OSG-28

[DaveV]

I always try to grab pollution reduction/cleanup tech early. I've never done the math, but it just feels better when I no longer have to devote half of my planets' production toward mopping up their mess.

It looks as though we should be able to grab a lot of worlds, so my priority would be protecting them, which means missiles, computers, armor, shields, and ECM.

[RefSteel]

Remember that each turn's factories accelerate future factories as well. I would definitely shift as much research to Tauri as possible, and if we do, I'll bet we can get up to 200 factories in lesss than seven turns. If IT+10 hits before that though, we'll have more infrastructure to build (terraforrming itself + 20 more facs) and the colship will be cheaper, so we'll probably be able to get a 5-turn colship before we max everything. (Of coursee, no guarantee terraforming comes in before we hit 200 facss anyway.)

Given our situation, yeah, I agree that Terra +20 should come next in Planetology - or if that's not available, then Controlled Tundra just to climb the tree ASAP. In terms of Construction choices, we really can't go wrong here as the Psilons, but one important thing to keep in mind is that techs shouldn't be considered in a vacuum. On its own, going back for Reduced Waste 80 wouldn't be bad at all since it would be our only cleanup tech to that point, but if we're planning to rush up the Planetology tree, given the lushness of our neighborhood and the ~75% chance that we'll be able to tech Enhanced Eco, it might be better to skip over it and move forward with II8 for our (hopefully!) many new colonies-to-be or Duralloy to help us hold onto them.

When to open the other fields depends on the strategic situation - when we think we need and can afford them - but my sense right now is "not too soon." I like Deep Space Scanners and Hand Lasers, but not as much as I like gathering information and responding accordingly!

[RFS-81]

I just loaded the save to have a look around. I've no concrete comments (other than: nice map we got there!) but a question about opening strategies in general. In my games, I usually play as follows (roughly based on Sirian's tutorial): I build a colony ship once the construction time drops to ~7-8 turns. I try to keep the 2nd colony half full while seeding the 3rd. I let the 2nd colony build industry all the time and when it needs more people to operate them, I let it fill up. By then, ideally, the 3rd colony can take over seeding the 4th. That's the plan anyway, the actual game can get messier, of course! (And with the Klackons, it doesn't really work.) You seem to prefer waiting longer for the colony ship, and actually delaying factory building. This feels a bit strange to me, but that's mostly due to my habits; I don't know what's the right way here. I guess the plan is to go on a massive colony spam once we crack the 5-turn mark, and Tauri will have to seed them all?

@shallow_thought: Regarding pop growth, there's some information here and here. (There's something very wrong with the text encoding in the second link; â should be a minus sign...) But the gist is: The game displays only whole pop-points but under the hood, it keeps track of them in 0.1 increments. The growth formula is basically:

Code:

POP = whole pop-points on the planet
FRAC_POP = fractional pop-points (so if our colony has 2.4 pop, we'd have POP=2, and FRAC_POP = 0.4)
FREE = 1 - POP/MAX_POP (i.e., the fraction of the planet that is still free)
GROWTH = FREE * POP/10 + FRAC_POP
GROWTH is rounded to the nearest multiple of 0.1

The game does some rounding at intermediate steps, but then the formula gets uglier, so I'll refer you to the second link for that. Also, if your population growth is slowed (hostile environment, Silicoids) or boosted (fertile, Gaia), then this does not apply to the FRAC_POP term in the growth formula.

For example! A new colony starts with 2.0 pop. Let's say its maximum is 100. Thus, FREE=0.98, and GROWTH will round off to 0.2 and in the next turn, we'll have 2.2 pop. In the next turn we get a growth of 0.4 (because we have FRAC_POP=0.2) and reach 2.6. Apparently, if you run a spreadsheet next to the game, you can manipulate population growth so that you have a high FRAC_POP for many turns in a row. (This was used in the OSG-27 in my first link and it gives a nice boost for the Silicoids.) That looks like way too much effort to me, and Thrawn wrote in that thread that for non-Silicoids, it's not really worth worrying about.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that, as the manual says, if a planet is close to half full, it has the highest possible growth!

