I'm playing as Terrans with most of my ability points sunk into increased ship speed. Here's the my basic strategy:
1) Tech rush to Universal Translators
2) Trade my Influence and non-diplomacy technologies for all other technologies + scout/miner ships.
3) Upgrade miner ships to constructors/colony ships. Use scouts to explore.
4) Tech rush to Sensors MK3, while continue trading
5) Build Galactic Guidebook structure.
6) Upgrade most scouts to survey ships.
7) Grab most of the anomalies on the map.
I've found that the cost of upgrading a ships is EXTREMELY low if you're upgrading the design to another design which has the EXACT same cost and components. Extremely low. I can use this to "some" effect when upgrading miners to colony/constructor ships. But...
... take a look at what the Galactic Guidebook structure does: it reduces the Survey module cost to 0.
With it, I can upgrade most (not all) of the other civs' scout ships to my newly design survey ships (I have two different versions, one costs 31 and the other 33) to survey ships for 5 BC each. FIVE. Normally, it would be 126 (or higher).
Using this strategy I can field a ridiculous number of survey ships.
So many, in fact, that (once I get rolling) I can clear the map of anomalies in just a handful of weeks.
So, now my treasury is (relatively) through the roof, and I'm still colonizing/grabbing resources at a decent enough speed... but, I have all these survey ships in standby. So, what do I do?
I now start boxing in resources/planets that I haven't taken yet. What is boxing? I have so many ships that I can afford to devote them to creating boxes around planets/resources that I haven't claimed yet. It takes a maximum of 8 ships to do this effectively... sometimes less, depending upon its location. I can even box other the civs' flagships and planets.
Why do this at all?
Because ships cannot pass through other civs' ships, I have effectively quarantined the galaxy from the filthy aliens.
But, it's not all roses... Some things I could do faster when using another strategy, given the same amount of time. Also, I will lose the first United Planets vote due to the amount of influence I traded away.
I'm really just concerned whether the upgrade costs for the ships being so low is a bug.
Forgive me if a similar strategy was posted elsewhere... If not, I hereby claim to have coined the term 'boxing'.
Interesting, at least it's the first time that I see this strategy being posted here.
I use boxing all of the time.
Problem is that I use lots of starbases so in times of war, all of the enemy ships will make a bee-line towards them. If I accidently box them in, then they will stop going to the starbases and attack something else that I do not want them to attack.
And the default spellchecker does not understand that "accidently" is a word!
Accidentally*
I buy up all ships while trading away technologies. Eventually the AI refuses to trade for anything when I want their scout ships though. They will still sell other ships for dirt cheap as well. I use the higher value ships to upgrade to faster constructors/colony ships. I usually build a few fast 4xcolony pod transporters to fill up tiny planets to a 20B population, so the reduced price of upgrading to a colony ship is nice, without having to build them at my own shipyards early in the game.
Eyes of the universe is definitely my first choice as galactic achievement though, then galactic bazaar, then galactic guidebook. Getting galactic guidebook too early sucks because I usually haven't found all the other civs yet.
Thanks for the replies.
I've discovered that it's harder to pull off on Suicidal difficulty, because most of the AIs immediately build higher cost scout ships (61+ build cost). So, I have to focus more on diplomacy tech in order to continuously grab all their scouts + miners.
I still do something similar on Suicidal, but I ditched the idea of building the Galactic Guidebook altogether (no longer any reason to keep the build cost for surveyors in the 30s anymore if I don't plan on ever actually building them).
I tried this on suicidal difficulty - large map; maybe not to the extremes that you did, but with about 7 ships. It paid off immediately, and I still got the research wonder (sensors 3), and Eyes of the Universe (sensors 4). Definitely a useful tool, and I would not consider it an exploit, since the wonder is working as intended - allowing all ships to survey. You could upgrade any of your own ships in the same fashion, just match the components and upgrade with a survey module. You might need to research a little miniaturization first.
Anyway, great idea!
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