To Explore or not to Explore, that is the question

Kruelgor the Great

Join Date 02/2008

To Explore or not to Explore, that is the question

(NOTE: If you're an LRM spammer and you're looking to win the game within the first 20 minutes, and need to know the location of the enemy home planet then ignore the following)

After playing more of the game, I'm even more convinced that scouting in the INITIAL PHASES of the game is completely irrelevant. Instead, my goal is to capture all the immediate surrounding planets as quickly as possible.

The first ships I build are colonizers. The number of colonizers I build depends on how many surrounding planets are around my base planet. They need time to build up antimatter, so build these ships first. I also build the most powerful capital ship (not mother) and light frigates.

Within the first 5 to 6 minutes of the game, I have built the largest fleet possible allowed by the initial crew points. I then invade a planet (any planet). I lose very few frigates since I'm attacking with a relatively large initial fleet.

With this method, I can capture 3 surrounding planets in less than 15 minutes while keeping my casualties very low.

In the early phase of the game, there is no need to waste time or resources on scout ships if your goal is to simply capture the surrounding planets in a hurry.

This is with game speed set on FAST.

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You might be right that my quick expansion strategy would be ideal for games against the AI, and less ideal for multiplayer games. If they do indeed attack within the first 3 minutes then you're right.

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Well, if you play against someone who doesn't want to attack within the first half of the game, i could see the strat working. But in that case, what's the problem with wasting a couple seconds building scouts? You either have a fast attack (in which case you get caught with your pants down) or you have a long buildup period, and scouts aren't going to hurt much.

And i think you were underestimating your times a little: 2 colony ships take more than 3 seconds to build (maybe you meant you start them building in three seconds?) and are you building extractors on your first planet? They take a long time. If you start with two labs and not extractors, the lack of metal and crystal is going to be enourmous (far more than the expense in credits and time for scouts).

And about taking all the planets around you: 6 frigs isn't going to take a heavily fortified desert or terran. If you jump to one of them, you loose your fleet and all those resources. I always take the asteroid around my capitol first because at that stage of the game, my fleet is as weak as it will ever be.

I understand what you're trying to do, and I can see how, if you luck out, it could work (i still don't see how you take all the planets around you with 6 frigs...), but it's extreemely hit or miss--i would guess mostly miss. And you also seem kind of bipolar about the philosophy behind it: you shun the idea of waisting a couple seconds on scouts, but don't care that your warping colony frigs will take a long time to build up the anti-matter to colonize one planet after another. (I find the colony cap a much fast alternative.)

But I think a replay would explain more than just words. Just blowing off our objections doesn't help much: actual numbers/relays are nice.

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And I'm actually rather fond of the name. Totally over the top.

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So Kruelgor the Great, you claim you win a lot of multiplayer? Because if you think your strategies are great and ally ou do is singleplayer, then I got news for you. AI is not even close to actual player. I can use any crazy strat I want and still win. It doesn't mean that my strategy is any good vs a Human.

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I mean this in the most respectful way possible; Krueglor the Great is a complete tool and his posts are to be regarded as the digital dribblings of a mouth breathing mongoloid.

In other news: scout ships are cheap and mom always said, "look before you leap" for a damn good reason.

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Early game scouts are THE most cost effective unit in the game. Since I started using a scout or two to harass early buildings, I think my record is about 4,000cr +metal and crystal in damage to my enemy...with one scout. I am still really proud of this strategy and have yet to see anyone I have played with use it (the good players learn really quick and try to do it back, but I know how to avoid it

) What do most people do on their first couple planets? They queue up a bunch of buildings, but only have one constructor. Your lone scout and kill anything at 0% with 1 shot. If you have 2 scouts you can kill constructors and colony ships if the enemy doesn't come stop you. Constructors take a long time to replace and colony ships are expensive and important in the early game.

For 400 cr you can inflict massive losses of time or resources on your oppenent and they have to pick which one they are willing to lose. As a bonus you can see the map, which way they are clearing, what capital ship they have and what their lab count is.

I feel like I have opened Pandora's box by using this strategy.

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When you're a juggernaut, there is no need to "look before you leap". Haha...

