The Early Turns - Sirian

Once you've become at least somewhat comfortable moving between the various screens, and you have sent off your ships and handled any Senate-related diplo offers you want to make, it's time to go to your homeworld and decide how to spend your crucial early turns.

There are only two controls that matter in the early turns: the two sliders shown with pink arrows:

The upper slider is your Military Spending. This controls how quickly you build the items in your build list (additional scouts and colony ships). The lower slider is your Local Development control. This determines how much is spent on DEA construction.

Note, both of these are planetary controls, they affect only this planet. (You only have one planet to start, though).

Now, how do you know WHAT to set these sliders at? The two figures in the orange circle are the relevant numbers. The top is your "current treasury" and the bottom is your "projected treasury" for next round, based on what you do with the sliders. If you spend less now, you'll save more for later use. If you spend more now, you'll have less extra for later.

In classic MOO1 style, I wanted to spend all my early turns maxing productivity, so that I could get more total colony ships produced more quickly, even at the cost of slowing the first couple of them. (In Civ3 terms, building a granary early).

SO... what I did here (as you can see) is to put all the available resources on the lower slider. The "Ending Bank" figure is what I used to gauge. I stopped adding when the Ending Bank was about the same as the Starting Bank. That is, all of the income on this round would be spent on production this round, but no extra spending from the treasury. And it was all going into DEA construction for now.

I let the planetary Viceroy pick the DEA's it wanted, to see what it would pick, and watch the results. It chose to build extra industry and mining DEA's.

The Green arrow points to the subpanel that shows you the planet, region by region. Here you can micromanage the DEA's if you wish (and you need to at least once, IMO, to get a sense of how they work). If you go in there, you'll note that some areas are mountainous, others flat, some more fertile, some more barren. Some regions may have specials. This is the screen where you can determine how to get the most out of a given world by deciding which kinds of DEA's it will have, how many and in which regions.

Two special considerations: A government DEA on almost every world is a good idea, since these reduce unrest, improve planetary defenses (the enemy must capture all governmental DEA's to take a world) and you can build governmental specials like "system seat of government" that give bonuses and other effects. Secondly, you have to consider your race. If your race is prone to unrest, then you may need military and recreation DEA's on all your worlds just to maintain control. (Planets CAN secede from your empire, and even them just going into unrest or revolt is bad enough).

The yellow arrow in the shot above is where you go (after opening the Economics panel, of course) to manage your military queue: in this case, which ships to build.

Finally, the red circle in the upper right shows where the food and minerals numbers are. If the "produced" is less than the "need", you've got to import from other worlds. If a planet that needs imports gets blockaded by a rival fleet, that can be Very Bad(TM). Even worse, if your main farming planet gets blockaded, you could have several mining worlds starving (if you specialize). This is pretty much the only real down side to a specialized economy: it is more vulnerable to attack. IMO, it's probably worth it, though. After all, if you go with max independence for your worlds, all the games will play somewhat alike. If you specialize, each galaxy will offer new and unique challenges on balancing out your empire's needs with its production and available worlds.

Now, you always want to send your first colony ship outside the home system. That's because it's a star ship, with interstellar engines. You can build system colony ships cheaper than colony starships. And if you have any green worlds in your home system (besides home itself) you MAY want to settle those first. Not only are the local colony ships cheaper, but there is no travel time. The sooner you get green worlds started, the sooner your population increases, etc.

Sadly, building queues only three items deep? Who's idea was that? They ought to be hung by the ears.

I had one extra green world in my home system, so I erased the default to-build items and put a local colony ship first, then more colony starships.

These won't have ANYthing done on them to start, as I'm filling out DEA's at my best rate, but unlike MOO1 it doesn't take long to get your homeworld up to full speed, at which time you can put everything you have into colony ship building, at least for a while.

OK, so that was my first turn. I think it only took two hours.

* Sent my ships.
* Learned the User Interface (UI).
* Sent diplo offers.
* Maxed spending on DEA's.
* Changed the build queue to match my colonization policy.

Here's the SitRep from Turn 2:

This is a rare event: a senate bill of actual importance. I didn't realize how rare a bill like this would be, at the time.

