Condensers multiply the food of the tile they are built on by 1.5 rounded down. For normal tiles that means they increase food from 3 to 4. On nutrient bonus tiles they increase food from 5 to 7. The only reason to use normal farms is to reduce overall demand on former labour. Otherwise, condensers farms are better, 4 > 3. However, since you do not have the happiness yet for huge population farms are iffy in general. The reason to get one condenser farm each is so you can work more food-negative forests.
There are two principle ways to organise terraforming. Tech terraforming with condensers and boreholes and forest with treefarms (plus a few boreholes and maybe condensers). The later approach likes running Free Market and/or using psych for drone control. The advantage of the forest approach is that you don't need nearly as many formers (and thus maintenance), the downsides are that you need way more population (and thus drone control) for the same output and that treefarms are horrifyingly expensive structures which slow you down a lot if you want to make them en masse.
The strategy I proposed for Lal in this situation is to boom in two stages. First to size 5ish to grab more forests. Here the use of condensers (max 1 per base) to provide more food would avoid the need for treefarms initially. Then make treefarms and crawlers once you have some actual production and boom to size 9. For the latter stage getting the Virtual World would be nice.
Crawlers go on condensers farms and mined rocky tiles. In the early game in vanilla you can also put them on forests to supercharge your production. In Thinker that's not viable as you get them too late.
There are two principle ways to organise terraforming. Tech terraforming with condensers and boreholes and forest with treefarms (plus a few boreholes and maybe condensers). The later approach likes running Free Market and/or using psych for drone control. The advantage of the forest approach is that you don't need nearly as many formers (and thus maintenance), the downsides are that you need way more population (and thus drone control) for the same output and that treefarms are horrifyingly expensive structures which slow you down a lot if you want to make them en masse.
The strategy I proposed for Lal in this situation is to boom in two stages. First to size 5ish to grab more forests. Here the use of condensers (max 1 per base) to provide more food would avoid the need for treefarms initially. Then make treefarms and crawlers once you have some actual production and boom to size 9. For the latter stage getting the Virtual World would be nice.
Crawlers go on condensers farms and mined rocky tiles. In the early game in vanilla you can also put them on forests to supercharge your production. In Thinker that's not viable as you get them too late.
but good to learn
but I'm starting to see it all a bit better.
