Hello and welcome to the endless AI stomping guide for Endless Space: Disharmony!

I came to the idea to write a quick endless difficulty strategy guide after googling numerous outdated forum topics regarding that great 4x strategy game by Amplitude Studios.

It seems that during the early access, launch, eventual patching and DLC releases a lot of game mechanics were changed, and trying to understand what works and what doesn't in latest release became quite a chore.

Please note - this guide mostly concerns offensive strategy against the endless difficulty AI, leading to either Domination/Science/Expansion victories, as the multiplayer games against human opponents are quite different in nature and should be approached individually for tactics.

So, how to properly wipe floor with endless AI?
Well, you have to use your racial traits to their power, expand quickly while holding infrastructure going, and hit harder than the others hit you!
Best is to make a custom race with some good traits. Consider going with generic game races as added difficulty level on top of endless one.

Most likely this is going to be "expand until I can, and then kill everyone on sight and take their stuff" type of game.
I never tried diplomatic victory on endless difficulty and not even sure it is doable, since you have huge diplo penalties due to difficulty - everyone will just hate your guts and invade your stuff as soon as they sniff your planets out. This is especially the case if you get Cravers as your neighbors - they have no concept of peace and will just come to eat you and yours.

So, get ready to expand fast and fight hard.

AFFINITIES

Out of best aggressive race affinities I would suggest:

- Cravers
I adore these bad boys, and they will always have a special place in my heart.
The planet depletion mechanic is a good buff to all your planets' output in the beginning - where it really matters, just remember that you must always conquer/colonize and consume new planets to keep it balanced out with depleted planets left behind (they still give OK science and production, just not that tasty as the first sweet bite, you know).
They also have very nice unique researches for fleet size and lower fleet upkeep costs, and empire-wide happiness based on total fleet power. In general their tech tree is awesome for warlike zerg empire with huge fleets.

- United Empire
Their empire-wide production bonus with higher taxes is very sweet to build up and spam your zerg fleets, also their ships are quite good to fit because of weapons loadout bonuses. A solid pick.

- Hissho
*If* you get that bushido bonus rolling, there is no stopping you.

- Sheredyn
Enemy cannot spam retreats. Awesome cheap early invasion troopers to take someone’s stuff right away. Good early tech for +dust per destroyed enemy CP (command point) along with nice buyout price reduction bonus will make you very rich, very fast - overall a solid choice for warlike empire.

- Amoeba
The ability to see everything right on start is awesome, especially on multiplayer. Their ship loadouts are okay-ish because all their ships have bonus to defense systems so you can make some pretty invulnerable ships as well.

POSITIVE TRAITS

There are looots of traits available and you can review them all and tailor something together.
I consider best traits to be the ones that help you build up fast, expand while keeping happiness up, and fight hard:

- Knowledge Gathering 2/2
The best trait ever! Sweet 40 research points per destroyed enemy CP (command point).
This trait is just so good many people just ban it in multiplayer - since you will fight a lot, it will net you huge amount of science, sometimes you will finish several research projects IN ONE TURN because of several fights happening thanks to that trait.
It does lose some shine in late game, but it is extremely helpful in the early game, where it really matters!

- Optimistic 2/2
Very important for early expansion, this additional happiness will let you expand quickly over your whole star cluster without dropping you into pit of expansion disapproval. And that is quite important to do before your neighbors come and settle on your stuff, because smoking them out of a settled system will be harder and requires more lategame techs.
This trait helps you to keep your happiness and taxes balanced in the early game while you expand like crazy and keep you going.
On endless difficulty you still might need to drop taxes to keep your happiness up at least on content, and without this trait it is even more painful until you research and build up happiness buildings (Infinite Supermarkets and Colonial Rights) to offset the expansion disapproval.

- Big Fleets 1 or 2
In reality, in all early and thus MOST important fleet fights it will not matter how exactly your ships are fitted, the only thing that matters is - who got more ships for better alpha strike salvo, and that is where this trait shines.
Let me put it like this - early game is all about zerg quantity, while mid- and lategame is more about zerg quality.
This trait helps a lot in early game skirmishes, because AI *will* have bigger fleets than you - because it researches faster for bonus command point techs.

- Dust Recyclers
Let's be honest - any sort of "farming" skills and traits are blatantly OP, just look above at Knowledge Gathering. This one is no different.
20 dust per destroyed enemy CP, this does add up to a lot of dust over the early game fleet fights, especially when you stack this with the “Harvester” Pilot hero skill for 50 dust per destroyed CP, then add "Saboteur" Adventurer hero skill for 20 more dust per destroyed CP, AND 20 more dust per destroyed CP if you play Sheredyn with their unique researched ability…
Basically, you will be swimming in Dust after every fight you win and that means more expensive retrofits for your fleets so you always fight with top technology, more rushed ships, more rushed buildings.. you get the idea. Cash always has its uses.

