GameDCoder

Join Date 03/2006

Are you still researching fire?

So I am playing the game, you know, designing all kinds of cool looking ships, and then I realize that there is this galactic domination sort of game included with the ship designer! So, I figured I would try that out and started a game. I saw the default difficulty setting and figured, "I'm better than that!" So, I kicked it up a notch or two and started a game for real. Well, I figure things are going well until I see one of the ranking lists. To say that I am last is an insult to the guy in the list above me, who showed up one day to try to trade with me. I'm sure he figured that we could pool our resources and improve both of our standings a bit, but he should have known something was wrong when he had to give me his translator tech for some, "Oh, I don't know, maybe some of those beads, and perhaps those pointy sticks you have over there..." Then he says, "So, I have this really neat particle beam tech that I would like to trade for... What, are you still researching fire?!" So I, of course, said, "Pfft! No! We are working on the WHEEL now, pal! And that new square design with the sawed off corners improvement is really shaping up nicely! I figure in about thirty turns or so we are going to be rolling all over you people with our flaming wheel... thing! What will you do with your little particle beams and duramax shields and stuff then, huh?"

Well, needless to say, I gave up on that game and figured I would start another one. I think I am playing on the "gibbering idiot" difficulty level now, and things are going a bit better. Still though, I have this sneaking suspicion that I am doing just about everything wrong. I have designed a "fast" colony ship design, and I seem to be doing a pretty decent job of snatching up all of the backwater worlds in my area by buying a colony ship every turn until I run out of cash. I started out by cranking up the tax rate on the little people until my approval rating was about 50%, turned my spending up to about 100% (or nearly that, but enough to not be losing money each turn), turned military spending down to zero while I am buying my colony ships because it doesn't seem to change their purchase price at all with it up when I'm buying them each turn, and put social spending at about 25% and put the 75% on research. Once I am out of cash for colony ships I tweak the sliders again to pretty much flip flop the research and military spending levels in order to turn out more colony ships. Then, when the available planets are gone I turn off the military spending completely (unless I need to build constructors to grab some resource) and go to about 40% social spending and the rest research. Also, I tend to start each colony by building one factory, sometimes two, and then a lab, but I am not too sure what to do after that.

I am sure there are just tons of you out there saying to yourselves right now, "Ahh, with a strategy like that, you might as well just go find some chimp to come in and slap random keys for you and give you a fighting chance!" So... Help! What am I doing wrong, or, is any of this right?

"No bonzo, get away from the keyboard! Just because we are rubbing sticks together while our enemies are circling our homeworld in dreadnoughts with lots of spiky bits doesn't mean my game is over!"

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Sounds ok. I would never put my social spending up to 40% though, I like to keep it around 20%-25% at the most. Rationale for this is until you get a factory on a planet it builds everything SLOW....after the factory the planet builds things at a good pace even with little funding (especially as your knowledge of manufacturing increases). Either way planet development takes awhile. When I colonize a world I immediately issues orders for a starport (if I intend to build ships there), farm, entertainment, then factory. By the time the factory is finished the population will have grown and things on that world will start happening faster. Then you can build your research facilities or whatever else you want. The reason I build farms first is to get population up, this seems to intimidate the A.I.

During the land-grab phase of the earlier game you do want to pump out as many colony ships as possible but don't neglect research! Research, to me, is the most important area to put money into. After the initial "land grab" hopefully you'll notice some of your "core worlds" (older settlements) starting to prosper a bit; when this happens I usually set my sliders to 20% military, 20% social, and 60% research. The faster you move up the research tree the more powerful and safe you will become....and make sure to vary your research. Better weapons and defenses are great but you also want better economic and manufacturing technology. It's great if you have Laser IV before anyone else but if you can't build or afford a fleet to use the technology it is useless.

Of course all of this is variable....starting position, special abilites, political party, ethical choices, special events....all these things will alter your game and throw curve balls at you. Like I said before try to get ahead in research early, for me this seems to make the other civs back off a bit at let you develop quicker. The A.I will bully you more when he has a tech lead it seems (my observation).

