It would be impossible to do much research with an all-economic approach. Would your approach be to buy an emerging tech from another race then trade it back to all the other races for cash? That would be a lot of work and still very expensive.

i don't believe all econ would work in DA unless you played on a special mode, such as battle of the gods. i've tried the all factory and all lab approach (well, mixing with econ in either occassion). i personally perfer all factories, especially if i select the hive super ability. but since tech trading was nerfed in DA, i don't think it'd be possible to buy everything you needed to win.

that said, some research and lots of econ might work. you could rush-buy anything you needed to build. it's really not very difficult to out research the AI if you can afford to support enough labs, and especially if you disable tech trading (well, except on the highest levels of difficulty where everything is hard), and if you try to max out your labs (that is, support as many as you can while breaking even econommically) you can rush through the tech tree at rediculous speeds, but i've found this only turns out to be a lasting benefit if research progression is set to slow or very slow. otherwise the AI can catch up to your tech level by the time you've put your techs to use in a fleet. but in one variant, i switched to all factories after becomming satisfied with my progress down the tech tree; the hive ability still came in plenty helpful.

You could use asteroid fields to build your econ buildings. But since buying stuff is pretty inefficient, I don't think it's a *great* strategy.

I personally like max econ + superbreeder on an all factory strategy. The max econ + superbreeder reduces the pain of building all those factories, and you can put more down. I don't really see the hive superability as all that useful for an all factory strategy, as one of the big strengths of the all factory strategy is your ability to go to 99% social and push through all of your factory builds very quickly....So the limiting factor ends up always being your underlying economy.

To address some of the other OPs questions (play gigantic maps):

I put a starport on every planet. I also, eventually, put at least three factories on every planet. If I really start to get in economic trouble, I will go through and set the shipbuilding to none on all planets that don't have significant amounts of build time into their current ship construction. However, I have found that even a planet with only three factories is capable of producing useful ships in fairly short order once it has nothing else to work on. This also lets me make use of all the inherit manufacturing capability represented by the initial colony squares.

I will semi-manually manage the very first survey vessel. My goal is to make sure it stays along my colony wave front IDing new planets to colonize, while avoiding picking up wormhole events. I do still use the auto-survey function to find the next item to explore. After I reach the point where I start pumping out my own extra survey vessels, I stop doing this...Usually the first two or three survey vessels I produce immediately head for a wormhole and get scattered across the galaxy. This tends to be more useful than you would think as they often reveal important strategic information on their way back to my space, so I'm alright with it as an exploration strat by this stage. If I can get the eyes of the universe built around the same time, it's even more useful...Often giving me a direction to rush for a galactic resource or two.

I don't build scout ships at all. I just use colony ships for this function.

I should point out that one's FAVORITE strategy and one's MOST SUCCESSFUL strategy are not the same thing. My favorite strategy, for instance, is Korath and all-factories. Thalans are pretty fun, too. But my most successful is Super Breeder w/ Speed bonus. I could very well see someone's favorite strategy be an all-labs approach, but I have a hard time seeing that as the most successful. I don't see an all-money approach being either, because of the way the morale & population system works. It takes all the fun out of it.

As noted previously in several other threads and by reference above, this strategy is more viable the more planets you have in a star system. If the random generator kicks out rare stars, rare planets, and rare habitable - you've got very little chance of getting this strategy to work. However, Mumble made me curious, and you CAN get this to work with as little as 200 planets on a medium sized map. The key is to be smart with your money, and focus on tech.

But, of course, if you've tried it, you should know if it is a viable strategy. Was it for you?


What do you mean by inferior? All of the strategies have their strengths and weaknesses in different situations. Plus, just knowing how you plan to build your planetary tiles at some point isn't enough. I usually rebuild all of my worlds at least once, so listing a set "build" is deceptive because it is only a snapshot of an overall strategy, for instance.


you can still have it mine, upgrade it to a different ship, leave it in orbit to defend a planet, or even sell it for a few dozen credits. It probably will make very little difference no matter what you do - it's just one ship.




Another question with no right or wrong answer. I mean no offense, but I think you don't understand the depth that exists within an "all labs" strategy, or any of the others. There is much more to the game then deciding how to allocate your sliders. For instance, there are at least 4 different ways I play an all labs strategy - depending on the situation:
1) Build several labs (at least 3) on every planet, with stock markets on most planets, so that every planet can produce something (social or military) at all points.
2) Build a few dozen core worlds filled with labs (every tile save one starport), and have every other world in your empire be all stock markets to pay for the production.
3) Pump up your military and social production bonuses, and then fill the universe with 2-4 econ starbases per quadrant... but only build one or two labs per world.
4) Create just one system that will produce everything - with a large (PQ26+) planet that gets all the tech super buildings, and surround that system with at least 16 economy starbases. Nothing else needs to be anything but stock markets - but place your wonders on garbage stock market worlds, where they don't take a precious lab tile.

