tetleytea

I'm one of those who gave up on Metaverse and moved on.

I like Medium maps on all Abundant settings. Let those Economy starbases rake it in!

When you go in for Lasik surgery and you ask the eye doctor if he's researched Laser IV yet.

When you think all your problems in life are going to be fixed in the next patch.

I like the first point of Morale, since that gives you 10%. But the other 2 points I can pass, because they only give you 5%. Population growth, though, kicks butt. Right now I'm going back and forth whether I prefer population growth or +30% economy.

Factories all the way. The best way to get more research is to colonize more planets.

Now that you mention it, I should be doing more espionage. Money spent on espionage is still more useful than money never spent at all.

Factories do cost 2 maintenance/turn, so not having one at all is better than having one and not using it. However, if you're converting a factory into a market center, something is wrong with your bulid order. If anything I go the other way around, because as my population grows I need more industrial capacity, not money.

I concur, factories and a starport. PQ4's make nice troop farms for your transports, since they hit the pop cap anyway. Another trick I do: don't develop them at all. In the initial colonization phase, the low-PQ planets can serve as a buffer, to make the AI will colonize them instead of the high-PQ planets you really want. But if you wind up colonizing them anyway, you can plant a very small population and then trade/gift it to an A

Better. They had to nerf military starbases in beta 4.

Is it a class 10 world? Unless it's a small map, I wouldn' t put a manufacturing capital there at all.

First thing I would do: lower your tax bracket to 49%. Big morale difference between 49% and 50%.

All I know is that I play Nano Rippers, and they own. I don't care that much about the cost because: a) the cost of a str-6 nano ripper is on par with three str-2 singularity drivers, b) I'm not constantly replacing dead Nano Ripper ships because they don't die, and c) I have far more military production capacity than I have research capacity. It's the research cost that's expensive.

I like the Jupiter calendar a lot. What am I, 3 years old now?

I am beating Crippling consistently (probably could go higher, but don't want the stress...), and here's a few things I do. This is in the beta 2: I don't worry about specialization too much. The bonus squares pretty much dictate your specializations for you. Economy Capital and Political Capital on the same planet. The high population benefits them both. Plus, the Political Capital gives a morale bonus. This planet tend

You can carry 3 billion people on a single ship. What else do you want?

If they really want to make the game Masochistic, they really ought to switch out the musical background to continuous non-stop country music. That would be masochistic.

I like small/medium galaxies with everything set to abundant. It maximizes the use of Economy Starbases, takes life support out of the picture, and I don't spend forever waiting for ship X to go from point A to point B.

10) Actually, varying levels of completion before rush-buying DOES matter. Very much so. As you near completion, you start paying only 4x the cost. When you have surplus cash, rush-buying near-completed stuff is a great way to jump start your economy. Generally speaking, it is more cost-effective to rush many near-completed things than it is to rush-buy a few big things from scratch.

I think it's just an aggregation of all your AI levels put together. e.g. if the average of the AI's is Intelligent, the difficulty is Tough. If it's greater than Intelligent, the difficulty is Painful. And then if you select the "Random AI levels" option in the beta, you can select a difficulty and then the game will select AI levels for you. Not sure, though.

Is this the one with the Gigantic galaxy and you have to invade the itty bitty planet at the south corner? I played this in pre-beta. Not sure how it works in 1.1--frankly, I think the DL campaign will need some re-balancing in 1.1. But what I did was first get Planetary Invasion, some engines, and some Basic Life Support as quickly as I could. There's not much time to crank up the economy first. Those transports (I suggest two of

Moral of the story: put 1 defense on your fighting ships and send 3 constructors into battle with the rest of your ships whenever you have a major battle ahead. They kick butt.

I go back and forth on whether to build a Manufacturing Capital on a Precursor Mine (700% manu bonus) planet. I keep running out of tiles to build Galactic Achievements on. If you have another 300% planet lying around, it's nice to put your Manu capital there and have two planets churning out Galactic Achievements. But when you get to the high tech levels, though, it sure is nice having that 700% capital really churning out stuff. And you can

Simultaneously maintaining a beta manual and a 1.0x manual would be a disaster.

The starting price of rush buying is 4bc per production point, and it'll go up to 5 & 6bc if you're rushing something big. OTOH, if you match one point of industrial capacity (such as from a factory) with one 1bc, that costs only 1bc.