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[KingApep]

BACKGROUND

So I've recently been made aware that playing the game without ever fighting a battle is considered odd.
I primarily play iron man normal, sometimes with Nexerelin, other times without.
Here is my standard lategame fleet:



Character skills (Important ones):

And with your 8 officers:

For reference that this does work, this is what you will end up with colonies wise lategame:


So lategame you have as many colonies as you like, 7k defence on each so you can ignore anything any faction does and with high command you'll be pleasantly suprised to often see your fleets harassing your neighbours to oblivion. You always have a failsafe of 1m income monthly if things go poorly that can't be destroyed, so you can have a lot more freedom to play the game with the attitude that even if you die horribly to an automated defence fleet (such as the red spooky planet) you only have to wait a couple of in-game months to get your full Doom fleet back.


THE WHY
So I struggled with combat after first watching Seth's video, and really enjoyed the trading and smuggling system showed off by it. Through my experiences of working my way up to endgame from harder starts or with every faction hating you in the 4X mod, I believe I have reached some sort of reliable success method.

As you can see, I apparently wasn't aware of such a thing, didn't know about that until today.


THE HOW
First days:
Step 1: Using your skill points, throw one point into the 'Technology' skill line, with one point in sensors and one point in navigation. You'll be able to get everything you need after your first trade so it isn't too big of an issue.
Step 2: Get the *** out of your starting place, if you can pick up some cerebuses or wayfarers, basically any freight ship you can; if you're lucky you may be able to buy the insulated engines mod from the first planet you visit.
Step 3 (Optional): Head to Tritachyeon space, find the bar and hopefully you can get yourself some 300k investment credits, don't worry, just like taxes & Tariffs we don't ever pay these people back.
Step 4: Once you either have a couple of fleet ships or picked up a few more with your investment credits, try and search various stations until you find the insulated engine mod, usually this takes about less than 5 ingame days, if you really cant find it, dont worry it's only an additional bonus supplement to your money making schemes.
Step 5: Refit your cerebus fleet with expanded cargo, insulated engines, you may want to pick up a cheap 8k tanker and throw on insulated engines on it too at this point.



This is my fleet about 3 years into the game, as you can see, this initial investment of your cash will stay with you for a while; you can actually move onto Doom's by this point but I prefer to spend the first few millions on building up my colonies to print out Dooms quicker.

Making Money
With your fleet, head to your locally cheapest area for drugs and buy as many as you can, heavy armaments are also an option, whichever has the biggest price disparity. When you do this, make sure you are going dark in a nearby astroid field and stealthing your way over. Even the Hegemony is poor at fully guarding their stations so doing this level 1 is fairly easy, worst case scenario you just get a minor faction relation reduction.
Head over to somewhere like the Beloved Luddics who will be your best friends next to pirates. These guys are going to be your best customers, most of their countries have *** patrols and will commonly have luxury goods, drugs and heavy arms deficits for you to make 200% profit off of. Hegemony is always good for buying cheap arms and if you haven't *** them off yet you can buy even more from the military shop, even with tarriffs you'll make insane cash. Keep repeating until you have around 1m minimum

Skill points and ship setup
With your first skill points make sure you always max out Sensors and navigation. These allow you to have minimal sensor profile and escape the system at literally any point with tranverse jumping. Later invest in the ECM skills that reduce enemy speed for each ship in battle, as well as buying any skill that affects your whole fleet except the fighterss ones. Put safety overides and the other one on every ship with insulated engines, and ecm package if you can. You dont need any vents or capacitors so you should have plenty for your cargo, fuel and crew mods.
After you have your fleet skill points or you fancy on moving to the next stage, put points into all your colony modifying skills. You dont need any of the other skills in the combat tree or the scavenging skills so you should have plenty by this point.


EARLY TO MIDGAME COMBAT (Pre-ascension)
With this setup, even if pirates scare you and engage you, you should be able to escape any fleet and even your tankers will probably be able to retreat. Whenever you start a fight or pirates engage you, or remnants, or *** of Tri-tacheyon whatever, just go into the command viewpoint and click full retreat, at most you will lose a single citizen transport and you can tranverse jump outta there.