Oh, and I'd definitely like to get my hands on the strategy guide too, but ReplacementDocs doesn't have it, and I doubt that the board is ok with linking a pirated scan here...

[RefSteel]

I wouldn't get too hung up on specific numbers, actually: Sullla likes to max factories at his homeworld before he starts a colony ship, for instance, and I tend to do that too, but there are definitely times when a faster colony is more valuable than more factories. Likewise, population growth is at its best (if you ignore the fiddly stuff thrawn does to boost the Silis) when a planet is half-full, but the difference is pretty small at the top of the bell curve: Anything between about 1/3 and 2/3 is getting something close to the fastest growth.

As for factories on the second world, I love building them early - up to about 2/3s of the planet's max pop at least - but my first priority early on is to get the homeworld cranking colony ships out as quickly as possible (unless of course there are more pressing needs!) - which means anything else the empire needs, especially when it will actually help get the colships out to their destinations faster (like planetology tech, or propulsion in the right circumtances) takes precedence. My preference is to seed a key planetology research target, often from both worlds, then "trickle" research from the second planet while building up its factories so it will be able to keep up with the research for the most part as the investment increases. And then once other planets get started, pop seeding can come from anywhere, depending on which planets are close, large, and growing.

It could be that I'm mistaken here and there are key, threatened gateway worlds we want to colonize and/or protect ASAP. It certainly wouldn't be terrible to go straight to the Colship for Incedius from Mentar right now, especially if Terra+10 completes in time to miniaturize it a bit. My sense is that we can afford to wait a bit longer first, but I'm not an oracle or anything!

[haphazard1]

This kind of discussion and opportunity to learn from other players is my favorite part of SGs.

I generally favor maxing out the homeworld as early as possible. Exceptions occur when scouting reveals there is a critical target for early colonization, such as a chokepoint world due to map layout, or a major nearby threat that requires immediate response. Since production drives colonization, military power, and research, getting the homeworld to max output as quickly as possible for more total production over time is worthwhile.

For growth, I tend to be pretty casual. As RefSteel said, planetary pop between 1/3 to 2/3 max puts you in the strong part of the growth curve. Micro to manage fractional chances is more trouble than I care to take, although I can see the benefit for the silicoids. Getting the big picture right and moving pop around to take advantage of different worlds' maximums is enough to capture most of the potential benefit.

[RefSteel]

That's something I love about SGs too, and I know they're a great opportunity to learn. I know in my case, playing in early SGs with the likes of Sargon, Zed-F, dathon, and do0m really improved my understanding of the game.

On this game: Were you waiting for input on anything else, Haphazard? Or just for time and opportunity to play another ten turns?

[haphazard1]

As discussed I shift our research spending to Tauri, so we can improve Mentar a bit faster. I decide to put one more turn fully into factories. This drops the time to build a colony ship to only 5 turns so I then reassign spending and begin a colony ship.

The following turn Terraforming+10 completes. We have a nice selection of options for the next rung -- it is good to be the psilons.

I select Terraforming+20 as the most immediately useful.

In other news, we do not need to worry about the bears claiming Proteus:

The Darlok homeworld is presumably that south-center yellow star. They had two colony ships and a handful of other armed stuff.

Unsurprisingly the shapeshifters quickly claim Paladia as well, leading to this announcement:

Could we see that rare beast, the runaway Darlok, in this game? Darlok ships are shortly seen here as well:

So expect formal contact with them in the next couple turns.

