Simple strategy question, i.e. how do you start

[Jeku]

Been playing the SEV demo as of late, and been wondering how you veterans out there usually start off.

Do you usually stay in your home sector and colonize each and every last planet first, building up tons of resources and ships, then start exploring warp points?

Or do you initially create a few frigates and explore a bunch of different sectors first?

And another question while I'm here--- in SEV the hex grids stay red until you've explored them, but is there any way to get a ship to automatically explore the red parts of the grid? It sucks manually steering ships over the red hex's.

Thanks!

[Hippocrates]

Hi Jeku,

Manually exploring a sector can be annoying. Thankfully, you can give ships a command to automate the process. I *think* it's under the "additional commands" button on the ship orders, and labeled as "survey sector." Additionally, you can use the shortcut key "/" to give the same command. Your ship will now go off and explore on its own until no red hexes remain.

Just be advised; you'll have to cancel the order if something comes up and you need to move your ship elsewhere. If not, it will happily finish exploring all the red sectors before carrying out any new orders.

[Jeku]

Wow, thanks for that. Everytime I play this game I find it gets deeper!

[Tim_Ward]

Do you usually stay in your home sector and colonize each and every last planet first, building up tons of resources and ships, then start exploring warp points?

In 4x games, it's almost always best to grab as much territory as you can as early as you can, *then* develop your colonies.

But with the AI as it is, you can pretty much do as you like and still come out of the first 20 or so turns with a massive advantage.

A lot depends on what's in your home system, though. If you've got planets with breathable atmospheres, grab those first. If there's no interesting planets in your home system, get the frigates first and send them off to see what they can find.

[Raapys]

Unfortunately the Survey System command is rather buggy; it always eventually drives into a sun or two in the system, which makes it stop surveying completely. *shrug*

[tmcc]

I agree with the basic expansion strategies above except that I emergency build colony ships immediately while dumping research into sensors, missiles, ship hull, point defense and projectile weapons.

I send the colony ships that are churned out each turn as far as they can go and then colonize the best world available and build re-supply first on those.

I also always colonize the best planet in my home system on turn 5 and build a space yard so that it will be ready as soon as the e-build rate on my home system is burned out.

I don't build a single a combat ship until I find an enemy.

Also in the early game I always optimize surveying by doing it manually.

[Captain Kwok]

What I do with my explorer ships is to a quick round the sun trip in a new system and then towards the nearest suspected warp point. Afterwards when I've colonized one of the planets a second ship will arrive to survey the system (which will work almost always perfectly in this circumstance) with a move order to the colonized planet afterwards where it can re-stock and move to the next partially scouted system.

[RonGianti]

The first thing I do, is research a couple levels in Small hull ship tech, Sensors and Ion Engines.

Then I build as many colonizers as fast as I can, usually using the Emergency build Queue setting.

I never, ever colonize a planet in the early game unless its got a breathable atmosphere. If you waste a colonizer on a planet that only gives you 5 facilitys (or 1!!) you will miss out on a planet in a nearby system with 15, 20 or even 25 facilitys, which your neighbors will then get while you were colonizing a moon... Somewhere around turn 15 - 20, if you check the status of other races, it says you have about the same number of planets, but thats misleading. Their planets are fully developed, because they colonize everything. Your planets are still building facilitys and your economic and research potential is growing long afterwards.

I keep upgrading the sensors and engines, upgrading the colonizer ships, so they can see more and go farther, only colonizing breathable atmospheres.

I keep doing this until either 1. I have colonized and claimed every system between myself and my neighbors and carved out an empire, or 2. I run across a megalomaniac that will not have a treaty with me and I think we're heading to war. By the time either of these happens, I usually have a good lead in quality planets and a good buffer of systems in the "outer rim" that can protect my homeworld.

If you can keep the peace after your borders are solid, then I go back and colonize the medium and larger, non-breathable atmospheres.

Preparing for an early war by building FG's before you have explored is a big mistake, imho. You may have to travel through many juicy systems, filled with 20+ facility planets that are basically FREE, to find a well defended system that you will need to fight to the teeth for.

j/m .02