RB OSG1 - Team II - Da not-quite-n00bz

One thing we could do is send pop from Gion to Ursa, and send pop from Ursa on southwards. Chaining pop transfers is an important trick when you have long distances to cross at slow speeds. It's not exploitative like in Civ3 either as we're not actually transporting units on the transports, just population.

Once we have a reasonable amount of population at Imra we should max out Ursa's factories and let Imra be a pop colony for the south, with some pop chaining help from Gion.
 
I thought Ursa's factories were maxed? If not then that's my bad, but I figured since we were building colony ships from there that the factories had already been completely built...

I did think about chaining transports like that but figured to keep Ursa pumping out colony ships we'd need to wait until the turn before the transports arrived from Gion anyway and with the initial delay like that it was about the same speed to send them from Gion anyway. Unless we'd want to take population from the only planet we have that's complete for now and leave factrories idle for a few turns, slowing colony production, etc, just to prop up a colony faster?

What's best?
 
No, Ursa's factories are not maxed yet - sorry for not stating this more obvious. I just built enough factories to be able to produce a colony 1.0 every 5 turns and decided to settle some important planets first before finishing the factories. My reasoning was that waiting longer could be dangerous, and that this way the pop from Gion could have something to do while still in the "strong" area of the bell curve.

I hope that wasn't :smoke: ...

-Kylearan
 
Well if the factories were maxed then the colony ships might have been built in 5 turns instead of 6 like they were when I played my round (now I know why.)

Usually the homeworld you want to max out in pop and factories ASAP, and let the first colony worry about spreading colonists around, at least after the initial group(s) go to stand-up the first colony.

No problem with the factories since I should have checked, but in the future, yeah, you want to max out the homeworld ASAP.
 
No, it's not :smoke:. Figuring out when to max out your home planet's factories is a tradeoff exercise. Do you get some colonies done sooner at the expense of decreased total ship production at the homeworld, and if so for how long? It's not a bad idea if you expect to be sending pop away from the homeworld anyway, since you can't really use any extra factories that might have been built while that pop is gone. If we plan to backfill with pop from Gion, though, then it makes sense to build up factories to the max to get colony ships out sooner as we don't expect to be below max pop for very long. Another thing to consider is how far your colony ships have to travel from the homeworld, and whether you can use relocate to get them on their way or not. If you need to wait for colony ship X to arrive at its destination before you can send colony ship Y to its destination, because you need the extra range from colony X to be able to reach planet Y, and you can't send colony ship Y at least partway there before X gets settled, then it doesn't help much to get colony ship Y done any faster than the amount of time it takes for colony ship X to arrive at its destination. Fortunately, it's often the case that you CAN get colony ship Y partway there while colony ship X is still in transit. Still, this sort of thing is worth keeping in mind.

Regarding transport chaining, it works out more nicely when there are several developing worlds to chain between without having to use a fully developed world, but even then the benefits can be worthwhile, depending on the length of the chain. Sending from Gion to Irma, chaining via Ursa, might not be worth it, if the chain is short and if Ursa is full-up on factories. However, sending colonists from Gion to a planet south of Irma is obviously painful since the colonists would take on the order of 8 years to arrive. Instead of sending a few colonists from Gion to the new planet and a few from Irma, it might be better to send a lot from Irma and then backfill whatever we would have sent from Gion to Irma. In fact, we can even send colonists from Gion to Irma in anticipation of colonies being settled, so that Irma can immediately send a sizeable number of colonists to the new colony as soon as it is settled, instead of dribbling them out over several turns.
 
Nice discussion here, I'm almost glad my computer had a minor breakdown now... if not I would have played by now. I'll hopefully have a working computer again tonight. However, if I don't post another message before 12pm EST, skip me, because I might not have a copmputer for a while.
 
Finally!

After all the stuff going on in other games, my computer misbehaving and so on, I finally got my sorry butt around to playing my 10 turns.

First things first, I have a bunch of nice screen grabs, but paint won't handle them. Can anyone suggest a good programme for manipulating my little sweethearts?

In any case here we go (without the screenshots for now):

2330 CE (Inherited turn):
I check out the map and look at the locations of all the planets we can settle - there are three relevant clusters (the single T-95-Poor is out):

NE - Two Jungle planets (75P & 85) at 6 and 8 parsecs. Both are back lines and can be safely ignored for some time yet.

