Research Points

Summary:

Gaining techs from losing wars.

Research Points

Phenoca 24 Dec 2009 00:58

I would like to create a doc on this if it sounds good. Basically, I want to encourage a system where instead of players needing to destroy enemy players, players are encouraged to destroy themselves. This is accomplished by declaring as many simultaneous wars as possible. The more population you lose, the more technology is researched. Players can easily recolonize their population by logging in and choosing a new world to settle on. While players gain research points by creating planetary wars, alliances gain alliance points (used for alliance-funded projects) by preventing war.

Ground Combat

- Losing colonists —> research points
- Declaring war —> lose colonists
- Planetary population decreased —> planetary resource concentrations increased
- Colonists on a planet exterminated —> can recolonize at any planet + facility production decreased
- Facility production decreased —> Maximum fleet cost decreased
- Recolonize a planet —> can pick a favorable location + population will regenerate over time
- High resource concentration + normal population —> high facility production
- High facility production —> resource concentration down
- High technology level + normal population + allied population —> boosted facility production
Example: Low resource concentration + normal population + multiple allied populations —> high facility production
Note: Sharing a facility with other players will divide the production towards each player. Yet sharing a facility with allies will provide a boost. If you have enough allies sharing one facility then the boost will be much, much greater than the loss due to sharing.

So basically, every time you want to increase your population, you must declare a war, wait for your population to die-off, and then repeat the cycle by colonizing a planet that has not recently had its resources extracted. If your population is at war and wins, then they will start a civil war until your population dies-off. Larger wars take more time (1-4 hours) to lose. Uneven wars (e.g. you have low population) take very little time (2-8 minutes).

You can also avoid war, and try gaining research points for your alliance.
Players at war take longer to die if there is a pacifist player on the planet.
You gain extra research points by losing to pacifists.
Pacifists gain research points for their alliance by slowing-down wars.
Players at war can speed-up a war by halving the pacifist-modifiers every f(n,x) seconds (by clicking the "speed-up" button).

Pacifists are divided into five categories:
Clan Pacifist, n=1, research points go towards a clan, which is composed of two or more players
Alliance Pacifist, n=2, research points go towards an alliance, which is composed of two or more clans
Guild Pacifist, n=3, research points go towards a guild, which is composed of two or more alliances
Faction Pacifist, n=3, research points go towards a faction, which is composed of two or more guilds
Coalition Pacifist, n=4, research points go towards a coalition, which is composed of two or more factions
More categories (n=5,6,7, etc.) as the playerbase increases.

Note: You can fight with guild members (depending on guild policy) to gain research points, but it won't increase your guild's research points.

Now for the value of 'n' and 'x'.

Time for population to die-off = 1 hour * (your population) / (enemy population) * (1+planet clan modifier) * (1+planet alliance modifier) * (1+planet guild modifier) * (1+planet faction modifier) * other modifiers

Note: For multiple clans on the same planet, the planet clan modifier is the root-sum of each clan's tech levels.

For example, with one clan, the clan modifier might be 1.
For each clan, alliance, guild, faction, etc. the player at war can click on a "Speed-Up" button.
The speed-up button will halve the clan/alliance/guild/faction modifier.

Example:
Time for population to die-off = 1 hour * (10,000) / (10,000) * (1+clan modifier)

After declaring war —> X=1

clan modifier = 1 / (2^(X-1))
clan modifier = 1 / 1
1+clan modifier = 2
Time for population to die-off = 1 hour * 2
Time for population to die-off = 2 hours

After exp(n*2) seconds —> X=2

Player clicked "Speed-Up" once, after waiting e^(n*X) seconds.
This is a clan, so n=1
clan modifier = 1 / (2^(X-1))
clan modifier = 1 / 2
1+clan modifier = 1.5
Time for population to die-off = 1 hour * 1.5
Time for population to die-off = 1.5 hours

After exp(n*2) + exp(n*3) seconds —> X=3

Player clicked "Speed-Up" a second time. Had to wait e^(n*X) seconds for the "Speed-Up" button to recharge.
clan modifier = 1 / (2^(X-1))
clan modifier = 1 / 4
1+clan modifier = 1.25
Time for population to die-off = 1 hour * 1.25
Time for population to die-off = 1.25 hours

Note: There is one "Speed-Up" button for every single clan/alliance/guild/faction/coalition with a member on the planet. Players have to be online in order to click the "Speed-Up" button. Longer wars give more research points to the players involved (calculated before any "Speed-Up" buttons). Research points are distributed once the player declaring the war has his population die-off. Players declaring a war get research points, and the clans/alliances/guilds/factions/coalitions get research points for prolonging them by pacifism.

