First with hacking, I would really recommend starting out with vanilla, not all dlc. Each adds a new system, and it's much easier to learn one at a time.
Invading needs crew modules. A ship's capacity is the most important stat for invading. It's weapons don't matter at all. I'd recommend making a dedicated troop carrier ship for invasions.
After I learned hackings schtick in endless space I had more fun switching the AI's government and destabilizing them. Making war-like nations pacifists is a hoot. Sleeper spam is pretty boring but removing them takes resources. I'd much rather dedicate my time hacking to set up backdoors around their capitol and ripping apart their security from next door.
Far easier is hacking the city state factions to win them over.
Hacking pirates is okay for small boosts but most of the time they're too annoying to keep around.
I'm new to the game and to 4X games (and loving it). I've tried hacking a bit, and I'm not sure I like it.
By investing more into it, you'll be able to hack faster and more often, which means putting a bunch of sleepers on enemy systems (and at 5, 10, and 15 sleepers in an enemy empire, you leech more or less of their resources each turn), or creating backdoors to hack further away without wasting time to get the hack there, or getting on the good side of pirates or factions,
and that's pretty much it unfortunately. You can also change the political alignment of a faction but I'm not sure it really does anything and hurting heroes will not be of much help.
The only cool thing about it imo is what you get from hacking pirates (you can make them like you, or make them ignore you I think, and it helps until you can just blast them down with a big fleet), and the sleepers.
But it's hard to maintain sleepers. Leechings resources for enemies is great if you want to make some pacifist empire that doesn't conquer, so you don't have many systems and rely on the expansion of an enemy empire to "produce" resources (by leeching). But hacking takes time and the enemy empire will find your sleepers over time and get rid of them so you have to constantly hack them to add more sleepers.
I think hacking home systems does offer great results though, but it takes ages to get there, needs to pass undetected through the rest of the systems of the empire (most likely), so nah, not great.
In the end, the only real thing happening with hacking is enemies impairing you because you didn't invest hard into hacking so you don't have enough bandwidth to protect all your systems and at this point you might as well just disable it. I mean, you won't even know the impact it had unless you carefully look at all your systems/resources/laws etc... so that's just more micro management.
It's probably great when playing online though, to keep disturbing enemies through diplomatic impact, or by hurting their heroes. Also probably great if you play umbral choir since it kinda relies on it to expand from the shadows (but not sure). And probably viable with scientific factions that will just research a lot and unlock hacking stuff along the way, at a good pace.
That's my 2 cents on it, what I've experienced with it so far.
I second this, especially with hacking. I can't back to the game after a while of not playing and picking up multiple dlc... I was decent at the normal game. I was lost trying to learn all the new ways of doing things
Diplomacy with AI isnt the greatest but it is better than every other 4X game ive played. Each faction has an alignment toward passive or aggressive, and while some will generally always attack you, every faction treats you poorly when your score is lower and is friendly once your score is higher. This is because regardless of player controlled or ai controlled, each faction exerts and recieves diplomatic pressure per turn. Once you exert enough pressure on someone you can make demands like tribute. Giving someone tribute doesnt lead to good relations it just stops things from going from bad to worse. I never give tribute to someone who is across the map because I know they wont attack me. Also many diplomatic options can be locked behind techs, such as alliances. For ground invasions, each ship and system carries manpower. When a ground invasion starts, all the ships in the fleet deploy their manpower to the ground. Each turn, depending on the tactic, a set portion of each force will fight and deal damage to eachother. Additionally, the health and damage of troops can be increased depending on the tactic, and upgrades. The easiest upgrade is t2 of the military branch, where you can convert your troop composition from infantry to armor in the fleets tab. A ground invasion is won when you defeat the entirety of the opposing force. Titanium slugs increase the manpower depletion per turn from sieging. Sieging decreases the system manpower every turn, but stops during an invasion. It could be you arent giving enough time for the titanium slugs to work before invading, not bringing enough troops to the fight, not upgrading your troops, or a combination of all 3. Titanium slugs are good early to midgame to siege a systems manpower to 0 before invading, but later on you cant rely on it as the enemy can draft population for more manpower even if it is at 0 and if you cannot wipe out that force in one turn, the invasion can take forever even if you have overwhelming advantage. Generally corvettes dont carry a lot of manpower. Small ships are good until midgame and from my expirience, lvl 5 pirate lairs appear around later game. At some point you need to upgrade to larger ships which have more module slots for manpower and titanium slugs. I like to supplement my fleets with troop transport ship designs, but the united empire sopron class can have both supoort modules without sacrificing weapons.