Colony building (THE NEXT STAGE)
With your first lot of cash, find yourself a nice class 3-5 planet, or as nice as you can in the middle of the sector (for convenience). Make sure you buy food and all the other stuff and throw it into your colony storage and enable 'use resource stores when lacking' as your first few days will have your colony in a very poor state of stability.
As soon as your spaceport is built, upgrade it to the megaport and enable free port. First port of call is building gun batteries, then start upgrading them as soon as they're built. At this point you can begin building your first industry. I typically go with mining but it depends on your planet's bonuses. I wouldn't recommend building on any tech ruins planets as your first colony. After mining, go refinery and finally heavy industry.
Keep smuggling whilst this is all built, this takes insane amountys of credits.
You'll probably be hitting 80k/month at this point, keep bribing the bastard expeditions for now. Build your waystation and battlestation asap also.
At this point you should create your second colony in the same system as your other colony and rush to build a command centre. This is an upgrade from the ship patrols building which you can then upgrade to high command which is what allows your fleets to win the game for you.


THE ASCENSION

When you can, upgrade your heavy industry to an orbital works; if you're lucky by this point you will have found some high tech blueprints and may have even got a Doom blueprint already, if not, dont worry.
Print yourself a full fleet of any phase ships you can, begin recruiting 8 officers.
Autofit your ships and make sure you have as many officers as possible, then head over to do the red planet mission for that lovely 7k planet defence. Find some redacted beacons and with your 0 profile, stealing all the Doom blueprint caches should be easy as anything.
Begin printing the best ship in the game. You don't actually need anything else, just throw cargo expansions and fuel expansions on your Dooms, keep printing more until you max your fleet size. You will have an incredible amount of fuel and cargo capacity.


POST-ASCENCION COMBAT
Congratulations, you have finally become able to fight in this game without any worries about losing your entire fleet, just wait another ingame month and print yourself your fleet back.
When you actually fight other ships and fleets, make sure you turn up 'battle-size' which allows more ships to be deployed. Deploy as many of your dooms as you can, just let the AI take control of your ship too.
You'll probably in hard fights lose maybe a couple of Doom's but do you know what? At this point the game becomes a problem solving game (an easy one).

They deploy two ships? Deploy three dooms.
They destroyed 3 of your unamnned dooms? Deploy 6 more.
Throw dooms at your problems, any problem that can be solved with your dooms isn't a problem at all. You are money. You are god. They can't destroy your planets, and they can't destroy you. You're the demon they talk about in Folk stories that can never be beaten. Only temporarily sealed as you come back with your Doom fleet. Your officers your undying minions. Your planets the undestructible phylacteries of your immense majesty.
At this point you can probably start trying to begin the game tbh

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

[Vayra]

Hahahhahaa yessssssssssssssssss. CARGO DOOMS.

[Lucky33]

So I've recently been made aware that playing the game without ever fighting a battle is considered odd.

But you do fight battles. So what all of this is about?

[intrinsic_parity]

Why do you have carrier officers in your dooms?

[SCC]

Odd, maybe not. But to me, certainly boring. Running away from the most enjoyable activity in the game is pretty counter intuitive. When it comes to credits, though, it's probably the fastest way to print them. Perhaps I could check it one day, how long does it take to make a million credits with bounties and with bounty hunting. In either case, the biggest obstacle is that at some point, you have to explore or raid for some time, in order to obtain blueprints. Preferably explore, since you get all ships from a package at once, instead of having to get them one by one through raiding.

[KingApep]

So I've recently been made aware that playing the game without ever fighting a battle is considered odd.

But you do fight battles. So what all of this is about?

I mean not until maybe 6 years in? I'm about 4 on that current cerebus phase; you dont really have to fight those ones; I've already basically 'won' at the point of having 9 invincible colonies bringing in over 1m/month whilst not fighting whatsoever. Which is the pacifist part comes from. The battles are just bonuses you can do as a fun extra at the end.

[Megas]

Pure phase fleet is nice for raiding Culann (and maybe Sindria) for blueprints without a fight, and without waiting for a pirate raid to distract the patrols.  May not work next release if player needs to bring more marines than the fleet can bring to reach the new threshold needed.

[Lucky33]

So I've recently been made aware that playing the game without ever fighting a battle is considered odd.

But you do fight battles. So what all of this is about?

I mean not until maybe 6 years in? I'm about 4 on that current cerebus phase; you dont really have to fight those ones; I've already basically 'won' at the point of having 9 invincible colonies bringing in over 1m/month whilst not fighting whatsoever. Which is the pacifist part comes from. The battles are just bonuses you can do as a fun extra at the end.

