Hey all,
I know getting a good start is important, but I sometimes find myself falling behind other players and have yet to find a good way to “catch up”.
Do you guys have any tips or strategies if this occurs? Or is it a loss cause when this happens?
Yeah, I’m never sure what to do.
I think perhaps focus on Economy to get back in there game there, try not to use ships, and beg allies for Science.
edit: Actually, along these lines, I was thinking of reducing the default tech trade cost to 10 to make it cheaper for larger payers to carry smaller players a little.
The only way you’ll catch up is to expand faster, which usually means you’ll have to attack. Try to ally up with one of the bigger players… a good tactic is to pick the 2nd or 3rd biggest player and offer to help them take on the biggest player (or help the 4th position take on the 3rd etc.)
Be patient, plan ahead, and keep up the diplomacy with all your neighbours.
Ditto what Myk said - speaking from experience, the leader often gets targeted - I had one dark circular galaxy where I luckily guessed the right direction to the center - tons of high resource stars all for the taking … and I had over the double the stats of the closest player … until all six remaining players pig-piled on me … got crushed!
So yea, try to rally the troops and in combination, the leaders will whittle down due to your combined efforts while hopefully your relative position will climb back up.
But don’t give up or go AFK - I had a game where I was down to 4 stars (it was a small galaxy) so I was kinda ignored, was able to build slowly back up, helped one of the leaders, and ended up placing second.
What about making trade cost inversely proportional to tech level difference? (so if you are one level above the person you trade with, then cost is expensive, but if you’re ten levels above, trade is cheaper) Or perhaps use a score derived from e/i/s to scale cost instead. Or difference in owned stars. Or number of ships.
Basically, don’t make trade cheaper when sharing with strong players, but do make it cheaper when trading to weak players.