SE - 4 planets (plus several unexplored, but in range of scouts): The M40 artifacts, A30 poor, O70 and a J90UPoor. Ranges are 4, 3, 6 and 6 parsecs. This is safely on the back lines and can wait as well.

SW - 3 Plantets, with Klystron (A65UP) as the gateway to a D45 and O80. These planets are coreward and exposed, and regardless of us having to take a UP planet, the cluster is worth the effort (and even UP planets produce population). The next colony ship is going for Klystron, with a follow up to Helos (O80) and Jinga (D45) in that order if I have it my way... the second ship won't be mine to send.

Ursa is currently at 97pop with 145 factories, producing a Colony Ship in 6. I shift it to factories for 11/t (until we can build ships in 5 years, not six.

2331 CE
Ursa from 11fpy to Colony Ship in 5 years.
Gion is changed from 13RPT (not doing anything) to 20RPT which will let us see our research choices.

2332 CE
Tech choices:
Computers: Deep Space Scanner and ECJ I - choose the DSS as it is higher up the tree and I want factory enhancements...
Contruction: Reduced Industrial Waste 80%
Force Fields: Class II Defence Shields
Planetology: Barren Environment and Improved Eco Restoration - I choose IEC as there aren't enough Barren planets to justify it... if it had been Tundra it would have been a tough choice.
Propulsion: Hydrogen Fuel Cells (4) and Inertial Stabilizer - Go with the Stabilizer as Hydrogen Cells are, well... useless at this point.
Weapons: Gatling Laser

Adjust research to focus on #1 Planetology, #2 Computers and #3 Construction. There is research in all the trees, but it's very minimal in some trees.

2333 CE
Zzzzzzzz

2334 CE
A scout discovers Dunatis (Yellow in the SE) to be a T95.

2335 CE
Zzzzzzzz

2336 CE
Colony ship produced at Ursa

Colony Ship arrives at Gienah
13 Mil are sent to Gienah from Imra, and 27 mill from Gion to Imra. That gives Gienah 15 and the 27 are needed to keep Imra well stocked as it will be our primary supplier of pop until Klystron is online.

Colony Ship sent to Klystron.
Ursa set to produce 10 Scout 1.0 and 7.1 factories.

2337 CE
10 Scout 1.0 produced.
Proteus M15Rich and Tauri T20 are scouted in the SE.

Ursa is set to produce a Colony ship in 5 years + 0.8 factories.

3338 CE
Nutin'

3339 CE
Zzzzz

2340 CE
Scouts discover Tyr - T20, Rana D50 and Thrax R25Rich.

Colony ship will arrive at Klystron in two turns, and another colony ship will be ready at that point. It can then be sent (my preference) to the O80 SW of Klystron, after securing that cluster and any interesting planets in that direction, I would start backfilling to the SE, but by then things should be getting interesting...


The save
 
I thought I had Ursa ready to produce a colony ship every 5 turns, but now I realize that this only appeared to be so because some BCs have spoiled over from producing scouts before. Have to remember this, I'm still in the civ3-mindset of shields wasted after production. :)

Regarding screenshots, I admit I never really used "paint", but it looked like it could do at least cropping and resizimg, dunno about adding text. Another small program to crop, resize and convert to jpg is IrfanView. It's "only" a viewer but can do simple image handling quite well and is small and fast.

If you really want to edit the pictures and don't want to spend much money on programs like Photoshop, you could try out The Gimp. It's freeware and has a lot of powerful functions, but the GUI is something that can easily drive you nuts. ;)

And now, have 'fun' reformatting and reinstalling your system. :p
-Kylearan
 
Comments:

We have enough pop sources other than Ursa now that we should definitely max out Ursa's factories, especially since Ursa is just sitting there at 100 pop. We only want to let Ursa stay under max IF we need to send Ursa's pop elsewhere. We have lots of ships to build yet so we should be sending them at the best possible rate.

Looking at your tech spending ratios, we are still early going. At this point, focusing on a couple critical areas is fine, but I'm not sure what the long term strategy for tech will be -- are we going to "set and forget" mainly after the first couple techs come in, or are we planning to be more dynamic in our tech spending ratios? It looks like you have it set up more for the latter. In any case, I would forget computer tech for the moment as it's more important to get the first couple waste management techs done and a head start on (hopefully) industrial tech 8 before we get our 2nd level computing tech. We don't want to get Improved Robotic Controls III too soon! This will stunt any new colonies we found or are still in the early stages of development. Team, please chime in on whether you would prefer to adopt a relatively dynamic or a relatively static tech approach over the long term.

