Early in the game some races may be looking to launch aggressive attacks before their prey is ready for them. This is especially true of cloak-capable races, and doubly so for those with strong ground assault capability (lizards, and to a lesser extent the fascists). For this reason you need to avoid giving away your position early on, and to limit information about your key areas of strength and weakness later on.
What follows is a laundry list of activities I have seen players undertake in games I have played (which is not that many, so take this with a pinch of salt!), which leak important information. As such it is more a list of things to avoid to some extent, than of positive suggestions, though in some cases the converse implies an active decision.
- Moving ships such that they end up in deep space, especially with naive (real intent) long waypoints:
- Most obviously this reveals your presence in an area of space. Do this early enough in the game and it limits the possible position of your homeworld based on the maximum range of travel of the ship in question.
- Long waypoints show a destination, and allow inference of a point of origin. If a few of these can be triangulated it reveals a lot of information - again most prominently the location of your homeworld early on. Having said that, this can also be used to generate misinformation if you fly ambiguous non-straight line paths.
- Habitually using the warp-well of planets to reduce travel distance without variation. This is a good way to save some fuel over time, but if the destination planet happens to host an enemy cloaked ship (or even turns out to be owned by someone else), then the heading indicated shows the general direction you approached from. It is therefore probably a good idea to not always use the closest edge of the warp well to connect with, at least occasionally, to muddy the waters a bit.
- Using the ship's name to hold notes! I have had games in which a player called his ships things like 'homeworld refresh run'. Needless to say, if this is actually true intent, and the ship is visible at all, it gives a lot away! Again, this can trivially be used for misinformation (lots of people seem to use the rather transparent tactic of calling their warships things like 'LARGE DEEP SPACE FREIGHTER', though this seems too obvious, and hence has little actual misinformation value, in my opinion).
- Not hiding industrial activity behind appropriate numbers of defense posts. Again, this is most significant relatively early in the game (later on territories will be more obvious anyway), but even later on allowing your enemy to see which worlds are heavily industrialized, especially the aggregate distribution of them, can say a lot about where best to strike the most telling blow. Up to 15 factories and/or 20 mines are not visible to sensor sweeps, but as soon as you go beyond those numbers 15 defense posts are needed to eliminate the possibility of detection by sensor sweep (dark sense you can do nothing about, I don't think). Similarly, natives are visible to bioscans if you have less than 20 defense posts (natives only grow if the planet is owned, so existential ownership information can leak this way). Often, building up 15 defense posts before you can go over 15 factories can mean worlds take a long time to develop, so later in the game (when general positions are known anyway) you may be better advised to build up factories first regardless, but early on probably not so. To get planets up to speed reasonably quickly this means that it is important to try to seed them with enough supplies/megacredits (mostly the latter since it weighs nothing) to get over the 15 defense post hump as soon as possible (at which point natural growth through factories is exponential up to the factory limit)
Somewhat related to this, but not strictly information leaking, is the general principal - don't be predictable. If you must leave a ship in deep space, try to leave it somewhere that maximizes its possible destinations (and points of origin). This applies when attacking also - if you can position your attack fleets so that they can potentially strike against more planets, then doing so makes it harder for your opponent to predict your actual intent, so ending the turn at a location within 81 light years (typically) of multiple possible targets makes it harder to cope with.
As an example of not being predictable (obvious in retrospect, but a revelation to me at the time), my opponent, the Colonies, in a recent game was attacking me with a fleet consisting of Virgos with a supporting Cobol. I rather naively assumed that if I had cloaked ships waiting at all likely points of attack I would be able to hijack the Cobol, after which mopping up the fuel-hungry Virgos would be much easier. What he actually did was attack with the Virgos, while leaving the Cobol to stand off with a random small move in deep-space nearby, which meant I could not pick it off this way. In retrospect I should perhaps have performed a cloaked intercept as well, as insurance against this. Regardless, this was a good example of an unpredictable move (to me at the time at least) being very effective in dulling my own tactics in the ensuing battle.
