General Strategy Questions

Althoughh I just discovered that you can build a freighter in an industrial planet then you send it to orbit in a good economy planet, then to its destination, it will set up the link from the last orbited planet to the opponent planet. Nice touch!

I did not know that! Great find.

Finally, it is a huge effort to build trade routes in the early game. Is it worth it? When you do it early, it's hard because you may not know which planets will end up being high-pop, you may not know which of the other races you will be friendly with or attack, and you may not know how safe the routes will be.

Well, every race has a central starting planet. I always shoot for those as they are guaranteed to be a 10+, with 10 billion pop and usually a good economy.

This is my way, works on Normal might need tweaking for higher difficulty.

planet grabbing: Whether build or buy Colony ships crank up spending to get a new ship in 5 or less turns. If you are playing a big map research propulsion tech and build a faster colony ship asap. I do go for the best PQ first. If you lose Mars to a Major you will get it back by flipping. Same goes for other small planets in your influence. If you are doing the right things they can't hold planets in your zone. Worst case build influence sb.

Tech trading: can be tedious but it is neccessary imo.

planet developement: I generalize on my home planet and HQ planets. Specialize small planets production or research. Look for moons and rings to decide. Replacing factories? Hmmm, I gues that could work in ceratin circumstance but it has to involve some waste. With the terraforming techs, I never seem to be that short on space.

Population: I am very conservative here. I usually build one farm on HQ planets and boost them with food tech as the game progresses. Only on very HQ planets do I ever use a food bonus square. Not that you don't need population for income but it is not as big a factor in this game as it is in some 4X games. I imagine that high pop would be an edge you need on the very high difficulty settings.

Trade is key for me. It provides income without population. Trade income is determined by distance and not population so you get as much trading with a small planet as a large. Spread the trade around and trade with those that you want to be friendly with. The AI is less likely to go to war with you if you are a trading partner. Trade tech is also good for Tech Trading. The AI puts a high value on it and it produces income for you as well as them. A trading exploit of sorts is to trade with Dark Yor. Any route to Dark Yor pays high dollars regardless of distance. I got a 9 return from Dark Yor in the same sector.

As a middlin player on normal difficulty this wins most games for me with very little stress.

I'm sure there are as many different answers to your question as there are players.

I always spend every starting credit cranking out colony ships. Generally I try to keep my territory pure, but it wouldn't bother me much if an alien took a planet like Mars. I'd just build an embassy or two on a nearby planet until it 'flips'. I would forego a higher class (12-ish) planet for a lesser (10-ish) planet if taking the 12-ish planet left me with an odd border or a logistics/defense issue. Also, depending on the layout of the galaxy, sometimes you can place your first six or so colonies in such a way that the aliens can't reach far enough to get past you. Then you can back-fill at a more leisurely pace.

You have to trade tech, at least until mid-game. Beyond that, you'll find that giving tech to your allies free of charge in late game, to improve relations or just to help them get an edge on a common enemy will be to your advantage. Most likely, if you survive to mid-game you'll be one of the top tech-civs anyway.

Planets. I always specialize. Earth is always a manufacturing zone. A higher-class planet becomes the economic capital. I use Mars and the cruddy planets stricly for research. One moderate world will become the research center. Later on, after I capture a planet just beyond my 'borders' I'll make that a cultural center, but before that time I don't waste space on embassies and such. I use starbases for influence if I need it.

I start by building three factories on any decent sized world. When the planet is full, if it is not a manufacturing world I'll upgrade all but one to the planet's specialty. Keep one factory because you will need to upgrade facilitties frequently.

An area with two or more good planets in the same vacinity is a gem. Economic starbases will crank production on all three worlds. I've found in this game that starbases are a true key to victory, and now that they can sort of defend themselves it's not so cost prohibitive to build them.

Population does 3 things for you (or to you):

1st: Its your tax-base. More peeps = more taxes.
2nd The peeps are your partisan defense force, and they suck! If you have a planet with only 5000 M colonists it can be overrun by a transport full of teenaged Torians with ganga-rockets. If you want to defend your planet you need to get population up to at least 10,000 M.
3rd Pop makes your morale (approval) decline. Build happy centers (multimedia, entertainment, stadiums) Or (cringe) lower taxes.

I don't worry much about where my trade routes go. I DO try to start them all at my economic capital (or where it will be) and have them generally all head through the same sectors at their start. That way if I need money I can build some economic starbases and add the trade route modules. Freighters are cheap, and if I lose a few due to war, or loss of a trading partner I just build more. The main thing is IF you are a militant, don't build your fleet up to the point where you depend on trade to pay maintenance. Militants lose friends like wild, and you'll soon find that you can't afford your fleets.

Good Luck!

