So I played my first game (of GC ever btw) as Yor and rocked a game at "challenging". Felt like Yor was a bit of a powerhouse, with being able to build population and not spending any planet space on food, so I thought I'd give humans a try. I'm on my 4th try now... I also play on large or huge maps with 'occasional' habitable planets and all AI opponents in the game. So not a whole lot of elbow-room. Not really on topic, but is that perhaps more crowded than the game is supposed to be?
I find it really hard to find space on planets for anything outside of production. I need at least 2 spaces for population, preferably 3 (growth + food), I need at least 1 space for happinness, at least 3 for production, preferably 4. That is 6-8 spaces, before I can find room for science or money. I do need some heavy production worlds to be able to build any ships, so my 12+ worlds go to shipyards and production, leaving my ~8 size worlds for science and wealth, of which I tend to end up with neither, due to the aforementioned space requirements for a basic society.
I'm wondering how you set up worlds, both small worlds and bigger planets. Do you specialize heavily? How much production do you aim for on non-prod. worlds? Do you have a rough ratio for science/wealth/prod worlds? Do you have small worlds go all production since they can't do anything else anyway, and leave the other things to the big ones? How on earth does anyone play anything outside of synthetics? Why do I suddenly feel like Cybermen actually SHOULD rule the galaxy?
Basic strategy insights welcome!
Thanks!
Couple quick tips. For non-manufacturing world's I usually try to get my production above 15 per turn as most buildings have their costs in multiples of 15. This is mid-late game of course. Early game I shoot for 5-7.5. Small worlds I set to 100% production until they complete their building sets for Research, as that's all I ever use them for, not worth making them into anything else. Wealth is very unimportant in the early game. I always set my slider to 0% Economy, 50% research, 50% manufacturing for the civilisation and then adjust that for colonies that need to be adjusted like Economy planets. Keep in mind that population does not appear to affect influence, so if you're going for a heavy influence world you can ignore the extra pop/morale buildings and just go for more cultural. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong on that.
For the smallest worlds, the basic general minimum is as follows:
1 morale building1 food building
The end. Two tiles.
For planets with a few more tiles, the profile shifts more towards:
1 morale1 food1 spec
We're still talking tiny planets here.
For anything larger you will want a manufacturing building so that you can build/upgrade more stuff in a timely fashion (a research planet is taken out of commission for a LONG time when you get a tech to upgrade your research buildings unless you have a MFR building to help upgrade those):
1 morale1 food1 spec1 manufacturing
Beyond that you just increase the # of food/morale/spec buildings to scale to the size.
E.g.:
2 morale6 food6 spec1 mfr
In the midgame you tend to need some morale pumps. Maybe up to 4 morale buildings or something. Lategame and with some of the economic starbase upgrades and relic artifacts, you can get some insane passive morale boosts, so you can often drop some morale buildings at that point (one game I had something like 65 approval on a planet with 0 morale buildings, and each morale building added like 25-30 morale, it was stupid).
> Do you specialize heavily?
Basically yes, although if I were to play a giant galaxy I would have a lot more slightly diversified/hybrid planets controlled by the governance wheel.
> How much production do you aim for on non-prod. worlds?
1 Quantum Power Plant on a tile that has a MFR bonus or if nothing else then attached to the capitol tile. As the other poster noted, most stuff is in multiples of 15 so early game aim for 15/30 as breakpoints for minimum social manufacturing thresholds. Mid and lategame it's kind of impossible to hit less than 15/30 social production at 100% soc mfr. In that case, when upgrading, you just throttle down soc mfr down to 15/30/45/whatever.
> Do you have a rough ratio for science/wealth/prod worlds?