I seconded the bill, and it was voted on and passed.

Hmm, now here's a curiosity:

That's my homeworld balance sheet on turn 2. Notice the Starting Bank. Hey, that's way more than I was told it would be. Apparently, these numbers DO lie a bit, in the sense that they project based on the current population and "grant status". If your pop is growing (insects grow a lot) apparently you get a happy surprise with an unforecasted surplus.

I don't yet know how, or to what degree, this will affect sound early decisions. Apparently, you can't even trust the numbers in some cases, you have to figure out trends and other factors, and be able to extrapolate what the real numbers will be, if you want to micromanage every shred of early growth improvement.

On turn 3, a DEA completed. The Sakkra actually signed that awax trade agreement. Oh, and I got the first of a kazillion "protests against new technology" that slowed research. I guess that's part of being an insect. I presume other races don't get several of those "bad news" tech notices each turn. Ha! Well, I knew I was taking on the worst researching race in the game, so I have nothing to complain about. Who needs research if you have 8x the next guy's population, right? Right!

OK, now to my chagrin, my colony ship did NOT settle upon arriving in the newly explored system. This began my second Frustrating Experience. (First had been trying to "get back out of this damn planet screen", if you recall from Chapter One).

ARRGH! HOW DO I GET THE DAMN COLONY SHIP TO SETTLE A WORLD?

Even when I thought I had it figured out, I didn't.

Here's the start of the answer: you need to use the planet screen under the Planet tab. There's a recessed panel there, called "Orders", that you have to use to control the colonization AI. See, you can't colonize anything directly. ONLY THE AI CAN DO IT. (As far as I can tell so far). If you know how to control the AI effectively, you can get what you want done. If you don't, you can't.

The orange arrow points to the orders tab.

Now, just go through the planet list and check "Send Colony Ship" to every planet you want to settle, right? BZZT! Wrong-o. Dead wrong. Beat your head on the wall until your eyes pop out kind of wrong. Not going to happen.

If you check mark multiple planets, it will send all new colony ships to the first one, until it has been settled. This could end up with several of your ships going to the same place. This is Very Bad(TM).

What you need to do is to check ONE planet at a time for "Send Colony Ship", and you have to do it in advance. That way when a new colony ship is built, your generals already have orders and it is dispatched immediately. If you wait until after the ship has been assigned to a task force, it WILL cost you at least one extra turn to found your colony, as you cannot combine (that I can tell) the "send ship to this star" order with the "colonize this planet" order. That can only be done (that I have seen) in advance.

Thus the procedure I worked out was to mark one planet at a time, and as soon as SitRep said a colony task force was dispacthed to that location, immediate unmark that world and mark the next one I wanted.

So much for the AI REDUCING micromagagement! If you want to colonize specific worlds, you have to spend three times the effort micromanaging the AI than you used to in MOO1 with the "Go here and settle" one click no-fuss method.

In fact, this lack of direct ability to order a TF to colonize is one of the worst things I've seen on my first night. It's completely senseless that you have to jump through these hoops, IMHO. But... at least you can. At least there IS a way, and it took me two hours before I figured it out.

My third Great Arrgh Moment came when I built my first combat starship. I COULD NOT FIND THE DAMN THING. I knew it was in reserves but I wanted to make it active, and there's no way to do that from the Shipyard. I spent literally half an hour hunting through every panel as if I had lost my car keys in real life and turned the house upside down to find them. I looked under the couch cushions six times, and I even looked in the fridge!

Finally I found it. You have to do it at the system level, or at the galactic level via system control. See, your reserves can pop ANYwhere you want, IF you have the correct "Mobilization Center" improvement built. Anyhow, here is the system level location:

At the gal level, you single-click on a star, if it has the ability assemble a TF, the option will be white, if not it's gray.

Once I had some worlds settled, I went in and micromanaged their DEA orders. I never ran short on food, but I was short on minerals until the Deep Mining Extraction improvement was finally researched.

Here was the sweetest turn in the game so far for me, turn 49:

Once you've played a bit, you'll come to appreciate what it means to settle three new frontier worlds at one time. Wowzers.