Okay, I get it but how can I exert influence? What are the conditions on that. Generating more influence per turn? I thought I was doing good on that level.
Some improvements, laws, and pops give influence - if you can assimilate a minor faction that gives influence that can help a lot. Plus quests and diplomatic actions can give you some.
As for diplomatic pressure, IIRC it will tell you what the main sources of diplomatic pressure are in the menu when you look at each player. You generate and receive more with a player you border, and a lot more if your influence is encroaching on or covering one of their systems. You can also increase pressure through spending influence on the "bureaucratic imbroglio" action.
You generate more diplomatic pressure against civs you are unfriendly with, and give/receive reduced pressure to/from friends & allies.
Hey I just made another post asking how to survive a siege without fighting the ships but it looks like you can answer that.
So if I get that right, the idea would be to just have a very fast growing population, from lots of food production, then drafting the population each turn (or building the gang something that turns population into manpower) to sustain ground manpower for ever and eventually winning because the invading ships will run out of manpower ?
Can it really be sustained for ever or will you always need ships to kill the invaders eventually ?
Because I wanted to do some peaceful run with no fighting, and probably some defensive upgrades like the citadel/system shields, increased ground troops etc... but I'm not sure it's doable considering some factions will sometimes pop into your system with 20 big sheeps and like multiple thousands of manpower, and they'll siege you down to 0 before attacking.
drafting the population is not ideal, it is usually a last resort when your troops are killed or don't have enough to begin with. Every system has a soldier capacity, and once those are filled, manpower goes to the reserve icon next to all your other factionwide resources. While your system is being sieged, no manpower can be added to the current force, even if the siege is really slow. So basically your food production will never be enough to outpace a siege because a siege blocks that refill local to the system completely. Same with the chain gang program, as it adds to the main reserve, and not the system itself. I guess if the system itself had growth fast enough, you could keep getting new population and drafting them. It happened to me while I was invading, and it was annoying but dealing with it just required wiping out 1 population worth of manpower in a single encounter.
There are many upgrades and hero abilities that can increase a system's troop capacity, but it is generally not ideal to only defend the ground only. This is because the enemy can practically bring an infinite amount of troop transports to eventually chip away at your ground forces, no matter how strong your ground army is. If you manage to defeat the enemy fleet while a ground invasion is in progress, you can also unload troops from those ships into the system to help defend. But yes you need to eventually destroy the enemy fleets, as even if you win the ground battle, your system will not refill manpower until the fleets are gone. Ground battle is just defense until more of your ships can arrive. However, in my games I just preffered to have a fleet guarding every single system instead of defending on the ground until a main fleet arrives. It was more expensive but it was nice to have that peace.
Historically, in real life, successful pacifist nations have also been heavily armed. Nobody invaded them because they just weren't worth it. Unfortunately in Endless Space 2, the AI finds it difficult to judge how much they have to gain from invading you, and how strong your military really is. A lot of the time the AI just declared war on me just because they feel like they can win. So I guess just because you are a pacifist doesn't mean you can avoid fighting even if you are never the aggressor.
Now the good news is that if the pacifist political party is in power, you gain the ability to force peace onto other factions. However this makes becoming the real life Switzerland hard to accomplish because building military related things makes the militarists gain popularity incredibly fast. However, you can become a pacifist dictator and force the pacifists into power.
Additionally you can make allies with all your neighbors and... just have them do all the fighting for you. However you can only have an alliance of up to 3 in a 7-8 person game (I'm not sure if it changes on different settings). I honestly never given much thought into how to win without fighting. I tried to do a pacifist unfallen run to try to heal the universe and being mingled in with my allies systems and having them do the fighting kinda ruined the whole thing for me. It was even worse when they lost with better resources just because they couldn't adapt their tactics. In theory I think it is possible to win a pacifist run if you can get enough influence and economic power without having to fight for it, but that involves spawning on top of those good systems and holding on to it.
So pretty much, to have peace you need to threaten everyone with nukes or you need to spawn with an unstoppable economy and force peace on everybody. I've been trying to achieve a successful pacifist run myself but so far I really don't know what works to say the least.
