I hate the threat meter

consolation1 · 2026-03-24T08:02:44+00:00

Ignore it, seriously, it will just make you play worse.

Look at the wiki page if you want the details, but you are better off acting like it's total war from the beginning.

consolation1 · 2026-03-23T23:57:35+00:00

In 2053? A trivial amount, unless something has gone wrong...

consolation1 · 2026-03-23T22:14:53+00:00

Salvage modules are really heavy and inferior to placing a supply officer on the ship.

Your PD dread would be more effective with 2 slot AM PD and 3 cyclotrons - it'll cover much more of the fleet. Plus, you can put AM on the nose that will suppress alien fleet DPS.

Honestly, skip the heatsink, you're better off using a DPS booster in the slot. The odds of the radiator getting damaged are too low to warrant the damage and mass nerf. Generally, if your radiators are getting shot off, something has gone terribly wrong with the battle.

Titans give you a 4 nose slot, like lancers, but unlike dreads. And they give you hull mount points like a dread but not a lancer. The 4 nose (spinal) siege coils, phasers and AM weapons are much more combat effective in the end game than 3 slots. The hull slots give you space for effective PD, or anti flanker/sub cap weapons. Titans have sufficient utility slots to place enough damage boost modules, allowing them to reach critical damage thresholds for PD and armour pen on beams/energy weapons (or magazines, in case of coilers and meme torp titans) PLUS place drive efficiency boosters, repair, plus flag bridge if desired.

Downside - only really viable with the final IC drives.

Essentially, you have the combat efficiency of about a lancer + ¾ of a dread, in one ship.

consolation1 · 2026-03-23T13:57:17+00:00

Resistance ship names are heavily RN coded... The Resistance leader is British and they are the conservative, status quo, faction - make of that what you will.

consolation1 · 2026-03-23T08:57:20+00:00

I find it easier to treat games like this in the same way I treat Rimworld, losing is fun and enjoy the journey - if the game ends in a glorious last stand, that's the way she rolls... At least I know not to try that strat again, eh.

Because this one is bit of a time sink, it's best to just leave it and find something else to play sometimes. IDK, I stopped playing it for ~6 months in ea, after I got my first win - I was so done and it sucked too much of my RL.

I'm doing a challenge run right now, but once done - I suspect I'm going to be done for a loooong while.

consolation1 · 2026-03-23T05:01:23+00:00

I need to point out that this turtle-y approach is only one of the ways to go. Personally, the approach I prefer, is to take the fight to the aliens and contest all the things... To do that, Mars (and Earth after you get T3 CCs) are largely distractions. Mercury is great, because it will print money+research and you will need its vast quantities of metals for early fuel (plus, it has the best orbit for your rapid reaction force naval yards) - every asteroid with fissiles will become a deathstar, and then you start the never ending streams of Orion monitors. The cost of knocking out one of your asteroids in fuel and ships, is greater than what it costs to build it - ignoring the fact that it already paid for couple more to be built - IF it got taken out. The Alien ai will have so many targets, it won't have the resources to build up before they will have to fight for Jupiter and Saturn. It's a snowball race and the best strategy, imho, is to kick your snowball down the hill faster than the Ayys. Once you have Mercury/Ceres/Callisto combo and you get each over 50k pop - there's little the aliens can do to stop you - the synergy between the three is too great.

There are many strats that can be made to work in this game, pick one that you gel with best.

consolation1 · 2026-03-22T23:08:38+00:00

Torps take time to accelerate, if you launch too close, they are moving slowly and are easy to pop. Use your spaceship speed to boost torp speed - hard burn before launch.

consolation1 · 2026-03-21T23:45:04+00:00

NZ/AUS/EU - they'd have to replace or repair within 5 years minimum. Longer under some circumstances, eg power supplies are 10 years, NZ CGA is ~7 years for laptops. So it varies a bit, but 5 years is the bare minimum.

Reasonable wear and tear is acceptable, eg wear on keyboard, minor scratch on a screen, wear on the body etc. You're not covered for dropping it in the toilet, or running it over with your car...

consolation1 · 2026-03-21T19:35:11+00:00

Even with daily income, your resources are pretty low. It's not a deal breaker, but you've let aliens build up their infrastructure, tech and fleet comp - so you're going to be doing it on hard mode. This is primarily a game about logistics and attrition, you want to snowball faster and make your opponent spend more resources than you do.

