Overall Strategy and Massive Confusion

[MikeRMcCartney]

I'm still in the process of playing my very first game. I'm at turn 130, with a small empire (51 planets), and only a couple of dozen ships. My problem is that, even though my empire is small, I have a hard time maintaining my overall strategy, ship movement, troop movement, population movement, and so on. I only get to play about 3 or 4 times a week, and when I get back to play, I can't remember what I had my fleets doing. What do you guys do to maintain your strategy? I read about some of you playing multiple games at one time, you must have some trick to keeping it all straight. Thanks for any help.

[Puke]

for moving population, there are a couple things. some people just dont do it. other people trust the AI minister for population transports and colonization. if you want to do it all your self (manage different races for breathing different atmospheres and such) then it helps to give long orders rather than changing the ships order on each leg of the trip. tell it to go somewhere, pickup, go somewhere else, dropoff. then, you can scroll through the ship list each turn and look for ships without orders, and give them somewhere to go.

for fleets, NAME them something meaningful, and only use a couple fleets per front. station the fleet at a training planet or at a rally point, and send new builds there as soon as they roll out of the factory. once a ship gets to the rally point, you know its supposed to be in the fleet. once the fleet is big enough, send it on its way.

if you want to manage production yards better without wondering which system is supposed to be supporting which front, try renaming your spaceyards and construction bases in a similar manner as your fleets. that way they will all sort out in the construction list and you can have them build whatever is needed on their front without wondering where they are and how close they are to the appropriate fleet.

i find the hardest part is keeping tract of other human players, and remembering who you had made which deals with. especially when two empires in different games use the same race picture and shipset. for this, there is no help that i have found.

back in the VGA Planets days, we used to keep wall-chart printouts of the galaxy map and stick pins in it here and there, as well as a notepad of friendly-codes for each game / empire / ally. you think SE4 is hard to keep track of!

[capnq]

When my plans start to get complicated, I keep written notes, with each game on a separate sheet of paper. I keep track of the sheets by labelling them with the same name as the save game file.

[Skulky]

I have abotu 6 games i am activly involved with in addition to the homeworld and awakening scenarios. I have trouble remembering human relations sometimes, especially if it is the same player from game to game. I take notes on paper, and you can add notes to systems in the map window, not too useful though. Remember renaming your planet is not too great with humans, if they are ancient they will seee the rename and know where you are, and even if they aren't and can see the planet they willknow more about youempire. fleet renaming is good, ships names are seen, classes arn't. Also, use waypoints as much as possible for rallying forces, they are a lifesaver for organization...does anyone know if you can send all ships built at X planet to Y waypoint?

[Phoenix-D]

Yes, you can. It's on the same screen you set things to be built at.

Phoenix-D

[BeeDee10]

If you are worried about other human players figuring out what your ships and planets are being used for based on their names, then I'd suggest coming up with a naming system which is _personally_ meaningful but which would be somewhat cryptic to someone else. For example, in one particular game I've been giving my colony ship classes letter designations; the "Colonizer C" class is for ice planets (after "cryogenic"), the "Colonizer H" class is for gas giants (after "Hydrogen"), and the "Colonizer L" class is for rock ("Lithosphere"). The next time I upgraded my colonizer designs, however, I switched them all around; rock colonizers became "Colonizer G" class (for "ground").

You can even go beyond cryptic and actively mislead a human opponent with names. Give your colonies suffixes like "mil" or "sci" or "stor", but instead of having mil be military bases, sci be science worlds and stor be storage worlds, have sci be the storage worlds, mil be the science worlds, and stor be the military worlds. Of course you'd have to keep track of this; keep notes.

That's the number-one biggest thing. Keep notes. I've got one game which is on turn 120 where I've got a 500KB text file that contains every diplomatic message I've sent or recieved; it's easy to search for the names of systems to find out who promised you what and when. You can also keep notes on a system-by-system basis within the game itself by using the built-in map, but I haven't found that as useful; I keep forgetting to refer to it. Making a habit out of it would probably help, but I think it's just too hard to search them easily.

If one of your neighbors is the Crystal Mentality, don't start producing warships with a class named "Crystal Breaker." Alternately, go ahead and name them "Crystal Breaker" if your _real_ target is actually the Rhodon Network which lies right next to the Crystal Mentality's space (you might want to let the Crystal Mentality know about this ahead of time, though, or it might draw erroneous conclusions). The Rhodon Network's scouts will see them and perhaps start massing its forces along the Crystal Mentality's border in order to scoop up some territory because they think you're going to hit them instead, leaving their border with you wide open.

If you act dumb, a lot of players will assume you _are_ dumb. You can exploit this.

But I digress. Keep notes.

[Phoenix-D]

More screw-with-people's-heads:

Every ship built has a default name of ShipClass #ofshipsbuilt

Try renaming the fleet you send into enemy territory upwards. If, say, your attack class was named Bat, and your ships were:
Bat 003
Bat 004
Bat 005

rename them

Bat 020
Bat 021
Bat 022

Also remember that you can make colony ships out of ANY ship class. Do that, and then rename them to look like an attack ship; rename a *real* attack ship to look like a colony ship. Your opponent can't see fleet names, and in order to see ship classes he has to click on the ship itself and check it out.

Phoenix-D

[Gryphin]

Ahh, the "Art of Misdirection" and "If you want to hide something, leave it in the open". I call it Physc Warfare.

For notes I use "Notepad". You can put each game in a separate folder and keep multible notepad files there.

I'd mention my method of misdirection but Growltigga migh read this. Er: then again, this might be misdirection. < bemused grin >

[MikeRMcCartney]

Right now I am only playing against AI, but these suggestions sound great for when I do start to play against humans. Thanks. I've seen a couple of people mention keeping notes, either electronically or on paper, and was wondering how you organized them so they were useful? Do you organize by system or fleet or date? Could anyone post a sample (Unclassified of course), that showed an example?

[Gryphin]

Growtigga: Heads up!
The key to most strategic victories are:
Concentration of Effort, Ecconmy of Force, Mobility, and Flexibilty. (Addapted and modified ro game terms from Zun Sue The Art of War and a US Army Training Manuel)

Like you, at the moment I only play against the AI, but sometime soon, Growltigga and I hope to have a trans Atlantic game going, (PBEM).

My notes are mostly kept in separate files:
Specific to the current game
Apply to SE IV game mechanics.
Possible Strategies
Possible Tactics
Surprises
AI Behavior

Within the "Current Game"
It has always been my experiance that changing strategies part way though any endevor can be a big mistake are requires signifigant analasys before doing so. This does not mean you should not take the time to develop Point Defence Cannons if you run into a race using fighters or Cap Shp Mis,
Selected Global Strategy, IE: How I intend to "$X" the game as well as any details such as Facillities, Tech Trees I intend to complete in what order.
I tend to organize by "Front"
Then Solar Systems within the Front
Notes specific to AI actions and my intentions.

There is much more, but over all, it will be determined by your developping "Play Style".
Enjoy