1. turn off pirates.

2. TURN OFF PIRATES!

2. guass defences cannons ARE worthless. stop building them. Only tatical structure worth building is the repair bay.  and you dont need many.

3. expand quickly. A sova-akkan pair can colonize even the most difficult of planets by themsevles. Be sure to position them so that all their guns can fire (move in-between the enemy ships).  if there are alot of heavies, kill the seige frigs and LRMS quickly, and then colonize, and build a repair bay. dont forget to que the population upgrades the second you colonize the planet, or you will be losing incomes.

4. repair bays are your FRIENDS.

5. you dont need to research everything.  Try to pick out the researchs that you really NEED.  (tradeports, ice/volc colonizingz, culture, ship types) everything else is icings.  THe best time to get the health/armor/damage upgrades, is when you wnat to spend money on fleet, but dont want to increase your fleet supply.

I've found that turrets can actually do quite a lot of damage against pirates. 3 or 4 turrets combined with a repair bay or two should hold off most pirate raids.

That said, I strongly recommend disabling pirates.

Turrets have their uses, even with Pirates off - both in single-player against AIs where the AI will suicide their fleet on your defensive structures, and in multiplayer for providing area defense for factories / repair areas.

That said, it is true that many newer players way overuse turrets in useless locations.

I recommend attacking only the siege frigates, colonizing, and then moving your fleet onward while building probably a single turret on the newly-colonized planet.

The most effective combination for that strategy is a colony capital ship and a ton of scouts (like 11).

Once your fleet has warped out, warp in a couple scouts again to kill the LRM (if there are any), which the turret will be unable to kill.

If you're playing 1v1 random small against the AI, you should aim to be getting trade ports as soon as possible, and then building as many of them as you can in a good trade chain. This will boost your income to 50+ credits/second: then you can easily win by just spamming a ton of LRM or Assailants against the lower-level AIs.

While the light-frigate based strategy works-ish and is easier for newer players, the scout-based expansion strategy is really the most efficient one to use.

There fixed it for better understanding.

Better yet, you can just sit an wait till pirates to come and kill them for easy levels for capital ships.

1) You can turn off pirates in game options. Or you can keep them turned on. They are not a bother if you know how to handle them and not bad to level up caps on. To handle pirates you have to bid against the AI players every 10 minutes or so( watch for the pirate raid imminent). They attack the person with the highest bounty.

2) You are on a terrible map. Play a bigger multistar map. Bigger maps are easier to get setup on.

3). Defense guns are not useless if you know how to use them( or you edit them so they are useful ). I use defense guns for two purposes: A) I put them so they cover all sides of my planet in case i get rogue siege frigates bombing me during a fight. The guns will help take care of them. Find the most likely phase lane an enemy will come from. This is typically the one that you would use to get to the sun. This is the side you want to concentrate most of your defense structures on. You want coverage to overlap each other so that multi cannons cover the same area. 

4) Only certain ships can bomb planets. This would be the siege frigate and any capital ships can bomb planets. After you bomb the HP to 0 then you can capture the planet using a colony frigate or the colony cap. If the enemy culture is to strong then you wont be able to colonize( it will give you this message). In this case you need to move on and find the nearby enemy planets with culture platforms( Like the broadcast center for TEC). You will have to destroy these to reduce the culture influence and you might as well bomb this planet as well.

5) Defenses only serve two real purposes: A) to keep small fleets from destroying your planet/ structures and to buy you time to either make a fleet or get your fleet to that planet. Usually the AI will attack the same planet repeatedly( unless you colonize a juicy target that is closer). Typically they go after undefended planets. So having defenses is good. But keep a fleet near your "boarder" that is for nothing but defense.

6) Your biggest problem is your map setup. The map makes all the difference in how hard it is to get started. I recommend learning to make your own maps( they are pretty easy to make) when you can. You will find the game much more enjoyable if you build maps to suit your playstyle instead of changing your playstyle to fit a very highly editable game. Start with the in game designer and when you get the hang of it try the galaxy forge( download) map editor. You can make a map in the in game designer and then customize it galaxy forge.

With starbases, the phase for example, which is usually my opponent and i almost never play, has a 40k hull,32 armor,82% shield mit, 20k shield and hits for about 2000 total with a 16k range. I also increased the number of starbases you can have per gravity well. Most gravity wells allow 2-3 starbases. Stars allow 6. All my starbases will melt a fleet of normal caps  solo. And most of them move.

I lowered the slot count on caps to 10 ( i play with small fleet setting usually) and increased the cap ship slots to 100. Then i buffed all the caps ships. I get a ship called a dreadnought which is really a cap on steroids that is produced at its own factory every 30 minutes. That you get 1 of per planet owned at the start of the game. I play with multiple starting planets so i get a few and the AI gets a few of these factories. I buffed their factories so they were very hard to take out( 50k hull, 50k shield). I lowered their dreadnought spawn time( it autospawns) to 1200 sec and kept mine at 1800.