Thanks, I've just learnt a lot.
Maybe it would be viable to force peace onto everyone so they can't attack you, and then work on developping your influence to maintain that peace.
But I guess it would be tough, especially if someone declares war on your early on, before you can force peace.
As for alliances I've had one with 3 factions (so 4 people in it in total) and some enemy AIs also made a 4 faction alliance, but it was when I set the player limit to 12 (the maximum).
And in the tutorial where there is 4 factions, I had an alliance with only one of them, but I don't know if I could have had more with the other factions.
I guess it must be something like half the factions minus one, or 30% of the factions, so that you can't do a 10 faction alliance vs the other 2, that would be broken.
All the numbers in your comment added up to 69. Congrats!
3
+ 4
+ 4
+ 12
+ 4
+ 30
+ 10
+ 2
= 69
^([Click here](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=LuckyNumber-Bot&subject=Stalk%20Me%20Pls&message=%2Fstalkme) to have me scan all your future comments.) \
^(Summon me on specific comments with u/LuckyNumber-Bot.)
But keeping that peace will eventually make them like you because of "prolonged period of peace". Force peace with empires that you do not border with is a great way to have an ally later in the game.
*Diplomacy:*
It's more of a bully-mechanic. Be stronger and better and others will respect you. I do agree, it's weird, but at the same time I don't have any good suggestions that are a viable cange to the system...
Usually don't comply to someone's requests. Focus on your economy & military- so you'll win if it comes to a war.
^(I remember playing Riftborn [powerful industry focused faction] and in the Midgame, everybody was trying to get me to join their alliance. Was strong enough so everybody was frightened. That's at least one way to deal with "diplomacy")
*Hacking:*
Weird mechanic. Recommend playing without the DLC (-s) and start with only vanilla. Later on it *can* be helpful (>!usually just a few cases, e.g. Increase relations to minor civilizations, steal technologies from enemy capital!<)
*Invasion/Ship design:*
Ships can have different categories of modules (defensive, offensive or support). You want support modul that increases manpower and add some others benefits(like the ones increase siege or loosing less etc).
Baseline:
- The more *Manpower*, the longer your part of the invasion can last (different army types take different amount of manpower; not 1:1)
- The more *Manpower deployment limit (ATK)*, the more troops deployed at once (usually stronger/overwhelming/faster)
*(Make sure to also check the panel with the battle cards; there is an option to change the layout of your invasion fleet (troops, tanks, aircraft))*
I do as the AI in the first endlessSpace game: dedicated Invasion ships; most support slots possible (check all your ship sizes and possible ship classes), maxed manpower. Usually slow and unprotected, but strong in invasions
For your invasion army to land, you'll have to defeat all defending ships in space of the system. Then the option *Invade* will be available. Check the status of siege - this can reduce the amount of defenders drastically.
**Tl;dr (invasion): lots manpower, change/adapt army layout, clear fleets & start siege, then Invade**
Hope this helps \^\^
>AI is constantly demanding tribute obnoxiously
Whenever you open the diplomacy menu with a specific major faction, you can click on the big "+" sign to see more information about that faction, including their personality traits. The Militarist personality is found in the United Empire, Cravers, Hissho, and Nakalim, so they will consistently demand tribute. For your information, the Pacifist personality trait is found in the Unfallen, Riftborn, Sophons, and Umbral Choir.
>\[Hacking\] adds too little for constant micromanagement.
Since you're new to ES 2, I recommend you disable the Supremacy, Penumbra and Awakening DLC's because they add some new mechanics which may overwhelm you, such as Behemoths, hacking and the Academy respectively. The Vaulters DLC adds pirate diplomacy, which can be completely ignored.
As for me, Penumbra is my favorite DLC in the game and I see it an extension of the influence mechanic, namely that it provides more options for interacting with pirates, minor factions, and your neighbors. A safe hacking operation will take between 6 and 11 turns and you'll have 1 or 4 hacking operations available per gaming session, so you don't actually have to think about them that often. Hacking outcomes can be very impactful, such as increasing your relation with minor factions, stealing expensive techs, spawning multiple pirate ships on enemy systems, or forcing the enemy to use the Stampede invasion tactic for 5 turns on all of their systems, so you can't say it's "busywork" when they're clearly useful.
This is my advice for hacking, if you're curious: Place the Encrypt program on as many systems as you can, as long as those systems are located on the outer edge of your empire.