The only possibly controversial tech choice is skipping Barren, but since we got range 5 out of the artifact planet, I agree with your call. If we had not, Barren would have been the better choice. I also agree we want to expand coreward sooner rather than later, but I'm glad you got the artifact planet settled first. However, we shouldn't ignore decent-sized planets in our core for too long. Remember that time saved on colony ship travel and on colonist travel equals faster colony development. We don't want to settle over-reach planets we can't possibly defend in preference to core worlds we can... but we also don't want to give up limit-of-our-reach worlds we could defend just to get those core worlds settled a couple turns sooner. Deciding just how far our reach extends is the hard part. Ideally I'd like to get Gion up to speed and build colony ships out of there to settle our back lines, while Ursa's ships expand our frontiers, but that's looking several years into the future and the situation may well have changed by then -- especially if (when) we meet someone else down south.

Regarding Klystron, settling there was needed in order to open the gateway south, but we probably can't hold the planet against any meaningful attack -- we know there's Alkari in the neighborhood, and the planet is pretty exposed. We have two options: build factories extremely slowly, trying to improve production there somewhat at the risk of possibly giving up tech if the planet is captured with factories intact, or just take what we can get out of the planet without building factories -- i.e. put all production into RP. With any race other than Bulrathi, I'd say skip the factories, as I don't want to give up tech. With the Bulrathi, though, there's a good chance we could hold on to the planet long enough to force the Alkari to wipe out all the factories before they can successfully invade, assuming we can't chase them off before that happens. Still, if that were to happen before we can max out the planet and start getting some returns from all those factories, we'd have nothing to show for our (many) years of investment. Either way, the next player gets to decide which course to pursue.

Regarding manipulation, in XP, when I double-click on the BMP files that ScreenThief saves, it brings up a viewer. There's a "Save As" icon at the bottom (floppy disk), so I just save them as JPEG images. Then Paint has no trouble manipulating them.


Roster:
Zed-F
Kylearan
Ozymandous
Kabuki
JMB <-- UP
TBC <-- on deck
 
I've got the save and will play tonight.

I'll see what I can do wrt filling in our core-lands without giving up distant planets. WRT research, I think I prefer mostly static, but occasionally play with the sliders to get certain things more quickly.

JMB

I'll see what I can do wrt filling in our core-lands without giving up distant planets.
 
Hi,

in my solo games I tend to play with a rather static approach regarding the tech sliders, at least after the first two or three critical techs like new fuel cells have been prioritized. I tend to forget to change the sliders when playing alone, so the static approach is a must for me so that I don't have to realize I have no force field tech once the first war breaks out. :)

In an SG however I favor a more dynamic approach since this format lends itself better to micromanaging. But I have no idea how drastic the in-game penalties are for changing the tech spending in a given area (or how big the bonus is you receive for spending the same amount of RPs over a longer time), so that may influence my vote.

-Kylearan
 
Until the first war or potential conflicts loom I usually keep pumping Planetology and construction tech until at least the first few terraforming and waste reduction tech's.

I have no problem with static tech discoveries, but I'd rather get that +10,+20 or +30 pop boost, with less waste and lower factory cost in addition to warp 2+ engines, than I would worry about getting the second generation of shields or maybe gatling lasers when we're not fighting.

I usually leave 2-3 'clicks' in force fields, weapons and computers and concentrate on propulsion, planetology and construction until I have met a few of the above examples and then balance them out more, but can deal with having static discoveries, even if they won't help much at the time they are discovered.
 
Originally posted by Kylearan
In an SG however I favor a more dynamic approach since this format lends itself better to micromanaging. But I have no idea how drastic the in-game penalties are for changing the tech spending in a given area (or how big the bonus is you receive for spending the same amount of RPs over a longer time), so that may influence my vote.
Click to expand...

I have never tried to determine the exact figures, but my impression is there is no penalty for switching tech priorities unless you completely eliminate funding to a given area, other than that you will get less bonus research. However, I also have the impression that that bonus research is a significant factor.