When you start a free port colony, you start a war because free port status even by itself is a reason for the expeditions. Up to that point its just a basic smuggler playthrough.

Cerberus fleet is not actually needed or optimal for that. Apart from the phase cloaked ships each vessel has innate sensor signature. Fleet of eight frigates generate 150 units. Single Colossus with Militarized Subsystems produces only 90. And it more than pays for itself in a single run. After that, occasional battles simply cease to matter anymore. You can afford to lose that ship. You can even sell it with the cargo. Especially if you take into account that you can get to 1M space quids after single run (do couple of missions, take the loan, sell full load of drugs at Chalcedon when its at 800 deficit).

[Kanil]

Cerberus fleet is not actually needed or optimal for that. Apart from the phase cloaked ships each vessel has innate sensor signature. Fleet of eight frigates generate 150 units. Single Colossus with Militarized Subsystems produces only 90.

A fleet of 30 frigates also generates 150 sensor profile, and is hauling a lot more than you can get out of 150 sensor profile of Colossus. I guess if you need exactly 800 units of cargo, then the Colossus is the way to go, but once you toss in a second ship, a stack of frigates ends up stealthier.

[Cyber Von Cyberus]

Interesting, although I admit that this would bore me to death. Still you now made me curious about a full combat phase fleet.

[Lucky33]

Cerberus fleet is not actually needed or optimal for that. Apart from the phase cloaked ships each vessel has innate sensor signature. Fleet of eight frigates generate 150 units. Single Colossus with Militarized Subsystems produces only 90.

A fleet of 30 frigates also generates 150 sensor profile, and is hauling a lot more than you can get out of 150 sensor profile of Colossus. I guess if you need exactly 800 units of cargo, then the Colossus is the way to go, but once you toss in a second ship, a stack of frigates ends up stealthier.

The thing is that without fighting (including raids) you will not be able to create enough deficit for a large volume trade. And the more deficit there is, the higher the prices are. You are kinda limited to the Chalcedon because its size 5, has a mine and Path is always hostile to many factions what severely limits the accessibility and makes shipping losses frequent. Since you need money there is no reason to haul 1600 units for selling on the several planets for 200+ then you can sell 800 in a single place for 400+. I'm not even mentioning the amount of fuel you have to burn by the 30 frigate fleet.

[Plantissue]

It's a strange first post to assert something is a unique playstyle. Where were you that you got that imprerssion from? Especially in a game where there are no real barriers to try to do everything at least once. And you 11 colonies with 3 Alpha cores so you must have done a fair surveying and exploration as well as the rather obvious colony play.

Misleading click bait title. What are the officers for without ever fighting a battle? In the last paragraph, you post a fleet of blueprinted dooms that you fight with, you aren't even trading with them. It's not unique to get max out Sensors and Navigation first. I do that and so do many other people looking at the forum. It's not unique to play trade and smuggle, as it is the fastest and most reliable way to get money. It is also the only practical way to gain rep with pirates. For instance in this forum you always have people advocating a pure safety overide hound fleet for smuggling so you can always disengage safely with no lossc of ship if caught. It's just that trading is boring and avoiding patrols when transponder off is the only exciting thing about it once you have seen all the locales, only that in the end you removed that excitement by essentially making yourself undetectable. You might as well play truck simulator or farming simulator (real games).

What's the point of posting your lategame fleet first when you churned them out from your 11 colonies and doom blueprint? It's not really that special when you have multiple colonies to be able to throw XYZ ship ad infinitum with near infinite money and call yourself a God or Demon or majesty like you have in the last paragraph.

[Null Ganymede]

The Doom fleet is hilarious!

The fact that it makes people mad is a cherry on top.


vvv lol

[Plantissue]

You didn't read the post. He didn't make a doom fleet till he already had colonies set up and the doom blueprint and production to mass produce them. That's not any different from making a fleet of XYZ after you had colonies set up.

The title is just misleading clickbait. He didn't trade with dooms or phase ships, instead he went and did the completely ordinary trading, (you can see his actual trading fleet as the last picture), and made loads of colonies and then produced from a blueprint and declared that unique.

[Broetchenholer]

Do you aspire to be the Gatekeeper for uniqueness for this forum or why does his post insult you so much?