Day 3

The first week or so is always going to be a slow; techs are minimal, ships take forever to get anywhere and your industry isn't producing a whole lot of ships.

Despite this, things are starting to get tense.

As you can see from the screenshot above, my borders are now touching enemy borders on all sides, most of the nearby stars have all been taken and my scanning isn't good enough to know what my neighbors are doing.

This is the game play screen and I'll detail what each item is. The orange line is my scanning range; other than the locations of stars and who controls them, I cannot see anything beyond this line. The colored circle around the star indicates who owns it. The yellow circle slightly further out is how productive the star is. What this means is that if you want to build on it, it's cheaper if the yellow circle is larger. Also, the more you have built on it, the more expensive consecutive builds are. The three numbers below indicate the number of economy, industry and research buildings on the star. The final number below that indicates the number of ships on a given star.

If you look at the list of players on the right of the screenshot, I'm currently in second place but that doesn't really mean anything at this stage of the game. I've run out of stars to grab while I know that some of my opponents still have a few stars available to take. Besides this, the players at the top of the list are always going to be targeted and teamed up against so as to not allow one to race out ahead of the others.

What I have got going for me are my techs. My feeler messages all came back positive. In fact, I couldn't have planned it better. I had each of the three say they'd be willing to swap a different tech with me. This means if all come through and we continue to trade, I should have every single tech increasing at the same rate - 4X faster than people without trades. Now that being said, so far I've sent out speed to all three of them and only received one back, I have heard from one of the others who has promised it me soon but I've not even heard from one of them. The other thing I have to be concerned about, as I said in my previous post, is that it is possible to see what everyone else has. If any of these 3 work out I'm getting 4 techs at once, they might see me as a threat and cut me off. And to just to let you know, sending a tech costs $25 which is quite a lot of money at this early stage of the game. To top it off, there is no in-built trade window so there's no guarantee that the swap will go both ways. I may have sent speed to these people for free. Let's hope not.

I've also had my first (albeit unplanned) battle. At the right of the screenshot is a planet called Rigil Kentaurus (I didn't come up with it's name!) where my fleet with 5 ships beat the dark reds fleet of 5 ships also. We just both happened to be going there at the same time, both seeing that it was unoccupied at the time. Once the ship sets off from a star, there is no altering course. I happened to reach it first and with my defensive bonus and extra weapon strength (from the trade), I was left with 3 ships and a star to call my very own. The star from which his fleet came from (Tarazet) is within both of our jump ranges, but not our scan ranges. The lesson is, be careful when jumping to a star outside of your scanning range!