The Middle Game

Time to cover some more advanced features.

First up is ship design. Let me say that I am IMPRESSED with the automated shipbuilding option. It does a good job of laying out a credible design quickly. (This bodes well for the game on two fronts: multiplayer, and the competence of the AI's in their shipbuilding).

When it comes to multiplayer, I expect people to be using timed turns, probably 3 to 5 mins per turn tops, for most games. Constructing ships manually takes a LOT of time. You add some of this, and you run over your space limit. That that away and add some of that, you've still got space to fill. Coming up with an optimized design in a short period of time isn't going to happen. So, on this front, for the time it takes to click the autobuild button (shown below), after you have selected the appropriate categories (starship, size, mission category) you get a solid return. Considering how quickly new techs come in, it's largely better to automate designs and obsolete old ones than it is to spend a ton of time optimizing each design.

Now, sometimes you tell it you want a carrier, and it still gives you a ship with mostly guns on it. So it ain't perfect. Still not a bad idea to autobuild, remove the pieces you don't want, and add the ones you do, rather than build from scratch.

Overall, I'm pleased with the options on shipbuilding, and the overall results. If you specialize your ship designs (carriers with mostly fighters, long range attack ships with only your best gun mounted on your best weapon pod, missile ships with all missiles) you can SEE the relative effectiveness of these weapons in combat fairly easily. If you try to make Jack of All Trades ship designs, you'll be sure to produce Masters of None. If you follow me. You balance out your fleets by combining ship types in a task force if you need one TF to do the whole job (small duty), or best is to have specialized TF's and combine several TF's with different missions and behavior.

Now ground troops. There are four steps to launching an invasion fleet.

1) Select an eligible world to deploy the forces, preferably your closest Mob (Mobilization Center) to the target.

2) Create the ground force.

3) Create the troop fleet and deploy.

4) Next turn, you can order the fleet to move toward its destination system.

You must complete 1-3 in a single move, or you have to start over.

Here's step one, for me to invade the Wolf system, two systems NE of my base at Cador.

Obviously, you click Create Gropos (ground pounders).

Next, you MUST select a type, size, and quality. Depending on your choices, there are some rules your new force must comply with. These are listed to the right, and any you are NOT currently in compliance with will be shown in red. You must turn all rules to black before you can deploy, or else select a different force type.

If you click Autobuild, the game will make a force for you. If it can. If you don't have the units to meet the rules for the type you selected, it will inform you. If you do, it will create a force.

As with ship design, you can now micromanage the suggested force design, removing some units, adding others, if you wish.

Step Three, you must assemble a transport fleet. You MUST have sufficient troop-carriers to move your whole force or you will have to cancel and start over. You MUST be able to assemble a legal task force of a size large enough to accomodate your whole force, or you have to start over.

Each troop ship carries 4 units. (You can design new troops ships, too, if you wish). Here you see I have only five, that's not enough to carry the force I created, so all these parts go back into the reserve pool and nothing happens. I can try again with a smaller force if I wish.

The only painful part is knowing what all pieces you need, in advance, to meet all the rules. You can always make smaller forces with less complex rules, but eventually it will be important to know how to assemble the largest types of TF's.

Now for Ship TF's.

You make these in a similar way. They have slightly different rules, depending on the mission type for the TF.

The biggest headache for me in Chapter Three is: HOW THE HELL DO I MAKE A PICKET SHIP?

There are three categories of ships: core, escort, picket. To make anything over a medium TF, you MUST have some picket ships. Well, I made about 60 tiny ships, thinking these would automatically qualify as pickets, only to learn they did not. So... I have some experimenting to do yet. In the mean time, my TF's are limited to 7 ships max.

I did learn that you can click and drag units from category to category, IF they are eligible for multiple duty. In the shots below, you see me moving a ship from core to escort.

Again, these categories are important mainly for just being ALLOWED to make the larger fleets. Also, these settings affect the position of the ships, so there may be tactical implications as well.

Again, the Autobuild option is highly capable. I suggest you use it. It will let you know in one click if you can make a legal TF of the size you want. Then you can micromanage the individual ships and assignments if you wish.

Now for some advanced planetary management.

The Planet Button at the bottom is very useful. You check Owned Worlds, select Sort Primary by Population, then scroll to the bottom of the list, to see all your low-population worlds (the newest ones). Then you can click on the bottom one, and go quickly backward up the list with Civ-City-Screen-Style scroll buttons on the individual planet screen.

Here's a shot of my four newest worlds ~T130.

The newest is a conquered Silicoid world. There's an Alkari world in there, too, and that's the only one without the blue dot next to the teraform rating on the left. The blue dot signifies Migration set to ON for that world. I am not migrating to the Alkari world so that more of its people will be Alkari, even though that means slower growth there.

Basically, you want migration ON in almost every instance for new worlds. Turn it OFF once a world gets close to half its max population. This can also be done quickly from this "sorted by population" planet listing.

For Military Build Queue management (very important to the gameplay!) you can click the Owned Worlds filter on, then Sort Primary by Industry. Your best producers will be at the top, and when you cycle through using the scroll buttons at the planet level, it will use the Sorting you have chosen, so you can go through your best producing planets bam-bam-bam and get it all done fairly quickly, with few wasted clicks.

Here's my best four producers in my first game:

Note the blue hammer shows the industry totals.

