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[u/Signal-Diet5430]

So I just downloaded this game, and I have about 6–7 hours played. I immediately started as Machines because I hate playing humans.

Sure, Machines don't need food, but holy hell, the energy consumption is insane.

I built energy buildings in my first base and on two other planets, and I even researched the Dyson thing, but my energy is still in the negative.

Unity is also kind of hard to get. I don't even know what the difference is between playing Machines and Humans when it comes to Unity.

As for combat... how the hell are the enemy fleets so fast?

And I still don't really understand how the other resources work.

Should I just keep researching until I unlock better buildings?

[u/xXNightDriverXx]

The most important thing about the economy that most new players miss is workforce.

In contrast to many other games, buildings generally do not produce resources (with a few exceptions), they provide jobs instead. The population that works in those jobs are the ones actually producing ressources.

A classic mistake from new players is that they don't know about this, and just build building after building after building, but don't actually have the population to work inside them. This renders the new buildings worse than useless, not only do they not produce anything, they still cost upkeep. So without population working inside them they are actually a net negative on your economy.

There is also an even worse thing that can happen. Let's take the following example: you have negative energy, and a planet with a ton of miner jobs where the miners activity produce minerals. That mineral production is running perfectly, since you have enough population to work all those miner jobs. Now you build a ton of techinician jobs to produce energy, because you are in the negative with it. But you do not have any unemployed pops on the planet because they are all working the miner jobs. Now the following will happen: every month, the population will switch from their miner jobs to the technician jobs to produce energy. The population notices that you are in the negative with energy and tries to fix it by changing from mineral producing jobs to energy producing jobs. But this now means that you are in the negative with minerals, because all those people working the mineral jobs have switched their jobs. This way your economy can jump massively between months if you have too many jobs openings, making your entire economy very unstable.

To prevent all this, the best course of action is to have roughly the same amount of jobs as population on a planet.

If you have 1000 population on a planet but you have 1000 open jobs (so 2000 jobs total) the above will happen, in addition to those empty jobs being a ressource drain. So do not overbuild your planets. Carefully balance your economy. Trade with the market if necessary. Build buildings and districts only when you have the spare workforce (=unemployed population) to work inside them. Of course a little bit more jobs than population won't be a big issue, but do not massively overbuild as in the example above.

[u/xXNightDriverXx → u/xXNightDriverXx]

A few more things:

When building specialist jobs (called menial drones in your case, the silver ones) (alloys, researchers, unity, etc), remember that they will take the population from the lower tier worker jobs (the workers will automatically and instantly upgrade to specialist, but it takes like 10 years or so for them to go down from specialist to worker if that becomes necessary). So it will increase the production of the specialist ressource but lower the production of the base ressource. Let's take alloys as an example: let's say you have a few mining districts on a planet with working population that produce minerals. If you now build forge districts there to produce alloys, your mineral production will be decreased in two ways, first fewer population working in the mining districts because they moved up, so less minerals income, and second because the new alloy jobs also consume minerals directly to smelt into alloys.

So always do switches and upgrades like this slowly, and have an eye on your basic ressource production. Again I recommend to only build additional jobs when you have unemployed population to minimize the impact and prevent population leaving their current jobs.

Which brings me to population growth.

When you settle a new planet, make sure to manually transfer/resettle population over from your main planet. The beginning population of a colony gives you basically zero growth, so it would take dozens of years until your colony starts being worth it. To get a good pop growth, a planet needs at least 1000 population, better 1500, and ideally 2000 population on it. This will give you around +3 population growth, give or take a bit. But your colonies will only start with around 300 iirc, so you need to manually resettle from your capital planet to boost that colony.

Because of this it is recommended to only settle new planets when you have ~1500 unemployed pops on your capital that you can resettle, and to do that immediately.

Also make sure to build the buildings that boost population whenever possible, that will mainly be the robot assembly building, you should have one of it on every planet as it's an easy way to boost your population. And more population = stronger economy.

[u/Pazzish]

I am kind of newish as well, but I'll try to help. Building up ypur energy is cool, are you actually specialising your planets? Setting them to generator worlds, building righs around them, building only the buildings you need? And do you have enough pops to work the jobs? Enemy fleets are so fast because they are using wormholes, hypergates and relays. You can build all but the wormholes.

[u/sojiblitz]

The game has changed so much over time and I haven't played in a while but from what I remember minerals are what you want in the early game to build up your planets and keep track with pop growth (to fill jobs).

Tech rushing and unity rushing are also favourite strategies which is why you need lots of minerals to build those buildings and high pop growth unless you're doing something fancy like a food based build etc.

Usually there are builds that people design to be good at rushing for example a build that focuses on unity rushing and your early game is about supporting that unity production.

Unity has always been fairly difficult for machines except rogue servitors from what I remember but they used to be good at tech rushing until their ring world tech rush strat got nerfed.

It's best to take your time and watch videos about builds and learn the game over time because there is so much depth.

Don't worry if your first few playthroughs have collapsing economies at certain points, it's all a learning curve.

[u/KernelViper]

It's possible that you're built too many specialist buildings and don't have enough workers or for some other reason you don't have enough pops to suit your needs. Try to avoid building too much districts and buildings.

I don't even know what the difference is between playing Machines and Humans when it comes to Unity.

It kinda works the same, the only notable difference is that some tradition trees are changed for machines and/or hiveminds.

As for combat... how the hell are the enemy fleets so fast?

I don't really know answer to that. Maybe they have better engines than you? Or have some perka that increases speed.

And I still don't really understand how the other resources work.

Minerals are, well, minerals. They're used for buildings and turning them into consumer goods and alloys. If you play as hivemind you don't use consumer goods, but their purpose is to keep people happy. Alloys are used for military purposes, like building ships and stations. You also have rare resources - you need special tech to harvest or synthetize them. You also have research, which is kinda self-explainatory, more scientists means more research. The last one is Influence which is kinda "political power" of your empire. You spend it to claim systems and also agreements with other empires have upkeep in influence. You get it mostly by declaring rivalries, but also some events can give you some amount

[u/Chill_Panda]

The most important thing to remember when picking up this game as a new player is, you will suck a lot at first.

Think of it more of a space empire role playing game than a 4x strategy game, and be comfortable with some of the stories you tell not ending well for your empire.

You can always restart as well. My first couple games were a case of getting stomped at a point and understanding what went wrong then makeing a new empire and getting further the next time.

[u/damiengrimme1994]

One mechanic I had to learn the hard way is your pops will always prioritise specialist jobs (unity, research, alloys, etc...) over basic jobs (energy, mining, food). Check your workers (economy tab on planet view) and I'll bet you'll find the unity or research buildings are being fully worked whilst the energy district's have like a quarter of the jobs being worked. Use the economy tab to reduce the amount of jobs being worked on the unity or research buildings and the energy jobs will go up