I usually start my planet out by turning off the governor and building one thing at a time. Most planets get four factories to start out, then a starport, then two each econ and research buildings, then entertainment and farm.

That's just a general strategy, but I hold to it more or less. I might build the research buildings before the econ buildings if I am losing the tech race. I strongly suggest never building more than one farm on any planet and you may need the entertainment building first. Never use the yellow bonus food squares for farms. I always have focus on social until the starport is built. I don't bother with specialization except for capitals, and the econ and political capitals don't need to be specialized, and puting them on the same planet and getting the population as high as you can is probably the way to go. Note that even the research capital needs four factories to produce new buildings at a reasonable rate.

I also do not generally upgrade buildings until all of the squares are used. This is because you can get into a rut of always building upgrades and never filling all your squares.

I can't explain why your all factory planets are out produced by a planet with only four factories. If your manufacturing capital is on the planet with only four factories that may be why. Also, planets will suffer a production penalty if you don't have both extreme colonization techs for an extreme environment--aquatic world, toxic world, etc. But if you didn't have the techs it would be hard to build all those factories unless you bought them all.

For small planets, of 8 or less, I don't try too hard to make them balanced. If they have a bonus resource, use that and tailor the rest around it. If it has an entertainment bonus, use that and build a farm to go with it. The four factory rule still applies however, although three is OK on a small planet. For me, research is the thing I am most likely to leave off on a small planet, unless it has research bonus squares.

For large planets, try to use some of the squares for trade goods. Trade goods are extremely powerful. They also make good research and manufacturing capitals. For mid size and larger planets, I think you should just build what you need at the time. Losing money? Build 3 - 4 econ improvements in a row. Build an extra factory or two to get warships out faster. Use the extra squares to make up for research buildings you left off smaller planets.

Population affects the amount of work units done on the planet, so if you have only .5 billion people on your class 25 planet, it won't get alot of work done. You can use colony ships or transports to move people to your less crowded planets (Fill colony ship with 500 million people on the way out, and then send it back with only 1 million on board, moves 499 million people at a time). This is also why fertility rate and medical technologies matter.

Hi!

They also provide influence and canon fooders for invasion or defense. Also they give you hard time when elections come around and they're not happy , and some points for social score at the end of the game. They have NO IMPACT on production but providing money for it.

BR, iztok

That's about all they can do. They can automatically terraform--change yellow, orange and red tiles to useable green ones and automatically upgrade. I uncheck both boxes and make my own choices. The thing that made me start doing that was that it would always automatically upgrade farms, and that can be a very bad thing. Also, you can and probably will get into a rut where you are upgrading all the time instead of making new buildings on your unused tiles. 99% of the time it is better to build on an open tile than upgrade. For example, building one research building may be the equivalent of upgrading five of them.




I'm not sure what you mean by focus production on military. Most planets should have a starport, or else there won't be any outlet for production except to build and upgrade buildings on that planet. For most of the game it will be beneficial to have nearly all your planets producing ships of some sort. If I don't need warships, then I build constructors or whatever else I can use. Later on, good warships take a long time to build, even with good production capability on a planet.

The point is I try to make most planets well rounded and have each building represented on every planet unless there is a reason not to. Research points generated by research buildings go into the general pool for your empire. Having four labs on one planet is equivalent to having two labs on two planets. The same is not true for factory production. Only the planet where the factory is located can use the production points. Nevertheless, nearly every planet needs several factories, or else it will take far too long to build new buildings or upgrades.

A planet by itself doesn't need research buildings, but your empire as a whole does. You can choose to put most of them on a few planets, or have most planets have research buildings represented. For one thing, with the exception of farm bonus tiles, bonus tiles should generally be used to build whatever building type can use the bonus. If your class 6 planet has a research bonus tile, you should use it.




In the GCII vernacular, a specialized planet is generally accepted to mean a planet that has most of its tiles dedicated to one building type. There is one obvious thing that discourages this in GCII--bonus tiles. They should almost always be used for the type of building that can benefit from the bonus, except for farm bonus tiles, which can safely be counted as ordinary tiles. Manufacturing and research capitals should be specialized, because each factory or lab on that planet gets a bonus. Still, a research planet needs factories to build and upgrade its labs in a timely way.




As others have stated, taxes are the biggest benefit to having a large population and it has nothing to do with production or research. But the population and the taxes they generate are basic to supporting a large empire.