My pirates are smarter have more ships,their own research, a cap that  even at level 5 is nasty and you will need a few caps to take on( or a dread can solo it), they have bigger raids( like about 50-100 support ships and 10-30 caps), and they grow very quickly. In two hours of game play my pirate bases will have 400-500 frigates, 20-30 caps, and 40 plus defense guns. They melted 100 LR frigs in about 5 minutes and i killed about 10-15. These were beefy LRs too not those TEC LRs. After getting another fleet together and going back i found out not only did they replace the ships they lost but added about another 10-15. I also leveled their caps up once...It took me a fleet of 15 dreads to conquer that base and an hour of fighting and i lost 4 in the process with AOE shield repair on all of them.Also my pirates will colonize so if they destroy your planet, they are likely to take it over and now you have to take it back. I have seen the AI get 2-3 planets taken from them before they recovered their planets.

I constantly make changes like to the game to make it more interesting. If you tried to to expand and conquer fast on one of my maps with my settings you would just die a lot and get frustrated and quit. My maps require slow expansion with well prepared fleets and taking one AI out late game can take many many hours of battles. Also the mod i use has something called "dangerous asteroids" They have 10 per neutral planet usually, 4k HP no armor but they have  a tractor beam/damage. They basically stay glued to your butt constantly damaging you. My neut planets are not colonized by minor factions cause i use galaxy forge( but they still have neut ships). 10 of these asteroids( that move like ships) completely destroyed a level 5 cap and 10 LR frigates and i didnt even get 1/2 killed. Colonization is impossible without a decent size fleet in my games.

Thats fun. Playing against a player and seeing who is faster at ganking the other one ....is boring. I can do that in a dozen MMOs that i dont play anymore because im tired of seeing who can gank faster and who can use game mechanics to the best of their advantage. AI allows me to play a slow game against a powerful enemy who is going to give me  lots of fights and make every planet a battle for both sides. Instead of the train, build fleet, go gank tactic.

The original AI i didnt. I modded that too. I basically took this game and retooled to fit me. My aggressive AI is very aggressive. My fortified AI is very defensive but also offensive. I use the AIs teamed up. One attacks often and builds a few tacticals. The other builds a fortress and attacks some.Also i set it so they dont retreat very often. They pretty much fight to the death.

I think the part you dont understand is some people dont always want to play against people. Humans can be annoying when you play with them day in and day out. They will use any shady tactic to win. They always try to hurry up and win. Games are always about how fast you can kill your opponent with human players. Ive played dozens of MMOS. Some i have played for years. Players do not give me the type of challenge i am looking for and a proper AI does. Plus like i said i heavily mod this game. Its to vanilla unmodded and i get bored quickly. I honestly dont think i could play it unmodded..i would probably fall asleep.

Stardock at times has made complicated strategy games. Sins was created more for people who want to be in "duh mode" and blow stuff up and watch pretty explosions.Its basically about as dumbed down as you can get and still have a functioning space game. I love the format of Sins but its just too dumbed down for me. So i play heavily modded with lots of extra content to complicate it. I mean Eve Online was my favorite MMO for years and thats a game that has a learning curve that is more like a cliff. I love complicated games that make me think and give me a lot to do and learn. Unfortunately without the complications of the game itself players arent up to the challange and will find the easiest and fast way to win.. which is boring and predicatable .Players and just  typically a bit more creative than an AI.

People like different things out of a game and some people like different things at different times. This is why i am working on putting my own game idea together. A space sim that basically allows you to set the complication and  map scale of the game. The game can be complicated  with random AIs of various levels and a map that boarders on infinite( I think i devised a way so that map creation is not limited by the game engine/ PC hardware). Or the whole thing can be  put in a simple mode for people who like quickish play games in a smaller confined area. With multiplayer support for both. I also tried to do away with hard limits in the game i am creating. Instead it has soft limits. For example  a ships max  recommended tonnage might be 500 tons, but instead of making this a hard limit you cant go past, i make it a soft limit that incurs penalties as you go past it. The further past it you go the more penalty is suffered. The major penalties are of two types. One is a maintenance penalty that becomes costly, the other is a penalty  in which you have to start compounding modules. IE: The more mods you add the more power you need thus the more power modules you have to add. Added weight slows down the turn rate and acceleration and after you reach a certain limit it also gets a stacking penalty which requires more engines to counter, which requires more power, both of which requires more tonnage, which all increase you maintenance penalty.

Thus you end up with either a never ending chess game that really has no end or end game.... or you can limit the size and scope of the game and have a game that can be over in a couple of hours or so. If i could just get someone to hear my idea out *cough* Stardock *cough*, i would be good to go.

I have an IQ of 148 ( well did 15 years ago anyway), i require complication to stay entertained. Humans are to simple minded in their execution of tactics. They become predictable. Its like playing checkers... i want to play chess. AI is simple too but i can make an AI physically hard to conquer. A player will almost always opt of the easy and fast win based on their game mechanic knowledge. Those that dont you can conquer easily with a fast and easy win strategy. So players end up being catch 22 for me.