Player techs are different from clan techs are different from alliance techs are different from guild techs. They each have a different tech-tree. For example, an alliance tech may be to increase the size of the alliance by +1 clan, or to grant a production-bonus to all facilities shared by alliance members.

Wars are planet-only. After the war is done (i.e. attacker's population has died off due to losing, or due to winning and then civil war), the players involved are automatically at peace again.

Space Combat

- Maximum fleet cost increased —> can keep more ships in orbit
- Planet with fleet in orbit —> no non-allies may colonize
- Ships in orbit —> can attack another fleet in orbit (travel time between planets is instant; travel time between solar systems is not instant)
- Attacking a fleet in orbit —> fleet in orbit destroyed
- Successful attack —> can now colonize planet
- Failed attack —> your ships are instantly rebuilt at the nearest colony and can attack again
Defending orbital fleets take a long time to regenerate if the player is offline (e.g. 50% of ships rebuilt after 30 minutes).
Fleets regenerate instantly if you are online.
Attacks take 2-8 minutes.
Defender and attacker gain research points for space battles.

Key points: The more production, the higher your fleet cost, and the harder it is to destroy.
Lots of players or one player with lots of time can destroy a large enemy fleet.
Fleets regenerate instantly if you are online.

Emphasis on "instant". The game… Now revolves around killing yourself by attacking as many people at once as possible. The faster you lose, the faster you gain research points, and the better your research, the more stuff you can control, and lose more quickly —> faster research.

Summary:

If I want to get research points then what I do is destroy an enemy blockade (2-8 minutes), colonize the planet (instant), wait for my population to grow (10-180 minutes), declare war (instant), wait for my population to die-off (can take up to eight hours), and then repeat! Any clans/alliances/guilds/factions/coalitions with members present at the planet will also gain research points. When I log-off for the day, I want to be colonized at a planet with high resource-concentrations and setup an orbital blockade there in order to:
a) boost my allies' production-bonuses
b) hope that someone will attack me

As my research points increase, I can maximize my maximum number of planets. This means that I can have multiple wars running on different planets.

Last edited on 24 Dec 2009 01:06 by Phenoca + Show more

Re: Research Points

Matt R 24 Dec 2009 08:37

I am just confused why you would want to have a system where players destroy themselves. Personally, I would find very little interest in a game where the whole point was to destroy what I've worked on so I can start from scratch again. One of the most aggravating parts of a game is when you are destroyed and have to start from scratch. Also, in your kind of universe, there would be no stability, since there would just be constant war. I just don't understand why this is desirable.

There is no problem with players attacking and sometimes destroying other players. That is the nature of the multiplayer ecosystem. It encourages people to unite to gain mutual protection, it keeps people on their toes, and it helps to eliminate empires where the owning players are no longer actively playing or don't care about the game anymore.

It should be hard to kill someone off completely, and not completely to someone's advantage, which can be easily done through tuned incentives. Even if someone does get destroyed, our current design states that the player will be given a "refugee" fleet to colonize a new planet with, and they will retain their tech level so re-building will be much easier the next time through. But in a desired system wars will be ended with treaties, like in real life, where countries are not removed from the map but rather are forced to give concessions of some sort, etc. Wars will mostly be fought for economic reasons, or to relieve over-population, or to eliminate a potential threat. There will rarely be wars of extermination, although those are possible. However, the universe is a big place, and so it will be difficult to fully destroy a civilization.

Re: Research Points

Phenoca 24 Dec 2009 15:55

One of the most aggravating parts of a game is when you are destroyed and have to start from scratch.

Exactly. And this happens to so many players, and I really really really dislike it, because:
1) I will quit the game afterwards.
2) If I am a GM, my players will quit the game afterwards.
3) If I don't quit, then I spend the rest of my time wondering how far-ahead I would be if I hadn't lost everything.

Remember at some point I mentioned that players got a little tech-bonus by losing to a player with higher technology..? Well… If players receive a higher benefit for losing than they do for winning, then this completely eradicates the problem of having to "rebuild", because instead of focussing on maximizing your size (alliances can try to do this with the Treaty Bonuses idea), players instead spend their time killing themselves and rebuilding, which is actually more beneficial to them.

