As a newcomer to the game, I am rather curious about what I am seeing in early gameplay.

I am trying the Phidi at easy difficulty sometimes on a normal sized galaxy and sometimes huge. Several starts in a row, I find that I have only 1-3 stars within exploration range. Of these, 1-2 have pirates, so cannot be used until I develop some military muscle. In my most recent start, it was one star within range, and that one had pirates. So... no development until after fighting my way out of this hole, which relies on some techs, or techs to extend range (which appears more time consuming).

In some cases, I might get another star or two in range by building a mining colony for range purposes, but often that would add only low probability red stars.

Further slowing things down, the home world seems to need a farm rather quickly, or else starvation strikes. My choices appear to be a boatload of tech to improve farms (won't happen in time) or using one of two remaining slots to build a farm, assuring that I cannot cut the time significantly with money, tech, or production.

The sum total is a very, very slow start. If that is the way it is supposed to play, then fine. But I have two sinking feelings -- one, that I am doing something totally wrong, or, worse, that this sort of bad luck just strikes a significant portion of the time and, although the human player can start over, the AI opponents are seeing the same thing and often stunted as a result.

Comments from more experienced players?

FinnegansFather wrote: I find that I have only 1-3 stars within exploration range. Of these, 1-2 have pirates, so cannot be used until I develop some military muscle. In my most recent start, it was one star within range, and that one had pirates.

Hi there. Was curious and fired up 5 games with Phidi in Medium map and all default settings:
- In all cases I did not find any pirate ships within range of the scout ship
- In all cases I had at least three habitable planets within colonisation range from types: Ocean, Islands or Glacier
- In two cases I found system Tyl within colonisation distance. This is a big deal as it contains a Garden world

So all-in-all I cannot confirm what you have seen, but I can confirm that Phidi AI does have a hard time sometimes to get expanding and get stucj on two systems. If these cases were due to the mentioend pirate proximity and not enough good planets around I cannot tell

A human player should be able to circumwent these adds both pirates and lack of habitable planets with the help of Outposts. As I haven't seen AI use Outposts yet that would definitively put them in a considerable disadvantage if they should get such an unlucky roll

Next game I had exactly one star system within range, but it was habitable and I went ahead and played, so no further testing of this for now.

FinnegansFather wrote:Next game I had exactly one star system within range, but it was habitable and I went ahead and played, so no further testing of this for now.

Did you consider scout and colonizer range or default vessel range like that of the transport?
If you select the whole fleet, the range is reduce to that of the transport

Also are you keeping the default star density setting or changing it? Usually your Scout and Colony ship should be able to reach 4-5 stars right out of the gate....

-Will

I am only considering scout range.

Couple more re-starts since then, I have yet to see 4 or 5 stars since then. I am playing with default settings as to density.

Very odd. I don't really have any other ideas now.

-Will

Can you send a screenshot of the starting and sorrounding systems with only the scout selected?