opening planet rush

There are anomolies that increase abilities and cash, both of which could tip the balance of power in (or out of) your favor.
I send out 4-5 survey ships to snag as many as I can, and use the cash bonuses to buy colony ships.
If each ship can snag a $2,500 bonus they pay for themselves as well as another colony ship/building.

My way on large maps or bigger is as follows.

Do not buy scouts, design your own improved colony ships and produce those.

Buy factories rather then colony ships, a factory is 500 bc approx, a colony ship is 1,000 bc. After a few turns u end up with more colony ships this way, hence more colonies.

I do not bother with scouts until the colony rush is over, let those colony ships scout for u.

I only target PQ 10 or above with my initial colony ships and do not really bother with anything less then a class 8. Let the AI handicap himself with those low PQ planets.

I am happy for the AI to colonise low PQ planets in my sphere of control, they will flip to me later or be easy invasion targets. Alot of games I let them have my PQ 4 'mars'. If I am evil I usually use PQ 7 planets or less to engage in planetary destruction, ie when invading use mass drivers etc.... then a transport will take my conquering soldiers off the planet and I 'nuke it' by selecting destroy colony

Those tactics work very well for me on suicidal level.

I always do exactly what Meglobob did, except I try and take all planets, no matter how low a PQ, so that the computer can't rush in later and undermine my influence solidarity.

except I try and take all planets, no matter how low a PQ

I avoid low PQ's because they effect morale----->less tax revenue------>leads to being poor.

Higher PQ planets have a morale bonus, which means higher taxes, more money.

so that the computer can't rush in later and undermine my influence solidarity.

Never had this problem, they might get an area to 2-3 times but so long as it never reachs 4+ let the AI waste resources trying.

Research propulsion first. The first tech allows a 4-move colony ship, impulse drives a 6-move colony ship, impulse II, an 8-move ship. Rush factories on the homeworld. Three factories and a player can crank out a colony ship every 3 to 4 turns.

After propulsion is done, research planetary improvements to get +10 all bonus. Then sensors to start building survey ships. Scout ships are not worth it, unless they can colonize or survey. A player can build maybe one scout and then upgrade it to surveying once that tech comes online. More than that will probably slow a player down.

Keep taxes low to keep approval at 100%. It will pay off big time in terms of population and ability to send out colony ships. This means be careful how the initial 5000 bc is spent. Unless good treasures are found in anomalies, that 5000 has to last a long time.

i have always played on Gigantic maps and i use my own custom civ. They have Bonus in luck so i used this to my advantage. At first i put my spending sliders to the following :
Military: 5%
Social: 55%
Research: 45%
(i play 1.1) What this does is that i am mainly gonna be doing is researching and building planetary upgrades VERY fast. In 1.1, however, any unsused social production is translated into military production, meaning if no improvements on the planet, i get a whopping 60% military and 40% research. Then what i do is immediatly research the technology that alows you to see the planets in your mini map (sorry forgot the name) At first this technology may seem useless, but if you look closely at the mini map, good planets look slightly different than non habitable planets (it would help if you take all the displays off except for planets in the mini map) What i do then is buy Colony ships and send them to those planets i think look a bit different.
Whilst i am doing this, i have my capital ship on auto survey, since i have 25% luck bonus i rely heavily on getting the nice money bonuses (2,500 preferably) since i am buying most of my colony ships.
After all of this is done, i research the technology that allows you to put survey modules on your ships (sorry forgot that one too) and then i build my own personaly survey ships with alot of engines, and a survey module, and then I give them Life support so they can go far into space, and set them on auto survey.
And then for my last tip, after getting the survey technologies, i then go into at least ion drive so i can get the 1 point speed boost.
That is my colony rush, it may seem like it will take forever, but since i have bonuses on technology and luck, and the fact that i play on gigantic maps, it usually doesn't take me too long.
P.S. i take over all planets regardless of PQ

Sorry for the long post

Keep taxes low to keep approval at 100%. It will pay off big time in terms of population and ability to send out colony ships. This means be careful how the initial 5000 bc is spent. Unless good treasures are found in anomalies, that 5000 has to last a long time.