Not so bad optional traits to choose from:

- Legendary Heroes 1 or 2
Nothing is more broken at start than Administrator hero with +10 production from Director 1 skill, and you might as well abuse that hard.
That being said, if you don't get an Administrator hero in your academy at start, you are screwed. Consider yourself warned.

- Optimal Structure 2/2
30% additional ship load is not so bad to pack more stuff in, but.. I would rather just bring another ship with Big Fleets...

- Strong Hulls 2/2
40% additional ship HP is solid, but realistically armor does just the same, and if you fit your ships properly, they just never die anyway. Still, this trait allows you to fit more guns while ignoring armor, as you have this bonus HP already. A good pick.

- Deadly Weapons/Sniper/etc
ALL of this is worse than just bringing another ship with Big Fleets, really.

- Scientists 1-2-3
Science in general is cool because it lets you make new boom toys.
So 10-30% science on systems is nice but realistically it is very point-expensive, fits peaceful empires better, and you will get more science with Knowledge Gathering early on.
And, well, 30% out of your early science is… not much.
Still, it does shave some turns even on early researches and is getting more and more powerful as the game goes on and you get more science-specialized systems.

Also, in general, it is considered that picking research science traits is bad because they provide no bonuses later on, and you can research them quick anyway, and after first few turns they are useless, but I feel like opening with "N-way Fusion plants" research might not be bad because sometimes you would rather start building a production plant right after planet exploit, while researching for new planet types to settle in. Also shows where Titanium is right from start, which in turn adds to planet production - quite solid tech if you have spare 5 trait points.

NEGATIVE TRAITS

While creating your blatantly OP race, you eventually will have to put some negatives to balance the trait points out:

- Sloppy Sawbones 2/2
Slower and more expensive hero healing - who cares, good luck hurting our hero first.

- Feeble Warriors 2/2
Less ground defense on planet systems against invasion – pfff, we are not going to even build those ground defense buildings since we are the ones who are going to invade everyone.
On a serious note - it is ALWAYS better to spend production on making fleets to defend your systems, than spending it on ground defense buildings which only slow the invasion down. The enemy invasion ships cannot safely invade your system with your fleets in orbit.
Best defense is offense, they got that one right.

- Dust Impaired 2/2
More expensive dust cost on hero abilities. Well, most of "paid" abilities are useless, the one and only "paid" hero ability we are going to spam every combat phase is "Dust Barrier", available from "Defender 1" ability, and initially it costs 40 dust per use with this malus on before you apply all the reductions, so who cares really - you will have more than enough dust at that point anyway, and with Dust Recyclers you farm any spent dust back anyway.

- Eternal War 1
Since we are most likely going to kill everyone on sight anyway, why not. Just please note, this means you are enemy to everyone too and they will shoot down your scouts on sight as well.

The first several turns are quite important, and this is probably where most fails happen.
I mean even on the first turn there is A LOT to do, so here goes.

Check what you have

You start with 1 planet in system, 1 scout ship, 1 colony ship and 3 heroes in your academy.

Check your heroes choices first - ideally, you need 1 Administrator to pump your fleets out and 2 Pilots to lead them.
If you don't have any Administrators, it is a good time to throw keyboard at the wall/restart game/take it like a man and try to move on.
Though, you want to hire that Administrator hero a.s.a.p. and put him into your starting system.

Dust and Taxes

If you started at endless difficulty without dust-changing traits, you will have 10 dust in your pocket.
The first hero to hire costs 20 dust and then the price increases (next one 80 dust, the one after that 140 dust and so on).

Your dust income will depend on your starting planet - so open the "Empire Overview" screen and check your income for the next turn. Now, adjust the tax slider accordingly so next turn you will get exactly 10 more dust to hire the hero.
You may need to raise the tax quite alot if your planet only gives like 2 dust per pop, and it may drop people unhappy - but thats just for a turn, to get the hero faster, and you can fix the slider back after that.

Ideally, in early game you want to lower your taxes to around 30% to put your planets on "happy" or “ecstatic” - so they get production and research bonuses, as well as lower disapproval from your fast colonization and expanding.
This is much, MUCH easier to manage if you have "Optimistic" racial trait I recommended above.
During the early expansion in general, try to keep everyone at least "Content" without dropping into negative finance pit.
You will have to balance your finances every turn, and as soon as you field your first zerg fleets - your finance will plummet due to maintenance, and this is where you will need to farm cash with Pilot hero Harvester skill.

Anyway - you really ought to get used to checking your Empire overview for happiness and taxes once every turn and play with the tax slider, to balance and smooth stuff out in star systems you own, until you get more and more happiness techs/buildings, so you can start increasing your taxes later.