My early planet grabbing strategy is to crank up Research to at least 50%, then about 41% industry, and 9% military. Since you can buy a bunch of colony ships right away, you don't really need to have any military spending until you get low enough on cash that you have to start building them yourself. And this way, you can research the early techs in 1 or 2 turns, making it easier to rush to impulse drives for even faster planet-grabbing.

With population, it's a tough balance... larger population brings in more cash through taxes, but too large a population can make for unhappy people forcing you to lower taxes. I tried a game with building only a couple farms, and my economy bottomed out. I had to spam freighters just to keep my income barely above 0. Since then, if I have enough room, I sometimes throw a farm on every planet if its quality is high enough to support it... as long as it's not going to cause moral problems, the extra population can help that planet's income keep up with maintenance costs of the buildings you place on it.

Trade is key for me. It provides income without population. Trade income is determined by distance and not population so you get as much trading with a small planet as a large

It says in the manual that the money you get from trade is determined by distance AND population of the planets the trade route runs to and from.
But, yeah, trade is a big help as far as diplomacy goes. I've had civs go from "cool" to "warm" with me just from establishing a few trade routes with them.

I have won every game I play using this strategy, my latest game was a large map with all 9 civs on intelligent.

I play as the drath legion without customization for the following reasons.

First they start with impulse engines and industrial theory, so you get impulse engines and factories right off the bat.

Second they are a good civilization, so you can use all the evil planet bonuses and become neutral without spending any money.

Lastly their raacial abilities are well rounded and numerous.

Usually what I do is crank research to 100% for the first four turns and research hyperdrive. This gives you the ability to make colony ships with 7 movement points (2 hyperdrives at 2 movement points, 1 impulse drive at 1, a base movement of 1, and 1 extra global bonus movement from hyperdrive technology) . As the AI colony ships will only have 2 movement points, having colony ships with almost 8 times the movement speed pretty much nets you every planet that is anywhere close to your home planet. The only thing you have to worry about is the range of your colony ships, however I play with abundant planets so I can simply hop my way across the galaxy colonizing as I go to increase the range of my ships. I ususally send the first colony ship at a star system a medium amount away from my home colony to serve as my jump off point for the rest of my colonization.

While researching hyperdrive I buy 3 factories on my home planet, unless It has manufactoring bonuses, which my increase or decrease the amount I buy. I buy enough so that I create colony ships in two turns, if I have a lot of bonuses to manufacturing you can sometimes buy them in 1 turn, although you have to generate 119 shields per turn, so it is not always fesiable. After hyperdrive is done I crank military production to 100 and crank out colony ships. I usually buy starports on my new planets and set them to building more colony ships, and purchase more factories if the planets have manufactoring bonuses on them.

After that, it is basically a cakewalk for the rest of the game, I can usuaslly colonize around 20 planets in a large game, with the best ai getting around 10.

I keep my approval around 70 for the entirety of the game, so tax rate is based off of that. After I colonize the planets, I do 20/30/50 sliders for military, social, and research until I get all the resources I need, then 10-15/20-30/50-70 depending on what I am doing for the rest of the game. I usually research trade early on and get that going quickly, as you are probably going to be running a decifiet until your population gets higher. I then usually trade my trade tech to all the other civs for their techs, so you quickly get on par after your colonization spree.

I then see what weapon techs the AI is researching, most of them will probably be researching one or two, I then research the one they are not. I research the given tech until I get to the second weapon upgrade, the one that gives you 2 attack for mass drivers and lasers, and 3 attack for missles. I also research medium hulls at this time. Once I have done that I create a ship which is fully loaded with these new weapons, and have all of my manufacturing planets make those. These ships are far and away better than what the AI is making at this time in the game, I have lept to the top of the military ranking building only a handful of these ships. Doing this stops the militaristic civs from declaring war on your all the time.

From here you can win however you want, I have gotten everything but an alliance victory using this strategy, and that is the next thing I will do.

I have not tested this on the difficulties where the AI starts to cheat in its production capacity, the 4 turn lag you begin with might start to hurt more when that happens, but I still think the movement advantage will outweigh it in the long run.

As I said above, I play as neutral, the increased trade and free terraforming are too good to pass up, and once the neutrality research centers are put in the game it will get even better.

The only thing that can really hurt you is if your starting position is surrounded by ai's with no room to expand, although even then you can probably leap frog one of the ai's and still do alright.

Hope this gives you guys some food for thought, it actually has made the game somewhat boring as after the expansion stage the game is pretty much won.

My thoughts on tech trading...

I tech trade all the time, but I avoid giving out certain techs like diplomacy techs (the higher my diplomacy, the better deals I get. If I help their diplomacy increase, then I'm shooting myself in the foot) and defense techs that are against my primary weapon (why would I help anyone defend against myself?)

Once I see one or two computers have a tech, I go around and sell the tech to everyone for whatever I can get. This gets me a little extra revenue, and also keeps the computer from getting that revenue itself.

-Dewar