If you keep taxes that low, you obviously cannot produce as much at first. How long does it take to pay off? I am convinced you need to do the planet grab as soon as possible. Then work on getting the morale up.

i go for p12 and above at 1st til i get a nice sphere of influence then work my way back and downwards on the pq scale.I will however colonize a planet if its the only habitable in they system regardless of pq.How many colonists do u put in each ship anyway people?????

If you keep taxes that low, you obviously cannot produce as much at first. How long does it take to pay off? I am convinced you need to do the planet grab as soon as possible. Then work on getting the morale up.

Use a morale building. Since your homeworld is going to sit at 5,000B or so for much of the colony rush phase, keeping its morale up isn't a problem. One building, + a decent morale ability (which you should always have some morale bonus) is quite sufficient to keep them at 100% happiness. Keeping your worlds at 100% is vital for good growth, even with a growth bonus ability.

Keep production at 100% and run a large deficit. each turn That's what the bulk of the 5000 initial bank will go for. Run the deficit for 10 to 30 turns depending on map size, and that player will have double the pop of a player with normal taxes during the same period. At that point, crank up the taxes, and have about double the economic base of someone with average normal taxes.

It's hard to say without complete information, because little things will change the strategy I use for openings (well, it's always changing).

For example, the decision to research Impulse Drives before colonizing is a function of how many planets I want, how far away they are, and how valuable they are (class, defensibility, economic starbase considerations).

Even things like the decision to build a research lab or a factory on the first turn is determined, I'm beginning to think, but galaxy conditions. I believe a research lab is almost always the way to go, except in closely-packed large galaxies with high numbers of habitable planets.

One thing that is constant across openings is holding approval at 100% as long as is practicle, and aiming to keep industrial capacity at 100% for the whole game.

Keep 100% morale + 70% pop groath the rest econ or sol prod also bild mind contel center if bad+morale bildings and 80% taxes + 2,3 $ planets = $ 10000000000000000000000000000000000 per turn.
heh heh heh

What are the drawbacks to go into deficit spending (below 0 bc)?

A trick that worked well for me in my last game was to build scouts with a cargo hull. Then I made ship designs of a constructor with long range, another longer range and faster scout, and a survey ship on a cargo hull. I then upgraded the existing scouts to allow them to scout faster, survey anomalies, or turned them into constructors on top of resources to build a mining starbase early, which also extends my range. As I ran out of anomalies and unscouted areas, I sent the remaining scouts to the mining starbases to add more mining and defense modules. I find that in big sparse maps, using scouts to find the resources and then upgrading them to take control gives a huge advantage. The only caveat is that if the constructor has poor range, it may be out of range when it appears next to the resource and therefore cannot upgrade it.

Hi,

Hard for me to remember my exact method but it's pretty much the following on Large and Gigantic maps which are the only two sizes I have played on...

I pretty much go for what would probably be considered a straightforward head-on approach. I made a fast colony ship by stripping the default one and putting one colony module on it, 3 hyperdrive engines on it(i think it's 3), then a couple of life support modules iirc. I think that left room to also put one sensor module on it. That's my initial colony rush ship and I send them out with 250 million onboard each one. And I purchase my colony ships until I get somewhat under 2000 bc(i don't like owing money so i never lease). This means I can really only buy a few colony ships at first. I seem to have bad luck with finding anomolies that contain bc so I don't count on that and do not make any survey ships. I just go for buying and making colonizers, no scouts until the colony rush is over.

Then I do what Alfonse said. IIRC I purchase the entertainment center(morale building ) to keep my home world at 100% morale from the get go. It also allows me to increase my Taxation rate. As I send out colony ships my home world does not go over 5 billion pop and they are always at 100% morale and therefore the pop rate is increasing at max with that one entertainment center building.

Also IIRC I purchase the first factory as they not only help with the speed of ship building, but also with the speed of new structures(buildings) too. But after that I'm purchasing colony ships rather than factories. I might go a turn or two without purchasing a colony ship so that I can purchase a partially made colony ship, which is less expensive... but I do purchase them.