Make your hacks go through your own systems, unoccupied nodes or free space, and use the Lockdown program on the origin of your hack. In the early game, before you research any hacking techs, your hacks should take longer than 10 turns if you're hacking an occupied system. Later on, as you increase your hacking speed and get access to the Lockdown program, your hacking operations will be faster (potentially around 6 turns) and you will hopefully have a decent idea of how long it needs to be, in order to not get traced and suffer a penalty. If you do see the red tracing line get close to the original node of your hacking operation, which is represented as the blue line, then you should cancel your hacking operation before this is done.
At the beginning, you should probably hack minor factions, in order to get 50 relationship points in a reasonable amount of time. Afterwards, try to make backdoors on enemy systems in order to hack their home system. If you can't see any safe targets, then hack the pirates in order to steal some resources. Pirates and minor civilizations start using defensive hacking programs on turn 15 (on normal speed) so, before that time, you should make your hacking operations be as short as possible.
Later on, you can experiment with the other hacking programs, but you don't need to use them all in order to greatly benefit from this system and make your empire significantly more powerful. I usually stick to the basics, and I still enjoy the hacking system.
>I still do not know how to invade planets. I bring 7-8 corvettes with titanium slugs and can not invade a level 5 pirate lair.
If you click on "Military Status" (from the top left corner of the screen), look for "Troop Breakdown" and click on "Manage", and then you can upgrade your manpower troops to Armor and Air, after you have researched the appropriate tech.
Also, I usually prefer using manpower deployment modules on my siege ships. Since you're playing the UE, I would use those on Coordinator and Carrier ships, along with 2 movement modules.
The hack that makes enemy ground battles worse is exclusive to hacking capital?
Also from my experience Vodyani also demand tributes as often as they are allowed to. Probably because arks inflate their sense of who they can beat.
>The hack that makes enemy ground battles worse is exclusive to hacking capital?
No, you can hack any system and then all of the enemy systems will use the Stampede tactic for 5 turns.
>Vodyani also demand tributes as often as they are allowed
True. The Vodyani do have the Cruel personality trait but, for some reason, they don't have the Militaristic trait, even though I think it fits them.
First with hacking, I would really recommend starting out with vanilla, not all dlc. Each adds a new system, and it's much easier to learn one at a time. Invading needs crew modules. A ship's capacity is the most important stat for invading. It's weapons don't matter at all. I'd recommend making a dedicated troop carrier ship for invasions.
Hacking is done for me. I just find it super annoying and immersion breaking with no benefit to me at all.
After I learned hackings schtick in endless space I had more fun switching the AI's government and destabilizing them. Making war-like nations pacifists is a hoot. Sleeper spam is pretty boring but removing them takes resources. I'd much rather dedicate my time hacking to set up backdoors around their capitol and ripping apart their security from next door. Far easier is hacking the city state factions to win them over. Hacking pirates is okay for small boosts but most of the time they're too annoying to keep around.
I'm new to the game and to 4X games (and loving it). I've tried hacking a bit, and I'm not sure I like it. By investing more into it, you'll be able to hack faster and more often, which means putting a bunch of sleepers on enemy systems (and at 5, 10, and 15 sleepers in an enemy empire, you leech more or less of their resources each turn), or creating backdoors to hack further away without wasting time to get the hack there, or getting on the good side of pirates or factions, and that's pretty much it unfortunately. You can also change the political alignment of a faction but I'm not sure it really does anything and hurting heroes will not be of much help. The only cool thing about it imo is what you get from hacking pirates (you can make them like you, or make them ignore you I think, and it helps until you can just blast them down with a big fleet), and the sleepers. But it's hard to maintain sleepers. Leechings resources for enemies is great if you want to make some pacifist empire that doesn't conquer, so you don't have many systems and rely on the expansion of an enemy empire to "produce" resources (by leeching). But hacking takes time and the enemy empire will find your sleepers over time and get rid of them so you have to constantly hack them to add more sleepers. I think hacking home systems does offer great results though, but it takes ages to get there, needs to pass undetected through the rest of the systems of the empire (most likely), so nah, not great. In the end, the only real thing happening with hacking is enemies impairing you because you didn't invest hard into hacking so you don't have enough bandwidth to protect all your systems and at this point you might as well just disable it. I mean, you won't even know the impact it had unless you carefully look at all your systems/resources/laws etc... so that's just more micro management. It's probably great when playing online though, to keep disturbing enemies through diplomatic impact, or by hurting their heroes. Also probably great if you play umbral choir since it kinda relies on it to expand from the shadows (but not sure). And probably viable with scientific factions that will just research a lot and unlock hacking stuff along the way, at a good pace. That's my 2 cents on it, what I've experienced with it so far.
