And how do you colonize & build

Just some observations. Perhaps opening it up to critiques. First, my style of play is to make a customizable race, huge galaxies. I've just put all the competition up to normal and I randomize my opponents. What I'm noticing is that below normal i almost always win. Normal I've lost every time. I tend to rush out a few colony ships early and set them to a distance away from my first colony. I've adapted this strategy somewhat, I've pushed out the second colony ship, then I make a scout. Once I see a good location I then send out a colony ship to that location, preferrably from the colony that has the most people. What usually happens is I may have a slight edge economy but began to fall way behind militarily and technology. Soon someone declares war and then someone else and I'm done.

I've adapted a bit and now will do a factory first, followed by a farm (for the tax revenue) and keep my funds above 1000bc. This is working slightly better, I can get a good economy lead, but eventually I succumb to either the Torians (bastards have so many colonies) or the Yor (they just never like me.) I'm also a big fan of diplomatic stations and flipping a planet.

So I'm curious, whats everybodies pattern for colonization? How do you keep up in research? And when do you start making military might?

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Ok, I play at crippling level, so spoilers follow... if you do this, you will pawn your opponents at normal or intelligent.

Turn 1: I purchase outright a factory on my home world, purchase outright a speed 3 colony ship on my home world (you can create this once in ship editor, then it will be available for all future games). Set taxes at a level that gives me > 50% approval (this is for 1.0.X). Give full funding to research (0 to social or military production), and increase the spending slider to 100%. Auto-explore scout, send first colony ship to a "close" star system (since it is slow). Set to research propulsion, which will finish in one turn, if you have done everything else as listed.

Turn 2: Start building second factory on home world (normally this time), purchase outright a speed 4 colony ship with no range modules. Send my newly build spd 3 colony to a system that might be long-range but that I want to beat the computer to. Change funding 100% to social production.

Turn 3: Your factory is nearly complete on home world, adjust spending sliders between social prod and research to be the minimum to finish factory in a single turn. Start researching xeno research. Purchase either a spd 3 or spd 4 colony ship depending on how much range you think it will need. Send off your new colony ship.

Afterwards: Switch production 100% to military. Assuming you need more colony ships, keep building them on homeworld, if not sure, build a spd 3 constructor, to claim any resources you have found. No more purchasing except if I find a world with a production bonus, I will rush-build a factory there for the first turn. Once I colonize a world or two, switch spending to no military, split between social and research, and then "focus" military on your homeworld. On every other world, I build two factories first (unless it is PQ < 8, in which case it gets one factory, or it's PQ >= 14 where it will get at least three), then starport, then research and entertainment, then market, then farm. I don't actually set military spending above 0 (just focus it where I need to build things, like home world, or any production powerhouses) until all initial colonies have starports.

I don't build scouts --- let your colony ships be scouts. Oh, by the way, I like to spend 3 points of racial picks to get +4 sensors.... you will be amazed at the advantages this gives --- you can beat the computer to nearby worlds, and later on, you can see when he is trying to invade (zooming out to the long view between turns is especially useful here --- his fleets and transports jump out at you).

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Well,
I play on normal and am about ready to kick up the difficulty one notch. My strategy for PQ 11+ planets is as follows: factory,factory,factory,research,bank,farm,morale,farm,influence,starbase,research. even on large planets (PQ20+) I dont prebuild more than these starting 11 buildings due to the fact that upgrades are going to be coming constantly and so are galactic achiements. When I run out of social buildings on a planet with lots of space I tend to add one each of research and bank until it fills up. of course i do dedicate 3 planets to econ/political, research and factory capitols. I try to pick planets whos starting pqs are 15+ for these so they have extra room for the extra buildings. Try to make the largest PQ planet you can find your economic/political capitol.

For planets PQ6 and less they never have farms and are primary reseach planets, I dont build more than one factory on those.

for planets pq 7-10 I vary things a bit. I generlally build factory,factory,factory,research,bank,farm,morale, starbase, and then add the other buildings from PQ 11+ as space becomes available.