Each one of these approaches has different strengths and weaknesses depending on the number of planets you have available, the spread of bonuses you are using, the average number of tiles available on each world, the amount of surplus money you have, the number of enemies you are fighting, what you super abilities are, etc. etc. "All labs" or "all factories" isn't just one strategy. I'm sure there are more approaches I don't use, a lot depends on personal style and game situation.

You might as well ask: When building a mix of factories and labs, how many starports should I build? It depends.


Why are you using scout ships? IMO, that is a waste of an early game resource. As for survey ships, there are advantages to micromanaging it. Its up to you whether the "annoyance" of micromanaging is worth the beneifits, or whether Auto Survey is good enough for you. I could tell you my personal taste, but ultimately its a question you have to answer for yourself.

There are already some very good responses to your question by veteran players above. If you are new to trying these strategies, I strongly recommend starting with an all factory approach - it has fewer weaknesses and is easier to pull off. All labs is more powerful, but a lot tricker to use, and I definetly think is a more advanced approach. Prepare to fail the first couple of times while you work out the kinks. Very broadly speaking all factories and all econ are easier the more worlds there are, where as all labs is often easier with less planets. It depends on how much money you can make, what galactic resources are available, how many planets there are, how fast you need to produce anything, etc.

I'm not really trying to get all Zen on you here, but seriously, experience is the best teacher. Skipping straight to suicidal is, well, suicidal. You say you already play with these strategies... so figure out what works and what doesn't in the game environments you are generating. Unless you give a very detailed situation, the best people can do is wax poetic about their own favorite approaches in the game environments they create for themselves.

Good luck out there. If you have a more detailed situation you need help with, I'm sure there will be people who will answer any questions.

- Wyndstar

Yesterday I *barely* eeked out my first obscene win and I could write a book on just how much of a learning curve it's been just getting to this point. And that win was with extremely favorable conditions and likely a lot of luck. The bottomline is the advanced strategies are extremely powerful in that they will enable an advanced player to take advantage of favorable strategic conditions, but what separates an advanced player from a beginner is accurately identifying and capitalizing on those situations.

For instance in my obscene game I was going all labs and mid-game I had a VERY strong Drengin neighbor decide to exterminate me since my military was weak. I had jack for industrial production and although I had two very advanced small vessels, they could not cover my four colonies, nor could they hold off a full assault. My response?

My Altarian super ability got me 3 immediate allies. I then proceeded to trade a boatload of tech to three other civs and goaded them into attacking the Drengin. Suddenly the Drengin who were about to pulverize my weak little hyper-geeks had to go full on defensive. All they managed to do to me was kill a couple trade routes and one single assault destroyed one of my defensive fighters and they proceeded with a failed ground invasion. After that they nearly folded under the assault of 6 other civilizations and I made troop transports and took their 2 undefended worlds (was a small map, occasional planets), exterminating them without a single offensive shot fired.

I couldn't write a strategy about how to use a very powerful diplomacy score to manipulate the computer, but its basically how I won that game. I researched entire lines of useless tech just to sell for easy money. I CONSTANTLY started wars between folks who I had economy and research treaties with just to keep their tech ages behind mine as well as keeping their fleets small. The only time I got into serious trouble was when two civilization folded in a short amount of time and BOTH surrendered to the same race. I responded by sending my hyper-advanced large ships to take out that race's fleets of smalls, of course only AFTER draining their funds and buying many of their warships with garbage tech AND bribing two other races to attack them. It was pretty savage overall, but I had little choice if I wanted to win. I doubt, however, that I could pull it off on suicidal with my current level of skill. I look back and realized there were MANY holes in my game and MANY missed opportunities.

Ultimately my point is simple, the strategies are just the framework ... the skill is in recognizing opportunities and knowing not only the right answer, but the timing. A strategy just provides a foundation upon which to get everything else right.

Did they ever change how reluctant any civ is to sell their own planets? I've never successfully bought a planet, but it's been a long time since I even tried, because it was so discouraging to be told No every single time.

I don't think map size would be a direct factor in willingness to trade a planet, but the number of planets the AI controls definitely IS, so therefore map size indirectly affects that. Otherwise, the major factor I can see has an effect is population. Above 3b or so and they'll never sell it, below 1b and it's relatively cheap, 1b-2b expensive but affordable, 2b-3b it'll cost you an arm and a leg. Super Diplomat has a MASSIVE impact on planet trading, much more so than on just tech-for-tech trading, in my experience.

Bit of a thread hijack, but meh.

i've bought planets. it seems like it's dependant on how developed the planet you try to buy is (so planets with special buildings aren't usually traded) and also seems vaguely related to how desperate for resources the AI is... but that's definately just an impression.

NICE! i wouldn't want to go to a yard sale at your house, but you give dam fine advice for this game. it might even be better to buy the planet when it's slightly more expensive - you get a planet and you get to sell the trade resource to the other AIs.