How Do You Do That?

[rtfox68]

Hi... Just won my first Apollo victory... Everything was random, and was basically a duel between me and the AI... While I won a Emancipation Vicotry on turn 194, it got me thinking about what I have seen in these threads.. and I wonder how you do that...

Power - a couple of experts here were talking in different threads about accumulating over 100k in power at 400+ / turn. My best is playing at Gemini level and was 150 / turn and 20k at the end...

Science - How in the world do you get 600+ beakers per turn? In the game above, I topped out at 180 / turn and every space available was either a manufactury (in the city I was building the gate) and acadameis EVERYWHERE else....

Affinity - yes I know the secret of using the setup to have the game tell you where all of the progentor sites are... but to me, that makes affinity too easy. Since the game ties affinities to scientific advancements, this one goes with the last?

One additional question... Is there a particular affinity that is tied to each of the sponsors? Is there a bonus applied to let's say ARC for going to one affinity or the other?

 

[EpicWestern]

Hi... Just won my first Apollo victory... Everything was random, and was basically a duel between me and the AI...

That's my preferred setting as well. Keep in mind though people posting ridiculous fast win times generally aren't randoming.

While I won a Emancipation Vicotry on turn 194, it got me thinking about what I have seen in these threads.. and I wonder how you do that...

That's actually a pretty fast time for your first Apollo win, and IMO is perfectly respectable for someone randoming.

Power - a couple of experts here were talking in different threads about accumulating over 100k in power at 400+ / turn.

100k in power is just silly. When you think about it its ~100 combat rovers or ~100 gunboats. If you have that much in cash you should have won already. About 400+ a turn is doable though, mainly just station routes with the +6 bonus and compound interest. You don't even need solar collectors.

Science - How in the world do you get 600+ beakers per turn? In the game above, I topped out at 180 / turn and every space available was either a manufactury (in the city I was building the gate) and acadameis EVERYWHERE else....

Sounds like you might have a population growth issue. Really you just need a strong industry based start to ramp up production so you can get the key buildings require to grow your cities at a decent rate. Even though science is of course key in BERT, knowledge tier honestly isn't that strong. Once your population gets going you can fill in your academies, if you time it wrong the academies will stunt your growth since academies don't give food and your workers could be building something better (or you use up too much production building workers). Also institutes and xenonurseries are really strong and aren't as much tech detour as you might think, the quests give you your science back. Also managing agreements is key.

One additional question... Is there a particular affinity that is tied to each of the sponsors? Is there a bonus applied to let's say ARC for going to one affinity or the other?

Not directly, but some sponsors pair well better with some affinities than others, though its somewhat of a moot point since supremacy seems to be the way to go. ARC for example can take better advantage from the mass spies that you get from the building quests usually found in supremacy tiers. Specialist buildings can be best taken advantage of with Samtar are usually found in the purity tiers, and super fast navies are best with purity and NSA.

 

[Martin_K]

there used to be a fairly broken agreement that gives you up to 5% (?) interest to your energy stockpile. the agreement is now capped at 100 energy per turn, but before the patch, there was no cap. so that 100k+ energy probably isn't going to happen anymore. you could still amass that much by building a huge empire and "artificially" delay the victory, but i guess that's beside the point.

i just finished a game at soyuz level with ~600 beakers per turn towards the end (finished on turn 185). i was playing as barre and ran a specialist economy with institues and xenonurseries (i think - that other building with science slots). wasn't an optimal game since none of the rival civs had the student aid agreement (specialists consume no food). probably could have finisehd it sooner, got carried away a bit towards the end (2 pointless but fun conquest wars against my annoying neighbors ).

beakers are mostly a function of population, so to get your beaker count up, you need to grow your cities (internal trade routes etc.). i don't actually know if population automatically creates beakers in BE (used to be that way in civ 5), but regardless of that, you'll need population to man those scientist slots or academies (or -to a lesser extent - nodes or arrays). strong production also helps - you'll want to get your buildings up quickly and if there is nothing important left to build, you can always switch to food or science conversion (decide case by case - for some cities extra food may actually allow you to run more science tiles/slots and get more science than straight up building science). for decent production, internal trade routes are also immensely helpful.

in my experience, once you're past the early "unhealthy" phase of the game, you'll quickly spiral out of control. cities grow a lot faster once you're in the green and instead of penalties to science and culture, you get bonuses.

it gets really ridiculous if you grab lots of extra cities (found or conquer). you probably won't win earlier that way, since all those cities have to be buolt up and have to break even before they rerally contribute anything, but you can get absurd yields in late domination games.

the game before the last one, i played a spy economy with ARC, had to kill some neighbors before i started work on the exodus gate and decided to keep going after build such a large navy, so i basically worked ont he exodus gate and settled the earthlngs while my navy was steamrolling the world. at the end of the game, i conquered the final city about 3 turns before the promised land would have finished. i had something like 2000 beakers per turn at that point and simply queued up all remaining techs (didn't really matter anyway). that was a fairly slow game, though (finshed around turn ~220?)

 

[Olodune]

i don't actually know if population automatically creates beakers in BE (used to be that way in civ 5)

Each population adds 1 base beakers. This goes up to 1.25 with the 1st tier knowledge virtue Laboratory Apprenticeship. Since these base beakers go through science multipliers, a medium sized Empire can easily generate 200-300 beakers per turn without working any science tiles/slots at all.

Population is very important for high science per turn.

 

[rtfox68]

i just finished a game at soyuz level with ~600 beakers per turn towards the end (finished on turn 185). i was playing as barre and ran a specialist economy with institues and xenonurseries (i think - that other building with science slots). wasn't an optimal game since none of the rival civs had the student aid agreement (specialists consume no food). probably could have finisehd it sooner, got carried away a bit towards the end (2 pointless but fun conquest wars against my annoying neighbors ).

I just finished a game on the easiest setting and with just 7 cities was pulling in 680 beakers per turn. This raises another question... I know the AI gets bonuses the harder the level is, but do human players get penalties the harder the level? Same basic stratedgy I used in apollo game... 2 very different science outcomes.

 

[Martin_K]

i don't think the human player gets penalties on the higher settings - that would basically break the game mechanics both ways (rather than just break the AI side of the game).

you'll have an easier time managing unhealth on the very low levels, though (i think you get some bonus health or lower unhealth per pop or something), so instead of a -20% penalty for being at -20 health, you'll get a +20% bonus for being at high positive health (see tooltip of the current health for exact numbers).

with positive health, you can "snowball" earlier since you produce stuff faster, cities grow faster and get bigger, you get more virtues and more tech etc. i think techs and virtues may also be cheaper on the beginner difficulty levels, so you'll get the stuff that boosts you earlier.

may also be related to the faction you picked, available diplo agreements, the diplo traits and virtues you picked, the tech order, luck/unluck with artifacts etc. there's a lot of stuff that can give you little advantages that compound into a large difference over the course of the game.