Below is another fun Space Empires article from one of our newer blog contributors, David Waldorf. You can find his previous Space Empires articles here. Enjoy! -Rachel

For me, the economic and exploration aspects of Space Empires are relatively easy to grasp.  Mastery of them may take a while with all the different options that are available (especially if you include the Close Encounters expansion), but there really aren’t any variables to worry about and the math is pretty simple.

Fleet building is another matter entirely.  I remember the first time I built Carriers and Fighters, and thought I was going to hammer my foes into oblivion with them.  I don’t remember for sure what it was they came up against, but I do remember it shredded them to pieces without remorse.  It was probably a fleet of scouts with Point Defense.  I still haven’t exactly recovered from that, and tend to look at Fighters with a great deal of skepticism.  What are they good for?  What ships are they effective against—and when should they turn tail and run?  What role (if any) should they play in my fleet?

So if you are just learning the game or want to play around with different fleet compositions, I have designed a short exercise for you.  Grab a buddy, and start with a clear map.  You’re going to focus on fleet building and combat here, so you won’t be exploring or doing much with economics.  Each of you should place your home world somewhere in the middle of the map—say hexes F4 and F10.  Then each of you gets an allotment of Colony Points, and you choose what techs to invest in and what ships to build.  Try starting with 200 points each—but it could easily be less or more, depending on whether you and your opponent want to try building up a fleet more slowly, or going straight to the top.

Once you have bought your techs and built your ships, put them on the map at your home planet, and start pushing them around.  Take regular movement turns, and take a simplified economic phase by giving yourself 20 (or 40 or 50 or whatever—so long as you agree) points to spend on further tech and upgrades.  Don’t pay maintenance, and carry over as many points as you want.  Play as long or as short as it takes to get a feel for the experimental fleet you have built.  An easy place to quit would be when someone scores a few hits on a home world.

If you want, you could throw in a few terrain markers to make things a bit more interesting, or add in a some colonies so that you each have multiple targets.  Again, the point of this whole exercise is to experiment with different fleet configurations to get a feel for how ships behave in combat, and possibly find new strategies that you had overlooked before.  You might even find that this provides a quick “fix” for when you’d like to play the game, but don’t have time for a full scenario.

And if you figure out the key to using carriers and fighters effectively, come back and let me know.

Author: David Waldorf