Tips for overall play, Singeplayer and Multiplayer?

Invent trade, culture, ice and volcanic colonization and forget about civilian tree for a longer while.

Singleplayer wise a balance is good. Getting Hanger D is pretty much essential - Depending on how many AI and planets there are, aim for the 'average' number and then fortify. The AI gets worse the longer time goes on.

I tend to be a bit more of a Civilian techie man myself, but after getting a few 'key' techs (For example, the "Invasive Economy" tech as TEC - swap to military and ignore all the 'useless' techs in the Civi tree.

I just picked this game up a few days ago. I've played through 1.5 games. The first time I lost pretty handily. I'm moving along nicely on the second game.

Regarding the Hanger defense:
1. How many should I build around each planet?

2. Which is better for defense? Bombers or Fighters? How is this determined?

Thanks!

I usually use about 1:3 or 1:4 ratio for fighters:bombers. I would suggest not building hangers on every planet because of the resource cost. Try to pick some planets that are on the front line or that are choke points and put them there. Good luck.

My only real suggestions are: Race to the trade port tech, improve resource gather rates, and ALWAYS FOCUS ON CHOKE POINTS!!! If you focus on fortifying bottlenecks and save resources for a balanced fleet, the AI usually can't hold you back. As far as military techs go, I personally improve shielding and hull strength as they apply to nearly every unit. I only improve weapons once I'm confident I've properly improved the survivability of my investments.

For tech, it does depend on your race. I play Advent and the tier 3 ships and the disciple leeching ability are big upgrades.

As for hanger defense, I'm not sure I agree with the 1:3 or 1:4 fighter:bomber ratio. If you are playing the AI, it likes to bring a lot of siege and fighters do a much, much better job. Turrets are good at keeping the non-siege busy and give you enough time to bring your defensive fleet. The important thing is stopping the AI siege from killing off your planet first.

You can't field much of a fleet without a strong economy. Then again, you can't build a strong economy without 'convincing' planets to join your cause. You get a lot more mileage from adding planets than researching economics though, except trade ports and colonize all planets abilities.

Multiplayer and single player are very different. The AI will not: cruise around your choke points to 'inner worlds', build much of an economy, build varied fleets, build much in the way of planetary defenses, use choke points, and a few other things. So, I'd preface questions always with "vs. AI" or "multiplayer", and expect wildly different answers to each.

A lot of the fun in this kind of game is finding the balance you're asking about. Should you try to take on the nearby asteroid with only your starting capital ship? Try it. If you get the answers from the forums you'll have missed a good bit of the fun, at least vs. the AI.

Heh, that's funny, the self-proclaimed "Trader Emergency Coalition" needs to research trade ports before being able to build them.

Anyways, I'd spend most of my early efforts on expanding as fast as possible. As fast as possible being, making sure your arse is covered from potential attacks, and making sure you're upgrading your planet infrastructure so as not to lose money.

Later on in the game, I find it's actually a better idea to find a chokepoint planet, and expand/colonize one planet outwards from it in each direction. As long as you do that, you can park your defensive fleet at that one chokepoint planet (right on the border, ready to phase jump), and quickly jump the ships to the outer planets when enemy fleets arrive. You cover more planets, deny your enemy planets, and they're still easy to defend since they're just one jump away.

I also disagree with the 1:3-4 fighter to bomber ratio.

Fighters excel at hitting light (LRMs, Scout frigates, Seige Frigates, Bombers) armored targets and can be used defensively to take out enemy strike craft.

Bombers are better at hitting medium, capital, heavy, and (especially) very heavy armored craft (heavy assault cruisers, tactical structures)

In SP, some of your biggest threats are seige frigates (pirate and AI player.) In MP, additional major threats are LRM spam (which can hit SD platforms from beyond their range) and carrier strikes (where fighters are useful defensively against the strike craft).

That's why the more common (and IMHO better) advice is a roughly 2:1 ratio of fighters to bombers, but where you expect to hit enemy capital ships in the grav well, increase the bombers.

When you're defending the system, you can manually vector all your fighters onto the seige frigates or LRMs. Essentially, a primary purpose of static defenses is to delay the attacker while you jump in your defensive fleet, and the ability to take out the seige frigates (the only thing besides a capital ship that can, in the early game, take out your colony) is hugely helpful, and the ability to kill passing scouts is just a bonus.