It doesn't really do that.  What it does is make the AI smarter about their military and some empire policies, while keeping them unique/playing differently.

.... I made this reply somewhere before.  I'm pretty sure of it.

Doesn't do what? Not affect the advisors? It adjusts the empire policy files for all races while doing some other minor tweaks to the default ship designs. This includes the player empire.

Here's a small example:

• Capital Ship template designed for Size 650 (they scale up automatically as larger sizes become available)
• Carrier template designed for Size 975 (buildable once Size 650 is available noting the 50% size bonus, also they scale up automatically as larger sizes become available)
• Cruisers, Capital Ships and Carriers include Troop Compartments to buff AI fleet ground invasion strength

Here's the result in my most recent game:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I'm sure you know in the base game the AI never builds troops or anything troop related on any ship that isn't a troop transport. Also look at the size of that ship. It's so much bigger than normal.

Here's an unmodded auto-designed carrier. This one, however, is from the ultra late game when there's no tech remaining whereas I only had Caslon missiles in the other:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

As you can see, the normal design AI never builds troop components on a carrier.

I chose a really obvious example to highlight that yes, the mod will change the player empire's automation AI and that I recommend it, as it makes your life easier in game.

[Sirus]

Could you explain why you'd want to take up space on a carrier to add troop bays? Why not more hangers or weapons or what-have-you?

[umiman]

Could you explain why you'd want to take up space on a carrier to add troop bays? Why not more hangers or weapons or what-have-you?

It's mostly a "goddamn the AI is retarded" issue.

The base AI handles ground invasions terribly. For some reason it treats dedicated troop transport like actual combat ships and has them doing stupid things like having a single troop transport guarding a space station for example. So you need to build an excess of troop transports before it even starts putting them into your fleets.

And after you do that, the automated fleet AI will only put maybe one or two troop transports in your fleets and just scatter them about making them pretty useless. So you could have 50 troop transports, but who knows where they would be. This fleet could have three, this one could have four, this one might not have any.

So when it comes to invasions, what you end up with is fleets flying in to clear out all the space targets, which it does pretty decently, but then when it comes time to invade well... it's pretty stupid. It might not have enough troops but try to invade anyway even though you asked the policy screen to have an overwhelming advantage before invading. Or it might just lull about and not do anything while another fleet somewhere else comes to try and invade. Or it might take them eons to even do it as they all decided to go load troops, then refuel, and do whatever it is they want to do before getting to invading. Most of the time, you'll just get frustrated, group all your troop transports together into a non-automated group, and manually do it yourself.

Overall if you're not looking to micro your ground invasions and like to leave everything on autopilot, this change makes it a lot easier to watch. I've noticed the AI will also more willingly help out ground rebellions if they have a surplus of troops too.

So yeah, it's not something that makes sense logically nor is it something you'd do if you did everything yourself, but more of something that makes the AI more bearable when it comes to ground invasions.

----------

Edit: I think it might also help with ship boarding but I'm not too sure about that front.

[forsaken1111]

I'm 100% certain I have seen autodesigned ships with troops on them without them being troop transports...

[umiman]

I'm 100% certain I have seen autodesigned ships with troops on them without them being troop transports...

You probably saw it on the event generated ships.

But I was just demonstrating to Zangi that the mod affects players too. Though to be honest I'm not particularly certain that's what he was referring to. It was pretty vague.

[gimlet]

I think I would prefer to micro the troops and transports, and recruitment, even if I were leaving a lot of the rest to the AI, except maybe in the very late game.   For me it always seems the AI goes gonzo recruiting troops and absolutely kills my budgets.   And leaving automated transports flying around inevitably means they'll pick them all up from the ONE planet I briefly forgot to make sure enough are set to Garrison,  and then it revolts or gets an easy capture.

[LoSboccacc]

you have to micro them anyway because planets never recruit enough troops to fill them transports and most of what they recruit goes into garrison

[Damiac]

Well I won my first game as human.  I put down a few rebellions here and there, and just kept expanding outwards.  On normal mode, it seems like the only real threats are pirates and your budget.  It's tricky when you first get out of your system, and you're just trying to get a foothold, those pirates can be brutal and you really can't afford to just pay them off.  Once you get a few systems established with defense bases, it gets a lot easier to stabilize.  I'm also far too miserly when it comes to raising taxes, it is NOT good to be 50k in the red when you really want to put down resort bases and buy colony ships...

I tried a game on hard, as the spider guys who want to enslave everyone.  They... are a really bad race for getting started, I have to say.  Slow pop growth, no research bonus, the only bonus they get is a huge reduction to war weariness.  Useful later, no use at all at the beginning of the game.  I started out kind of trapped in a corner, captured a couple minor colonies from my securan neighbor, then fell further and further behind because I could not get my empire out of the red.  After a completely failed conquest attempt, I just gave up on that game.  Anyone have any tips for surviving the seemingly extra tight economy of hard mode?  I know one huge mistake I made was to rush to build the bakuras shipyards.  200% construction speed is nice, 10k maint a year is not.  Building 0 ships at double the speed isn't actually much help...

