Basic Rush

I've been playing a few games against one of my friends recently and he always seems to kick my arse. He told me what he does is he just colonizes a planet, upgrades infrastructure once, builds mines and moves on - and spends the rest of his income on basic units. I can fight him off for a little while but eventually he has an fleet of equal size to me with more planets, though I've had some research done and my planets are a bit better developed. Anyway, he has me at a deadlock and he can just build up an economy while matching me unit for unit.

Can anything beat this strategy?

strategy

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He's not running a strategy, not really -- he's playing "simply". If he's building only light frigates he's really easy to beat.

Examine a replay of one of your games and watch it from his point of view. How does he scout? How does he expand? Does he build a Colony Cap or a War Cap? Does he build Civ Labs first of War Labs?

First off, SCOUT. SCOUT SCOUT SCOUT. Build 3 scouts at the start and use them to find him and the worlds around him and KEEP scouting those worlds. You should do this manually. Never autoscout.

See my post here for more on how to start out.

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It's called eXpanding. Depending on the map size, this tactic will either be effective, or a game winner normally. On smaller maps there are so few planets that siezing them early is cruicial (and getting the infrastructure upgrade quickly). You have to realize, teching up has a pay off time, until that time is met you spent more on teching than you got in benefits out of it.

It sounds like you're teching too early, losing too many planets, and then he has a greater econamy than you (from expanding quicker) and is able to overwhelm you.

Generally speaking, you have to get out and grab more territory asap since this is how you increase your income and ability to produce a fleet/tech up. Often times sacrificng an early expansion for a early tech can be fatal since you don't live long enough for it to pay off.

In any case, I would advise expanding quicker, but if that's something you don't want to do, then you could also try to expand and then secure your planets using some defences (Not neccesarily turrets, more like repair platforms+a couple of turrets+your fleet, which can normally hold off a bigger fleet due to the assistance from your turrets and repair platforms).

So in short, depending on the size of the map, producing large numbers of basic units(I'm mainly refferring to some light frigates and then plenty of LRM's) is probably going to be a must. You must sieze territory to live.

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Build a few military structures and get your LRM/Illum/Assailiants up. Don't waste much in the way of basic units before you get a planet. Your cap can cap the nearby roids by themselves so that'll free up a little income for the military structures. Also, scuttle your cap ship factory after you build your first cap, it sounds crazy but it really helps out with that extra income early on in the game. You really shouldn't need to cap more than 1 or 2 extra planets in order to get to the ships mentioned above. After that spamming those ships will give you the advantage against the ships you mentioned above. Continue to do your planet upgrades, your income after awhile will over-take his. Eventually he might actually go negative with the fleet capacity at higher levels. Don't waste much in the way of research for military (aside from ships) until you get a much larger fleet. This is one reason that upgrading ships strengths is not a good factor early game because you won't gain as much extra damage as making a new ship.

The only other solution that I have for you is to beat him to the planets or take them out earlier because I doubt he's doing the health upgrades if he's just taking them and moving on.

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