So you sort by Industry, double click on the top planet, you go to the planet level. There you click the economy button (shown below with the pink circle) to get access to the Military Queue, where you can check on your current projects and make any changes.

Also, you have to keep an eye on the Military vs Economic sliders. If your military queue has "gone light" because all the big projects completed, and the Viceroy chose to add small projects to the list, for which your alloted military budget was actually TOO MUCH, the leftover gets put down on the Eco slider. And yes, you have to manually put it back to Military once you set some big projects (battleships, or packs of smaller ships) or the extra money just goes to waste, and your stuff builds slower.

Note the yellow arrow points to the scroll buttons. These buttons are Very Good(TM) because they tie in with your Planet List sorting. However you have the main planet listing sorted, THAT sorting is used to determine the order you are shown planets when using the scroll buttons. This is enormously helpful. You can pick any option (food, mining, industry, research, and more) and quickly look through all your best OR worst worlds in one tight pack with no hassles.

This gets to be vital if you have upwards of a few dozen planets under your control.

Here you see me working one of my military queues.

"Gravitar" is my name for a recent battleship design. I name stuff by function, to better remember what's what. So this design uses almost all graviton guns. My system ships are always named "(Something) Defense", to remind me these are for defense only. My nuclear missile ships were called Nukem's. My tiny ships were called Gnat Pickets. Hardbeam-equipped ships were called HB Escort (medium) and HB Picket (small). You can name your ships whatever you please, but you will have to REMEMBER what the names are attached to, so choose wisely.

Also note that you double click an item to get the option to build 5 or 10 of them. Options that allow bulk manufacture have an arrow next to them. Options without the arrow tend to be singular planetary systems.

Here's a shot of the victory screen. Check here for your power rating. Mine's been number one (even ahead of the NO's) since about T90. Let there be no doubt, the Insecta are among the strongest races in this game. Population equals power.

Here's a shot of the regional subpanel from a planet screen. I have found that this are, where DEA's are managed, CAN be successfully micromanaged by the player from start to finish, if you wish. That's because it's a do-once task, for each world. You set the DEA's and the Viceroys DO NOT overrule any DEA you hand-placed, IF your development policy is set to Specialized. (I dunno about the other settings, don't much plan to find out any time soon, either. I'm a Specialized kinda guy all the way!)

By contrast, stuff that is Do-Over-and-Over MUST be given to the Viceroys to handle. This starts with the planetary build queue. Don't touch it. (You can touch the slider if you have an urgent need, but that's about it). Think of the Vicerory AI as your spouse, and the PBQ as "their" personal space. You let them have it if you want your household to function correctly. The military queue is yours, though they will take care of it (less efficiently) for you if you neglect it.

You can let the Viceroys handle the sliders, too, except when they "steal" your military budget because you let a turn pass with "nothing to do" and the Viceroys moves the unused portion to the Eco slider. You may have to go and get that back.

You CAN let the viceroys run the military queues too, if you want. Or rather, you won't NEED to overrule their choices if you do a few specific things:

* Obsolete any designs you don't want them to build. This can include scouts and troop ships, truly obsolete ship designs, and anything you currently have too many of. (You turn designs obsolete at Shipyard).

* Set at least a global DevPlan.

* Leave some DEA's blank so that the Viceroys can meet any unexpected needs, by using DEA's you leave to their discretion to plug holes. The balance of your food supply, mineral supply, etc etc will SHIFT over time, due to new techs coming online, so leaving a bit of flexibility in there can be wise. The Viceroys WILL pay attention to all the day-to-day stuff at times when you don't, which is very good. You can click Next Turn a few times without managing anything when you want to get that new TF into battle quickly, for example, and skip the management for a bit and run things only at the top, Emperor-Only level. You can always go back in later to check up on the Viceroys and tinker with things if you're not happy with their choices.

Another word about colonization. The AI colonization is VERY good at continuing successful colonization in the middle game. It's not good enough (IMO) to trust it right out of the gate, but once you have all the nearby worlds settled manually, the work to continue manual settlement goes UP, while the returns for doing so go down. Any mistakes made can actually cost you time vs the AI handling it. You CAN still prioritize target worlds by telling it to send ships to them. It may not send them in the order you would, but it will send to all the targets you pick, eventually, letting you reduce your workload a lot but still enjoy some input into the policy.

I can't imagine NOT turning AI colonization on at some point every game. How soon is the question.

Finally, some words about Espionage.

* Start on spy recruitment almost immediately! Your recruitment capacity DOES NOT increase over time, so you pretty much need to be recruiting spies nonstop, just to replace the ones that get killed, retire, or die off. Just keep six alive (one of each type) on home patrol duty (counterspying) is a challenge.

Maybe some races will have better results here, I don't know. If they can recruit faster, that would make an enormous difference!

I only recently got to try some offensive spying. I had some success, but I also had a spy caught:

He died the next turn, without talking. Good fellow. We're going to miss him. Oh wait, no we're not! We're insects who reproduce so fast, we have whole planets of expendable hive units. Ah, if only it were so in the spy realm. Spies are so hard to come by! By the time you train one, you need him just to plug a counterspy gap left by a now-dead agent.

Anyhow, I hope these tips and instructions proved useful. Now back to the game for me!

Thread posted - 27/02/02