Gameplay - Wars & Early Aggression

Always make sure your Fleet Strength is 'Equivalent' to your neighbors



Always fight next to spaceports



Do not lose your main fleet at any cost



Build defensive armies on every planet

Defensive Wars:

Offensive Wars & Early Aggression

Eliminating a bordering empire threat



Eliminating a bordering rival that has the potential to form a defensive treaty with another nearby empire against you



Expanding your borders



Crippling a growing, nearby empire that may pose danger in the near-future

Researching the mining drone laser tech.

This is done by scouting the galaxy for mining drones, destroying them and salvaging their debris. Mining lasers are EXTREMELY potent at melting down spaceports. They are pretty common so one should encounter them in the majority of the cases





This is done by scouting the galaxy for mining drones, destroying them and salvaging their debris. Mining lasers are EXTREMELY potent at melting down spaceports. They are pretty common so one should encounter them in the majority of the cases Destroyers, provide great firepower vs spaceports.





Early plasma weapons, sometimes you will get lucky and will get the plasma tech really early, this will pave the road to an easy domination very quickly.

Vassalize



Conquering planets

In some games you will happen upon a peaceful start, where you can expand to your hearts desire without any conflict or strife, or any pesky neighbors.In other cases (the majority of them), all hell will break loose on you very quickly.This brings us to the subject of wars.The best way to understand and fight a war is to adopt and work by the following fundamentals,Each will be discussed and explained in detail:A common balance of power between your fleet and the AI fleet on a 'hard' difficulty game:Defensive wars are wars where an AI empire has declared war on you, in this case, you are the defender and they are the aggressor.In the early game, especially in higher difficulties, you will face overwhelming odds and getting declared by 2-3 empires at the same time (as seen in the picture above) is very common. The way to see war coming as FP is very simple: When two neighbors or more, sign a defensive treaty between them, you can be sure that the declaration of war is soon to follow.There is a very easy way to know if your prepared to fight them, or if you are going to have a really bad time:Make sure that your Fleet Strength and your neighbors are always 'equivalent', as long as it is, you stand a good chance to beat them back with a little help by your best 'friends' in the early game. If its 'Superior'....then you better start pumping those corvettes REAL fast.Those 'friends' mentioned above are spaceports, make sure every planet has a spaceport! Spaceports are EXTREMELY important in the early game, as they can hold an entire force of corvettes by themselves and stop early aggression attempts dead on their tracks. ALWAYS fight near space ports, and when the enemy fleet approaches it, make sure your fleet isthe spaceport, so it will get the majority of the fire and not your fleet. This will maximize casualties on the enemy fleet and minimize yours.Sometimes, its better to push to 20% warscore and immediately force white peace. The AI mostly expands fast, but doesn't have the minerals to build spaceports around each planet. Look for those planets and capture them during early wars, capturing even one will almost always push you above 20% warscore. If you lack the weapons and means to assault enemy spaceports, then don't, its better to take those 10 years to breath and build up rather then losing a majority of your fleet for nothing.Rebuilding fleets in the early game is difficult and can really screw up your expansion and economy.Never fight an equal fleet head on in the early game, remember the Retreat button and fight only in favorable engagements. Losing your fleet can cause to catastrophic snowballing as you can get even more declaration of wars by other empires that now see an opportunity for an easy grab.Sometimes you will get attacked in two places at the same time and cannot defend, no matter what, as you only have one fleet. This is where defensive armies come into the picture. Yes, yes, its THOSE armies that nobody even bother building or remembering that they even exist. Defensive armies are VERY important to prevent planet capture even when the enemy fleet took your spaceport down. Don't forget that the FP bonuses to army damage also apply to defensive armies, that makes them very powerful and hard to take down.Also make sure to add attachments to them! Stopping an invasion force will cripple the enemy momentum and give you a nice chance to counterattack enemy systems while the enemy fleet is sitting aimlessy at the orbit of your planet.Generally speaking, going to war isn't a good thing, it forces you to invest minerals into building more ships and armies, away from expansion and economy building, overall war isn't healty for your economy.One doesn't simply go to war without reason, more so in the early game.You need to consider a worthy goal or objective to accomplish in order to make the best of it.Here are some notable reason to declare a war:Its very easy to overwhelm lone empires as FP, and as such its important to look for those opportunities to cripple your neighbors before they get the chance to expand or find allies.When one or more of those goals are met, you have a good reason to go to war.FP empires are the best empires when it comes to early war aggression. Especially when dealing with lone empires. The main challenge though is to overcome enemy spaceports. The best ways to deal with spaceports as early as possible are:When going into an offensive war early in the game, you have several options for the war goals:Vassalizing is very important early on, because empires are small and the war goal cost to vassalize them is relatively low, whats more, by vassalizing an empire you take it out of the picture and eliminate a threat, allowing you to focus your efforts somewhere else, at any point you can integrate them and then purge them when you feel like they served their purpose in life.Conquering their planets will put a big strain on your economy as it can push your core planets over the cap, so mass-conquering systems early isn't healthy for your economy. Also, you can always choose when to integrate you vassals and purge them from the galaxy.When vassalization isn't possible, you should target their highest pop planets in order to cripple the empire, taking those planets, like their capital and purging them, will greatly set back that empire and will allow you to start snowballing on them on the following wars, also more pops to purge = more unity gained.If you have no plans to colonize their planets and just planing to purge their population, manually destroy their structures as you pay upkeep from your coffers as long as they are up.Finally, you can choose to expand into captured worlds (if they are the same prefered systems as yours) by resetling one of your existing pops into the planet.Make sure you do so before the planet is completely purged as this will de-colonize it and will destroy all existing tile building on it.When purging its best to set purging to 'processing' as the boost to food income allows you to fill planets faster and boost your expansion potential. However if you want to just remove a specie as fast as possible, select extermination.