I've found an effective way to get back into the colonization game is to buy AI's small and tiny warships and scout ships and upgrade them to colony ships, using a purchased planet in their space. They value these ships little, and I often spend a turn or two researching minor military (usually defensive against enemy weapons) techs just to trade for ships.
Am I hallucinating, or does it look like you're in some difficulty here, trailing in economy and population?
Wonderful stuff -- I look forward to every installment.
Hilarious!
And on a big map I'd reload like a shot the instant I saw it. Move of 5 -- sheesh.
Great stuff!
Or on the larger maps, click 'automate' and forget 'em.
This is priceless, indeed.
Post away -- it'd be fun to see!
Did you do better with this strategy than you would've by NOT making the ships and saving the money (by turning off or diverting production) to buy stuff with? Seems to me that the AI typically undervalues ships; that's why i can buy 'em for a song and convert 'em to colony and constructors cheaper than I can make 'em myself.
Nice writeup -- looking forward to more.
I'd kill to be able to do that, but haven't found a way myself.
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. [quote who="negadeath" reply="73" id="2779821"]A personal early game
I've gotten to the point where I just take the mines, blockade the planet, and wait for them to be willing to talk and accept their peace offer. There might be a diplo hit for starting the war, but I don't destroy their civ, so it's not so bad.
I haven't had the Thalans as much of a threat recently. Can you override that preference by dumping missile tech on the Thlans, or do they persist on using Lasers when they've been handed Harpoon?
It's much better for you if all of them do focus on the same weapon type; that way you only have to research one defense line, and your warships are good vs all opponents, instead of having upgrade or change designs for different fronts.
[quote who="Sole Soul" reply="11" id="3000685"] No, they don't. I can't recall ever seeing them build miners, actually, although it has been some time since I've actively played a complete game. A large number of players ignore the mines-they're not particularly useful (except perhaps in early game TA as Thalans), and although some people have incorporated them into their playing style, not having mines isn't something most of us would notice-no
There are several ways of knowing how the enemy is equipping ships: 1. As stated, check in the diplo screen; look at the latest, largest warship the opponent of choice has. 2. Once you've got some level of intelligence, you can directly click on enemy fleets and see their stats. 3. The best way of all, though, is to determine what 'tech your enemies use. either develop one line yourself and trade it to everyone, or wa
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If you get a really dreadful setup like that, you can use ctrl-N to restart automatically using the same parameters you originally set in all those startup screens. Ctrl-N and repeat 'till you get something you can live with.
I've never ended up in the end-game with the Doom weapons and all, but in the early and mid-games defense is vastly superior; well-chosen defenses properly deployed can make your combat fleets nearly invulnerable = invincible. Extra HPs, which take up nearly as much space as the defenses, just mean you last three battles instead of two.
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Interesting work; please keep us up to date!
If you like that strategy, close-pack the starbases for -9 (4x-2 plus racial) in each sector. Interstellar mud.
I haven't gotten above 'tough' in difficulty, but at my level: I never spend resources fortifying planets. I tend to play huge and above galaxies and the number of ships to fortify versus the resources to build mobile offense-defense fleets doesn't make sense. Ships are for fighting -- and deterrence until you're ready to fight. Fleets sitting in orbit and not fighting are a waste. If I can beg, borrow, steal, or
By the time I've got the advanced structures available, I try to have my economy developed to allow me to rush-buy the recruiting center; then social-focusing the colony allows the buildings to be coming online as the population builds to a level to support the production. If the population is getting up to 2B without that first production building, I'll rush-buy what's left of it to bootstrap the colony.
When I'm doing late-game mass-upgrades of whole classes of warships, I always use the long-term lease option. No way I'm going to take the corruption losses to save up 100K bc to warp-equip my battlefleets.