Right now tho, your goal is to get exactly 20 dust to hire the hero now or in the next few turns.

Home system

Now, for your home system the plan is simple - you need to build up production power to be able to spam colony ships, as well as get some population to be able to pack those ships with people.

Put the planetary exploitation at home for industry or food.
Usually for EVERY new planet that would be only food farming until the whole planetary system is populated to full - BUT for the starting home system I recommend going with industrial exploitation first, because very soon your home will only be producing colony ships to colonize your whole galaxy pocket - and that means no food production anyway (because making colony ships freezes food production), so only industry matters.
You might even consider picking up “mineral rich” home planet anomaly in racial traits just for that – so your home system can spam those colony ships REAL hard.

Now, let's put a research going.
The research tree in that game can make your brains blow, but honestly - there is so much love and detail put into every tech description, I just love it. Hat off to developers definitely.

Usually, most likely - you want to get all cheap inner ring researches first, then beeline for "Applied Cazimir Effect" in bottom tree to enable wormhole jumping (using those wavy travel paths you could not use before) and reduce your expansion disapproval which should give happiness boost because you should have some stuff colonized by that point.
Usually after that it is good idea to beeline for the tier2 weapons for your ships to meet and greet your new neighbours properly. After that the research usually goes around depending on what you need most, and it is up to you to analyze your situation and to think and plan what you need next.

You can Shift-click on several techs to put them in queue order and that is what you usually should try to do, because when you get bonus research points from random events or fights it can finish a few projects in one turn right away!

The starting research order I recommend usually goes as:

• N-way Fusion Plants
  That early production building is usually the first thing you build on any planet after food exploitation, very important to start a planet going, also shows where Titanium is, best first tech ever
  
  
• Xenobotany - Colonize Tundra
  Out of all "non-garden" planets I consider tundra the best, because it has good food along with awesome production, which will allow whole system to roll/self-expand faster, awesome planets for colony ships to drop in if no jungle planets are available
  
  
• Arid Epigenetics - Colonize Arid
  More crappy after Tundra planets, consider these as the next "okay-ish" planets to colonize, because they have much worse production that tundra planets, and colonizing the system out of Arid planet will be harder. they do give some good dust boost, which makes them bearable
  
  
• Soil Xenobiology
  Upgrades your food exploitations and makes your food production bloom, you want all your planets filled with people a.s.a.p. because each planet population point gives a bonus, and the best way to get most of those is to get more population fast. So, FOOD!

Usually the above stuff is most important and enough to queue your research ahead. But since we are beelining to Cazimir anyway, you can queue:

• Xenology
  Good for early cash which you need badly because you lowered your taxes, and enable first package of luxury stuff if you lucky to have those on your planets - they give nice bonuses to systems, and even better empire-wide bonus when you have a monopoly of 4 and more. Always check your planets for that stuff.
  
  
• Isolation Shields
  By this time your planets should have some population on them and this will speed up your research and let you get to Cazimir faster
  
  
• Compact Fusion Reactors
  Extra ship speed and ice planets colonization on the way to Cazimir are very nice, but be careful about settling on ice planets right now because this may drop your happiness too low, and it will hurt you more than help you. Ideally you want to colonize ice planets after you got the Cazimir bonus
  
  
• and finally Applied Cazimir Effect
  This should offset some expansion tension and more importantly - allow you to travel through wormholes between star clusters (those wavy passageways your ships could not use before).
  Do keep in mind, however, that those star clusters are most likely already colonized by other species, and most of them want to steal your stuff or eat you, or both. Best is to proceed with caution and with hero-led fleet of hungry zerglings.

This is the base "beeline" research plan to get you going. Deviating from it usually means you will lack in some area (like, loosing dust and early luxuries bonuses if you skip Xenology, or having slow research because you went straight to Cazimir without Iso Shields).

As you can see, I deliberately ignore inner ring weapon techs for now - because they suck, really. Both lasers and missiles are much worse compared to simple Kinetics you already have, and their respectful defenses are bad as well in small doses. You will pick those techs up a bit later, after Cazimir - on your way to Tier 2 weapons and fleet command points researches.
You can check more details on actual early ship fits in below fleet sections.

Still, you might want to adjust some stuff - like, skipping Xenology if you have no luxuries at all and your dust income is okay-ish with plenty of arid planets.
After that, usually I would go for more fleet command points and better weapons in top tree - Isotope fabrication, etc., because you will probably have a lot of fighting on your hands. And then for more happiness because it will drop the more you settle/conquer – infinite supermarkets, colony rights, etc. And then for more science power from the right research trees, then for colonizing totally bad planets from bottom tree like desert/barren, and back and forth – it really will depend on your situation. But that’s for the future.