I find it amusing that you boast about your supposedly amazing IQ but still apparently have problems understanding that the singular I is capitalized or how to use its or it's correctly... not that I'm a grammar nazi but the contradiction there is interesting. That said, you have a point:

You make a good point that the core of Sins (competitive Sins at least) is not all that complicated to master if you're familiar with RTS and understand the game mechanics. That said, even with mods, the AI still seems to be horribly dense at not understanding how to handle starbases or multiple enemy raiding fleets or countering ships effectively (or bomber spam). Mods don't change that, although they can affect general build priorities or income advantages (right?). The AI is incapable of even halfway decent strategy. Humans are not. For this reason, if you're looking for a challenge, you should really think about ICO, where you'll find much more difficulty than you ever will against an AI. But if you just like watching ships blow up it makes sense to prefer AIs and mods.

But since the AI can't even handle playing normal Sins competently I don't understand why you would find more of a challenge playing against it using mods... sure, you can add all sorts of nifty abilities and ships and stuff but with a human player that would probably only make it easier to trounce computer players.

Regardless of the game, (competitive) humans will probably generally attempt to find "the easiest and fast way to win"...

Competitive online play *is* a chess game, to an extent. Have you mastered it? If not I would be hesitant to say that it's boring - and if you haven't, it shouldn't take much for you to become quite skilled if you are as you say you are (and if you aren't I'll be happy to help teach, if you want it).

Against a 2-year-old who doesn't understand the rules.

I typically do not use great english. Its not that i am not capable.. it is that i do not care. Its annoying when people bring up grammar that is readable on an internet forum board. It makes one wonder if they take life too seriously. Grammar nuts are worried about sentence structures while i am coming up with hydroelectric power plant designs in my head that do not need a traditional water source( IE: self contained hydroelectric power plant) and a way to make "real" space exploration and colonization cheaper by at least a power of 10 using current technology. And i am not even a hydroelectric engineer or astrophysicist. Also my brain operates at a speed i could never physically keep up typing or talking so i tend to leave, sometimes vital, words and punctuation out of my sentences. I wrote this entire post in my head in less time than it will take you to read this paragraph. Now i have to wait for my hands to catch up.

Actually, when i play against the AI, i play against myself. Since i pretty much have edited just about everything about this game. I set the AI up so they are hard. I cannot make them more intelligent, not easily anyway, but i can make them harder. My AI is completely different then if you took Sins out of the box and installed it and started playing. Can i counter them? Yes. But i can counter a player just as easy. When you play in a 6000 member alliance in the largest sandbox MMO with some of the most hardcore pvp you will ever find for a few years players become as predictable as the AI. I think that is why i got bored with pvp in general. It lost the strategic aspect and became about who could better exploit game mechanics and when that fails bring friends!

Plus the nilla version is SOOOO boring now, i would have to play a 6 planet map or risk falling asleep, reading the news, or watching tv.

Their is more than one type of difficult. Something can be physically difficult but mentally easy. And sometimes can be mentally difficult and physically easy. First i play one race. Two the AI is setup in a way in which they are more powerful. If you were to take over the AI race and play against me you would ALWAYS win. Even if we let our empires get completely built up, you would only have a bigger advantage over me. For example the Phase dread gets a 150% damage increase from leveling up to 10. I get a 50% damage increase leveling up to 10. The end result all teched out is the Phase dread hits about 2 1/2 times harder than my dread.

I took a pirate base the other night right off the star. Two Vasari on cruel i think it was attacked me They brough 23 dreads between them. I had two starbases fully setup, 6 dreads ( with AOE shield repair maxed) and a couple of normal caps and about 2 dozen LRs. We fought for nearly 3 hours. I brought in reinforcements twice. Once i brought 4 more dreads, the second time i brought 30 dreads for a total of 40 dreads and two starbases. They reinforced as well several times. I lost 12 dreads and they lost maybe 15-20 between them( and i was doing focus fire they were shooting 4-5 targets at once), about 8 other caps, who knows how many LRs, two starbases, and 9 orbital defense cannons ( which hit for about 700 alone). The problem was i couldnt kill them fast enough. When i left they still had 32 dreads left and 4 more sitting at the star.

Its was physically challenging but not mentally. Mentally  i would of just ignored the base for now and while they were busy taking the system with most of their fleets run to their systems and knock out several of their planets and set them up defensively. Then when they went to take them back i would let them have them and run to more poorly defended planets and take those out.. repeat until they have no planets left and no fleet and i win. Pretty easy and works every time.

That is one reason i fixed tactical. And i even go as far  as setting them up with defense before the game starts. Physical difficulty is more of a challenge to me than mental difficulty.Maybe ive spent to much time pvping, I dunno.