Questions for the team:

- Immediate spending to terraform+10, or finish the colony ship first? We have 3 turns to go on building the ship.
- Tauri: terraform immediately? The planet is in the strong part of the growth range already.
- Possible reactions to the Darloks? They will shortly have range on Tauri at least, and we have no armed defenses of any kind there.
- Where do we send our colony ship once it finishes? In-/En-ncedius which is most threatened by the bears and shifters, or to the larger safer Gion to open up Kulthos and other northward options?

Sorry for playing turns in little chunks like this, but key decisions need to be made and I do not feel confident about just making them without discussion. If it is preferred to just play the whole set, I can do that, but results may be very sub-optimal that way.

[DaveV]

My response, based on initial reaction rather than in-depth analysis:

- Immediate spending to terraform+10, or finish the colony ship first? We have 3 turns to go on building the ship.

Finish colony ship, build factories up to 180-190, then start putting some money into terraforming. Put most of our output into more colony ships throughout that process.

- Tauri: terraform immediately? The planet is in the strong part of the growth range already.

Since we're going to be stripping off population to send to new colonies, I think we can wait.

- Possible reactions to the Darloks? They will shortly have range on Tauri at least, and we have no armed defenses of any kind there.

We should start building a missile base, and probably put a few fighters into orbit.

- Where do we send our colony ship once it finishes? In-/En-ncedius which is most threatened by the bears and shifters, or to the larger safer Gion to open up Kulthos and other northward options?

Incedius first.

[shallow_thought]

Could we see that rare beast, the runaway Darlok, in this game?

Sorry for playing turns in little chunks like this, but key decisions need to be made and I do not feel confident about just making them without discussion. If it is preferred to just play the whole set, I can do that, but results may be very sub-optimal that way.

Huh. Oddly the Darloks are also enemy number one in the game I fired up over the weekend to familiarise myself with the 1.40 patch.

From my point of view the discussion is helpful at this stage. Hopefully things will be easier by the time the save comes round to me!

@RFS-81 - thanks for the info on pop growth. I knew the rule of thumb about keeping around the centre of the bell curve, but it's nice to see the details. I doubt I'll ever want to run a tracking spreadsheet for my own games, but if things get competitive or it's necessary for a challenge...

As for the OSG, I really wouldn't mind paying something sensible for a copy, but I can understand how some might be driven to piracy given the amount wanted for a second hand paperback. Will just have to keep reading the threads.

[RefSteel]

My opinions in order of most to least importance:

1) No need to apologize - the unexpected keeps happening, the way it does in Orion, and it's fine to want to check in with the team. At the same time: Don't be afraid of making suboptimal decisions! The very, very worst thing that could happen is that we might have to record a loss and start up a new game. In real life, this is not at all a bad outcome! A more likely result is that we'll be facing more of a challenge. This is an excellent outcome! Come up with a plan, execute it, and see what the rest of the team thinks about it afterward, but don't be afraid to play your own game!

2) As in any 4-X game, contested sites take priority. I would definitely stick to the plan of colonizing Incedius.

3) I almost always terraform everywhere immediately if the planet can afford the 50 BC (we're Psilons, so that's the equivalent of 75 RP) but I think the colship should take precedence here. Also note that more terraforming always increases pop growth rate (though sometimes only marginally) even if you go out of the "fat part" of the growth curve (e.g. from 30 of 90 pop to 30 of 100, although the pop is growing in the meantime so this won't really happen anyway) - so I do favor 'forming Tauri.

4) I don't think the Darloks will actually attack in the near term; they probably have better things to do with their fleets, and Tauri is a pretty well-established colony. I'd still be inclined to terraform and/or build more factories there (which would at least help future defenses get built quickly) rather than starting defenses immediately. Incedius is another question, but we already knew it was threatened.

Finally, note that where my thoughts differ from DaveV's, for example, I'm not necessarily right - it's a situation that could go several ways, and there are multiple strategies for dealing with it, which is why I'm trying to offer the reasoning behind my strategies. Ultimately, you're the emperor for these fifteen years, and the empire's in your hands. Asking for discussion like this is fine - so is going with your instincts!