After all of the previous stuff is done, you can actually move your scout and colony around.
The reasoning to moving your ships last is - some random exploration events give you bonus science, and to get use of it you need to have research project going, otherwise it will be applied to your next research you will put in and not immediately.
Also, some events may give you bonus dust, and that may allow you to buy Admin hero on your 1st turn, which is extremely awesome.
That being said - the utterly best exploration event is getting a free colony ship. Yummy.

Just remember - not all events are good. Some may spawn pirates and you will have to deal with that, and endless difficulty pirates can give you a headache at start. Best is to avoid them best you can until you build some fighter ships, since your starting scout sucks at fighting until you can afford to retrofit it.

Also note - if you have a specific hero you want to buy this turn, ALWAYS buy him before you move your ships to new systems with exploration event up. There is a random event which replaces all of your academy heroes with new ones - so you may either get a bad surprise when the hero you wanted is gone and replaced by something worse, OR use this to your advantage - like, try to reset your academy with a random event in case you didn't get an Administrator hero.
This is also why usually you may want to hold off with triggering exploration events on your first turn if you got a nice Administrator hero waiting in academy - safer and better to move your ships and trigger the events on next turn, after you bought the hero.

Now, where to go?

• Check the systems with exploration events first – they might have nice early bonuses
  
• Explore distant planets with your scout ship (it has more speed)
  
• Explore closer planets with your colony ship (it is very slow)
  
• If you are exploring with colony ship you would want to check Yellow or White sun systems first, because they usually have more "hospitable" planets you can drop right on
  
• If you tripped pirates with your colony ship - immediately get out of the system before they can attack you. Hide it back in home system hangar if you have to. Losing colony ships hurts, bad.

Second turn you should have enough dust to hire your Administrator hero (if you have one in academy), and assign him to your home system. If you are lucky to have a choice, prefer Administrator/Corporate heroes, because they can also help with Science from Negotiator tree later on.
If you got Legendary Heroes 1 or 2 trait, he will get level immediately, give him Director 1 skill into +10 production bonus Civil Engineer skill next.
This will allow your home system with assigned hero to spam colony ships in just a few turns until your whole home cluster is colonized.

The usual build order for home system is:

• Industrial zones exploitation ( to get that bonus production for colony ships spam)
  
• Heavy Isotope Refineries (as soon as N-way research is done, also adds nice production. If your science is slow and you still need a turn or two to finish N-ways research, make production to dust conversion – will give you a nice dust boost to buy second hero or retrofit your scout into a warship)
  
• spam Colony ships until ALL star systems with "good" planets around you are colonized

The usual build order for your first colony “productive” system is:

• Food exploitation on first planet
  
• Heavy Isotope Refineries (helps with production and system colonization, also gives time to get some population on first planet to colonize the rest of the system)
  
• repeatedly Colonize next planet in the system -> Food exploitation until all “good” planets in the system are colonized
  
• can build some Xenotourism and Public-Private for cash and science, if they take like 1 turn each, but what you really need to do is start SPAM warships nonstop. If the system is productive enough, it should pop tier 1 warship every 1-3 turns.

So you keep exploring around, find some good productive system to drop a colony on, get some dust for another Administrator hero (if you have one) and get your first production colony rolling, all while spamming colony ships in your home system to settle everything which looks nice.

At that point, it would be a good idea to retrofit your Scout ship into a warship – the initial design is terrible, it cannot fight enemy scouts and pirates at all, really. Edit the current scout design (it may be called differently from faction to faction) – I recommend removing everything from it to 0 load, then add 1 armor if you have titanium, and ALL the rest into starting kinetic guns in “long range” mode (like, 10-15 cannons or so). Don’t bother with tier 1 defenses – at that point, raw hitpoints and guns are better. More details on fitting later. Retrofit should cost you around 50-60 dust.
Now, send this bad boy to guard your wormhole entrance systems from unwanted guests – scouts and *especially* colony ships. Every warship you make after that should do the same – you will need at least 1 ship guarding your entrance systems, it may be 1 or 3-4 systems depending on how lucky or unlucky you are. You do not want enemy scouts to roam around and others to know you have stuff to settle and especially enemy sneaking in a colony ship into your star cluster – because initially you can only fight in orbit, and the technology to take enemy planets comes only later on.

Of course they won’t like you shooting their scouts down and eventually will come to visit with a proper fleet, but you should be ready with your own fleets by that time. For now, 1 guardian warship in every wormhole should do it.

Ideally, what you need is to find 1-2 really good production systems with several productive planets to spam your early and probably later fleets. Like, a system with some jungle/tundra planets will be awesome, because these types have good production and food going.

