transition from the opening to middle game

It's probably due to my lack of knowledge more than anything else (still fairly new to the game) but I find the following virtually essential to get my economy working:

(1) Racial Economic Bonus
(2) Racial Population Growth Bonus
(3) Racial Influence Bonus
(4) Anomaly Harvesting
(5) Rapidly Tech up to Republic
(6) Rapidly Tech up the financial structure trees

I find that without doing/having these the early game rapidly becomes a tedious and unpleasant grind. Having/doing these forces you down a particular path, but deals with the economic problems fairly effectively.

So far I reckon that economy is pretty much about population growth, lots of it, and fast - supported by appropriate racial abilities/techs. Which is fair enough; but at this stage seems to somewhat limit the approaches to playing the early game.

One thing I have just started experimenting with (which seems to work quite well, although it's too early to tell) is to have dedicated colony/transport ships to transfer population from my homeworld (and later other high population worlds) to newer colonies. This definitely speeds up the development of an economy.

Personally I would love the game to include some form of "pillaging" option for when I play a more militaristic race. Something along the lines of:

(a) Ship module to allow salvaging (and hence selling) remains of defeated fleets
(b) Ability to scrap (and hence sell) structures from conquered planets

etc.

There are quite a few threads out there on the economy worth tracking down, or hopefully someone with more experience than me will chip in.

Franbo

Hi!
You may find this thread useful: Playing with lots of planets - how to financially survive the first year?. Also anything about early-game strategy.

BR, Iztok

Thanks for the tips, and I will look it up.

Well, I read another similar thread where it was suggested to leave the build queues empty to avoid tanking the economy. I had been filling them and of course this meant going broke and then some with a long recovery. I find by avoiding rush buys and by not building anything on colonies during the colony rush I can avoid the colony hangover phase altogether, at least that worked in one game. So I may have this licked now, but will check the article you referenced. Oddly, I still a point after the treasury runs down where I want to sit and do very little at low taxes while waiting for the population to finish building up, but that is way better since in an emergency (ie early war) I can at least crank out of it and build stuff for a few turns anyway.

Note despite my first game I ever won being with Torians set up to be economic giants (and still had the hangover because of the above dumbness on my part)... I hate using racial bonuses on economy stuff - I mostly play conquest victory only games and also want to have the best combat ships in the game and you need weapons and speed to keep ahead of the AI, sure you could economy and just have more and larger fleets, and this may even be the way to crank up big scores, but just not the same fun to me where I am at now. Plus the game I lost towards the end (painful) with Altarians partly on account of their -20 weapons hole will stay with me for a while.

I see one other little gem too - I make custom colony ships sometimes, after I have researched better drives or support maybe, or sometimes just to make a cheapo with no engines or support at all, but I never thought of putting a colony module on something besides a cargo hull, like a small hull. Interesting if it saves a lot of money. Have to look into that one. Take it you need Ion drive to make that fit with an engine? But maybe could make it with no engines even prior to that (I admit I have taken a shine to those wasteful racial speed bonuses, next fav thing to weapons and luck and creativity)? Hmmmm......

On larger maps I'll often use a cheap no engine colonizer to start. You can spit them out pretty quickly and colonize everything in the immediate area with them until you have the production base to build something with Ion drives every couple of turns. I also only build up a select few production world durng the rush while leaving most worlds empty. I'll start buillding them up slowly as my econ allows, usually during the last half of the rush. The game I'm on now, I outcolonized four obscene AIs snagging 209 planets while never going below 1000bc in my treasury. It's all in keeping your tax base slightly ahead of your production and research costs. Iused to runa low tax rate for the double pop growth at 100%, but I have mostly abandoned that nowadays for a 50% approval approach. New colonies will start breaking even as soon as you colonize them or shortly thereafter if you don't start building them up right away.

Something I've learned, PLEASE someone correct me if I'm wrong; Don't build any farms on the homeworld. At all.

A lot of the times, I've got 80-100% approval everywhere, except my homeworld, that's at around 40% or, at times, even lower. This drags my overall approval down A LOT, running on a map with habitable planets set to "rare".

Just something to keep in mind. Overcrowding REALLY kills approval.

Preface all the following with "as a noob I have found..." and take with the grain of salt that goes with that statement. I never build farms on the homeworld. 16B is plenty of people for a class 10 planet, even after terraforming raise it to a 12+. I mostly only build one farm on colonies (and well down the priority list and only if the PQ is high enough to leave some free tiles after the basics) then carefully let the one farm upgrade by researching more farm techs. But even then you have to watch out especially if you build farms on bonus tiles, it is okay to do just make sure you shut off the auto upgrades for that world (I think it is in the governor screen you select from the planet view) so when the advanced farm techs hit that world does not explode - gives you a bit more micrmanagment headache but worth it, same goes for advanced factories and labs, research the techs for the bonuses but unless you have bonus tiles under the buildings the low-tech buildings are better, just build more of them as you can afford it. Now, a class 20 planet okay you can let the pop go wild with a few (or a bonus) farms and still have tiles enough to build lots of entertainment and stock markets.