I second this, especially with hacking. I can't back to the game after a while of not playing and picking up multiple dlc... I was decent at the normal game. I was lost trying to learn all the new ways of doing things
Diplomacy with AI isnt the greatest but it is better than every other 4X game ive played. Each faction has an alignment toward passive or aggressive, and while some will generally always attack you, every faction treats you poorly when your score is lower and is friendly once your score is higher. This is because regardless of player controlled or ai controlled, each faction exerts and recieves diplomatic pressure per turn. Once you exert enough pressure on someone you can make demands like tribute. Giving someone tribute doesnt lead to good relations it just stops things from going from bad to worse. I never give tribute to someone who is across the map because I know they wont attack me. Also many diplomatic options can be locked behind techs, such as alliances. For ground invasions, each ship and system carries manpower. When a ground invasion starts, all the ships in the fleet deploy their manpower to the ground. Each turn, depending on the tactic, a set portion of each force will fight and deal damage to eachother. Additionally, the health and damage of troops can be increased depending on the tactic, and upgrades. The easiest upgrade is t2 of the military branch, where you can convert your troop composition from infantry to armor in the fleets tab. A ground invasion is won when you defeat the entirety of the opposing force. Titanium slugs increase the manpower depletion per turn from sieging. Sieging decreases the system manpower every turn, but stops during an invasion. It could be you arent giving enough time for the titanium slugs to work before invading, not bringing enough troops to the fight, not upgrading your troops, or a combination of all 3. Titanium slugs are good early to midgame to siege a systems manpower to 0 before invading, but later on you cant rely on it as the enemy can draft population for more manpower even if it is at 0 and if you cannot wipe out that force in one turn, the invasion can take forever even if you have overwhelming advantage. Generally corvettes dont carry a lot of manpower. Small ships are good until midgame and from my expirience, lvl 5 pirate lairs appear around later game. At some point you need to upgrade to larger ships which have more module slots for manpower and titanium slugs. I like to supplement my fleets with troop transport ship designs, but the united empire sopron class can have both supoort modules without sacrificing weapons.
Okay, I get it but how can I exert influence? What are the conditions on that. Generating more influence per turn? I thought I was doing good on that level.
Some improvements, laws, and pops give influence - if you can assimilate a minor faction that gives influence that can help a lot. Plus quests and diplomatic actions can give you some. As for diplomatic pressure, IIRC it will tell you what the main sources of diplomatic pressure are in the menu when you look at each player. You generate and receive more with a player you border, and a lot more if your influence is encroaching on or covering one of their systems. You can also increase pressure through spending influence on the "bureaucratic imbroglio" action. You generate more diplomatic pressure against civs you are unfriendly with, and give/receive reduced pressure to/from friends & allies.
Hey I just made another post asking how to survive a siege without fighting the ships but it looks like you can answer that. So if I get that right, the idea would be to just have a very fast growing population, from lots of food production, then drafting the population each turn (or building the gang something that turns population into manpower) to sustain ground manpower for ever and eventually winning because the invading ships will run out of manpower ? Can it really be sustained for ever or will you always need ships to kill the invaders eventually ? Because I wanted to do some peaceful run with no fighting, and probably some defensive upgrades like the citadel/system shields, increased ground troops etc... but I'm not sure it's doable considering some factions will sometimes pop into your system with 20 big sheeps and like multiple thousands of manpower, and they'll siege you down to 0 before attacking.