Nothing I've done a lot of analysis on. I did some very casual analysis and "food=spec" works reasonably well for optimization at certain tech levels with certain assumed bonuses. As a result I run roughly "specialization = food buildings" as a generic rule of thumb, but a lot of my decision making comes down to available tiles and how they are spaced. E.g. if there's a cluster of ~5 tiles in one spot and a cluster of 10 in another spot on the planet, I will use the 10 for specialization builds and make the planet some absurd capitol (like research capitol with the galaxy-unique building etc), and spend the 5 on food. Spend a loose tile on MFR and spend another loose tile or three on morale.
If you want a planet to be somewhat hybrid, then you want to emphasize food (population = production for all 3 categories) with ~2 spec buildings of each type. Maybe something like 8:2:2:2:2 food:mfr:res:wealth:morale.
Please note that a game/race where you already plan on going heavy hybrid with this strategy means that you have high base production (high food) but you have comparatively low multipiers (your mfr/res/wealth multipliers will be like 150% or 200%, as opposed to a specialized planet's 900%). This means that racial +% bonuses or starbase +% bonuses or artifact +%bonuses ... basically any mods that are outside of tiles on your planet become very important.
If you specialize all your planets heavily, then racial bonuses like +20% research are worthless. +20% when your research planet has 1200% research? Yeah whatever. +20% research when you have 10 hybrid planets that each have 150% research? Ok that's a bit more relevant.
Same deal with artifacts or certain technologies. For example tech specializations that give "+10% research" -- same deal as above. When my research superplanet has 1200% research, that 10% means zilch. On the other hand, in a hybrid empire approach, that 10% can add up quickly.
> Do you have small worlds go all production since they can't do anything else anyway,
Absolutely not. Manufacturing is the worst because you spend MFR to build ships, aka military. Now you have to switch this random worthless planet's investment bar from social to mil all the damn time. So obnoxious.
For small planets I always make them wealth or research (or military building complex if they're large enough), and let them go afk and unattended for long periods of time.
When specializing, I always make large planets into manufacturing specs -- I don't want to have to micro many planets, and MFR requires the most micro due to the shipbuilding switch offs -- at least the way that I play. I can imagine it makes more sense if you constantly pump out ships -- in that case you won't have to go back and fiddle with your planet that often.
as a general rule, don't build so many farms. try one farm, skip the growth building, skip the 2nd farm. with lower pop, you can also skip the approval building. so you have something like 3-4 factories, 1 farm and the remaining tiles filled up with research. same deal for wealth planets, but you'll probably only need 1 of those to fund the first 20 colonies 50 starbases and a few fleets. add a few more if you grow larger or like to have a huge military.
you can always add some more farms, approval and all that jazz later as you unlock the terraforming techs. or you just keep building research/wealth. manufacturing planets are even simpler. just factories all over the place and maybe a farm or two to get some more base production.
refarding small planets - you can use some of them for special tasks. for example, use a small planet for the trade capital and a trade post. add the planet to the shipyard spomsor list of the shipyard where you actually build the freighters - the game will prompt you to pick the home planet and you can just select the small trash planet. fill the planet up with markets or something (trade cap has +3 wealth adjacency-might as well use that) and set it to 100% wealth for the rest of the game.
other small planets can be used as "people farms" for your future wars. fill it up with farms and maybe some approval and let the popilation grow. when you get near max pop, build some troop ships on your production worlds. launch them with minimal population, fill them up with the peple you created on the people farm.
if you find a small planet with some military bonus tile and some adjacent empty tiles, put the hyperion shrinker on that planet and fill adjacent tiles with stuff that boosts the shrinkre with +military (elerium shield, antimatter plant) - in a really large empire i'd probably look for a perfect planet, with a full ring around a +3 tile, but if you can't find something like that, might as well use some crappy little world that has no other use anyway.
or fill it ip with simple labs/markets (no farms or factories) put the slider at 100% res (or wealth) and forget about it don't bother upgrading them - takes a long time, you'll never catch up to the research you lost while trying to upgrades the buildings on a world that can't do the upgrades at a 1 per turn rate (which requires about 3-4 up to date factories). a 5 tile planet isn't going to contribute much anyway, but this way it will at least provide a steady 50 research points per turn or something for the rest of the game.