Also, in your kind of universe, there would be no stability, since there would just be constant war.

Now that's realistic :)
Actually, stability can be created by players who want to blockade a planet. The problem with doing this is that you need a lot of players in able to build a blockade that won't be destroyed within 15 minutes.

Even if someone does get destroyed, our current design states that the player will be given a "refugee" fleet to colonize a new planet with, and they will retain their tech level so re-building will be much easier the next time through.

Yes. Yes, and this is the most annoying possible aspect of the game, because you lose everything.
What I want to see is more support for "refugee" status. Every time a player loses a colony they get refugee ships, which can recolonize anywhere. But… If we actually make it beneficial for people to kill themselves, then they will want to!
People won't mind losing battles! Instead, you will be logging-in, and saying to yourself, "Aww man, nothing happened today because nobody declared war on my population". Allies can co-operate to wipe themselves off the face of planet (for research points while other alliance members are offline). People can lose everything, and be in a better-off position than before because:
1) The planet they lost has a lowered resource-concentration (due to overextraction), so they find one which has a higher resource-concentration.
2) They have more research points.
3) They can recolonize, and in eight hours, everything will be rebuilt. That is enough time for you to sleep, brush your teeth, eat breakfast, and login again, and then harvest all that eight hours' growth by killing yourself again (which can take 1 minute to 8 hours depending on how many pacifists are on the planet), and you can do that once per every planet in your maximum number of planets soft cap.

Wars will mostly be fought for economic reasons, or to relieve over-population, or to eliminate a potential threat.

Yeah, well… There could very well be some serious flaws in my ideas, but I think that the reasoning is sound. Giving an extremely high benefit to killing yourself will cause players not to mind when they lose all their things. But we made a mini-game out of it :)

Last edited on 24 Dec 2009 15:55 by Phenoca + Show more

Re: Research Points

Matt R 25 Dec 2009 01:57

Here is what I'm trying to say: we don't want players to want to kill themselves. If our goal is realism, how on earth is desiring your own self-destruction realistic? We want players to grow and expand and become part of the universe we are building. We want them to make alliances and fight wars and develop a community. The gameplay dynamic you are describing makes it so that there is no point in communicating with other people. There is no feeling of connection to the game environment. You simply build and destroy, build and destroy.

Yes, you say that people will be motivated to form alliances and keep on playing because of incentives like alliance bonuses and such. However, just because there is an incentive, does not mean that people will want to follow it. If I was playing your game, I would be given the choice of continuing an endless cycle of fast-paced destruction and reconstruction, or quitting to do something more productive. I would most definitely choose the latter. I would not continue to play because I would feel like I'm not doing anything interesting, I'm not making a difference, I'm wasting my time.

You say that there are things to gain though, but what? Research points? To me, "research points" is just another name for a score I get for killing myself a lot. How is that fun? I have more research points than you, which means I'm better at killing myself than you, or I've done it more often. How is that at all desirable? It just makes no sense to me.

You developed this idea, as you say, out of a desire to make the game more friendly to people who are killed. I think this is admirable, but turning the game around to say not only will we be generous to people who are killed, but we will motivate people to kill themselves, is taking it to an extreme. We can certainly add more benefits to refugee nations if testing tells us we should, but the point is that it should be a bad thing to die. We want people to not want to die, because the threat of possible future death motivates us to build a better civilization to try and fend it off. It is the same in real life. If humans were immortal, we would not have developed all that we have, because there is simply no motivation. Modern society is based off of a principle of survival, which motivates us to improve our lives as best we can, and is the basis for all methods of living.

Yes, some people will be disappointed if they lose their civilization, but this will not happen instantly. The only way to die will be by a very deliberate conflict, and often after a long and arduous war. If you lose, then you lose. I don't believe that "persistent universe" should mean that you never lose, although some people do think so. People who play FG should remember that it is just a game, we are not trying to replace their lives, and if you die then you should look at it as being the end of a good playing experience. If you want to take a stab at another experience, then start again, this time with some new benefits. If not, move on to something else.