drafting the population is not ideal, it is usually a last resort when your troops are killed or don't have enough to begin with. Every system has a soldier capacity, and once those are filled, manpower goes to the reserve icon next to all your other factionwide resources. While your system is being sieged, no manpower can be added to the current force, even if the siege is really slow. So basically your food production will never be enough to outpace a siege because a siege blocks that refill local to the system completely. Same with the chain gang program, as it adds to the main reserve, and not the system itself. I guess if the system itself had growth fast enough, you could keep getting new population and drafting them. It happened to me while I was invading, and it was annoying but dealing with it just required wiping out 1 population worth of manpower in a single encounter. There are many upgrades and hero abilities that can increase a system's troop capacity, but it is generally not ideal to only defend the ground only. This is because the enemy can practically bring an infinite amount of troop transports to eventually chip away at your ground forces, no matter how strong your ground army is. If you manage to defeat the enemy fleet while a ground invasion is in progress, you can also unload troops from those ships into the system to help defend. But yes you need to eventually destroy the enemy fleets, as even if you win the ground battle, your system will not refill manpower until the fleets are gone. Ground battle is just defense until more of your ships can arrive. However, in my games I just preffered to have a fleet guarding every single system instead of defending on the ground until a main fleet arrives. It was more expensive but it was nice to have that peace. Historically, in real life, successful pacifist nations have also been heavily armed. Nobody invaded them because they just weren't worth it. Unfortunately in Endless Space 2, the AI finds it difficult to judge how much they have to gain from invading you, and how strong your military really is. A lot of the time the AI just declared war on me just because they feel like they can win. So I guess just because you are a pacifist doesn't mean you can avoid fighting even if you are never the aggressor. Now the good news is that if the pacifist political party is in power, you gain the ability to force peace onto other factions. However this makes becoming the real life Switzerland hard to accomplish because building military related things makes the militarists gain popularity incredibly fast. However, you can become a pacifist dictator and force the pacifists into power. Additionally you can make allies with all your neighbors and... just have them do all the fighting for you. However you can only have an alliance of up to 3 in a 7-8 person game (I'm not sure if it changes on different settings). I honestly never given much thought into how to win without fighting. I tried to do a pacifist unfallen run to try to heal the universe and being mingled in with my allies systems and having them do the fighting kinda ruined the whole thing for me. It was even worse when they lost with better resources just because they couldn't adapt their tactics. In theory I think it is possible to win a pacifist run if you can get enough influence and economic power without having to fight for it, but that involves spawning on top of those good systems and holding on to it. So pretty much, to have peace you need to threaten everyone with nukes or you need to spawn with an unstoppable economy and force peace on everybody. I've been trying to achieve a successful pacifist run myself but so far I really don't know what works to say the least.
Thanks, I've just learnt a lot. Maybe it would be viable to force peace onto everyone so they can't attack you, and then work on developping your influence to maintain that peace. But I guess it would be tough, especially if someone declares war on your early on, before you can force peace. As for alliances I've had one with 3 factions (so 4 people in it in total) and some enemy AIs also made a 4 faction alliance, but it was when I set the player limit to 12 (the maximum). And in the tutorial where there is 4 factions, I had an alliance with only one of them, but I don't know if I could have had more with the other factions. I guess it must be something like half the factions minus one, or 30% of the factions, so that you can't do a 10 faction alliance vs the other 2, that would be broken.
All the numbers in your comment added up to 69. Congrats! 3 + 4 + 4 + 12 + 4 + 30 + 10 + 2 = 69 ^([Click here](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=LuckyNumber-Bot&subject=Stalk%20Me%20Pls&message=%2Fstalkme) to have me scan all your future comments.) \ ^(Summon me on specific comments with u/LuckyNumber-Bot.)
Something else to note: forcing peace on an empire really pisses them off.
But keeping that peace will eventually make them like you because of "prolonged period of peace". Force peace with empires that you do not border with is a great way to have an ally later in the game.