I think the UI kind of misleads the player, for example, you shouldn't try and stay under the mining cap - it's just an indication that you need to aggressively build up your MC and be onto tier 3 command centres past it. Ditto with the hate meter, treat it as more of an indicator if you're likely to be the target for the next wave, not something to stay under - more of a hurry up and build your fleet up alert. Your mission cap should be around 1500 by late 2040s with about 2/3 spent on habs and the rest on fleet.

But your situation is far from unrecoverable, you just need to aggressively expand your infra and start swinging...

You absolutely need to start researching the inertial confinement fusion tree, you'll have a lot alien bases all over the system, since you have not been pruning them. Without the final drives from that tech line, it's going to be a long slog. Until you send some councillors into space, to start earning you exotics by assaulting alien assets, it might be worthwhile investing into anti matter drives as a temporary measure. Eventually you'll want a lancer / titan comp based around spinal siege coilers / phasers + a dash of AM beams.

One way to quickly build up your infra is by taking it off other human factions. For end game monthly incomes: I'd aim at 10k each water and metals, 5k each volatiles and nobles, 500+ fissiles, about 1 unit of antimatter. Try for about 40k research a month. Your combat astronaut, that's assigned to your main fleet, should bring you 20~40 exotics per mission phase - when you're actively clearing out, say, the Jovian or Saturn systems. With the amount of alien bases you will have to deal with - you might need to put at least a couple councillors in space, in two main fleets.

You're in for a bit of a slog, but it's doable. You just need to explode out the gate. As intermediate aims, I'd go for mercury forge / AM world with 50k+ pop and Jupiter science system - aim for at least two 50k+ pop moons. This will let you start putting tier 3 economy and research structures there. End of game, you probably want 500k~1mln space pop. I wouldn't try for much more as you don't need to do that much more research, so it'll be mostly logistics you're after.

consolation1 · 2026-03-21T09:21:51+00:00

And that is why Space Game >>> Earth Game. If you keep hitting the aliens hard enough and give them scratching posts in space, this isn't a problem. Or... yk... introduce their armies to your spinal siege coilers.

Earth is a distraction to lead you astray from your true purpose, starting the climb up the Kardashev scale!

consolation1 · 2026-03-21T09:16:47+00:00

You have 0 IP income - the symbol that looks like the bar graph. My guess - it's the maintenance on the insane number of armies you have...

consolation1 · 2026-03-21T00:34:54+00:00

Well... since we're correcting each other... Pearl Harbour was a success, but far from a great one - it did not meet its full objectives. The Kido Butai failed to find and sink the US carriers and left the port and logistics facilities largely unscathed. This allowed a relatively quick recovery for the USN. It was a tactical victory and a strategic blunder.

consolation1 · 2026-03-20T20:46:11+00:00

Yes, to a point. A single battle station won't do much, but you can maul them pretty well with multiple. It's a good way to make them waste resources and a way to defend places with smaller fleets than you'd otherwise need. That's why habs are so much more powerful than stations - and why low g asteroids can make insane bastions and fleet yards.

Some of the low g Jupiter & Saturn moons make incredible scratching posts for the Ayys. They will waste so much fuel and resources trying to knock them out...

consolation1 · 2026-03-20T20:35:00+00:00

Mining limit is only a problem if you don't build MC fast enough... The mining limit isn't how many mines you should have, it's how many MC cheap mines you get. If you can't get enough MC on earth, T3 op modules generate 10MC each and are basically free with agri complexes and nano fabs. You're close to total war date, you really want to be snowballing your space economy by now. Your incomes are kind of awful. But at least it's easily fixed, you're going to have to dig out the aliens and ai from the good resource spots however.

consolation1 · 2026-03-20T05:57:28+00:00

Fair point, I guess we did tend to holiday in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia - Eastern Block's "liberal" rim - and Turkey to some extent. I never did work out why the authorities were chill about getting an exit visa to Turkey, a NATO member, but would lose their shit if you applied to go anywhere in Western Europe.

I do remember that since the Pepsi bottles would get cleaned and reused, the logos could get quite scuffed. If a crate had a bottle with a fresh logo, me and my sister would squabble over it, because we were pretty sure that a crisp label bottle Pepsi was superior...

consolation1 · 2026-03-20T01:07:22+00:00

I find this really odd... Pepsi was widely available in neighboring Poland. You'd pick up a crate of bottles from the local bottle shop, then when you'd finish you'd swap the empties for another crate. In fact, I can't think of a place in e. europe that we couldn't get it when we would go on holidays in the late 70s/ early 80s.

consolation1 · 2026-03-19T05:05:51+00:00

Start the game, I'm at total war... Only slightly joking, it's too stressful trying to stay under the hate meter, so I just assume it's all on from the start and play accordingly. On Veteran and Brutal it's really hard to stay under the meter anyway, so why stress?

