Early game space miner

I'm a late convert to upgrading my free mining ship to a colonizer, but since I started doing that I've had a casual conviction that it's worth more in the long run to get that third colony founded ASAP. I'm far from the sharpest numbers player around here, but at the moment I think that the BC flow from a new population source is more useful than the production boost from the home asteriods.

Interesting.  I still say the game would be better if you started with nothing, and you had to research to build anything.  (constructors, scouts, and colony ships...)

That would make those first 20 turns really key, and allow you to size up your situation and persue the best path.

To me, this is another sign that mines are overly weak.

Hi Bentley,

Nice post. I have one question.

This is something I've never bothered to do...though I always enjoy designing an uber-class medium hull survey in the late game, I've never bothered to upgrade my original survey fleet because they have small hulls. So from what you're saying, if I was to design a small hull survey in the late game, any ship upgrading to this design would keep all the bonuses? I had always assumed any upgraded ship goes straight to the vanilla design, to know different would be helpful.

Yep me to, just did for the first time in my last game, and it got me a sweet pq15 by an insects wingspan. 18 months in and still learning hehe.

You don't need a mod to research everything from scratch. You do however start out with a few default social buildings (factory research, etc.). All you have to do is design a Custom Race, and in the "choose starting techs" section of the editor, don't put anything in there. Remove everything that is there already, and voila! You have a race that has to research everything from scratch!!! That includes colony/constructor/scout ships, you have to research Hyperdrive in order to obtain them.

I've also made a thread about space mining. Everyone thinks it's idiotic, deal with it. Just upgrade it immediately into a colony ship. If you want to make sure however that no one gets any asteroids, buy out their space miners within the first 15 turns and you're fine. The AI doesn't build miners. Even though it starts out with one.

Also in TA (so I've heard), anomalies regenerate. So it's worth it in a way to upgrade your survey ship so that it'll get more HP, or whatever else it is for it, or for you.

@EF

The AI values its miners relatively high, at last check.  Certainly not as much as their flagship, or even their econ treaties, but that's a bit much to pay for a miner.  Further, as mines flip relatively easily, it's only the planets that matter.  But interesting from the viewpoint of shutting down an avenue, albeit a small one, of their production.

Anomalies also regenerate in late DA (1.7x or 1.8x, I forget).  The "survey ship gets more hp" talk is about the anomalies that it runs into that give it bonus hp.  The "upgrading survey ship" talk is about taking your flagship, or a few small survey ships with several hp bonuses due to anomalies, and upgrading the ship itself (not the design, as someone else seemed to have suggested) to a different design, i.e. a fighter or even an armed survey ship, as the extra hp makes it that much more effective in combat.

You don't need any techs to build colony ships, EF.  You can design your own cargo/small ship (without miniaturization, you're not hitting 20 space on a tiny) with no techs researched and slap a colony module on it.  Further, the prebuilt ships are arguably useless when compared to ships the player can design, if only because they're largely inflexible.  The autodesigner helps with this somewhat, but is to my knowledge only for armed ships, so it's not going to help you with colony ship or constructor design, among others.

While you may not have sensors researched, any ship can auto explore, if memory serves, which is really all a scout's purpose is.

As for the talk of upgrading the miner into a colony ship-the only time you -don't- want to do this immediately is when you're using the Thalan tech tree, as the extra industry the mined asteroids provide help make up for your initial lack of factories.

I don't have the updates so don't bother.

I don't have TA either.

Without hyperdrive, the colony module is not available (to the best of my experience).

That should cover further speculation.

I always upgrade my miner to a colony ship on turn 1, and later in the game my flagship will also get upgraded to a warship.  The survey vessels I design use cargo hulls so I can pack on some more engines and acquire anomalies faster.

Sentient species taste better...

Then I suggest you start up a new game with no techs, go to the shipyard, and see what modules you can fit on your cargo hull (as it's obviously not going to fit on small, though it should still show up as an option) on turn 1.  In all of my experience with DL, and then DA, and then TA from beta 2 onwards to its present form, I have never had to have hyperdrive researched to build a ship with a colony module-or a constructor module, or a mining module (in DA and TA at least, as it doesn't exist in DL).

Not to derail the thread even further, but if you don't mind my asking, why do you, in your words, "not have the updates"?  DA 1.80g.100 is on SDC, and DA 1.80g.103 (which appears to be simply a cosmetic version for distribution via Impulse, as far as differences from 1.80g.100 go) is on Impulse.  Further, the game is not that large (approximately 300MB per expansion pack, although the base game is over a gigabyte) and the updates themselves are much smaller than this.  So assuming that you have the game installed already (as you must, in some fashion, to play it, yes?), it wouldn't seem to be very much effort or time to be able to update your version.

As far as TA goes, that's an entirely different topic in my book.  I like TA, but I'm not "sold" on it yet (i.e. I'm still too in love with DA), even though I already bought it.  But suffice it to say I won't be pressuring you into buying it-though I won't stand in your way, either.

I don't have the updates because my game is glitched. Not gameplay wise, but downloading stuff off the internet for it. My computer crashed the last time I tried it, and on top of that I had to reinstall the game. I found this out 3 months after my warranty expired. The store I get my games from also has a "restocking fee", so that if I gave it back before the warranty expired, I would have had to pay 40% of the game's original cost, just so that they can go put it back on the shelf. Literally, I am not joking. I found this out while trying to return a faulty printer. I didn't give the printer back however, I instead, by a stroke of good luck, found a really good tech person in my neighbourhood who could fix it.

it was quite malevolent with instant windows crashing upon downloading certain items

moreover virtual comps were used for training courses, and a lot of virtual comp images were also infected

I once got a virus that kept showing me the Windows logo being eaten by worms.

I loved it. It turns out that it was just a really creative "spam" sortof thing sent by a friend of mine while he was downloading my music files.

I found it quite funny actually.