Counter strategies

Umm, if your opponet uses missiles, fighters, drones, sats use point defense weapons

If he uses armor skipping weapons (crystalline race) make sure and have lots of shields

If he uses shield skipping weapons (phased polaron beams) make sure and used phased shields and/or lots of armor

Like that?

Perhaps you can re-phrase the question. The answer so far seems to involve a measure of common sense as Astorax is indicating.

Most of the Fleet strategies doesn't matter too much as the ship break formation right away. Fleets are most useful to move ships of different speeds together.

A lot of the strategy is: What you research. What you build.

You must build your ships to take advantage of your enemies weaknesses. Its a learning process there. If the enemy uses powerful close range weapons then consider using the 'Maxiumum Weapon Range' with a longer ranged weapon than your enemy.

If hes is Missle, Fighter and Drone Happy. Counter with missles, fighters and Drones + strong Point Defenses.

Be careful researching Facility upgrades when you are at war. The temptation to upgrade will take your planet's ship building offline while you upgrade.

Its really about the little things and getting the feel for everything. You should try PBW to go against real people to see the best potential in the game.

SE5 Files hosted on Filefront (Patches, Mods, Races, etc)

I think part of the problem here is for new people to the game (such as myself), as near as I can tell, you learn the "obvious" counters and counter-counters by playing the game; there's no help or systemic resource you can use to systematically understand the technology and what it does (or at least that I know of), what it's good for, what it's bad at, and where it fits in the rock-paper-scissors ecosystem.

Which weapon would I use that gives me shield skipping? Can I find that out before I research it for the first time? Which part of the tech tree do I go down to get there? At least for me, it would be blind luck to research something and have it result in a shield skipping weapon system (or even shields for that matter ).

I guess the answer to this question is to click the ? button on the right of the toolbar in-game, and read the description for every tech and commit it to memory (I'm making an assumption that all techs in the game are available there).

For those who've played many games into the late-tech phases, how did you learn about the techs and which ones work well together, and which ones counter others, and so forth?

Well, like you said, its trial and error. Atleast for me it was. It may seem overwhelming to begin with (there are alot of techs) but once you get a few games in you'll have a pretty good idea of whats what. You don't even have to play full games, just experiment with researching a certain tech to see what it does.

In the beginning I was forever starting over to try to achieve that fabled "optimal start" - the most efficient, balanced tech research possible. If I found something that was like "oh wow, thats really neat I should have done that from the beginning" then I would. I would incorporate that into my beginning strat and so on and so forth.

Its a learning process, mate, but its fun to figure things out on your own, atleast I think so. But, if you really must know how to get to certain techs, you can always take a look at the components.txt and techareas.txt etc in your /data folder and it will list the prereqs for certain items.

Phased Polaron Beams (PPBs) are the only shield skipping weapon I know of (unless they still have nullspace weapons from SE:IV in SE:V) - hint: research physics

They still have nullspace weapons.

He ponders the dangers inherent in the advantages, and advantages inherent in the dangers. - Ts'ao Ts'ao

Crimson

Phased shields (which stop normal shield skipping weapons) and perhaps weapon damaging weapons (to take it out before it shoots you). They are powerful, no doubt, but its balanced in that it has a slow rate of fire compared to other weapons.

Unless you have Phased Shields, both of them should skip the shields entirely. Are you using stock or a mod? Updated to 1.66?

Hmm, it might be a bug but then again, it could just be the Combat Simulator. Its notorious for being kinda buggy itself and things that might work perfectly well in real space might not in there. I know you probably didn't want to hear that but try to test it outside the combat sim and see if you get different results.

Hmm, I wouldn't think so but ...well, who knows. That would have to be one of the resident guru's call, methinks. I'm just a soldier

Still, from SE:IV, I think the nullspace projectors did not skip phased shields and I would assume its the same way here but, to tell the truth, I've yet to actually use the nullspace projectors in SE:V, heh.

Consider that the weapons are destroying the shield generators themselves, hence why it appears that the shields are being reduced.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

^--- theres one of the guru's

I don't doubt that people like me who play single player against the AI would get crushed the first time or two against real people. I wish I had the time to give that a try.

I've not played against real ppl either, Vince, heh. Still getting used to various mods and how they do the techs and such first. The AI really isn't a challenge though Unnamed's Mod and, surprisingly, BM with high difficulty + large bonus can be ...umm tricky at times.

I have found the BM AI to be the best challenge so far. Not sure if I like how research is handled though.