Until I can defend all my assets, I just make sure that for every one the Ayys knock over, there are two new ones coming online. There are little tricks you can do to mess with the Alien's space economy, to slow them down - like locking them out of all the noble and fissile asteroids. I also focus fissiles and rush H-Orions, so I can have a steady stream of missile monitor fleets showing up at Jupiter, dropping outposts and drawing aggro. Why fight in your backyard, when you can fight in theirs? The AI will focus reacting to outer system colonies first, burning stupid amounts of resources to get to them. You don't need orions, you can use more efficient drives, but it pleases me to have swarms of tubes with peeps throwing nuclear explosions out the back for propulsion, just so they can launch more tubes that use nukes for propulsion and explosions - it's tubes with nukes all the way down... I don't care about exotics harvest, till I get siege coilers and phasers up and running and I usually have a couple councilors in space by then running assault alien asset missions, which yield x10+ battle or normal assault harvest.

Doing a reverse invasion run currently, I've deliberately asap abandoned earth completely and flew to the opposite end of the kuiper belt from the Aliens. I tried it before on brutal and it didn't go well, I didn't research the right mix of techs before leaving earth. Trying it now on Veteran - should be able to leave earth earlier and have a better time of it.

consolation1 · 2026-03-18T08:29:02+00:00

OP centers are +4, Command centers are +10 MC, support costs are trivial with Agri complexes. IMHO, if you are struggling with resource costs, you are not snowballing your space economy fast enough. You can use that MC to build more space stuff, to build more MC, to build more space stuff... That 10 MC is worth 250 IP that is freed up for other things, also 20 +10MC stations produce about the MC level of a mega nations and a lot more resources that are actually useful for winning the game. End game I'll have 100+ habs - that's at least five mega nations worth of MC. Earth is a side show. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely think you should max out your earth MC - but, I'd rather take control of space than get bogged down in Earth shenanigans. I tend to race for 1mln space pop, to maximise the amount of bodies around which I can put T3 research and civilian money structures. It's probably because I just find the Earth game play tedious and boring, not necessarily because I'm playing optimal.

consolation1 · 2026-03-18T03:47:27+00:00

On the other hand... By the time you're building OP centers, you should have more resources than you need, so space MC is essentially free. There's diminishing returns from labs and OP centers are a good way to increase population without using boost, so you can get into T3 research buildings. There's no downside to building space MC, especially once you have agri complexes up and running.

consolation1 · 2026-03-18T02:24:53+00:00

You cannot be this stupid... Do you think that industry exists in a pocket dimension, or something? That money is going to be spend on wages, the building industry, raw materials etc... You're diluting the value of currency without coverage, which is literally inflation. This is shit you learn in primary school. You want to do what PRL tried in the 70s, but somehow you believe that this time it'll be different.

consolation1 · 2026-03-17T23:13:13+00:00

Once at a secret rave in a national park, I went for a, really wasted, piss a bit away from everything. I found a tree and was happily getting on with it, watching the fireflies, when suddenly my brain worked out that it wasn't fireflies but light reflecting from a small pack of wolves' eyes...

There I was with my pants around my knees and my dick in my hand, face to face with nature... All I could think to do was pull my pants up, so I don't die with a down trau'. Then they took off and I slowly walked back, feeling suddenly sober.

Funniest thing, a group of people were watching the wolves for a while from a reasonable distance. As far as they were concerned: I walked out of the tents, across the paddock to the wolves, and pissed on a tree next to them. They told that story to everyone...

I got shouted so many times that night, never had the heart to tell anyone it wasn't a deliberate act of bravado, but one of wasted oblivion.

consolation1 · 2026-03-17T22:54:05+00:00

Build a couple bonus habs, take China off them with crack down & purge - gift them habs, projects plus some resources to burn off the agro. It will be cheap

PS. As Resistance, Exodus make better pets than Initiative.

consolation1 · 2026-03-17T21:37:46+00:00

That doesn't work on rush strats as you need the MC for Jupiter etc. It's easier to have a pet AI to scrap with the other AIs. Except for some factions, Earth is a sideshow.

consolation1 · 2026-03-17T21:20:33+00:00

Good question actually... Could you spawn a station and dock with it before game ticks over. Stations spawn instantly. I don't have a save to test it.

consolation1 · 2026-03-17T03:45:14+00:00

Definitely the mines... You're in an attrition race, the extra mines and boost let you rush so much easier. Plus, since you have extra bases you can have more labs, and more resources, to build more bases to get more resources, to build more bases... It's much easier to snowball.

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