GalCiv3 Forums
I usually go the diplomatic/trade route in the beginning to avoid any early wars but I find that by the time I get around to researching weapons, even with planets dedicated to research, I'm almost always far behind. Not only that, but I have no clue what a good fleet comp is. Any ideas to make me less ''ripe for conquest''?
The only thing to make you less ''ripe for conquest'' is military power. This really kicks in at turn 75 so one thing you can do is save the Pragmatic - no war on me, use it around turn 80 and it gives you 50 turns to concentrate on your military. The aggressive AI's will likely still be "furious" at the end of 50 but you should be in good shape to fight them off.
What difficulty are you playing on and against which AI's? You can lower the difficulty on just the aggressive AI's and that should help. Also, using culture starbases to boost your diplomacy really helps
Early to mid game, look at the type of ships that your enemies are producing. They will most likely have one or more weaknesses, such as on type of weapon and one type of defense. You should build custom ships designed to take advantage of those weaknesses.
Later in game, balanced ships of the largest size you have are a good choice.
Am I correct in that were limited to beam weapons except the odd prototype until we fully research missile or kinetic weapons? Thanks for the advice too. I found that if I stuck to my diplomatic route, it took me a looong time to catch up militarily to everyone else, which seems odd in that even civilizations with research or economist mic focus have tons of ships and even then I was still behind lol. This is on gifted since I like the Ai being on full power with few benefits. I don't mind the difficulty.
Any suggestions about role of ships and how many of each to have?
Once you unlock weapon systems, you will have access to the weakest weapons from all three types, but in order to upgrade, you have to further research them separately, as dictated by the usual tech trees.
Also, roles in the game are almost meaningless. Quality/Quantity of ships are all that really matters. However, the game does a decent job of detecting whether you have a support ship or a capital ship. I would simply recommend that you make all ships that are not meant to be on the front lines a Support ship.
You don`t suck at making war- Anyone can make a war. You mean you suck at winning one! 
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