Strategies

Well, I have heard that there are two main strategies that people follow for this game:

 

All factories

All Labs

 

My only question is how is this fiscally possible?  Fill a planet with factories and you get a deficit.  Are some planets made as economic planets to bring in cash?  What exactly does this strategy entail?

5,955 views 4 replies
Reply #1 Top

Those two strategies are designed to circumvent the split-up of general production in order to run your production-buildings at 100%.

Are some planets made as economic planets to bring in cash?

Yes, indeed.

Reply #2 Top

Okay, that makes more sense.

Reply #3 Top

The All-Factories approach has been somewhat nerfed in ToA, or so it has been posted here.  I play DA and it is among my favorite strategies.  There are lots of older threads about both All-Factories and All-Labs.

The way I implement it is simply not to build Research buildings, but to use Focus-Research instead, channeling a percentage of production to Research.  That lets Factories essentially do Research.  There are lots of details, such as do racial Research bonuses increase Focus Research?  Do Social racial bonuses increase Focus Research?  Does the Research Capital increase Focus Research?  Do Research starbases?

I never let All-Factories stop me from building economic-boosting buildings, especially on higher pop planets.  Not only do i not build Research buildings, I do not waste the Research on them.

On higher difficulty games, I often delay starting All-Factory for the first ten turns or so.  I ensure my Homeworld comes with at least a 300% Research bonus tile.   -  A 700% would be best, but they seem really rare for me in the gigantic all-abundant maps that I prefer.  - Then, I buy a Research building onto that tile and put all or almost all of my resources into Researching the initial foundation techs, like Planetary Improvements that give Empire-wide bonuses, and some others.  Once that is done, I shift to All-Factories, including paving over that first one or two labs.

Oh, in any fast early Research strategy, it is vital to use your first colony ship fast and to convert your miner to a colony ship and use it fast, also.  The game limits the number of tech levels one can gain to N+1, where N is the number of settled planets in one's Empire.  Thus, if you use that first colony ship as a scout and the miner as a miner, you cannot gain more than 2 tech levels per turn.

Reply #4 Top

Focus was reduced to 20% rather than 25% in TA, yes.  But you still lose the full 25%.

For reference, say I have 100 MP and I'm focusing it to research in TA, with a 20% bonus on each of them (to make things simple).  This gives me 75*1.2=90 military (or social, if you prefer) and 20*1.2=24 research, whereas in DA I'd have 75*1.2=90 military or social and 25*1.2=30 research.

But for the record, military <-> social focus (that is, focusing from military to social or vice versa) still transfers the 50% (base production) that it loses, even in TA.