Oh, and for once a POSITIVE tech message. Go figure.

As of Turn 87, playing Normal difficulty with stock Klackons, random events to normal (not low), in 2-arm large, with 8 opponents, I am at war with one weak species, full alliance with one senate member, on GOOD terms with the entire senate and one other race, have twice the planets of any other empire, calm fronts on all but one side, second best power rating, and looking like I have a good shot at winning my first game, despite fumbling around not knowing wtf I'm doing.

Pros:

* Diplomacy is a major plus. It suffers from lack of direct info to figure out why your rivals react the way they do sometimes, but that could be overcome with more experience. (It took me a long time to finesse my strategy in MOO1 on this same front, so... maybe it's meant to ba bit obscure).

* The DEA system is much simpler than it appears. You can micromanage your DEA's to good effect with no problems, at least in the early game. It starts to become too much after the initial colonization phase, though, but the automation controls seem POWERFUL. With practice, they should be up to the task.

* The planetary diversity is extremely wide, making replay value potentially infinite, IF the DEA management side of the game is streamlined enough to allow MOO1 style macromanagement. I have high hopes still.

* Space combat is much improved. You don't really get to control it like you did in MOO1/MOO2, but that's BETTER. It closes out countless loopholes, and gives you more of the feel of a space admiral, as opposed to a guy sitting at a computer exploiting game rules to max your results. Sure, you get less control, but you do have some: mainly in the ship designs and task force assembly, but some little bit also on the field of battle. I believe I'm going to like it.

* Ground combat is WAY better than anything that has come before in the MOO series.

* The info overload is more a matter of poor documentation and poor tutorials and reference materials than it is a matter of the game sucking. For example, when I went to the help screen to find out how to create a task force, there was no goal-driven help. There was no option "How to create a task force". There was a long listing of what each screen could do. I had to hunt through this mess by trial and error until I stumbled on the right screen. Whoever was in charge of writing the manual, the tutorials, and the rest of the instructions just plain did a piss poor job. (Sorry, whoever you are).

Cons:

* I am VERY disappointed in the research tree. It is worse than I could have imagined. In MOO1, you had six fields, and you got to pick which tech to research. In MOO3, you don't pick anything. You adjust the sliders to determine which fields get your priority attention, and that's it. That's IT. You don't choose anything, you don't strategize anything. You don't choose between short term gains (researching everything) or long term gambits (skipping cheaper techs to get to pricier ones slightly faster). And whomever it was at Orion Sector in their review who said the techs were so numerous, they all seemed meaningless... in my view, he's right on the button. Since you don't get to have any say in what is researched, at the specific tech level, then it hardly seems to matter what the techs are. You get randomly handed a different tech tree, but even that doesn't matter, since YOU don't have any input into it. The game researches everything that comes up in your tree. Period.

Even Civ's research method is better. There you only research one thing at a time, but YOU CHOOSE that thing. You get to decide the priority.

Now in one sense this is like the space combat. You can't fuddle with it, all you can do is stand back and give broad instructions, at the macro level. Well, I think it works for combat because you still have the full hands-on ship design and task force design. THAT gives you input into the outcome of the combat. You get no input into the outcome of research, so that whole part of the game is dead to me as far as experiencing it. It's on automatic; I can't do anything about it except to add more Research DEA's to make it go faster.

Blah.

It's not all bad. You DO have to make the most of whatever techs you have on hand, in your ship designs, but I miss the MOO1 tech method already, and I haven't had MOO3 for a whole day yet.

* Also very bad is some of the UI clumsiness. The colonization thing is just one example. The information presentations are good, but they are not flexible enough. And there's a lack of smooth transitions from place to place in some cases. You have to back out, then focus in again, rather than a direct route. ESPECIALLY BAD is the planet list screen, where trying to find the next colony to settle from a growing list of dozens gets longer and longer and longer as the game goes on.

Now maybe as I learn more, solutions to some of these issues will arise. Fine. These are my impressions after the first serious go at it. I hope this helps some of my fellow RB'ers get started.

Thread posted - 27/02/02