I'm asking the professionals of this game for advice. (game advice)

[COPYCAT2531]

I want to create a race of intelligent futanari cat people and take over the galaxy. But I am often killed or I stay at the broken cart when I start to attack. Tell me what to do???

[Armchair]

That's kind of a broad question.  I'm not an expert, but I can share some tips that I follow.

 

• Having a large population is key to success since it is a direct metric of the sum of resources that your civilization is capable of processing.  A trend both in these games and in real life is that battles are won through tactical prowess and fancy war machines, but wars are won via industrial output and logistics.
• I don't know what your race of people looks like, but before the game even begins you can get a head start on helping fuel your expansion by taking the rapid breeders trait or at least by avoiding the slow breeders trait.
• Once the game starts, you want to prioritize gaining the capability to start growing pops in parallel.  This will be accomplished by setting up your first colonies as fast as possible and by beginning construction of robotic pops.
• On day 1, you want to scrap your starting corvettes since they're of no use to you and their upkeep is noticeable to your fledgling empire.  First alter their design by unchecking the "automatically update this design" checkbox and then removing all of the weapons/armor/shields/FTL drive so that you're left with a naked corvette design that's just an empty hull.  Then order your corvettes to "upgrade" to the naked version of the design.  This will result in your nation being refunded a small pile of alloys that you will eventually invest into your first colony ship.  Once they've finished upgrading, then disband the corvettes so that you are no longer paying monthly energy upkeep on the useless hulls.
• At the start of the game, we want to rush robotics tech as quickly as possible.  To that end it is a priority to hire an "Industry" focused scientist and have him working as our engineering researcher since doing so will stack the deck and improve our odds of being presented with the "Powered Exoskeletons" and "Robotic Workers" technologies as quickly as possible.
• You'll want to gradually start building more science ships so that we can find our nearby habitable worlds.  At the start of the game, we want to "explore" systems more than we want to "survey" systems.  Surveying is too slow, and we want to find the important systems first.  We want to identify locations of habitable worlds, strategically significant hyperlane chokepoints, the locations of our nearest neighbors, and other points of interest such as derelict megastructures, wormholes, and gateways.
• You can explore faster by exploiting the fact that you can instantly re-assign scientists to different science ships at any time.   A single scientist can explore the galaxy in opposite directions if you reassign him from ship A to ship B after ship A finishes making a jump so that ship B can can make a jump.  Ship A's progress won't be impeded since it doesn't need the scientist to return to its helm until after it's spent a few weeks flying across the star system to reach the next hyperspace jump point.
• After identifying the location of key locations like habitable worlds or significant chokepoints, then backtrack and survey the systems so that your construction ships can claim the territory.
• Whenever possible, specialized your colonies by making them dedicated mineral/energy/alloy worlds.  This lets you stack resource multiplier bonuses effectively.  Your homeworld will likely be your first science world and it is in your interest to build some extra science labs there.
• Once you have some science labs at the homeworld, assign a science ship to assist the world's research output.
• Build hydroponics bays on all of your starbases.  It's an efficient way to generate food.  Just sell any excess food on the market.  It's basically free money.

 

Some tips about warfare:

• We don't want to get stuck in a multi-front war, so it can be beneficial to spend time improving relations with some of our neighbors so that we can focus on one opponent at a time.  If possible send them an envoy to improve relations and organize a trade deal that is slightly in their favor to help make them happy.
• Strike craft are kind of OP in the early game, so we'll want to make use of that in our early defenses and as part of our early cruiser fleets.
• I recommend using energy weapons since our engineering department will be too busy prioritizing techs like robots/destroyers/strikecraft/cruisers, etc.   Also, closer to the mid-game, plasma cannons are nice and neutron launchers are OP.
• Once you have robotics, try to hire a voidcraft scientist and have him start leading engineering research to help boost the odds of finding strikecraft/warship class/starbase size upgrades.
• We want to minimize usage of defensive platforms since their static nature makes them questionable investments, but they can serve a purpose if they are in a chokepoint system that the enemy must be forced to pass through to reach your territory.
• You want to take the Supremacy tradition as one of your early traditions.  I normally take it second.  It gives you the extra fleet power that's needed to stand against militarized opponents, or overwhelm more peaceful opponents.
• Keep an eye open for opportunities to sucker-punch the opponent by using the pirates against him.  For example, I once won a very early war against a very aggressive opponent with overwhelming naval power by spending the bulk of the war turtled up behind a chokepoint system that they weren't willing to attack.  Then, after years of cold war where the war exhaustion crept up to near 100%, I hired the pirate marauders at the eleventh hour to raid his star systems.  My fleet followed the pirates.  The pirates smashed the enemy navy, and my armies occupied the enemy planet once the pirates started returning home.   At this point I signed the status quo peace deal, which let me steal one of my opponent's colonies despite their vastly superior navy.  The boon to my economy, and damage to the opponent's economy, was enough for me to crush that opponent in a follow up war in a few years once the armistice expired.  An important detail is that I received ownership of the colony because I both had a claim on the system and the system was presently occupied by me at the time that the status quo peace was agreed upon.