Last edited on 25 Dec 2009 02:00 by Matt R + Show more

Re: Research Points

Craig Macomber 26 Dec 2009 07:12

We have a rather detailed research/tech design. It has no place for "points" of any kind. FG involves no stockpiles. This was one of the basic design decisions, and I will not consider changing it unless we find a very good reason and are willing to reconsider most of the design. Your ideas could be contrived to be applied as research exposure scalers and such, so I will continue to discuss them anyway.

I want to encourage a system where instead of players needing to destroy enemy players, players are encouraged to destroy themselves.

This is illogical, unrealistic and bad for gameplay. If losing is good, there is no reason to try any win, and thats the point of the game. Good ships, strategies and plans would be pointless. There is a huge difference between reckless aggressiveness (attempts to destroy enemies, with less regard for losses) and masochist suicidal attacks with the intent of loss. Even the most reckless aggressive players should not intentionally lose more units to achieve the same ends. The essence of strategy is to use units efficiently. It is not really a strategy game if the only good strategy is to spam units at the enemy one at a time with no armor or weapons as fast as you can. You brought up the topic of fast ship recovery to allow aggressive tactics. I like that idea, but this is completely different.

This is accomplished by declaring as many simultaneous wars as possible.

We must do the opposite. if declaring wars randomly is good, all the new players will get attacked (by people trying to lose though…). This is unrealistic, and bad for gameplay.

The more population you lose, the more technology is researched.

This is also unrealistic, and bad for gameplay. The point is supposed to be to survive and prosper through efficient and stable colonies, not mass murder. This encourages intentionally ineffective attacks and defense. The whole game is designed around players trying to do the opposite in order to grow their nation. Rewarding worse performance is one of the very worst things in game design. It is generally considered a bug or exploit (depending on who finds it). We can't reward massacre trading deals. (Thats worse than insider trading!)

Players can easily recolonize their population by logging in and choosing a new world to settle on. While players gain research points by creating planetary wars, alliances gain alliance points (used for alliance-funded projects) by preventing war.

Our research system does not involve points, nor is is practical to allot points for avoiding things where the game has no way to know you avoided something. Attempting to do such things would simply result and war/peace spamming exploits anyway.

I do intend to add appropriate exposure bonuses for working with and fighting against techs, but this is completely different from rewarding losing. It still applies if you win, even with no losses.

Uneven wars (e.g. you have low population) take very little time (2-8 minutes).

Insta-killing all new players as soon as possible. Great plan. Think of large scale wars on the several day scale btw. It would be a shame if your entire nation you build over months was destroyed while you slept/went to school/work…. Space battles might be on shorter time scales, but capturing planets entirely should be quite slow. While players are not really involved on the battle scale, I would like to allow them to strategize on the war scale, thus wars must span at lest a few days to people can login a few times. We can't simply let the online players win wars in one sitting, or it might as well be a match based RTS not MMORTS.

- Losing colonists —> research points

Already discussed, bad.

- Declaring war —> lose colonists

I didn't really intend declaration of war to be formally in game, but yes, people die in wars

- Planetary population decreased —> planetary resource concentrations increased

In people per resource terms yes, but net income goes down.

- Colonists on a planet exterminated —> can recolonize at any planet + facility production decreased

Production is dependent on production budget, not directly effected by such things. Ability to colonize is always there, just soft capped as efficiency drops off with colony count/size.

- Facility production decreased —> Maximum fleet cost decreased

The max fleet size is just based on the fleet maintenance/support budget. It is unrelated to production rates/spending.

- Recolonize a planet —> can pick a favorable location + population will regenerate over time

We must always allow people to abandon and create new colonies on new planets and in different spots. Otherwise we will have people requesting getting their undefended stuff killed so they can move. Please kill all my guys now begging is just dumb.
- High resource concentration + normal population —> high facility production

- High facility production —> resource concentration down

If such depletion were implemented, it would be related to resource extraction, not production. Having depletion over time as a factor is still up for debate (I oppose it due to a a rather complex and subtle issue with the economics of it, but it could be added later if desired). As already stated, efficiency does drop with growth through, so the amount of various resources you can profitably collect in an area is soft capped.

- High technology level + normal population + allied population —> boosted facility production

Techs can effect production rates and costs yes, and so can the budget. This takes population effects into account as labour is a resource needed for production, and having available workers makes it much cheaper.

Note: Sharing a facility with other players will divide the production towards each player. Yet sharing a facility with allies will provide a boost. If you have enough allies sharing one facility then the boost will be much, much greater than the loss due to sharing.