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You just made me realize something. I've been playing against a Fortification AI.

Well that explains it all. You're intentionally selecting an AI that will sit on its butt and let you expand like a mad fool. You're mumbling a lot about the importance of timing, but clearly timing isn't a huge part of your strategy. It doesn't matter if you're holding 10 worlds at the 15 minute mark or at the 15.25 mark. Getting scouts has nothing to do with enabling or disabling your strat.

A couple other reasons why I think you're off-base:

1) Even your crazy strat would benefit from 1 to 2 scouts. Your 6 frigs WILL lose if your first jump is into a heavily defended system like most terran or deserts. The 200 to 400 credits WILL NOT matter from how you've described your build.

2) You're not taking advantage of your free cap. Your 6 frigates aren't equal to one front-line cap in any comparison in either cost or combat-effectiveness. Hell, a colonizer cap would save you 1 of your two colony frigs. Building a cap yard (and then salvaging it) will result in a more effective strategy and BETTER timing, unless you happen to dumb-luck guess ice or volcanic for your first jump (very rare). Hell most of the time, those two early labs aren't going to matter until your 3rd or 4th jump. The odds are you'll hit asteroid, dead system, terran, desert, or wrong enviroment rather than that precise one you happened to BLIND research. Frankly this supports going with scout(s).

Overall, you've dropped scouts as some sort of perceived benefit to your early expansion strat (allowed by playing against fortifiers) when the two really aren't mutually exclusive, at all. Rather, you'd BENEFIT from a scout.

My conclusion? You're the type that starts games and drops them if they don't happen to go EXACTLY your way for the first couple of jumps. Then all you remember is all those times your wonderful blind strategy worked.

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When you're a juggernaut, there is no need to "look before you leap". Haha...

Watch this next game he plays his fleet ends up 6 jumps from the nemies homeworld and another 6 from his and his under attack.

Note this post cannot be held responsible for exact numbers and dates.

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Oh no! 200 credits and 5 seconds lost! It makes all the difference! I must be poised at the edge of my seat the entire game and plan every mouse movement out so it requires the least amount of time to get there!
Oh Nooooo!

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Oh Nooooo!

The way you wrote that made me chuckle

-Stick

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I'm hoping Kruelgor the Great's plan fails, last thing we need is for the Koreans to be able to do a zealot rush they are so damn good it.

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I went and tried this. I call BS. You're not even playing the strat you describe given the long wait times I experienced. I played a small 1v1, normal speed/tech against a fortifier. Here's how it starts. Note that you never mentioned your extractors. I tried adding them in at the end, and that went so badly I won't bother reporting on it. In this case, I build them up front. Here's the build (as you described) with some mods I had to do (buy/sell) to make it happen:

Queue 1 crystal, 2 metal extractors.
Queue 2 colonizers.
Buy 200 crystal, sell 100 metal
Queue 2 research labs.
Wait for $$$
Mark volcano/ice for research.
Build 6 frigates as $$$ money allows.

From start to end, this takes 6:15 with a lot of dead time in between. At the end of that you have a fleet that could not survive a fight against the force on a terran or desert world (I tried) and will take 3-4 losses against a volcano/ice world. Note that that costs more than 2 scouts. Income is 10.1/0.9/0.5

Consider this badly optimized strat:

Queue 1 crystal, 2 metal extractors.
2 Scouts
Build civilian infrastructure on homeworld
Buy 200 crystal
Queue Cap ship factory
Queue civilian research station
Set scouts to auto-explore
Research Deep Core Metal Mining
Build Cap ship (Akkan)
Research Deep Core 2
Buy 100 Crystal
Send Akkan to asteroid...only 2 defenders
Akkon kills siege ship
Colonize, build civilian infrastructure
Akkon kills remaining ship

At 6:15 The Akkon was about to kill the siege ship. Income was up to 11/s and climbing because of the population growth on my homeworld. After the fight, the Akkon is at 90/200 experience and no losses have been experienced. After colonizing the first planet (and buying civilian infrastructure, for which I had the money), income will continue to rise. I also know roughly 10 planets because of the scouts, including where the pirate base is (which is important as they always head straight to you) so I can plan my defense, if required. My next two colonies are already clear.