I have no mods installed, and I have definitely had the ship designer stick troop transports on my cruisers.  I usually take the AI design, then modify it to my liking, rather than starting from scratch, but I noticed the AI can be rather stupid about some things sometimes.  I tend to have one warship design I keep redesigning, always max size, one special space station for my main base with extra labs, one special defense station with recreation and medical centers, and then I stick long range scanners and a few extra guns on the mining stations.  The civilian sector has far too much money, I could be a lot more abusive about weaponizing them, but I limit it to mining bases for my own sanity.

[Akura]

I have no mods installed, and I have definitely had the ship designer stick troop transports on my cruisers.  I usually take the AI design, then modify it to my liking, rather than starting from scratch, but I noticed the AI can be rather stupid about some things sometimes.  I tend to have one warship design I keep redesigning, always max size, one special space station for my main base with extra labs, one special defense station with recreation and medical centers, and then I stick long range scanners and a few extra guns on the mining stations.  The civilian sector has far too much money, I could be a lot more abusive about weaponizing them, but I limit it to mining bases for my own sanity.

I should point out that the designer screen recommends troop modules on destroyers and up.

My method of ship design is I start with a capital ship(cruiser if I don't have a lot of construction tech to increase max size), build it up to the maximum size, then designing the other classes and self-set the limit on the design, down to the escort which I will put at most half the maximum size. I also put my fleets as having one or two capital ships, a carrier(if I bother with fighters at all), 2 or three cruisers, 4-5 destroyers, 7-8 frigates,  8-12 escorts, usually not more than 3-4 troop carriers - using more ships if I have the economy for it. The build order screen makes this a pretty easy setup - queue the ships(their build and maintenance costs are displayed before purchase), then immediately go in to the ship list screen and pick out all the ships that just started construction(they'll be orange) and assign them to a fleet.


Tips for money: generally, you need to put some early research into troop logistics(under weapons), command, and commerce. The first two reduce maintenance for armies and ships respectively, the last gives you more money from your space port.

I notice you say you build defense stations. How many and how large? That could be sapping your economy.

[Damiac]

The defense stations I build at each planet without a starbase are basically the AI designed defense base, with a medical and recreation facility slapped on. In the portion of the game where I tend to be in the red, these stations are costing me about 12k to build and 3k of maint, if I recall correctly.  Not cheap, but cheaper than a defense fleet, or worse yet, eating tons of pirate raids.  Those raids can cost a LOT of money and materials.  I have seen those defense bases take a good size pirate fleet with no trouble at all, so perhaps I could downsize the default one a bit to get some savings there.

I have been bad about upgrading my command and commerce techs, so I'm sure that's something I should focus on earlier. 

I've noticed an odd quirk that I have to assume is a bug, even if it kinda makes a little sense:  When I build a civilian mining station, I pay for it.  When I upgrade a civilian mining station, I must have enough money to pay for the cost of the retrofit.  However, and this is the weird part, when I actually order the retrofit, the civilians pay ME the retrofit cost. 
I try not to take advantage of that, because it seems wrong, especially given that the game makes sure I have enough money to pay for the upgrade in the first place.  But honestly given how much cash the civilians usually have, I could just slap a bunch of crap on their designs and force them to upgrade whenever I want more cash. 

It's funny how many seemingly obvious bugs like that there are, given how long the game's been out.  This game could really use an unofficial bug-fix patch, but it seems like the community is really tiny, so I'm not holding out hope.  There are some cool looking mods I plan to try out after I get a good handle on the base game.

One thing I really wish was that the financial information window actually reflected reality.  The cash flow number is meaningless, the bonus income is meaningless, I'll be running in the red sometimes for cash flow, and yet my actual cash on hand is skyrocketing.  Other times I have a nice healthy cash flow and bonus income, yet my cash on hand is dropping!  The non-bonus income should be easy to predict, since it's based on taxes of a fairly constant population, and maintenance once again is completely predictable, so the cash flow number ought to be a lot more reliable.  Bonus income is based off the doings of individual civilian ships, so I can see why that's basically impossible to predict.


Nevaris:
The constuctors when not in automated mode will still pick up queued construction jobs, which is how I handle them.  I have all my constructors off automated mode, then I'll go into the expansion planner and queue up jobs for them individually, or go into the resort locations window and queue a resort, etc.  This way they only build what I tell them to build, but i don't have to actually ever select a constructor (unless I am trying to repair ships in a debris field, or something like that.)  They seem to usually stay fueled, I believe they fill up their tank whenever they pick up construction materials, so unless you have a fuel shortage at that location you shouldn't have to tell them to refuel, but the game is nice enough to give you a warning when a ship's fuel is low anyway.