This makes no sense logically. How can having lots of allies around make building ships cheaper or faster than if you controlled all the workers? If 50 nations shader the city, why would it result in over 50 times the production as under one centralized government? Forcing players to split up all their facilities among vast amounts of players would discourage war completely and just make everyone share everything. There would be no benefit to conquest. We need to encourage a balance between war and peace so players must make choices and take action. I generally intend the ability to share colonies as rather bad, but necessary as it is needed to deal with colonies during militaristic takeovers. I would prefer to not encourage it as it only very rarely occurs in the real world, and tends to over complicate things for players. Allies might as well just build another colony right next to it.

Players at war take longer to die if there is a pacifist player on the planet.

Killing or avoiding pacifists is easy. Sad but true. Having people around that avoid the conflict should not slow it. Also, gameplay wise, it would cause militaristic payers to try and force other players to become pacifist and put colonies on their planets for defensive reasons. This is bad.

Pacifists are divided into five categories:

Forcing people to select a category, and having the game enforce it, or having the game decide someone's category are the only ways to do this. I don't like either. I also don't like formally defined group types like clans/guilds/alliance/faction… for the same reason. If it matters in game, then the agreements must be formally classified. As treaties are not enforced and often secret and likely somewhat conflicting, such classifications are impractical and unnecessary. The rather obvious/extreme example is that it make double agent type stuff impossible because the game would have to put the research points to one side or the other.

Player techs are different from clan techs are different from alliance techs are different from guild techs. They each have a different tech-tree.

We have a tech system designed. I love it. There are just so many issues do doing as you describe that I don't want to consider it.

Defending orbital fleets take a long time to regenerate if the player is offline (e.g. 50% of ships rebuilt after 30 minutes).

We should not have such differences between online and offline players. It was a design decision we were forced to make at the very beginning. The entire design is based around that.

Player clicked "Speed-Up" a second time. Had to wait e^(n*X) seconds for the "Speed-Up" button to recharge.

This is also a kind of thing I really want to avoid. Having to be online to press the button as a specific time means being online at a given time matters. We decided to avoid that, and made major design decisions around it. Having the button auto press when it is ready is pretty silly too. You might as well just have a "Go fast" checkbox, it is easier for everyone. I don't like boolean setting much anyway. It makes much more sense to have the wars take how ever long they take, though allow players to adjust their offense/defense ratios (already in GC prototype) and militaristic spending and military population sizes (already in GC prototype) instead.

Also, please use differential equations for everything: express everything in rates. We want loss rates, not death times. Growth rates, damage rates, production rates, resource collection rates, spending rates, movement rates….. The purpose of the game engine is little more than to evaluate (integrate) these equations over time. Thats how the combat, economy and even physics work.

"persistent universe" just means that if you never lose, you never start over, and when ever you start, there are already long established nations. That is it. The key is that (re)starting around established nations must be doable and fun. There are many factors in place to make sure this is the case. The main one is increasing maintenance costs as your empire grows. This means that is becomes increasingly costly to colonize, and thus only good/resource rich planets are profitable to hold. The slow rate of conquest of ground colonies requiring full capturing and control forces attackers to actually capture, and thus maintain all colonies on a planet if they truly wish to defeat it. Doing so gets more and more expensive as the nation grows and/or the planets are of lower quality, thus large nations defeating small/new nations on lower quality planets becomes prohibitively expensive.

Yes, new players will die, and even older nations will die. We simply have to make the recovery time rather short. The idea is to tune the shape and scale of the function describing national power as a function of time with player skill as a constant. Like most things in FG, it will end up as a somewhat logistic curve, where a player can achieve a power close to their potential in a rather short time, but the rate of increase decays over time as they converge to their skill level's respective max power. As invested time in a nation grows, the players skill becomes the dominate factor in their nation's power.

I'm open to running multiple servers with different time scalers for the various factors. We can have fast growth servers where recovery is quick, and skill (the quality of your strategy/national efficiency as a whole) dominates time investment very quickly, and we can have slow growth servers where the most powerful will be mainly the players who's nations have survived/played longer, and thus avoiding destruction is the key to power.

Of course, there are tons of other time scale related variables that are independent of growth rates. A simply faster or lower scaled game is another issues, and so is faster/slower combat. Those are another issue more related to login frequency.