At first I leave the Spending(67%) and Spending Distribution(33, 33, 34 or something like that) sliders at their defaults. After securing a good number of planets I think I have had to turn the Taxation up somewhat to keep from going in the hole, putting morale at less than 100% for a bit unfortunately. But then I get things stabilized and after a while, as soon as I think I can get away with it really, I will lower the tax rate and then after a bit I start pushing the Spending rate slider up. Later on I will adjust the Spending Distribution sliders as I desire according to the current situation.

In my current game I have had the Taxation rate at 49% nearly the entire game with Spending at 100% and overall empire morale at 90% or better(rarely lower than 90). Every planet I have has a Starport on it and only for a short while mid-game did I command all Starports to stop building a ship. Other than that all of them have always been buidling a ship. I only playing on Challenging though which some people might consider to be fairly easy. So far I have found it to be, well, challenging. But with what I've learned so far and the way my current game is going I think I might be ready to go up to the next level of difficulty.

So it sounds I do it a lot like you pnich. However I haven't reseached faster drives until a considerable amount of time has passed. Perhaps I should try getting them earlier than I have been? I've just been using the early fast colony ship I made with 3 of the engines you get to start out with.


Cheers

I only play on gigantic galaxies, so this is my way in the beginning:

At first I buy a morale building, this to keep morale always at 100% - the bonus is worth it. Then I build three factorys (buying one by one in each of the following turns). The "flagship" gets directly the order to autofind anomalies and the first colonizer is send to a region where I think there could be many stars.
I research at first stellarcatographie, next propulsion and I go on there till I reach impulse. I construct my own fastspeed colonizer and buy the first at the stardock, the next I buy till my money gots less than around 500bc. The colonieships are going to the planets with many stars; I keep on upgrading new colonizers as new "speedtech" is aviable. So I get as fast as possible the good plantes (10+) in the beginning. Sliders for taxes and spending are set new in each turn to get the maximum taxes and spending by having a total amount of 100% morale and as much spending without getting a negative income. Money that I get this way I use to force buying ships and buildings.

This works fine for me and when I have around 8-12 good planets above 9, I concentrate on goodies to build starbases at them.

Colony ships should never be wasted.

You can always upgrade them into Constructors if you built too many.

I usually play on a large galaxy with a custom race with Ion Drive as a starting tech on Masochistic. I put my production slider at 100% and make it 60% research, 5% military and the rest social. It takes 5 or 6 turns to research Impulse Drive. I buy a factory or two and a morale building on my home world. Once I have Impulse I build fast colony ships. I buy as many as I can afford. My survey ship does some scouting of very close star systems but grabs all anomolies on the way. As soon as I am producing fast colony ships I put my survey ship on auto. I switch production back to 40% research and 30% to the other two and work on getting planetary improvements and then the ability to make more survey ships. If I have the money I will buy a factory on new worlds and then start working on morale buildings and more factories. Only PQ9 and above planets get starports and small worlds only build research improvements unless there is a bonus tile for something else.

What are the drawbacks to go into deficit spending (below 0 bc)?

I think you're confusing deficit spending with a negative bank balance. Negative bank balance means a morale penalty (I think?), plus you cannot rush buy/upgrade/pay money in Diplomacy. I'm not sure if there is any interest? If your money gets too low, production will stop entirely.

Deficit spending is spending more money than you are making each turn. Obviously, if you keep this up for too long, you will run into a negative bank balance, but until then there really aren't any drawbacks. If you avoid rush buying, you can run on a defosit for a good while, and if you build enough economy buildings you can basically keep your Spending slider at 100% for the entire game.

Re purchasing/deficit spending, this thread seems to indicate a split between those who purchase factories and/or other facilities and use them for faster colony ship production and those who simply purchase the colony ships outright. The end result is probably the same; with the first approach you get going a little later but end up producing more faster so you catch up there; with the second approach you are first off the mark but your later colony ship production may be a little slow. At a certain point the first option probably is better than the second, depending on the size of the galaxy one's playing.

The same could be said for ship speed. Buying research facilities and putting emphasis on research so as to get impulse drive as quickly as possible will slow you down more than either of the two options above, but then again once you get impulse drive your ships may be fast enough to reconcile the different approach.