You need a new productive system because your home system will be busy pumping out colony ships, losing population because of that and cannot do much else anyway right now. And it has to do it to colonize your cluster anyway.

So, your fist colonized system must be a good productive system to quickly colonize itself internally, then build basic infrastructure and then start working on building your fleet power a.s.a.p., because AI is also beelining for Cazimir and they will come for your stuff, and you better be ready when they do - with a fleet either on your side of a wormhole, or even better on theirs!

Also keep in mind - as the game progresses, especially on endless difficulty, it is best to specialize your systems and stick to it. Usually that means 1-2 systems pumping out your ships, and ALL other systems working on science to push your warfare tech and happiness ahead.
So, colonize systems and treat them with that plan in mind. Like - you do not need to build ship bonus stuff on systems that are not going to produce your ships, and vice versa, building some expensive science stuff for small science % bonus in your "factory" systems. Or building defenses on non-border systems – or any defenses at all, to that point, because it is always better to just build more fleets to defend your orbits, than trying to save some time from system invasion.

Overall, your colonization will depend on planet types, their anomalies, unique planet relics and so on and you should plan this ahead, check all planets in system carefully for the luxuries/anomalies good or bad, and so on.

And that is why your first 1-2 systems to colonize are very important - they must build you those early fleets to survive. So, do not just slap your first colony ship anywhere you can on that tiny arid planet - make sure to scout thoroughly and find a good system to settle with your first hive, because most likely, this system will be your initial place to build up your fleet.

As soon as your home system is finished or close to be finished with spamming colony ships - immediately reassign your Administrator hero to your new cool "production" system you established to get it growing and going real fast and spam your first fleets.
Your Admin hero should have +10 production and +15 food skills from the Director tree by that point, and can basically jumpstart any system you move him to – still the best use for him is to stick him into your “productive” system and keep pumping your early warships.
Your home system is probably exhausted from making colony ships, drained of population at that point, so switch it back to food exploitation and give it some time to come around, colonize other planets in it and so on.

Aside from early available and obvious jungle/terran/ocean planets you want to pick the most balanced/foody/productive planet, without terrible negative anomalies/effects that lower your happiness (approval), preferable with nice anomalies, and luxuries.
Make sure to check whole star system first - some bad effects on one planet can be offset by good ones on other planets, or by early luxuries as soon as you research those with Xenology.

Never, ever, ever settle in early game on terrible arctic or barren planet with -20 approval and bad anomaly on top of it for -20 more - you will not be able to terraform/fix these issues until MUCH later into the game, and this early disapproval hit may be just below the belt and will bring your overall approval down along with your empire.

Be realistic - settle the "juicy" stuff which can be immediately useful first. Don’t hesitate to skip bad planets. Sometimes even skip whole star systems with bad planets or with a single "meh" planet until much later - just make sure to guard them from enemy colony ships or pirate spawns if you can. Later on, when you have proper technologies/terraforming/cash you can settle those and jumpstart them with Admin hero quite quickly.

Note that Pirates will spawn on systems you do not have vision on, so it is a good idea to keep a scout on remote unsettled star systems to stop pirates from spawning and annoying you in early game.

• The best production systems would be the ones with many jungle and tundra planets, also lava planets a bit later on. They will end up terraformed into methane gas giants (+20 production per pop) and will spit you a battleship per turn (5 turns - you got full packed fleet of battleships ready to jump into the fray, trololo).
  
  
• The best science systems would be the ones with many ocean/barren/arctic planets and asteroid belts. They will end up terraformed into helium gas giants (+20 science per pop) and will push your science into godliness.
  
  
• The worst systems are the systems with 1 single planet, and also most desert planets. Avoid settling on 1-planet systems like a plague, they will always be horrible with approval, production and science, unless they have some cool luxuries you really need for empire-wide bonuses. Desert planets, while okay-ish to settle, will pretty much will never have worthwhile production/science until late game terraforming, where they don't really matter anyway.

For any new colony system after home, the build order goes usually like this:

• Food exploitation on every planet until population on ALL planets of the system is full, then switch to production or science, depending on the chosen system role
  
• Heavy Iso Refinery to help early production/colonization
  
• Colonize every good planet inside the system, the earlier you do this, the faster they will gain population
  
• Food exploitation on newly colonized planet then colonize next "good" planet in the system
  
• When all habitable "good" planets inside the system are colonized, build up system-wide basics - Xenotourism for cash and Public-Private for science, happiness buildings.
  
• After that specialize the system - if the system is going to produce ships, build some ship-enhancement buildings, then ships, and if's the science system - build more science stuff or just convert production into science. Don't bother trying to build ships in low production system, it will take ages and this is better spent to just pushing your research on.

As for fleet combat, there are many tactics and opinions on how to compose your fleets.

