Hi!

There's a very simple way to produce a colonizer on the HW each second turn, and keep producing them for at least a half of a year. At the very beginning AIs are a bit faster by outright buying some, but that kills their early game economy, and as consequence their production of colonizers. On medium difficulty levels they're never a match to a skilled human player. So you're either playing on very high difficulty level, where AIs get huge bonuses, or you don't develop you HW properly.

BR, Iztok

Hi Oldstatesman,

That is a neat trick you propose. Can't wait to try it out!

Have fun

With Enhanced Miniaturization (or just Basic with the Yor), you can bring the cost down to 55 production per colony ship by using Tiny Hulls. This is fairly relevant in very fast tech rate games.

Another trick I use to speed up colony ship production while conserving money is to build or buy "incomplete" colony ship hulls during the first few turns of the game, and then upgrade them to colony ships. I don't know the precise formulas for purchase cost, but I have found that buying, say, a 125 production item outright is several hundred credits more expensive than building/buying a 55 production item and then upgrading it next turn. You do usually lose a turn of movement when using this tactic (since you have to wait until post-upgrade to load the colony ship), but rushing 3-speed colony ships in this manner is cheaper than rushing 2-speed colony ships the normal way so the tradeoff is almost always worth it. Furthermore, this tactic can be adapted to fight the problem of wasted overflow military production -- suppose your homeworld production is 62 and you're building 125 cost 3-speed colony ships. Normally this would take 3 turns a ship. But you can design some random hull with slightly lower cost (just dump a whole bunch of life support or sensor modules on it to get the cost where you want it) which you can build in two turns, and upgrade these hulls at a very cheap price to the final design (and in this case, you only lose 1/3 or 1/4 a turn of movement because you can make your cheaper hull include a colony module and one Ion Drive, and move it toward its intended target on the first turn before you upgrade it). Yeah, the usual solution to this problem is to build or buy another factory, but it's useful to have this tool in your arsenal as well, and they can be used in concert with each other (e.g. when buying one more factory is just barely insufficient to finish the next colony ship in the time you want...).

Oh, a random note on rush-buying: when the cost is below around 240 bc, the first lease is usually STRICTLY BETTER than paying up front (i.e. you actually pay less total money!). The difference is small, but when you're constantly making these small-scale purchases it might add up.

And one last micromanagement observation: you can often save a unit or two of movement by using rally points. Normally when you launch a ship from a planet, it comes out at the lower right; but when you've assigned a rally point to the shipyard, newly produced ships will auto-launch in the direction of that rally point. This can save your constructors a turn (or occasionally, even two) of travel time. However, this does NOT usually help you with colony ships or transports since the auto-launch does not load population, and if you return to the planet to load population you can then only do the usual lower right launch.

Actually, not so. In DA, you can choose any adjacent square to be the launch square for a planet, on a per planet basis. You can even change launch directions several times within one turn. This tactic has many uses.

Really?! How do you do this?

*starts dreaming of moving engineless ships a full sector per turn by just hopping from planet to planet*

Hi!

Even worse. The landing and launching on/from a planet doesnt't count as a move. If you have planets 1 square apart you can move ships accros them for free. A resurected GC-1 glitch IMO.

BR, Iztok

If you zoom in, there is actually a little arrowhead which indicates the current launch direction. It's good for double checking that you have the direction right.

You have to change the default launch location before launching the ship.

Also the square that's highlighted doesn't always change to become the new launch location unless you are really zoomed in....So zoom in really close when you want to change the launch locale.

I'm not sure what "L" does and I'm not at the game computer...I do know that when you click on the planet that an icon appears down in the planet description area that will let you change the launch location and that this icon works. "L" probably does the same thing.