It may be then, that for gigantic galaxies, it's best to play a compromise game (all other things being equal of course). Buy a Xeno lab, then a factory. Start out by buying a regular colony ship (just to have two out and about early on). Put your emphasis on R&D. By this point you've already worked through almost 1/2 your money. Buy a second factory, research impulse drive, design a new colony ship with impulse drive, then switch your emphasis to as much military production as is necessary to rapidly churn out the colony ships. You should be able (barely) to avoid going into red, assuming of course your survey vessel does not run across any valuables (which has certainly saved my biscuits at early points of the game).

pnich of the hapless Terrans

Actually, I don't purchase anything until I have so much money that I have no other way of spending it...

I always play on gigantic now and this strategy is what I use.
Lower tax for sure to get the 100% growth. You need the growth to send the colonies. Set research to 100% and for the first few turns buy factories while researching speed. When you get the speed switch to 100% production at this point I am down to around 2000. This 2000 BC I use to cover the loss from the little tax. Send your first couple of colony ships with only 100 people. Then your next 3 with 500. The idea is the low pop colonies explore and find the best places. They do not pop the best places but go until you find where you want to try to put a border. The next 3 ships go to the big planets. These are to be your income, manufacturing, and research capitals. Many times I actually just make the first planet the manufacturing capital and then I only send the 2. This process means it will take you a time to start but once you do the ships are faster and you can still get a lot of planets. Not to mention the fact that they are all at 100% morale they will grow pop quickly and you will end up with less planets but they will all have more pop. I used to start with too many planets and struggled to get them populated.

1. send out several scouts as far as they'll go and send your colony ships as far as they'll go as well, so as to create the largest perimeter possible. Produce colony ships as quickly as possible while maintaining research and social construction. 2. send out colony ships as they are produced, in random directions, looking for planets. No scouts.

Depending on other settings like the abundace of stars, planets, or the clustering of stars number of opponents doesn't it?

If planets and stars are abundant and quality is high, scouts are of limited use (in terms of looking for resources they can still be useful), since every star system will have at least 1 or more good planet to colonise. On the other hand if planets (and good quality ones) are not abundant, you can very well send a colony to a far remote star system and realise on arrivial none of the planets are habitable, wasting time. Worse yet, the close by star systems might be equally barren. This is unlikely on abundance settings.

So #2 is better than #1 the more abaundant planets are and the higher Quality settings , as you can send colony blindly to planets or star systems (you don't need to find planets, they are already marked by stellar cartography on the minimap, you only need to see if they are habitable) and be sure to find at least one habitable planet usually in the star system.

If you run into other races or hit empty space you could 'waste' a few colony ships but that's better than wasting time on scouts. Produce colony ships as quickly as possible, reduce research and social to bare minimums, buying what's necessary for production.

You can avoiding running into other races by looking at the mini map and roughly see where they influence are (unless you turned on blind exploring), you can try to send colony ships into such areas quickly to snatch planets, but after a certain point it is highly unlikely there will be much left, so either do it early, or don't do it at all. Me? I seldom do it, because it's a gamble.

I prefer to expand quickly in the direction where there is no race yet. I also leave out until later star systems that are behind me, in my backyard corner, where the AI won't see them until much later.

3. colonize only the good planets; leave the PQ4-6 for later on.

This is compatiable with #2 actually. Again it depends on your settings. At the most abundant settings, I never settle for anything below 10 PQ. Don't worry about PQ 4-6 , particularly those within your backyard (Mars!), even if the AI gets to them, they will just get cultural flipped.

The only exception why you would colony a low PQ planet, is for strategic reasons to extend your range. I almost never equip my colony ships with life support (though researching a couple is not a bad idea on bigger maps), so colonies need to be strategically colonised if they are necessary to extend range. This is less important in not so clustered settings.

a question here, I'm doing the demo atm, but will get the game in a few weeks for my B-Day, so it doesn't hurt to pick up a few strategies now.

my question is, when I start, since you don't want to use the core ships, should I buld colony ships with one or two colony modules?