While your strat can get lucky if you don't try and take a larger planet, overall you wind up behind and blind. With scouts, you're guaranteed to take on an easier adversary. You're colonizing faster, and those resources that you used to research colonizing are now being used for better overall development which will put you in a better spot to do that research down the road. This strat can also be adapted to build two trade centers early on if you prefer over the metal research.

I've done the math. I call BS.

Tea

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in any RTS game, scouts are VERY important. that is why they're there in the first place. don't listen to kruelgor or how great he claims to be, cos i'm pretty sure his strat will fail once he gets out of his 1v1 3-planet 2-asteriod 1-pirate base map.

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Dude, just make like 2 or 3 scout ships, right click auto-explore and be done with it. Soon you'll have the entire map scouted out, with a minimum of effort and resources spent.

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You all got some pretty good feedback.However, I disagree. I'm way past you.First, I totally skip scouting.Second, I immediately build two colonizer ships. This gives them time to build up anti-matter for the colonizing process. (3 seconds into game)Next, I build 2 research labs and begin researching colonization of the different planets right away. (10 seconds into game)Next, I put 6 frigates into the production queue. (20 seconds into game)When the 6 frigates are ready then are you ready to capture your first planet. Your colonization ship will have enough anti-matter for colonization. Go into any planet of your choosing and WAM! You got it.Now, do the same thing with the second colonizing ship you already built. It will also have enough anti-matter by this point. Use the same 6 frigates you already built. You may have lost 2 of the frigates by this point, so build 2 more while you're attacking your first planet.Also, by this point you have already discovered the technology to inhabit the different types of planets.So basically, as quickly as you can build the 2 colonizing ships and 6 frigates then you can conquer two planets fast. Very FAST!

So you just don't build your cap ship till when...?

Quality over quantity my friend. While you waste money colonising volcanic and ice planets, I'm upgrading my one desert planet that will produce more income than both those planets combine. I always wait till last to colonise ice/volcanic planets unless I seriously need metal or crystal. Both of those techs cost 600 credits, 50 metal and 100 crystal each. Thats 1200, 100 and 200. With that kind of cash I can colonise one desert planet, upgrade its population 2 points and chances are I'll have enough for 2 trade centers if I colonised an asteroid first. That desert planet will make more income than an ice and volcanic put together with only half as much metal and crystal production. This will be playing as TEC.

1 scout costs 200 credits. That is seriously not going to hurt your start, in any way shape or form. Plus since this game is pretty slow, your initial build order isn't nearly as important as it is in say, supreme commander.

Like I said, quality, not quantity.

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Stupid. I need to know what planets to send my huge cap to (ice, terran) and which ones to send 3 light frigates to (asteroids, anything with one siege and one light). If I don't scout, I lose time and end up mis-matching my forces.

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Krueglor's strategy reminds me of Civ style "ICE".

It's a nice strategy, if you have plenty of room and no pressing opponents. (I include pirates in that equation). Take away that safety and buffer zone, though, and as has been dissected earlier in the thread, the colony rush fails miserably.

At the very least, getting the cap ship up as soon as possible is always a must for me.

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What I usually do is capture the 2 surrounding star systems FIRST. Then, send scouts out. Like other strat type games you wanna have a perimeter around your home area. After you explore you have a better sense of where you want to colonize to cause bottlenecks while expanding. By the time those scouts get 3 jumps ahead you have a general idea where your going to send your front line fleets.

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After testing this about 6 times last night, capturing the two adjacent systems is almost always a bad idea. For example, if you have:

D-V-TH-A-T

D=Desert V=Volcano TH=Terran Homeworld A=Asteroid T=Terran

surrounding you, then you would likely be better served colonizing the desert planet before the volcano. The "buffer" volcano problem may not actually be much help in your defense depending on the actual location of enemies and pirates. Moreover, it will cost so much to settle that you will likely be ill able to defend it anyway.

Scouting around to know the lay of the land will generally always pay for itself.

Tea

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Information is power. Every war man has done, shows this.