P.S One more thing...STARBASES ARE CRUCIAL. Build an economic starbase in every multi-planet system (two or more colonies) and near every major manufacturing planet! Then upgrade them as far as technology allows. Before you know they'll be economic and industrial powerhouses cranking out money and ships.

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If you make more than one starbase in a sector, do you get double the bonus?

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You do get double the bonus.

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I belive you do....but to tell you the truth I'm not sure. Although I don't think that the location of the starbase (sector location that is) is a factor in calculating the starbase's effects. The starbase effects are felt on any world that falls in the starbase's "sphere" of influence which you can view by clicking on the base.

I have on occasion built multiple influence bases with overlapping spheres of influence in order to culture flip a particular planet but I haven't built multiple economic bases to see if the benefits double....I imagine they do. (Ask Frogboy)

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The starbase bonuses *do* stack, you can check this by going to the planet view screen then clicking on the details button at the bottom right; in the details screen you get to see all the bonuses affecting your planet and some other thing... including a quote from a denizen of the planet, nice.

I would change your start by, at most, purchasing only one colony ship. Buy your first factory. Crank your production up to 100% and set your tax rate to 49% (There's a larger morale decrease at every 10%). You can then adjust your spending in order to get your colony ships at whatever speed you feel is decent. Buying things out right costs ALOT more than spending production points on them so you'll be able to keep your production at 100% for a significantly longer time this way than if you buy a bunch of colony ships, and that means your social and research production will be increased as well. Once you have multiple colonies going, you'll notice that their production needs are different but you still only have the one production slider

. If you'll notice, there's a little round button on your planet view screen by your production numbers for Military/Social/Research if you click on it then it tells the planet to divert resources away from the the other two fields and focus on that field; this helps a lot in the beginning for managing your econ, try playing around with it.

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I thought of researching Fire, but first I wanted to research Pottery, Alphabet, and Monotheism. Oops, wrong forum.

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my strategy was to buy 2 colony ships and 2 constructors right off, increase production to 100%, taxes to 40-50, social 0, research and military 50. then i would build a starport first on every planet followed by my market centers, as far as building them if you focus power like chair mentioned on social, the building will each still be produced in around 4-7 weeks.

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tetleytea, just research fire and pop the native huts to get that other stuff

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Yeah.. After fire.. go for pitchforks and torches

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Again... I get beat to the punch! As soon as I saw researching "fire" and "the wheel", I was going to say , "Skip that... just build a warrior to explore and get those techs from the nearby huts!".

Anyway, I have a suggestion and question, all rolled into one. I'm currently setting up "Specialized Planets", once I colonize them. One that has primarily factories (plus a single farm and enough entertainment-type buildings to keep the locals happy -- Happy people = more taxes), one that has primarily research centers and one that has primarily enonomic structures. On the non-factory worlds, I'll start with a factory (and pay for it if I have the funds) to increase production of the other buildings. Once the planet is full, I usually replace the factory with the specialized building. As an end-result, I have power-house type planets that focus on one area of production (I've even started setting up Influence-based planets). Does anybody else use this method, and can you guys offer any feedback as to why this might be a bad idea? I figure the two bad reasons for doing this are as follows:

- If I lose a specialized planet, I lose a TON of my production for that resource
- Upgrades take a LONG time on the non-factory-based planets (but most of the time my economy-strong planets make enough cash to allow me to buy the upgardes outright).

Anyway, I'm playing a game on "Normal" right now in a Huge galaxy with 5 major races. I've met all races, and all of the minors as well, and I'm currently in first place, overall... We'll see how that changes as the game progresses!

Thanks all!

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Ah! GameDCoder, that is the funniest post I have read in a long while. Thanks for brightening up my average day. I suck too but its good to have a sense of humour abour it!

Cheers

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Hey Vern! I play with specialized planets on maps bigger than small/tiny. I say its worth doing so I still use it.

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FYI... you can't build Pottery without Fire. As to the original post, infrastructure seems to be the modus operandi, and most of the techs you can't utilize until you either upgrade your ships or have the infrastructure needed for them.

(Note: I'm trying to figure out how to overcome the tech lag. I do well enough on Normal difficulty but I'm trying to move onto higher levels.)

Consider this in the first few turns of the game:
1) First thing to do, buy a factory. This increases the speed at which you build *everything*.

