09-13-2020, 04:50 AM
Gathering intelligence...
Military intelligence (where opponents are located and what resources do they have there) is very important late in the game, but this information needs to be collected throughout the course of the game rather than trying to wait until later. For one thing, information is easier to get (and poses less of an affront) earlier in the game, and information about known ownership tends to change reasonably slowly (and any observed changes are themselves useful information).
For another thing, knowledge about where your neighbors are located is very useful even in the beginning of the game. For instance, if you know what areas your neighbors occupy you'll be in a much better position to know in which direction to expand and where to suggest borders with friendly neighbors. The best way to gain this kind of information is to send out a number of scouts whenever possible. Of course, sending out scouts means spending a small amount to build them and spending a number of actions to get them built and sent out. These requirements have to be balanced with your need for economic expansion, but you can often come up with a few actions and a few PI each turn to do some extra scouting while that's going on.
For your best use of actions, build as many as 3 scouts per Build command, and send them to as many as 4 consecutive locations in a Scout command. They will then proceed from place to place sequentially without requiring any more actions until they run out of locations to visit. Early in the game scouts are not likely to be caught (except at Home Worlds, which is also useful information) and can garner quite a lot of useful information.
Once you've started exploring more widely, chart your results on a map to see where other empires are located. If you're using the GTac Assistant, the zone-of-control (Zones) map can help you visualize that more easily.
Military intelligence (where opponents are located and what resources do they have there) is very important late in the game, but this information needs to be collected throughout the course of the game rather than trying to wait until later. For one thing, information is easier to get (and poses less of an affront) earlier in the game, and information about known ownership tends to change reasonably slowly (and any observed changes are themselves useful information).
For another thing, knowledge about where your neighbors are located is very useful even in the beginning of the game. For instance, if you know what areas your neighbors occupy you'll be in a much better position to know in which direction to expand and where to suggest borders with friendly neighbors. The best way to gain this kind of information is to send out a number of scouts whenever possible. Of course, sending out scouts means spending a small amount to build them and spending a number of actions to get them built and sent out. These requirements have to be balanced with your need for economic expansion, but you can often come up with a few actions and a few PI each turn to do some extra scouting while that's going on.
For your best use of actions, build as many as 3 scouts per Build command, and send them to as many as 4 consecutive locations in a Scout command. They will then proceed from place to place sequentially without requiring any more actions until they run out of locations to visit. Early in the game scouts are not likely to be caught (except at Home Worlds, which is also useful information) and can garner quite a lot of useful information.
Once you've started exploring more widely, chart your results on a map to see where other empires are located. If you're using the GTac Assistant, the zone-of-control (Zones) map can help you visualize that more easily.