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And I would just like to point out I know next to nothing about gameplay, but I plan on learning quickly!
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Excellent, please say hi on the SG thread once you have got the game and I will slot you in! You may be at the back of the rotation or perhaps miss one go-around if folks are keen but I'm sure it won't be a big problem.
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Ilios Wrote:And I would just like to point out I know next to nothing about gameplay, but I plan on learning quickly!
Stacking 10 colony ships is better than settling sending one by itself. Though you might want to send one by itself in the early game when you don't have a ton of powerful ships...
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God I hate colony traps. You thought Civ's random events were frustrating? Here, unless you have great point defense, every single settler is going to die.
I think the trick is you send out the first coloniser 2 turns ahead of the rest of the fleet, otherwise the rest of the colony fleet will arrive during the interturn and get slaughtered.
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That is certainly one way to handle them. There are a number of early weapons that will make mince of colony traps, though, including light emitters and gauss PD. IIRC beamers and laser PD should work to some degree too, if not quite as well, and UV lasers can work in a pinch if you keep your ships still so the gunners can shoot more accurately. If you are using biomes, add particle beams to the list -- and of course there are more higher tech goodies in the fusion and AM eras to add as well.
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Your ships don't keep still, they're being dragged towards the planet, remember? Hence, it's difficult keeping your PD ships in range to cover your colonisers. Also, I'm not a fan of putting things like beamers and high-tech lasers onto colony ships, all those expensive weapons systems and command sections are going to disappear as soon as they fulfill their mission.
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If you kill most of the colony trap drones with your lasers before they start dragging you it can work out ok (some losses but not total), but only because the UV lasers have better damage, range, accuracy, and reflection-penetration than the green or red versions.
Of course the beamers, emitters, and PD weapons are more accurate still and thus better choices. As far as cost goes... I tend to find that as long as I stick to simple sections like standard command for my colonizers, I can easily afford to put accurate anti-colony-trap weapons on them. The cost in time and money of needing a sacrificial colonizer to send in first tends to outweigh the cost of using decent weapons on my colonizers, once I have them, so long as I don't go overboard and start using expensive command sections as well. 
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Yeah but who sends a CnC section with your colony fleet? You end up warping in in a wide formation, so your weapons can't cover each other.
Maybe it's just better to stick cheap Gauss PD on your small slots. After all, they're not for fighting.
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Not sure why you'd want a CnC with a colony fleet either, but I certainly didn't mention it so I'm not sure how the thought came up. Although if you did have a CnC you could certainly use the formation manager to ensure you arrived in a defensible formation rather than all strung out. 
Gauss PD would work quite well for trap-busting, and that or light emitters is what I will tend to use in preference to other options, once I have them.
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Okay, enough about colony traps. What's your usual tech paths, and what heuristics do you use to decide what and how much research you invest into?
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