If the shipyard is close enough to the colony, you don't even need to do that. A world can sponsor a shipyard even if none of its output is going towards military production, and any sponsor close enough to the shipyard can provide population. Might not be the best of ideas for a major shipyard building your biggest ships, but if you tend towards minimalist troop transports you can probably get away with a lackluster contribution from some of the sponsor worlds.
It never ceases to amaze me how so many folks in Stardock's forums are so willing to take the time to provide detailed help and suggestions.
Thumbs up to the whole community
Thanks a lot for the in-depth responses guys!
I've been tinkering with this during the evening with your responses in mind. Seems like I've over-emphasized production on non-shipyard worlds and under-emphasized population in general. With the new approach I'm at least holding my ground and having a buffer of paper-planes with torpedos to kamikaze against the Yor (again!) and hold them at bay. I did set up a couple of hybrid worlds at start, which seemed fairly ok to bridge the gap into specializing other worlds. I'm still lagging behind hard in tech, but gotta have some room too improve
Does the AI get any bonuses on difficulties above normal? It seems like they have much more money, tech and ships than their bases and structures should suggest.
I believe so, yes. Looking in GalCiv3AIDefs, it looks like Gifted empires get +10% colony growth, +20% ship range, +33% base production, +25% research output, -20% manufacturing costs for planet improvements and ships, -20% ship maintenance costs, +100% shipyard HP, and +25% total income. It also looks like they get a 1% chance of obtaining a free war technology and a 10% chance of being given 10 free ideology points, with the chance presumably being rolled each turn.
Genius difficulty seems to have 10 extra logistical capacity, +20% ship range, +20% colony growth, +25% base production, -25% manufacturing cost to improvements and ships, +25% research output, -50% ship maintenance costs, +10% hull capacity, +15% ship and starbase HP, +100% shipyard HP, and +50% total income. It also seems to have a 10% chance of obtaining free war techs and the same chance of the same number of free ideology points as Gifted.
Godlike appears to have a 50% chance of being given 500 to 1000 credits every 10 turns as long as it has at least 10000 credits, a 40% chance at free war technology, a 40% chance of 20 free ideology points, a 30% colony growth bonus, +100% ship range, +25% research, +200% total income, +300% base production, -50% manufacturing costs for ships and improvements, -50% ship maintenance costs, +15% accuracy, +100% hull capacity, +50% ship and starbase HP, and +150% shipyard HP.
At least, if I'm reading the XML correctly.
Saw this in another thread. Enjoy!
hmm interesting read - thanks for the numbers joeball123 & Christian_Akacro.
so going from beginner to normal to gifted to genius looks more like a natural progression for a player who is getting used to the game and improves their strategies over time, but "godlike" is a really big jump. i guess that's the level where you don't have to feel bad for using exploit-y stuff the AI gets some insane bonuses up there, arguably you can't really catch up to that level of bonus with good planning and efficient planet management alone.
Well. My point of view on planet specialistion is next:
I. Industrial world:
Conditions for spec: Hexes whith manufacturing bonus, trade resorces whith manufacturing bonuses, apsent of any bonus hex, no hex\TR whith other bonuses
Improvements: 1 approval building (from ideology), factories and other manufacturing improvements, shipyard (if in that sector aren`t any).
II. Profit world:
Conditions for spec: more then one hex whith economocal bonus, TR whith economical bonuses, apsent of any other bonuses except manufacturing\military
Improvements: 1 approval building (from ideology), markets, 1-2 factories
III. Research world:
Conditions for spec: more than one hex ehith research bonus, TR whith research bonus, apsent of any other bonuses except industrial\military
Improvements: 1 approval building, labs, 1-2 factories.
Influence buildings are built if neŃessary.
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