It's been awhile since I played, but I haven't seen these mentioned here.
Troopship bays are typically *much* more efficient than the equivalent amount of colonizer bays. A ship with one colonizer and 1-3 troopship modules a quite efficient colonizer that doubles as a troop transport when needed. Particularly useful ferrying colonist to a new colony that you *did* just use a single colonizer on.
It's rather 'munchkiny' but if you seem to have a lot of anomalies in a game, stick survey modules on the smallest ships you can, wind up the tiny little keys and toss them out (I've also been known to put them on Asteroid Miners) and grab anomalies en-passant - they're slow, but as your territory expands you have them everywhere and no one else ever builds them. Particularly useful in combination with the speed boost Civ bonus.
Theory: (Untested) Due to the odd way the system breaks ties, a ship down to one hitpoint and a lot of weapons can survive encounter after encounter if it outguns other ships. A, ah, Cargo ship has only 1 hitpoint.
Jonnan
Here's one trick I like to use: buying out the minors.
I generally prefer not to conquer minor races as it adds up fast to a "Our reputation for conquering others" diplomatic penalty, not to mention that I often grab their treaties (every little bit helps) and that's an even bigger penalty. But especially in the expansions, the minors are always all snapped up eventually by the AI.
So what I do is this. I wait until a minor is on the ropes against the AI - usually, this is when it has no military left. Then I offer it all my techs and trade goods, plus a half-dozen old ships (they won't go lower then this, number-wise) in exchange for the minor's homeworld. If the minor agrees, you can also get all its money, techs, and influence points. The result? The minor race ceases to exist and you get control of its high-PQ planet, all without a shot being fired. Profit!
Notes:
I'm interested in feedback on a trick I've been trying; only on my third game, up to challenging difficulty.
I try to lead the AIs into specific weapons lines. If someone develops Laser early -- it's usually lasers -- I trade for it, then trade/sell/gift it to the rest of the civs; and I keep doing that to keep all of them going with the lasers. Meanwhile I'm researching mass-drivers and shields. It's been a lifesaver so far; I'm fighting for my life, but the enemy's running lasers into my barriers and nobody's even researched armor yet.
A good thing, because I'm an utter doofus at economy management so far, they're coming in screaming swarms and I'm just barely fending them off.
To expand on this; once you've got some miniaturization, you can take those small and tiny ships you buy off the AIs for ridiculously low prices -- often just a bit of influence -- and upgrade them to colony ships or constructors.
In an extreme case, you can buy a small planet and some warships from a distant AI, upgrade the warships to colony ships and out-colonize him in his own backyard.
Can anybody explain why going from a mining ship to a super basic cargo hull colony ship with nothing added costs way more to upgrade to than a template colony ship?
I know I can abuse this by upgrading to colony ship one turn (for 60 credits) then moving to a resource and converting to a constructor for far cheaper than going from miner to bare bones constructor directly, plus you get the additional 1-2 additional movement from the colony ship/impulse tech.
edit: forgot to add a concrete tip
In TA you can pay in cash for anything you want then trade in your worthless influence to get the money back. Money is no issue in trades anymore with the quick trade fix. You will be asked for infinite influence for a tech, or 500 gold. You can then barter for a quarter of that gold (quarter at a time down to 30 or so credits) for 4-5x influence each. A lot of times if you click on gold you can pay 50 gold OR 50 influence to complete the trade. If you get trade for something with a bunch of techs, whittle away as many techs as you can, then take away one more tech until you are in the red, then pay the difference in influence. It works so often its ridiculous.
It has to do with component similarity as well as difference in component cost, but I never took the opportunity to spend potentially dozens of hours working out exactly how it works.
Constructors (and miners, I think) also have some value inserted to increase their (upgrade) cost, that I've forgotten the number of, whereas transports are IIRC ~50 more expensive to upgrade than their build cost would suggest.
Say, these are some great tips!
Might help since I kept on losing my harder games!
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