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Hmmm... some good thoughts on tax rates and approval. After looking at the formulas (in the Wiki) it at first seemed like a good thing to be at 100% approval everywhere during the colony rush as the x2 is much better than the x1.25. But the issue is what that does to your tax rate and how long your money will last versus more taxes and less approval. If it takes 1.6x as long to build up your population base at sub-100 approval but you are able to rake in 3 or 4 or 5 times as much income then you have that much longer before the colonization hangover sets in and that extra time, even at a lower pop growth rate, leaves you in better shape.

So I will have to look again at the pop growth and approval and tax rate formulas and re-evaluate how I am doing this.

Thanks for pointing that out.

I wonder also, my homeworld obviously lags, a bit, behind in approval as the pop is slightly higher. Pop growth on your homeworld is a separate issue from pop growth on your colonies. For the one you just want to get your colonies to where they can be in the black when you start building on them, for the other you want to increase your tax base on the one world where you are actually making money. But I suspect growth on your home world might be less important, provided you keep it above 41% so it at least grows _some_.

So next game I try small hull no-engine no-support cheapo colonizers with setting my tax to put my homeworld (and hence every world) at or above 41% approval while setting production at 100% until the money runs out, but only building on my homeworld, and even on my homeworld only the necessities like two factories and a lab (especially any homeworld bonus tiles) so as to focus on cheapo colony ship building mostly, maybe a bit later also some entertainment to bring approval up to where my colonies are so I can tax more across the board. See how that works.

Just remember not all strats will work for everyone and a lot of little details always get lost in explainations . For instance some things I forgot to include in the above, my homeworld is almost always all factories, man. capital, and an entertainment. Also the first thing I research is sensors and alternate surveyors and colonizers the first few builds until I feel I have enough surveyors(dependent on map size/anomoly frequency). Anaomolies are another big if. If they good to me money wise and get a few K built up I'll switch to 100% approval for awhile. A lot of it is just playing it by ear.

This is big map long rush strat, I play totally differently on small maps. Essentially the AIs blow their cash on colonizers and get the jump on you. I often have met the AIs and find them ten planets ahead of me colonizing, but with setting up a good production base on the homeworld, I can usually catch up and pass them by the time we all have 30 or 40 planets.

I seem to like to play on anomalies rare (and, oddly, asteroids abundant). So the surveyors mix probably will not work as well. Removes a random element from the early game economics profile but does make it a bit more difficult since I am rejoicing when few and far between my one flagship stumbles on a 1000bc anomaly. Seems I am lucky if that happens two or three times during the colony rush and hangover.

I don't think I read this anywhere previously in the discussion, but I would strongly suggest running at taxes so low that your morale is 100% for as long as possible. Taxing your small population @ 49% to 59% is only gaining you marginal returns. Crank those taxes down to under 10% (or even 0%) and then you'll gain the 100% population growth bonus (they're so happy they reproduce like rabbits). After you have healthy populations on your planets and/or your treasury is running low, crank those taxes back up. You'll tax return will be much better and everyone will be happy.

This single strategy completely changed my early game outcome. I too suffered the colonization hangover but no longer. Instead of grabbing planets and working myself from the bottom of the ranking, I'm now in the top four consistently. Of course, once you've got the hang of this you can turn up the difficulty and watch yourself struggle from the bottom all over again.

being at 100% only grows pop 1.6x faster than at 76%, and only 2x faster than at 41%.

your capital gets a 40% approval bonus but only 5% on your colonies. so to be at 100% approval on your colonies often requires a tax rate in the single digits, while, with the same relative bonuses, to get 61% approval you might be in the 30's for tax rate and for 41% approval you might be in the 40s for tax rate. If you have 6B total population, you are looking at around 24 x sqrt(6) x tax-rate for your income, so 9% tax (100% approval) maybe 6bc per turn, 39% tax (61% approval) maybe 24bc per turn (4x with 62% as much pop growth), and 49% tax (41% approval) maybe 30bc per turn (5x with 50% of the pop growth).

All very rough numbers (from a quickie look at the Wiki, someone maybe with a better grasp should check them), but it looks to me like the 100% approval is asking a lot relative to higher taxes if you are not super breeders.

Thoughts?

I suppose it depends too on how quickly one is spending the initial BC's, if the added tax benfit does not really add to the number of turns before you hit the hangover point then the pop growth, no matter how seeming small relative to the tax rate, is more important. But if the added tax money makes you stay financially afloat that much longer then you have more time at a lower rate to grow your population and it might be worth looking at higher taxes.

I set my initial tax rate at 49% and forget about it until mid game. I find that I can establish 12-15 colonies, build a couple of constructors and usually a freighter or two before I am forced to scale back production to roughly 40% to keep my economy in the black. By this point my tax base is expanding at a reasonable rate and I can advance the production slider by 2%-3% per turn, restoring full production within 20-25 turns. I do play with abundant anomalies and figure I'd have to scale back quite a bit sooner without the bonuses they provide. They also let me run at full production for a few weeks whenever there is enough cash in the bank to support it and that's important because I am currently experimenting with an "all-X" factory strategy so research basically stops when I am forced to scale back production.

The first building I put on most colonies is a market center - instant 10% tax increase and no maintenance. I also build an entertainment network and basic farm on every colony (no farm on my homeworld).

Probably the biggest expense you'll face in the early game is the 12bc/week basic maintenance for the initial colony structure on each planet you colonize. The more successful your colony rush, the faster you go broke.