Ok you colonize two planets, but you have no ships at all. 6 frigates wont stop a Kol. Your cristal is low, you have to sell your metal, and for what?
In a big map were enemy is not near, i think is big mistake. 1v1 maybe to get a faster star than the other. If the other did not build with the time and money you speended a Cap and some frigates.

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When you're a juggernaut, there is no need to "look before you leap". Haha...

6 frigs and 1 colony ship does not a juggernaut make.

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Voqar

Join Date 03/2003

+21

There have been several threads telling people what to build first that are almost always exactly the same.

So, expect to be criticized for doing anything against the status quo.

I like to build scouts and an early cap ship but who frickin cares if someone else has found success doing something else, especially if it has nothing to do with multiplayer!

The game *does* have a single player capacity. I personally will never play this game MP - it just doesn't appeal to me for a host of reasons that boil down to it just not being fun for me, and reading posts every day here from people who do play MP only further makes me want to avoid it like the plague.

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You are all right and have provided some great advice/feedback.

I'm not sure if this is good or not, but I'm sure with experience I can get better at it, but it takes me 20 minutes to colonize 4 planets, have them cleared out of enemy units, 1 capital ship, and 10 frigates.

By the way, unless you missed it in the original post. This is a strategy just for the beginning phase of the game. I'm not talking about disregarding scouting all together. I'm just talking about the first 10 to 20 minutes of the game.

I am still fine tuning my "beginning phase" strategy. I'm still not using scout ships though, and am not scouting the nearby planets. I have changed what I build and in what sequence though.

I build a capital ship factory first, then the metal/crystal mines. (This allows me to get the capital ship out asap).

With the frigate factory, I use up all my fleet points by first building a colonizer, then all fighter frigates and another colonizer as the last ship.

I then have a capital ship and 8 or 9 fighter frigates ready to invade a random planet at 4 minutes and something. I send in the colonizer ship after the planet is cleared out of enemy. I'm replenshing my fleet while it is fighting always keeping my available crew at zero. After the first planet is cleared out, I immediately attack a second planet system and I use the second colonizer ship I built earlier to populate it.

This is all experimental for sure, and it's probably not much different from most other players.

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You are all right and have provided some great advice/feedback.I'm not sure if this is good or not, but I'm sure with experience I can get better at it, but it takes me 20 minutes to colonize 4 planets, have them cleared out of enemy units, 1 capital ship, and 10 frigates.By the way, unless you missed it in the original post. This is a strategy just for the beginning phase of the game. I'm not talking about disregarding scouting all together. I'm just talking about the first 10 to 20 minutes of the game.I am still fine tuning my "beginning phase" strategy. I'm still not using scout ships though, and am not scouting the nearby planets. I have changed what I build and in what sequence though.I build a capital ship factory first, then the metal/crystal mines. (This allows me to get the capital ship out asap).With the frigate factory, I use up all my fleet points by first building a colonizer, then all fighter frigates and another colonizer as the last ship.I then have a capital ship and 8 or 9 fighter frigates ready to invade a random planet at 4 minutes and something. I send in the colonizer ship after the planet is cleared out of enemy. I'm replenshing my fleet while it is fighting always keeping my available crew at zero. After the first planet is cleared out, I immediately attack a second planet system and I use the second colonizer ship I built earlier to populate it.This is all experimental for sure, and it's probably not much different from most other players.

While a more "standard" build, the above STILL doesn't explain WHY you're skipping scouts. You're skipping scouts we understand that, but there really is no reason to, given what you've described.

It all comes down to one issue: cost/benefit of a single scout at the start. Just two examples of why even the above build is MUCH better with 1 scout (which will, AT MOST, set you back about 30 seconds).

1) If that first jump is into a dead system, you've lost AT LEAST several minutes, right there.

2) You're literally wasting time waiting for 1 cap and 8 to 9 fighters, because you don't know what's on the other side. If your scout identifies an asteroid, no NEED to wait for all frigates to build. Jump the cap only, followed by the colonizer.

So with scouts, your strategy is IMPROVED. Your essentially taking a handicap under the guise that a scout prohibits your strategy, which IS NOT the case.

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