Some people like to make fleets out of several ship types, like 3 first ships to tank the damage (to offset the Nosebreaker and Guillotine tactics), where tank ships are accompanied by glass cannon ships, also mix some invasion ships in and so on.

I personally tend to mass-produce "zergling" type ships of the same type and pack them into a swarm, where each ship is a good self-sustained and easily replaceable asset.
It makes fleet management less tedious, ship production more simple, also since later on you will have no glass cannons in your fleets, it will make the "Spread fire" tactic useless, and enemy does use it a lot as well.

Initially my tier1 ships are all like zergling roaches - some armor and all guns, they go in swarms to farm Science and Dust off my enemies, and eventually they die 1 by 1. Their role is to push my science and dust into tier2 hulls with Hull Weakness x2, and while enemy is busy fighting off my initial swarm of zerglings, these ships are being produced at my home systems and already on the way to reinforce the initial swarm. Now they rock serious armor and HP, good defenses and carry fighters to boot, and fighters just eat enemy tier1 glass cannons/destroyers alive.

Always merge your fleets as soon as you can upon researching new fleet caps - the bigger the fleet, the heavier alpha strike it does at long range.

And later on the cycle continues as you move into the tier3 battleships to replace your fleets (altho oftentimes I find myself still rolling enemies with a horde of my tier2 ships they STILL cannot deal with)

The approach may differ, but as it is, it has proven to be working perfectly fine and I recommend it, unless you really want to creatively compose your fleets (especially for multiplayer you have to).

You need fleets roaming around, ideally led by Pilot heroes.
Just keep in mind - as soon as you research Cazimir effect and can jump wormholes to another star cluster, it means endless AI also did, probably faster than you, and most likely guests are already warping to your star cluster to sniff around, with colony ships following.
Like, “Oh hai, nice to meet you earthlings, can we has your stuff?”.
So get ready to build some warships, slap those tentacles off and protect your stuff!

A bit about ship fitting in general

There are basically 3 ship roles in the game:

• A simple Colony ship. Initial design is good, just 1 colony module, makes’em as cheap and quick to produce as they come and spam them in early game. After early game everything everywhere is usually settled anyway, so you will rarely ever need these again.
  
• A Warship to fight your orbit battles and defend your systems, your bread and butter. These should be made with love, taken care of, retrofitted with every major science improvement. You live and die by these.
  
• An Invasion ship to take enemy systems, these work best when dedicated to invasions, go in dogpacks and should be defended by your warships from orbit

Let me put it like this – the ships go through 3 stages of hull weakness. Early ships with x3 hull weakness are paper, and no matter how you fit them, they will pop like flies, and you should treat them like so – fruit flies. Cheap to make, easy to replace. So, full on guns and go pop stuff before it pops you.

The whole combat system rolls around different weapons being effective at different ranges, like rockets for long range, beams for medium range and kinetics for melee range.
But sad as it is, in reality, long range kinetics (yes, your starting basic weapon) just stomps everything in alpha-strike from long range, as inaccurate as it is, when you equip like 15 guns on a glass-cannon ship it is destined to blow something up over 3 long-range combat rounds . Your goal is to blow whole enemy fleet from long range, since if any of them get into medium and melee range you are toast anyway. And that is exactly what is most effective to do early game – spam those glass-cannon ships with lotsa guns.

Why kinetic guns? Because, to put it bluntly, beams and missiles suck after all the patches. Beams were real good, but got nerfed and now fire more slowly with reload rounds, much more slowly now. Missiles always were bad – they hit only at the end of whole long-range phase, their damage is spread terribly because all your fleet fires at same ships and overkills, while kinetics fire salvo per round, they have the most quick, reliable and precise damage over the 3 weapon types.

Early tier 1 defenses are a joke and do not help anyhow – if anyone sneezes at your ships, or gets closer, they are dead anyway. Only raw HP and salvo firepower matters, really. Defense systems start being not completely horrible from tier 2, and it actually makes sense to start fitting like 2-3 of each defense type on a ship to reduce incoming damage. Before that the tier 1 ships are so weak anyway, that any defenses do not matter, like, at all. If anything sneezes at the ship, especially whole enemy fleet focus firing it, it just pops.

As you progress into tier 2 hulls, this is where it gets more interesting, and you can actually fit ships with good defenses and offense to withstand enemy fire and punch back quite hard. At 2 command points (CP) per ship they are worth it, as they will eat all early tier 1 ships alive with fighters. And as game goes on, 4 CP battleships with NO hull weakness will be tanky as hell (people were going crazy to fit battleships with 40-50k hitpoints, but most AI fleets will have problems dealing even against a single 10k hitpoints battleship with good defenses and a bunch of fighters/bombers).
I literally had a single battleship defending a system from 3 endless enemy fleets of smaller assorted crap, they just couldn’t break it with my Pilot/Adventurer hero spamming Dust Barrier every phase and passively healing it every turn on top of it, while my fighters were chewing his smaller ships 1 by 1. AI is just bad at fitting stuff, and even worse at adapting to your fits.

