No Industry a viable strat?

My current games are like that for the AI, for the most part. They seem to do alright by it.

Frogboy says he has not seen it yet, but since beta 3x came out that is just about all I am seeing. They build mainly econ, followed by research, influence, then factories and farms. I usually find 1 or 2 factories built early in the game, then an explosion of econ.

So, give it a try. All you can do is lose a game if it does not work.

I've been using a no industry strategy for a long time. You do need some industry originally to get the infrastructure down in a reasonable time though. Once that's done, I convert the factories to something else. I go at it from a research heavy angle rather than economy though...all research buildings then use the focus buttons for production. Enough economy buildings to support the research (which is expensive since with this strategy 100% of your buildings capacity is being used at all times) but I'm not going for a large surplus.

It works great on everything up to masochistic since your weak production is compensated by having such a huge tech lead that you can build invulnerable ships. Above masochistic it's not so great because the AI gets such heavy bonuses it will keep up in research, or often beat you.

Economy strategies work OK too, but if you don't have tech trading on, the highest difficulty levels are going to be even more brutal than usual.

If you get rich enough with this strategy, you can just buy fleets from the AI's instead of building them yourself, and upgrade them as you see fit. I've been doing that with a heavy diplomacy/trade goods strategy, and pacifying AI's by buying their war fleets is working pretty well for me. Then again, I'm not playing at high difficulty levels yet.

buying is 10x more expensive then building. so you can make more omney buy building it.

I must say that's an interesting idea (why do I never think of these?). Specializing like that would let you put your race points into either econ or research bonuses. You'd also avoid the waste that comes from having your factories / labs only being utilized at whatever percent you're allocating spending to them. That definitely seems worth a try.

Only problem with buying everything is that you have to do some mouse clicking to make ships appear. When you have factories popping out ships, they appear on their own. If nothing else, it's less tedious to let factories build them.

From a pure efficiency point of view, a buying strategy for social and military production is not good...a stockmarket is only going to produce the equivalent cash of 3 or 4 points of production, and even those levels are going to be tough to achieve with the new rebalances. However, it does have logistical benefits, in particular being able to get your military material exactly where it's needed almost immediately.

The same comments don't apply to research with tech trading on as the AI often doesn't charge heavy multiples of the research cost and this is boosted by the fact you can skip large chunks of the tech tree and just buy the latest (unless that's changed recently?) This makes a no labs, all factories and economy approach pretty effective.

It is a viable strategy but I don't think you'll be able to win at very high difficulty levels but you should be able to win at cakewalk anyways.

Also I believe you would become more of an economic powerhouse earlier on with a different strategy.

Sort of cheesy but -- you cann't have no industry -- capitol has 24 production and initial colony buildings have 12 production.

There are some players that do switch over to using NLCs with a neutral alingement and get rid of their factory buildings -- this is a viable strategy even at suicidal difficulty i believe.

Personally I usually rely on my factories and use focus to get research most of the time but I do do research buildings on bonus tiles and also do a tech capitol with research buildings -- comes in handy for hurried research off and on.

There are some players that do switch over to using NLCs with a neutral alingement and get rid of their factory buildings -- this is a viable strategy even at suicidal difficulty i believe.

Absolutely viable. 4 NLCs on a planet, using 100% research with production focus where required gives about 40 production points and 130 research points (depending upon bonuses). Try getting the same conbined output using a 50/50 spending approach and see how many planet tiles you need to use...