2) Buy a second colony ship. For your first few worlds, send your colony ships to worlds of at least class 8. You're looking for industrial, productive worlds. A class 4 isn't worth much except as a research or income drone. And at first it's going to do nothing but drain your economy and won't have the production needed to generate enough infrastructure to generate enough cash to offset the drain. Mars, I'm looking at you.

3) Set Industrial Capacity to 100%, Taxation as far as you can go with Approval still > 55%.

4) Set the sliders to 100% military. Build some constructors. Maybe one or two, then another colony ship. Then alternate as needed. The constructors will be used to place economy bases around your home world. I imagine you can build upwards of eight economic bases if you maintain a military base directly next to your home planet. I haven't messed with the geometry to figure it out. If each base only upgrades your social, military, and research production by 3%, you can boost your output by 25% with 8 bases. And that's only with the first upgrade.

Also, you're going to need a decent amount of base output for the individual colony emphasis to do anything significant anyway. I went to a colony that was generating 2 military, 5 social, and 1 research. I clicked emphasize social and it became 0 military, 5 social, and 0 reserach. The other two didn't even add up to one additional social point. Totally not worth it.

5) Consider buying a second factory. Unless you're generating a positive cashflow, stop buying. Now switch to 50% social, 50% military. And grow your home planet as needed. Lacking for cash? Build Markets. Don't build a Farm until your population ~= to your food per week. Farms only increase the population limit, not its growth rate. And if the world is below class 9, I'm not sure that the population cap will actually increase, even if you're generating lots of food.

If your approval rating drops too low (ie lower than 50%), build entertainment centers. One should do the trick per world, generally.

After your cash flow gets positive again, you may want to ease off the military production, for a 33/33/33 ratio or even a 25/25/50 ratio to play catch up on research. And start building labs with excess space, interspacing them with markets as your cash flow becomes negative. If you have multiple planets, consider designating one as the research center (replacing any markets you may have), and the other as the economic center.

Note: I do this because I find that in this game, cash is essentially useless except that you need it to stay above 0. I find actual production to be much more valuable and much less micro-management intensive. Because with cash, things not only cost 10x as much, but you also have to go back and click on every single colony and click the 'BUY' button every turn in order to get it to produce. There's no auto-buy function.

I've heard that being designated a home planet gives you an inherent economic bonus also, so you may want to designate your home planet as the economic center after finding some other planet to be your factory planet.

Techwise, you'll want to at least get the first space weapon and the tech that allows you to build Protective Fields (if you're using a military base near your home planet to protect all the economic bases), and then beeline for the industrial 'Capital' techs. I don't remember what they are right now, but IMHO the Industrial and Research Capitals are the most important; but Research and Economy are fairly far down the tech tree, so just go for the Industrial one and then branch back to gather the rest of the techs and trade for them as necessary.

For defense, I prefer to use tiny ships (Star Fury is good enough for me) coupled with a central military base that grants Protective Fields. This converts my fleet of 3+ Star Fury's from 1/0/0-0/0/0 to 1/0/0-1/1/1. I won't be able to attack with these things, but I'll at least be able to cover my arse. Any enemy will have to do at least 4 damage in order to penetrate my defenses and even hurt one of my ships. And the Protective Field is cumulative per ship. Which gives me a fleet of 3/0/0-3/3/3, assuming I never research logistics at all.

So, that's what I do. Good luck with that.

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1) OP: You are hilarious
2) Send in the chimps!

Some tips
- Those bonus tiles for manufacturing do NOT give you free production, they allow you to pay for more production. Important to realize the difference.
- The manufacturing capital DOES give you free production
- Unconfirmed whether the tech capital gives you free research. If I had to GUESS I would say yes but its unconfirmed.
- It does not matter on what planet you build your labs.
- It does matter where you build your tech capital. More labs on the tech capital planet is better, regardless of whether capital bonus is free or not.
- On your economic capital planet, consider focusing on population, morale, and trade bonuses, and no research.
- Beware over-farming or using farming bonuses, larger populations mean more taxes but lower approval rating. You will need morale boosts to counter population growth.
- Military spending is returned to the treasury if you have no military project
- Social spending is wasted if you have no social project. This is a touchy issue here on the forums but the strategy we've developed against it is to try to give all your worlds similar industrial capabilities. Otherwise your mega industry planet finishes its social improvements first, then sucks up the majority of funding while other worlds catch up. Exception: manufacturing capital is safe, since you do not pay for the extra production (it still gets wasted though

)

Good luck!