So, early game - the more powerful your long-range fleet salvo - the better. Ideally if you get 1 of your fruit fly to destroy 1 enemy ship PER SALVO (you get a salvo per round, 3 rounds every phase), that means you can totally rip enemy fleet TRIPLE the size of your fleet from long range before they even get anywhere close to you during long phase round.

So, our initial “fruit fly” warship design would look like:

• Starting Hull x3 weakness (or destroyer)
  
• Optional 1 armor plate - if you have titanium ready (raw HP from armor does help a bit with missiles and some stray shots of medium/melee kinetics or beams from enemy, especially against pirates when they shoot a load of missiles that hit you at the end of long-range phase and blow your ships up unless you have good HP)
  
• Everything else guns guns guns, 10-12 of those. Aim at 100-140 salvo firepower per ship. Can also drop armor for firepower anytime!

Other modules:

• Engines are mostly useless - most of the time your fleets are not going anywhere and fighting in orbits....
  
• Evasion looks good on paper, but even with Chameleon tactic your early ships pop when focus-fired, and later ships have low Evasion anyway
  
• Support modules are useless - it is always better just to fit more guns

As soon as “fighters” and “bombers” modules become available, use those as well (tuned for the combat). They turn your ships into fighter-carriers on top of all else, with tiny fighter ships following you and eating enemy like locusts, they are pure awesomeness. Also, more importantly they will help you to keep in fight after your ships pass their best phase, which is long range – because these tiny guys will eat enemy alive in medium and melee phases too. And, as you research better fighters and bombers, each of them becomes similar in power to enemy tier 1 ships. Definitely recommend them, they are just that good.

Later on, as you get more combat techs and research better ship hulls, your warships should look like this:

• improved Hull x2 weakness
  
• 1-2 x armor plates
  
• 2-3 x of each defense module
  
• 1 x tier2 Repair module (the best in entire line, 10% repair per combat phase - NEVER upgrade this, tier2 has best bonuses to personal and fleet repairs, also helps to regenerate fighters/bombers faster)
  
• 1 x fighter +- 1 x bomber modules
  
• Everything else tier2 kinetics in Long Range, 5-10 or so

These bad boys can carry you into the very endgame. A fleet of these can take care of ANY setup the enemy uses, hits hard from long range, repairs like crazy, and usually by the time enemy makes it even to medium range, there are only few ships left, finished getting eaten by your fighters and bombers.

And when you get to the totally late game, your battleships would look like:

• Battleship hull with no weakness
  
• 2-3 x armor plates
  
• 3-5 (depends on racial) x each defense module
  
• 1 x tier2 Repair module
  
• 2 x fighter mods + 2 x bomber mods
  
• Everything else tier3 long range kinetic guns, like 5-10 or so

As I mentioned, 1 of these beasts with a hero spamming Dust Barrier defended my system from several different endless AI enemy fleets of assorted crap. By that time, each of my tiny fighters it carried had better combat stats that their tier2 ships.
So, when you drop a fleet with 5 of these, led by a high-level Pilot hero into enemy systems, they just go shoot themselves in the leg. Just get into the system, click "defense" to block the system and stop cockroaches from running away, click “auto-battle” several times and move forward. It's hilarious.

Now, for invasion ships it goes like this - initial invasion mechanics allow you to bomb the hell out of the planet (destroying infrastructure in the process) and take it over some turns, depending on the invasion power of your fleet.

Later on you get access to ground assault troops - so you can go for "instant" capture option by storming it with ground troops, the chances to get it will depend on ground defenses and your troops quality. It is considered the best option, because it takes over system immediately, drops some population but saves the expensive infrastructure - so you don't have to rebuild it, and population grows back again nicely with some farm epxloits anyway.

So our very first "complex" invasion ship design will look like this:

• 10 or more x Siege Kinetics invasion weapon (you get this real soon anyway from Specialized Isotopes on your way to tier2 weapons)

Build full fleet of these bad boys and send them following your main warship fleet like a puppy.
And this is why I find it really effective to specialise fleets - while your hero fights the hell out of enemies in orbit, these invasion ships do their business over a few turns to capture the enemy system.

After that, as soon as you get access to assault troops (Sheredyns get them really early, others have to research a bit deep into the top tree), you can fit troop modules on.