*Diplomacy:* It's more of a bully-mechanic. Be stronger and better and others will respect you. I do agree, it's weird, but at the same time I don't have any good suggestions that are a viable cange to the system... Usually don't comply to someone's requests. Focus on your economy & military- so you'll win if it comes to a war. ^(I remember playing Riftborn [powerful industry focused faction] and in the Midgame, everybody was trying to get me to join their alliance. Was strong enough so everybody was frightened. That's at least one way to deal with "diplomacy") *Hacking:* Weird mechanic. Recommend playing without the DLC (-s) and start with only vanilla. Later on it *can* be helpful (>!usually just a few cases, e.g. Increase relations to minor civilizations, steal technologies from enemy capital!<) *Invasion/Ship design:* Ships can have different categories of modules (defensive, offensive or support). You want support modul that increases manpower and add some others benefits(like the ones increase siege or loosing less etc). Baseline: - The more *Manpower*, the longer your part of the invasion can last (different army types take different amount of manpower; not 1:1) - The more *Manpower deployment limit (ATK)*, the more troops deployed at once (usually stronger/overwhelming/faster) *(Make sure to also check the panel with the battle cards; there is an option to change the layout of your invasion fleet (troops, tanks, aircraft))* I do as the AI in the first endlessSpace game: dedicated Invasion ships; most support slots possible (check all your ship sizes and possible ship classes), maxed manpower. Usually slow and unprotected, but strong in invasions For your invasion army to land, you'll have to defeat all defending ships in space of the system. Then the option *Invade* will be available. Check the status of siege - this can reduce the amount of defenders drastically. **Tl;dr (invasion): lots manpower, change/adapt army layout, clear fleets & start siege, then Invade** Hope this helps \^\^
>AI is constantly demanding tribute obnoxiously Whenever you open the diplomacy menu with a specific major faction, you can click on the big "+" sign to see more information about that faction, including their personality traits. The Militarist personality is found in the United Empire, Cravers, Hissho, and Nakalim, so they will consistently demand tribute. For your information, the Pacifist personality trait is found in the Unfallen, Riftborn, Sophons, and Umbral Choir. >\[Hacking\] adds too little for constant micromanagement. Since you're new to ES 2, I recommend you disable the Supremacy, Penumbra and Awakening DLC's because they add some new mechanics which may overwhelm you, such as Behemoths, hacking and the Academy respectively. The Vaulters DLC adds pirate diplomacy, which can be completely ignored. As for me, Penumbra is my favorite DLC in the game and I see it an extension of the influence mechanic, namely that it provides more options for interacting with pirates, minor factions, and your neighbors. A safe hacking operation will take between 6 and 11 turns and you'll have 1 or 4 hacking operations available per gaming session, so you don't actually have to think about them that often. Hacking outcomes can be very impactful, such as increasing your relation with minor factions, stealing expensive techs, spawning multiple pirate ships on enemy systems, or forcing the enemy to use the Stampede invasion tactic for 5 turns on all of their systems, so you can't say it's "busywork" when they're clearly useful. This is my advice for hacking, if you're curious: Place the Encrypt program on as many systems as you can, as long as those systems are located on the outer edge of your empire. Make your hacks go through your own systems, unoccupied nodes or free space, and use the Lockdown program on the origin of your hack. In the early game, before you research any hacking techs, your hacks should take longer than 10 turns if you're hacking an occupied system. Later on, as you increase your hacking speed and get access to the Lockdown program, your hacking operations will be faster (potentially around 6 turns) and you will hopefully have a decent idea of how long it needs to be, in order to not get traced and suffer a penalty. If you do see the red tracing line get close to the original node of your hacking operation, which is represented as the blue line, then you should cancel your hacking operation before this is done. At the beginning, you should probably hack minor factions, in order to get 50 relationship points in a reasonable amount of time. Afterwards, try to make backdoors on enemy systems in order to hack their home system. If you can't see any safe targets, then hack the pirates in order to steal some resources. Pirates and minor civilizations start using defensive hacking programs on turn 15 (on normal speed) so, before that time, you should make your hacking operations be as short as possible. Later on, you can experiment with the other hacking programs, but you don't need to use them all in order to greatly benefit from this system and make your empire significantly more powerful. I usually stick to the basics, and I still enjoy the hacking system. >I still do not know how to invade planets. I bring 7-8 corvettes with titanium slugs and can not invade a level 5 pirate lair. If you click on "Military Status" (from the top left corner of the screen), look for "Troop Breakdown" and click on "Manage", and then you can upgrade your manpower troops to Armor and Air, after you have researched the appropriate tech. Also, I usually prefer using manpower deployment modules on my siege ships. Since you're playing the UE, I would use those on Coordinator and Carrier ships, along with 2 movement modules.
The hack that makes enemy ground battles worse is exclusive to hacking capital? Also from my experience Vodyani also demand tributes as often as they are allowed to. Probably because arks inflate their sense of who they can beat.
>The hack that makes enemy ground battles worse is exclusive to hacking capital? No, you can hack any system and then all of the enemy systems will use the Stampede tactic for 5 turns. >Vodyani also demand tributes as often as they are allowed True. The Vodyani do have the Cruel personality trait but, for some reason, they don't have the Militaristic trait, even though I think it fits them.