Ascendancy can suck up a lot of time. Even now, I still treat it out several times a year to play again and again. It is a turn based building strategy game. It starts off very slow and takes 500 – 700 ‘turns’ (which you can skip over the turns where nothing happens) before things start to get interesting. You start with a single planet and minimal building and zero research. It takes a while to get enough factories and labs to start the ball rolling.
By the time you get enough resources to build a ship you are more than ready to head ‘out there’.
The techno tree has a LOT of different things on it. It has a lot of bells and whistles, that I find to be ‘cute’, but useless. The end result of most items that you will want are nano-whatever, but you have to build up through a lot of crap to get there. My recommendation is to put at least 2 drives in every mid sized ship and 5 in every enormous one. They have shields available but I haven’t fond them to be very useful. The space is more useful for invaders or for colonizers.
I spent a great deal of
time, sending my ships out to colonize and then even more trying to get them back for refitting. I have found that by the time you refit the first 2 ships you are now making them faster than it takes to get them back. At that point I just send them out to explore and discover the rest of the galaxy.
The gold mines are the ones with xeno-ruins. These are planets that had an ancient civilization there before. By accessing the ruins you discover a ‘free’ tech. If you have the time and patience you can save the game a turn before the xeno finishes and reload that one if you don’t get what you were looking for since it’s random. Once you get the first several systems close by set up I tend to only populate one planet per system unless there are ruins avail. I have run into problems before with large numbers of planets. I can’t remember if the limit is 100 or 200 but once you reach that number of planets the game becomes unstable and crashes a lot.
Also, once you have reach a number of plants, that are becoming productive and the turns start to slow down, you might want to pick a dozen or so and deal with them, letting the other go fallow. To try to deal with all of them takes way too long and the odds of the later ones actually becoming productive before the game is over are remote. They just waste time each turn having to deal with them.
One of the underestimated techs is automation. Automation frees up one of the people on the planet to produce something else. By using automation you also free up squares for industrial that would otherwise be used for living accommodations. This lets that planet be much more productive. By the time the game is over I usually have the giant planets cranking out enormous ships every 16 - 19 turns. As with most of these types of games the secret is to out produce the other guys. The AI is pretty simplistic so that’s not too hard to do. The idea seems to be not if you will win, but how fast and how decisively.