And your final invasion ships would look like:

• 1-4 assault troop modules (as many as you can fit, modified for elite troops)
  
• 1 x tier2 repair module (it helps to regenerate mech troops later on)
  
• everything else into invasion weapons for those special moments when your troops do not have good % chance to instantly take the system

Remember that assault troops take losses during attacks and you need to "rest" your assault ships inside your empire borders to recover their troopers. Takes a turn or few.
Just be careful with your invasion fleets, and don't leave them uncovered. They will get you whole galaxy real fast if handled and fed properly.

So, you got your whole star cluster colonized, your Administrator heroes are pumping out a warship and invasion ship every turn, your guardian dogs are eating enemy scouts and colony ships on the wormholes, and your fleet is ready to move... somewhere.

This is where you really need a Pilot hero to start farming. And by farming, I mean jumping wormhole with your hero fleet into enemy system, slap a blockade on it and start turning endless AI fleets into dust and science, and taking their systems when your invasion ships are ready.
If you lose some ships, your production planets should keep you resupplied non-stop to keep the fun going.

So what hero is the best to lead fleets?

Ideally consider the very best for the job a Pilot/Adventurer hero.
In my opinion, Pilot spec has the most powerful fleet skills, starting from Dust Barrier into Tinkerer for damage and defenses, as well as farming enemy fleets for 50 dust per destroyed CP with Harvester, which can give you around 1200-1500 dust PER BATTLE.
And topped off with Adventurer, which gives awesome fleet regeneration bonuses as well as additional damage and dust farming from Dirty Tricks.

I recommend to cherry-pick these Pilot abilities as fast as you can, in that order:

Assailant1 -> Veteran1 -> Veteran 2 -> Dust Wielder 1 -> Dust Wielder 2 -> Harvester
Oh, this is so good. Not only it does reduce the cost of your Dust Barrier, but now along with the science per destroyed enemy CP you farm 50 dust per CP. And this is A LOT of dust per battle, ranging from 500 to 1500 dust per battle in midgame already, lategame it gets even more.
You can use this dust to retrofit your ships into the latest tech and keep your warmachine going, really cool ability.
I recommend this beeline as your first pick, since it will drastically improve your Dust situation as soon as you start fighting your neighbors.

Veteran 1 -> Tinkerer1 -> Lethal Modder
Lethal modder adds 100 damage on every salvo, and that is A LOT. Your fleets will simply start melting enemy in long range phase, pure awesomeness.

Defender 1 -> Dust Barrier
"Dust Barrier" is awesome. The one and only fleet card you would really want to be spamming - for a price of measly 30-40 dust you get 25%-40% hitpoints shield every phase.
And when you use this later on with your tier 2 and 3 fat armored ships - enemy simply does not have enough damage to break through it.

When you got your most important stuff from the PIlot, here are some nice abilities to pick from the Adventurer tree:

Fast Reboot 1/2 -> Rapid Adaptation
Adds great regeneration bonuses, so your hero can keep his fleet healthy all the time, even during the invasion in the enemy territory.

Veteran 3 -> Master Hacker -> Saboteur -> Dirty Tricks
Master Hacker is kinda meh, but it leads to additional fleet effectiveness from Dirty Tricks, as well as additional dust per destroyed enemy CP from Saboteur, all in all a solid choice.

All other talents are quite optional to have and give much less bonuses and are much less important, still some good picks include - Battle Action: Convergence, Fearless Foe, Defense Systems Specialist, Hyper Driven, Science and Dust leech talents.
When you are out of stuff to pick, just increase yor heroe's offense and defense stats for additional fleet bonus.

So as weird as it is, a "Commander" hero specialization, while sounds cool, does not give anything remotely as good for fleet as a Pilot/Adventurer hero with Tinkerer, Lethal Modder, Dust Barrier and Harvester :-/

As your fleet leader gets most of these abilities, it is over for your foes unless you did not retrofit your ships for quite some time, and manage to get into a fight with their whole cluster worth of fleets on same turn.

Just a few reminders:

• Remember to keep building more and more ships in your backyard and send them over to your rampaging zergs to reinforce as you get some ships blown and when you get more fleet command points from research.
  
  
• You need to have a war declared in Diplomacy screen to be able to jump your ships into someone's known territory borders.
  
  
• When you capture a new system, check the buildings list - AI tends to build a lot of useless stuff, like trade routes bonused buildings and ground defenses.
  Scrap ALL of the useless stuff to reduce the system dust upkeep and make it profitable right away. Best buildings to keep are food, production, science and happiness.

Happy hunting!

Well, I hope that helped you to get some clues and ideas how to stomp endless AI into the mud.
Excuse my English if anything - it is not my native.

So have fun, thank you for being patient enough to read all of this, and most of all thanks to Amplitude Studios for making the awesome Endless Space game! Can't wait for Endless Space 2!

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