Summary

I don't have time to read all these posts, but I read most of it. Generally I think the existing plan to give research bonuses for techs covers the research issue. If you are around allies that use some techs, you are more likely to discover them. If you fight enemies who use some techs, you are more likely to discover those. It is simple, realistic, very adjustable, and already well fit into the design. The treaties design does not allow favor such specific group classifications which have any actual impact in game outside the treaty itself. Encouraging self destruction/rewarding unit loss is simply a bad idea/horrible design choice. Encouraging lossy attacks is fine, but that is because it is still better to be more successful (higher kill/loss ratio, or even just higher kill total or lower loss total) in battle than less successful. We have already incorporated that idea into the design. It is tunable by adjusting build/production times.

Last edited on 27 Dec 2009 07:24 by tbg10101 + Show more

Re: Research Points

Matt R 26 Dec 2009 23:46

Thanks Craig, that covered everything I was trying to say earlier.

Re: Research Points

tbg10101 29 Dec 2009 06:23

Phenoca, your plan may make a fun RTS shoot-em-up, but that is not Fragmented Galaxy. FG is about building and growing in a dynamic system of peace and war.

I will side with Matt and Craig on this: the plan detailed in the first post is, for the most part, not appropriate for FG.

Re: Research Points

Phenoca 30 Dec 2009 20:52

I feel that my response is too lengthy to post, and that my idea is to controversial to be realistically incorporated into FG's political system.

While I still support the idea, and it would separate our gameplay from the dead MMORTS games that I have played I'll hold my tongue until I have a better understanding of the points Craig and Matt have brought up, and feel motivated to design a working system that can successfully keep players from quitting due to the "I lost all my stuff" syndrome while still keeping the gameplay of FG dynamic and exciting. I fully believe that many of my ideas could work if I can find a way to build on your feedback.

Tristan: Phenoca, your plan may make a fun RTS shoot-em-up,

Ha - and I don't like first-person shooters for their violence. But it does sound like I'm advocating the respawn system. I still want to play with this idea since it has interesting implications for alliances (declaring war on an ally gives both of you research points)?!

Last edited on 30 Dec 2009 21:06 by Phenoca + Show more

Re: Research Points

Craig Macomber 31 Dec 2009 08:56

RTS shoot-em-up

That actually an interesting thing to mention. My design is kinda like that (I don't see any other tolerable approach other than straight RTS with world resets to revive/add players). Basically we have to have a max power a player can have (very vaguely defined and very soft capped, but it must be clearly impossible to expand/grow forever). It is kinda like a FPS where you spawn with crummy/no weapons. After a short while (if you survive) you can get more weapons/items, but you eventually pretty much max out (getting another rocket launcher won't really help). New players can join at any time without being too disadvantaged, and re-spawns are nor too bad off either. In FG, it might take a few days to start getting near your potential, but the gameplay design will keep you from getting pestered more than you want during that time. Players who wish to avoid getting wiped out can simply stay away from the violent areas (intended to be more resource rich planets near the center). This is kind of on par with power ups in FPS games. If a lot of people want them, you don't go there until you have some decently powerful stuff.

It really is just FPS game mechanics ported to strategy based combat on a longer time scale. Thats how you should think about it. If you die, so what? You gotta build your strength for a little while and you are right back in.

Anyway, its a strategy game. If you get owned, you don't lose any of your time invested in developing strategies (designing ships, treaties, formations, AI and even just general tactics). You can also keep your techs. You really just need to colonize some planets and you will be pretty much right back where you were, though it may take some time to recapture good planets and regain full strength. We can even tune the penalties for having large nations such that initial growth can be almost instant if we decide it helps gameplay. After all, a technologically advanced population in a unpopulated resource rich area should be able to grow exponentially. Potentially we could allow re-spawning players to start colonizing multiple planets (the number based on their past size. Consider it an ability to recruit colonists via reputation/fame) at once to speed things up if spreading out tends to take too much time.

Potentially we could simply change a few constants and make a super fast paced game where you would spawn a nation when you logged in and it would play more on the traditional RTS, or even FPS time scale. Choose some planets, place a few colonies, and almost instantly (seconds) get the max sized fleet they can support. Then attack other planets. Try and capture more valuable ones to replace your worse ones and thus increase your fleet size slightly. Really, once you have the formation and AI specs configured, there is no reason gameplay couldn't be on the week or second time scales with a bit adjusted tuning.