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Well, hopefully I did not mess things up too badly. Five turns is hopefully not long enough to commit a fatal mistake, anyway. 
What do we want to do about the bears? How many ships do we think we need to prevent them from taking Encedius? And do we want to build LR ships to try to blockade Proteus? I would hate to lose all three worlds to the bears. But if we are building blockade fighters, we are not building factories or colony ships of our own.
I do not have a good feel for just how hard the AI will push on Incredible, and how quickly.
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My two credits: a few fighters aren't going to stop even an armed colony ship, let alone a large or huge warship. I think we need to build colony ships instead of warships.
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Don't worry, you definitely haven't messed anything up! Thanks for grabbing the save!
The upcoming techs are II9 andd terraforming +10, right? I think we already have Range 4.
I'm with DaveV on colonies versus warships right now. In particular, I think LR gunners would be a waste in this situation. They're very useful for holding a critical world that you can't yet reach with colships while you push hard for that reach, but with so many great planets nearby, we have to prioritize our resources: We can't hold 'em off everywhere! Our small fleet of fighters should ensure the AI can't waltz into Incedius and take the planet with an unarmed colship and a single popgun fighter or the like, and it might be worth adding to the fleet from Tauri if it can spare the BCs from research (it's okay to delay factories there because it's going to be sending population off to seed other worlds anyway; it won't have enough population to work full factories for a long time). Stretching to try to block off a planet at long range from us and in colony range for an Impossible rival probably doesn't make sense though with all these delicious habitable worlds right around home!
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You are correct on the techs: IIT9 and Terraforming +10 are the current research projects. Terra +10 is at 13% now.
Some cardboard ships are not likely to hold off the AI for long at impossible. But it would be nice to delay the bears from grabbing those worlds with just one fighter breaking our scout blockades. But I am not a good judge of how hard the impossible AIs will push this early. Which is why I stopped for discussion. 
When do we want to start a colony ship? Currently Mentar would take 7 turns to build one. Is it worth doing that now, or is it better to add more factories and bring that down a bit further? We are going to need quite a few colony ships just for what is already in range or will become reachable as we grab the closer worlds, so building them all more slowly with a non-maxed homeworld seems like we would end up worse off 20-30 turns from now. But if it keeps those worlds from bring taken by the bears, it would probably be worth it. If they get range on our colony worlds and start sending transports full of big bad bears, that would be ugly.
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Probably a little too soon to start the colship now, yeah. Once we have Terra +10 (which reduces the cost of the ship a little) and enough factories to get it down to 5t, it could be worth squeezing one out early just to stake a claim at Incedius and get transsports over to start its growth curve going. We're hopefully going to need to populate a lot of worlds! There are valid arguments for waiting until we max factories though, especially if we manage to get some more fighters out over Incedius in the meantime.
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Thanks for the welcome! Hopefully six players won't be too many. Nothing done so far has been wildly different to anything I would have tried, but I'd like to actually get hold of a copy of the OSG and polish up my rough understanding of some mechanics (trickle research - I understand that the patch can help make this more obvious, pop growth) a bit, so fitting in towards the end of the list would suit me.
FWIW Losing Incedius would be annoying, but a quick look at the turn 20 save (which loaded fine) suggests that it shouldn't be critical. It doesn't look like it would give the bears access to much but Mentar - and we should be able to throw up a missile base there quickly if we have to. Those two uninhabitable asteroid belts NNE of Toranor are very convenient in blocking ursine expansion to our north.
So, how much resource is it worth putting in to trying to hold Incedius? How many fighters, should our first colship go there and (as Haphazard has already asked), how soon should we build it? I have little feel for this on impossible, particularly as it will be impossible to win the ground fight in the early game against the bears.
As an aside, I sometimes wonder about the RNG for planet generation. It feels more as if the game picks one of "lush, normal, harsh" and then populates the galaxy accordingly, rather than just assigning individual planetary climates. This certainly looks lush.
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
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Welcome aboard, shallow_thought.
I am still getting used to the patch and some of the changed things. What are the little pips under the techs on the research screen, for example?
I worry about how much the bears are going to expand towards us. They can already reach Proteus with colony ships, and that world will give them range to Paladia if they do not already have it. That is two solid worlds. If they grab In/En-cedius as well, plus the colony of theirs we already found, that would give them 5 good worlds at least. Plus anything they may be grabbing elsewhere we do not know about. That would be a lot of bears. Admittedly, lots of bears is better than a similar number of bugs. But still not a positive thing for us overall.
I also wonder about the galaxy generation algorithm. It does seem "streaky", in that you see regions with tons of habitable worlds and others with much harsher environments. But this perception may just be selection bias on my part, noticing/remembering the exceptional cases both good and bad. Accurate perception of statistical distributions is not easy, and there are lots of ways to fool yourself.
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The LEDs are to make trickle research more intuitive. It works like this:
Once you've started research in a tech, you get triple value for investing more research in it, up to a point. That point is where the LED lights up red. Anything above that just gets the usual 1:1 return.
The way I think of it is that spending in the "lit LED" range is like investing in labs and research infrastructure, best to do ASAP. Once the initial investment is in, keeping research right around the point where the LED goes from dark to lit means making full use of the infrastructure and research work you've already built, while "overspending" means building yet more labs to allow yet more high-powered research.
I admit I haven't actually looked at the save yet (and now it's 4AM...) - I was just working from your reports. I don't think it would be a good idea to let Mentar be our front-line world with the Bulrathi though, so making sure we own Incedius would be a priority for me.
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Thanks for explaining the pips. Very helpful to have those.  I was familiar with the concept of trickle research and had read the math on it, but estimating the proper amounts on the fly was a challenge.
A couple thoughts on Mentar and industry:
- We can currently build a colony ship in 7 turns
- Maxing factories will take about 7 turns. (If we shift the research spending load to Tauri it would certainly be 7.)
- With max factories we should be able to build colony ships in 5 turns (I think) or so.
- So maxing factories first will delay the first colony ship by ~5 turns, the second colony ship would be delayed by about 2 turns, and the 3rd and later colony ships would be accelerated.
So unless we really need that first colony ship a handful of turns earlier, maxing factories first will help us overall. (I won't get into estimating the present net value of getting the first colony founded and growing 5 turns earlier, compared to the later ones being sooner; it will balance out in favor of maxing factories in the longer term, just pushes the break-even point a little futher out.)
And yes, I have thought about this way too much.  But I was waiting for a build/test/debug/build again cycle to finish, so why not?
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I was wondering what everyone thought about tech choices once we finish IIT9 and Terraforming+10. No way to be sure what options we will get, of course, but as the psilons we have good odds of having some choices.
Construction next rung duralloy looks good if we can, IIT8 would not be bad but with IIT9 just done maybe less of a priority.
Planetology is likely to have a wider range of options. Bigger terraforming is never bad to have. Hostile environment techs...well, we aren't actually seeing many of those yet. Death spores does not seem like a good option unless we somehow do not get anything else.
When do we want to start researching the other fields? And what would be priorities in them? We know force fields and the next rung of propulsion have no choices for us, but what about computers and weapons? What would we like to see?
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