I insist on building a minimum of 3 factories if i build a starbase.

I always try to rush build the first factory if i can on each planet. Better to rush build your production than rush your ships every time.

Next starting ship construction order for a "huge" galaxy is scout,scout,scout,colony. Scouts are vital for scouting out those anomolys for your starting survey ship. After that I alternate between colony and constructor. When the pop on my starting planet is over 5b i build colony... when under i build constructors. all new colonys with starbases do this also (means most of em build a lot of constructors early on). This also means that farms dont do much in the early game. I also rush build all 3 of those scouts. Typically i can rush build 2 factories, 3 scouts and 1 colony, after that I let the economy losses I take absorb the rest of my cash (run things at 100% production as long as you can). If you get lucky and find one of those 2500cr anomolies you can rush out more ships.

Constructors go one each to every available mining resource and any extras begin building my economic starbase grid. I try to cover every planet in my empire within the radius of one econ starbase.

I continue to do this until i spot any of the computer players with defenders or other war ships. Then I switch one of
my better producing planets to making nothing but tiny warships equipted with stinger II missles and one of my best engines. (first upgrade of the 2 damage missles). This fleet is generally big enough and early enough to prevent "normal" intelligence computers from attacking you. these ships assemble wherever near the front lines, however once you build a spin control center I park enough on that planet to fill it up.

I continue doing this until there are no more stars to colonize. I also colonize sectors by trying to take the best planet in each starsystem first, and generally let the computer take the smallest one if they want.. after all not much he can do to prevent it from flipping to me. The computer players generally take systems by taking every single system thats as close to him as possible. So I colonize the bettter worlds with my limited supply and rely on planets flipping to get the smaller ones.

This should pretty well get you through to the mid game. I find that my economy is fairly tight until I can research my first government, and then I run at a 100% production for the rest of the game.

ps: my economic capitol planet never produces colony ships and produces all of my freighters.

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Farms don't five you tax revenue early on, only useful when you have reached the 5 billion (10 on homeworld) maximum. Rush buying factories means you don't have to buy colony ships as much, and sets you up early, followed by two +12 economy planets (market centres and farms) to support my empire for a bit, then research or military planets depending on bonus tiles

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My home world is always an Econo, the second world had factories and a starport, my third world is research, my fourth is balanced. Fifth world is a new Econo, and so on...

Unless there are significent bonuses on a planet. Then I follow the Bonus and go out of Order.

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Well after reading this thread, I made a few changes to my strategy. The biggest moving the slider to 100%. Immediately my planets were pumping out everything at a nice pace. Thankfully I had already made a whole range of colonys ships (marked speed then max distance in their names). So i ran up the tech tree to drives II. I only had two planets making colony ships and still managed to make them fast enough to have equal population to the torians, the strongest economy, a slight edge tech wise, and a military around 100. Now I'm trading alliances to everybody to backfill my missing techs and building some decent ships.

All in all, by building market centers when my funds got around 1500 i was able to keep myself with positive cash, and for some reason my people are happy even though im taxing them at almost 50%.

So I appreciate the tips above, i combined a few of them and have a much more entertaining game experience.

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Turn 1: I purchase outright a factory on my home world, purchase outright a speed 3 colony ship on my home world (you can create this once in ship editor, then it will be available for all future games). Set taxes at a level that gives me > 50% approval (this is for 1.0.X). Give full funding to research (0 to social or military production), and increase the spending slider to 100%. Auto-explore scout, send first colony ship to a "close" star system (since it is slow). Set to research propulsion, which will finish in one turn, if you have done everything else as listed.

Turn 2: Start building second factory on home world (normally this time), purchase outright a speed 4 colony ship with no range modules. Send my newly build spd 3 colony to a system that might be long-range but that I want to beat the computer to. Change funding 100% to social production.

Question about the ships and speeds. My ship designs are not saving from game to game. How do I fix this so I can purchase these ships outright. Shouldn't this be a bug though? In the new game you haven't Researched a speed 3 or 4 engine yet but you are buying ships with speed 3 and 4 engines.

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