N00b and starting position

I would take the enemies position and thank him for the hard work before I blast him into Oblivion. (BTW every post I will ever do on this forum will have a star wars or star trek quote in it, cookies for those who find them)



Pint

You could still probally win. Take this as a learning experience. Figure out what you did wrong, and what you could do better.

After that, then figure out how to get out of your current crises. Make a save, and return there if you lose. Do that a couple of times until you either figure out how to win, or realise its beyond you... for now.



Buy a couple of factories, and increase spending ratio to military production. Also decrease tax rate until morale is 100% (double population growth) so you get a larger taxable population quicker. Buying stuff is a lot more expensive than building things normally, and is ussaully a wasteful tactic until you are making lots of money.

It doesn't matter who gets the most planets. It matters who is first able to make the first strike, and finish it ofcourse. Having too many planets makes you a big target, and the money drain can slow you down big time.

It depends on how many planets total there are. If there are an average of, say, 5 planets per civ, you aren't going to be at too much of a disadvantage. If they had an average of 10+, you are definitely looking bad, but still not impossible. Especially since they are on regular AI, they won't handle their planets very well; proper development of your own could put you past them.



Just curious: how much is the difference? 50%?

Hi!

800% -1000%

Yep, 8 to 10 times as expensive.

BR, Iztok

indeed it is, buying is only for impatient people with lots of credits!

A good invasion strategy can easely level the playing field.
Pick on a weak target, destroy the orbiting fleet and take the planet.
With a bit of luck you'll also get a free tech out of the deal.

I've seen a lot of posts about buying and not buying colonizers. What i do isn't really mentioned, so ill tate it, after buying th first one i lt eachone get about half built and thn buy it. I find this to be a good balance between using credits and saving time.

One very useful compromise between buying and building colony ships is to do both. Iztok's estimate of directly buying a ship is spot on. For example, a run of the mill colony ship will "cost" about 120MP's to build at 1 bc per MP but cost about 1,000 bc's to directly buy.

However, one thing you can do is to build a bare cargo hull. At 55MP's it doesn't take that much industry on your home planet to build one of these per turn (3 factories or one factory on a 300% bonus tile). Then you can upgrade the bare hull to a full colony ship for about 350bc. That's a big savings and it allows you to "produce" a colony ship per turn for about 1/3rd the cost of buying one.

This requires a one turn latency between the building of the cargo hull and the launching of the colony ship but once started you can produce a colony ship per turn using this method and you usually have enough money to spit out ten or so colony ships in this manner.

There are other ways to get your home planet to produce a colony ship per turn in the normal manner but these take quite awhile before your home planet has this much production and by the time you get this going the colony rush is over in smaller galaxies.

This method is very critical to out colonizing the AI in smaller maps. I use this method consistently in my MV League games that are limited to galaxies of medium and below. I consistently out colonize the suicidal AI by a factor of at least 2 to 1 if not 3 to 1. This is a huge advantage to have.

Certainly there are many other methods to achieve the same thing. Rushing to planetary invasion and taking over the strongest AI early can be almost as effective, but nothing is more effective then combining both stratgies. Outcolonizing the AI by at least 2 to 1 *plus* rushing to planetary invasion.

One major point is that I will only buy the 1st and sometimes the 2nd factory on my home planet otherwise I never buy a building on any colony. Also I don't even que up any buildings for my colonies to build until they get to the 2B level or so. I save all my money for the colony rush.

[edit] As an example of this, in my current MVL game in a tiny galaxy there are 19 total planets and I own 8 of them and my four opponents own the other 11 for an average of 3 planets each. By the way I had all 7 of my colonies colonized by Mar 15, 2225 (that's 10 turns). Plus I'm ahead in the resource rush as well. [/edit]

Great advise, thanks! I'd missed that fact that 100% morale doubles pop growth. Guess I better get the manual out again...

Another good point. There aren't a heck of a lot of planets. Most systems I've recon'd have dead planets. I would say I'm not in bad shape from a # of planet perspective, though my closest neighbor has better quality planets and a lot more influence (greater footprint).

I was afraid that NOT buying stuff was putting me at a disadvantage (ie: not colonizing new planets fast enough, but it appears from many posts here that the recommendation is to NOT burn funds buying because the cost is so disparate when compared to building your own.

That'll be my strategy from this point forward then. I was planning on focusing on economy as much as possible and putting military on the back burner (wanted to try a peaceful existence approach). But I'm afraid my growth will be stunted if I don't expand now.

Good idea, I don't want to burn my $$$, but I don't want to end up an easy target because I wasn't taking enough early action.

If you see a class 26 planet, though, that's a good time to buy a colony ship and send it over there. Maybe stick some extra engines on it, too (but make sure to have enough life support so it can get there...).

I like this idea
Does this work also in Large games? If will be testing this on my own when I get back home.

GalenEvil

It works in large games also however you do run out of money at around ten colonies or so. What I do is start out like this for my initial burst of colonies but gradually continue to build up my production base on my home planet. Once I get down to about 1000 bc I stop buying cargo hulls and start producing colony ships directly.

However by the time I start producing colony ships directly I have enough production on my home planet to produce a colony ship every other turn.

This also works out well with your home planets rather high 8B starting pop. For the first 10 turns you can afford to send out a colony ship per turn but after that your home planets pop starts to get depleted, so switching over to a produced colony ship every other turn doesn't deplete your pop as much.

Plus in a larger galaxy game by the time you start geting to this point your first colony is getting close to being able to send out colony ships of it's own. If you do it right you can transition from 1 colony ship per turn from your home planet to 1 colony ship every other turn from your home planet and your 1st colony.

In any but the tiniest galaxies your rush is more limited by the *rate* at which you can produce colony ships and not so much their speed. However in a tiny galaxy it really helps to be the Yor who can build a speed 6 colony ship from turn 1.

The key is not wasting any money on your colonies until they have enough pop to begin to support themselves. I may wait 10~15 turns before I begin to build anything on any colony. I might make an exception for my very 1st colony that I effectively want to make into my 2nd home planet but even so I will *never* buy a building on any colony until the 2nd year at the earliest.

As I said in another thread here recently sometimes the best thing to build is nothing.

Like anything else this technique requires you to develop the "knack" of exactly how to balance the rate of colonization and the rate of planet development. As someone else pointed out it does little good to have 100 planets in a gigantic galaxy while your opponents have only 25 if their 25 planets are developed and 99 of yours aren't.

Well, things are looking up a bit. Sent out some long range scouts and pretty much all cultures have the same number of planets. After I upgraded my military and cranked out about 10-15 ships my overall score went from worst (6th) to second.

What had me concerned at the start was my small influence area, but that was probably because my planets were so close to the edge of the screen so a lot of the projected influence went 'off the edge' of the map. I think I'll be able to make a go of things after all...