Early war is too difficult

[Kuciwalker]

It seems to me that the early offensive ships are too weak. Just a little bit after I get starfighters (yes, I'm at least on par with the AI in tech, usually above), BATTLEAXES come out! There's no way to take a system defended by the with just starfighters and corvettes!

[Garret OneEye]

Just curious, what level are you playing at?

At the crippling level of difficulty, I'm finding that you cannot sustain an offensive in the early game: your goals must be limited to terrorizing Colony ships/Constructors and maybe getting a couple or three planets from your not-to-distant neighbors. Usually the AI just has Defenders guarding his planets in the early game and they can be defeated with a relative small Fighter force. But you're right in that once BattleAxes arrive, its time to back off & dig in. The delay to get to Battle Cruisers is just too long to maintain any offensive momentum. Actually, I think this is pretty well balanced in that you cannot really 'rush' to win the game; early rushing is a valid strategy for some situations and can net you some positive things, but at the cost of lagging in the economic arena. Personally, I'm struggling with finding the right balance of quick attack vs. getting back to building empire infrastructure. At the crippling level, the economic cost is really hurting me; I can't seem to catch back up.

I don't know if the above holds true at lower difficulty levels, but I imagine it's about the same other than the economic penalty not being as difficult to overcome.

[Kuciwalker]

These are my first two-three games, so I'm on the default difficulty.

I've found that when Defender's guard a planet, I need to wait for Corvettes. My starfighters just impale themselves.

I think this goes beyond simply rushing; I can't mount any sort of offensive at all.

[Harry Seldon]

I almost never begin an offensive until I can start producing Battleships.

[The Templar]

Originally posted by Harry Seldon
I almost never begin an offensive until I can start producing Battleships.

If I max out my tech options, I can usually get gravity accelerators (a must have!) and Battlehammers before everyone else. At that point I launch my offensive against my nearest weakest neighbor.

Battleships are OK, but I usually prefer to wait for Drednoughts to begin replacing my battlehammers. This works especially well whne you guard your systems with military module heavy starbases. They greatly enhance the defensive lifespan of battlehammers.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Early war isn't too difficult if you have the right goals.

If you plink colony ships, constructors and freighters, and halt the enemy's expansion while continuing your own, you gain enough of an advantage that it's easy to finish him off. Or just build starbases in his sectors and add cultural improvements and take his planets whole, with the enemy having paid for all that development instead of you paying for ships to take it, etc.

If I can spend less resources early and contain an enemy so I can harvest him at my convenience, that's fine with me, because there's always other enemies out there.

Another way to approach the problem (especially on larger galaxies) is to get 3-4 survey ships out hunting anomolies and getting all those little 1% bonuses.

In one huge galaxy game I'm playing, between anomolies, techs and mined resources, I have ~ +300% on weapons and defense, and +60% on hitpoints.

My original survey ship also has 118 HP, a modified attack of 47, defense of 96, and I lost track of how many ship kills it has. It can clear out entire sectors singlehanded, and successfully took out four enemy dreadnaughts and a ranger over two single turns.