When I was besieging the last system of my enemies, they had two colonies of different sizes. The bigger colony had a 7x multiplier on its defenses, and the smaller one was 5x.

Hmm...so is it more important for PD to have high Accuracy or high Damage? How do I decide between Laser and Coilgun PD in the beginning?

Looks interesting. A lot of introduction to "Who are the Phidi?" for your audience. It will be cool to see what happens when the action starts.

The Phidi were the first race I played when bought the game. They will not run short on gold.

Yeah, I initially thought that maybe it was because I had just taken one of their star systems (Gacrux), but their new colony of Rasalhague in the south was closer to Deneb than Gacrux was. They were clearly in range.

It just seemed like the AI had already decided that it had to leave, and had ...

I'm a little unclear on what you mean by these.

In the first example, you are using slaves as an invasion-force to create more slaves? Or is this a tactic to quickly remove the foreign population of a planet?

In the second example, I'm not exactly clear on why you are putting all the Tinkers onto ...

I have attached the save of the turn when there are still two Teros Cruisers in the Deneb system, the third one has already withdrawn. I am still no match for this force, but the Teros don't actually do anything. Even if I send my Light Cruiser away, they withdraw a second Cruiser that turn, and ...

There were no starbases or any sort of planetary defenses backing up my Cruiser. Just the defenseless Space Station needed to build it in the first place. Maybe the AI was treating that as if it were as strong as a Starbase?

I didn't check whether the AI would invade if I lost my Cruiser. They only ...

An AI fleet containing 3 Teros Heavy Cruisers (and one troop ship) headed for Deneb my only colony with a Space Station, that had just built a Human Light Cruiser. 1 on 1, a Human Light Cruiser can take on the Teros ships, but I did not have any deflectors (big problem!), and they outnumbered me 3:1 ...

The fire when in range thing is a bug for both sides. I cant count how many times my ships have not fired when another moves into range. The sole exception seems to be if its a ship I want to capture...
I'm not sure that it's a bug per se, but maybe the gunners are waiting for the "right" time to ...

I was attacking a Yoral colony with a group of Laser Destroyers, and after disposing of their scattered defense fleet, I found myself facing their ground batteries. I noticed that their ion cannons had the same range as my lasers, and after a bit of trial and error I found that my Destroyers were ...

They add Trade Potential?!! They're even better than I thought!
I like to use them to expand my range when I'm too impatient to wait for propulsion or colonization techs to let me expand it normally. They're a little bit metal-hungry in the beginning, but it's a lot cheaper than a colony ship!

I had always just assumed that once in a great while, mankind unlocks a secret so profound that <their> future is altered forever. Fire, electricity, splitting the atom. At the dawn of the [??]th century, <they> unlocked another. It had the potential to change humanity's role in the universe. <They ...

New user here, long time fan of Arioch's webcomic, acquaintance from Explorminate forums. Finally decided to see what all this SiS business was about and was quite pleased with my game yesterday.

Also an unrepentant MoO1 fanboi. I found the sequel to be inferior.