Noob Teching question - Fastest way to warships?

Ah, you are still trying to use the pre-designed warships. When you go into the ships screen build your own ship and then you can use whatever war tech you have already discovered....And the ships you design will be much better than the pre-designed ships.

Agreed. The predesigned ship use the Mark 1 of whatever defense they use, and have no sensors, support, or engines.

I also find it a pain to keep designing new ships because the ones I'd did before are too advanced for me to get when I need them.    

I think these predesigned ships were a poor way to push the ship editor on us, but now since we have Twilight of the Arnor, it should help.

Etrius

(BTW How does the AI ship creator work? Does it produce good ships that use the tech you have, or does it produce crap?)

Yes. Make your own ships. And - do not make the mistake of thinking "just one other tech and i will build it". I know everyone has this problem - it is the same like the "just another turn"-problem when you want to stop playing. Just get satisified with what you have. You can upgrade ships everytime you want (and have the money to), so just keep building that things and when you got a new tech upgrade them. If you dont you will end up like me on my first games - building almost no ships until you got the biggest available. Mistake. In higher difficulties you will get smashed with this strategy. Having a big army and military rating to impress the enemy the whole time (it doesnt matter if the ships you can build suck, just get many of them and you rule) is the secret of winning. The game is not about getting one thing as fast as possible (eg huge hulled monsterships), but about balancing every aspect as good as possible to push them altogether in the best way. It is hard to tell you a set strategy of techs you should research, it is more a matter of experience and decision, what you need most at the time for your imperium.

I've found that the AI ship creator places more components than possible on ships, at least in my games. It'll have the max # of weapons possible, but then it'll stick on some life support even though there isn't room! It forgot to add any engines, though. It will use the best tech available, however.

My typical strategy is to only build my military up when I see the AI has started doing so, and then to just try to keep even with them so they don't attack me. A good-sized military gives you a diplomacy advantage as well.

I hit the economy tech branch first, then work on getting advanced research techs while my new econ buildings are going up, then research industry while my new labs are being built. By the time the AI has some decent military techs I'll have a bigger economy/industrial/research output than them, so it doesn't take me long to pump up my military for an invasion.

Also, bigger isn't neccesarily better. Another viable strategy is to use an industry-strong race and just focus on having way more ships than your opponent. Keep in mind with this approach you need to start conquering before the AI gets a tech lead, and to really focus on early economy and population to support all those troops and conquered colonies.

I usually use the top-tier of whatever tech I need (for space/weight reasons), with a few exceptions. For example, my basic K-5A Diamondback corvette uses less efficient mass drivers, because using more efficient ones does nothing except give me two or three more units to work with, which I can do nothing practical with. So I therefore degrade them to a lower efficiency to lower the tech cost.

Hmmmm... Thats not good. Probably a bug. Engines are vital, because you need to send your ships to where you need to go. Nevertheless, this AI Ship Creator was an awesome addition, one of those "About time!" things. Hopefully Stardock can patch this up. Put the text I quoted onto a new post in the Bugs Forum, and Stardock will know.



It certainly does that. And I also think that there is a diplomacy penalty for having a smaller military. I always lose my games because I cant research things and build ships fast enough to keep up in military strength. I learn that adjusting spending to favor research takes care of this problem. I keep trying to win on GalCiv2, but I'm simply addicted to X3: Reunion. :p 


Etrius

Ah, the sliders. The pesky sliders. It's often a good idea in the long run to favor the research slider, but I push up the military slider when I need lots of ships for war, and the social slider after I've conquered a lot of worlds or need to build new things on all my worlds at the same time.

Something else new players need to know is that the 3 sliders set production at a percentage of your maximum possible output. That is, if all your labs total 1000 research points, a %50 research slider will give you 500 RP each turn, not using the other potential 500 pts. This means that if you build a lot of labs you should set your research slider correspondingly higher so that you don't waste all that potential production! After all, why did you build those labs if you weren't going to use them? You could have built more factories or econ buildings instead...

Yeah, the sliders are stupid. Hopefully they will be gone in Galciv III.

This might not be exactly what I should answer but I think it still helps. If your trying to get a better ship but a tech takes too long (40-200 weeks, or something like that) you can actually research in incraments. Just start the research, after a bit switch to one with less time, then research a little more, then change... just keep doing that. The game actually remembers your progress on the tech and sometimes it still slowly goes up when not researching. And researching less time consuming researches actually shrinks the time for longer techs. So maybe that helps some.

Well, I would say its better to research a tech right until you get the new tech than to stop halfway through. You'll get techs in the shortest time possible that way.

Its not slowly increasing progress when you arent researching a particular tech. The likely answer is that your research output is rising over time, so when you go back to a previous tech it takes less turns than it did before, simply because you are producing more tech points.

Switching back and forth is the least efficient way to do research.

Sentient species taste better...

It might not be the most efficent but I seem to do a lot of things differently than reccomended, like learning to play on a Gigantic with all AI, loose clusteres, and everything else as default.

Absolutely play to the style that makes you happy and most comfortable. The suggestions you get here are just that, suggestions.

With that having been said, i always find that it is better to have a coherent strategy to my research. I start out researching the research techs to the point just before it becomes prohibitive and then switch to something else lesser (usually econ or weapons) until my emipre is larger and the larger techs take less time.

As far as upgrading, I do the opposite of Uranium. I research until the last upgrade level for an individual weapon/upgrade and use that to outfit my ships. That way I get to maximize versatility of my ships. And they last longer.

I also tend to go for the medium builds as soon as possible and don't mess around with the smaller ships, unless I need support craft. The mid grade ships are nicer earlier as they have more HP than smaller ships and can usually crush fleets of smaller craft.