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it's a little tempting as yesterday I got a planet with 4 100% Manufacturing bonus. That's 8 factory on a normal planet.

I cranked out all the ship that I can while the planet still develop the building, after that I had to remove 2 factories an replace with 1 farm and one stadium because the waste is too much.

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OP: Yeah I feel your pain. My tech progress relative to the AI on the higher difficulty settings can be summarized as follows:

Imperial Scientist Report: "We have discovered... ROCKS!!

After years of study our brightest minds have concluded that there are all kinds of rocks; heavy ones, shiny ones, crumbly ones, pointy ones... we are especially interested in the pointy kind! One researcher theorized that we can make our own pointy rocks after spending weeks banging two rocks together. There are rumors among the intellectual elite that these pointy rocks could someday be used to upgrade our existing arsenal of pointy sticks. We theorize that the optimal use of these pointy rock-tipped pointy stick prototypes would be for hurling them at people and things which we find offensive (or tasty!)."

Estimated research time for "Pointy Rocks" tech advance: 57 weeks
Estimated research time for "Pointy Rock-tipped sticks" tech advance: Don't Ask

Grats to Stardock for creating an AI that can beat me down fair and square! Just wait until I get those pointy rock tipped sticks, THEN we'll see how well those dreadnaughts fare against me!!

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Arg - double post

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Citizen techn0mage, are you sure social spending is wasted if you have no social project? The manual says it's converted back into cash.

Now I have a really dumb question. What do the sliders for social, military, and research do?

Let's say my spending rate is at 100% (the slider underneath taxes)... doesn't that mean that my factories and my laboratories are working at full capacity? So what do the next three sliders do?? I really don't understand it.

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Yes, we are sure that social spending is wasted. Long story short, Brad (Frogboy) said it could be exploited and he's working on an eventual workaround. Later in the game I always turn my Social spending down to 10% or less.

The sliders:

Tax: what percent of income you're taking

Spending Rate - how much you're spending of max on production (overall). 50% means a factory could produce X shields, but you're only providing enough money to produce X/2 shields.

Social / Military / Research:

Pretend you're collecting 100 BC income from taxes, tourism, etc. 33/33/33 would mean each gets an equal share of the money spent. 25/25/50 means 25 to Military, 25 Social and 50 to Research.

The spending rate is a "global" setting, it impacts all areas equally. The other sliders allow you to "fine tune" your spending and put priorities to more detail.

(and you can tweak it even further on a per-planet basis as well)

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4) Set the sliders to 100% military. Build some constructors. Maybe one or two, then another colony ship. Then alternate as needed

Well, I wouldn't set anything else tahn 0% militray if I have just rushbought a ship on the only planet I have

Pretend you're collecting 100 BC income from taxes, tourism, etc. 33/33/33 would mean each gets an equal share of the money spent. 25/25/50 means 25 to Military, 25 Social and 50 to Research.

Sorry, but spending have nothing to do with income

In the case you have described, a 33/33/33 setting (with a 100% general spending) will means that you produce 33% of you maximum military, social and research maximum capacity.
If set to 25/25/50, it means 25% ofthe military capicity, 25% of the social and 50% of the maximum research capacity.

It is very important to understand that spending is only related with the production capacity of your planets. It allows to spend much more than your income. Try an homeplanet with a fcatory on aprecursor mine at the start of the game

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My technology comes from the dead cold hands of my ennemies! One planet per technology! Wuzza!

alternatively, you can exploit a world: Capture it, leave it undefended, the AI wil re-capture it, re-capture it, get a new tech, rinse, repeat. This can lead to worls having almost no people left on them but they will always be a few hundreds and besides, the base growth rate is a fixed number modified by your approval and growth bonuses.

Ever seen 10 thousand people have 20,000 thousand babies over the course of one week? Promiscuous litle things

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After fire you must research matches!!!!

That was a hilarious post!!!

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