I don't know if it works this way or not, but if I were designing MOO and I wanted to give out bonus research to counteract the usual "I research one thing at a time at 100% so I can get the benefits faster" paradigm, I'd design in diminishing returns on the bonus research. That way you'd get more total research done if you spread funding out relatively evenly rather than one big dollop in one field and small dollops everywhere else.
 
I generally use a static research model after the initial techs, but as we are in an SG I would love to go with a dynamic model.

The reason for the focus on computers was that it is our weakest area and needs the extra help and that good computer techs help us steal stuff later, and I love espionage. Improved Robit controls, too early is bad, but we need to know where they are in our tree. If IRC III isn't there we need to hunt for the next one up asap, not having III or IV and being able to time the switch could be very painful. Oh, and yes, I never would not have skipped barren if we hadn't had deuterium fuel cells, as even one extra planet could have jumped us into a cluster.

W.r.t. Gion, it can be ramped up completely as soon as Irma is can do 20rp without sacrificing too much factory production, or Gienah is in the same situation (far more cost-efficient). Ursa can afford to sit pumping ships for a good while, although another two turns on factories would allow it to finish its factories while building ships.

And Zed, thanks for the critique and the info on the images. I'll see if I can get some up a bit later.
 
0 - MM a few of the sliders. Most notably, it appears that Gion is already using its maximum number of factories (pop 48, factories 116), so I turn off factory production for a short while so that our population can catch up to our factory growth. This results in an additional 40 BC towards research.

1 - Our scout is forced away from Yarrow (another artifacts planet; it has been colonized by the Alkari) by Alkari fighters. Klystron is founded. I'll leave the decision as to whether Klystron should build factories for the team to make as it isn't an essential decision right now (I doubt we'll ever be able to get anything useful out of this planet other than population and range. In the even of a war with someone else, I would imagine that if they couldnt take the planet within a couple of ground assaults, they'd just raze it...)I like Kabuki's suggestion of colonizing the O80 next, so I relocate our ships to Klystron. I send 25 colonists from Imra (50 of 55) to Klystron with the intention of using the extra colonists to help settle the O80 once it comes online.

2 - Our scouts encounter the Alkari's at Incedius (T30 Hostile) and force them to retreat. Now that our colony ship has been completed and is on its way, I pause to max out Ursa's factories (it should take slightly over two turns).

3 - We find the Sakkra's. They are living on the yellow star inside the nebula. We need to begin filling in the planets to our NE... We explore another hostile tundra planet (Nitzer, size 40) in the far west. Not much else to do...

4 - Not much.

5 - Ursa has maxed out on factories. Nothing much else of note.

6 - Alkari's try to scout Iranha (the green star outside of the nebula in the NW). (Pause for copyright protection...). I try to decide where we should send our next colony ship. I think I am going to send it to the A70 poor planet in our core. My reasoning was as follows... We should be able to get the colony found and colonized rather quickly, allowing other planets to continue building up their populations. By the time our next colony ship is ready, we can send it to the O70 planet and seed its growth with the citizens of the Arid planet. Then our third colony ship can be sent to the T95 planet and the colonists from the A70 and O70 can enhance its growth. By this time, Gion should be able to produce colony ships at a decent rate. Gion has now grown enough that I shift to producing factories.

7 - Not much.

8 - At the yellow star in the center of the map, we encounter the Psilions and force them to retreat. The planet is a Fertile Arid planet (size 80; Esper). The red star to the East of the yellow star is a Hostile Barren planet (size 30). Well, now that there's a fertile planet, I think I will send our next colony ship out to get it. I also think that this is an important planet because it is so centrally located (which, I think, will important for contacting other races...) I ship another 18 million colonists to Klystron (from Imra).

9 - We build a colony on Helos. Our colony ship will reach Klystron in 4 turns; it should then be sent to Esper. 17 million colonists are shipped from Klystron to Helos.

10 - Not much. In the near future (but after we've begun to settle our core), I think we should send a colony ship to the M15 Rich planet south of Imra to open up more exploration options. Once the colonists from Imra arrive on Klystron, send them onto Helos, and then to Esper. The next colony ship produced (3 turns) should, imho, be sent to the mineral poor Arid planet in our core.

Here's the save: http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/RBOSG1_Team2_2350.zip

Zed-F <-- on deck
Kylearan
Ozymandous
Kabuki
JMB
TBC <-- UP

Have fun TBC! (Tasty Burnt Chicken) :)

JMB
 
Note that Jinga (Desert 45) is within range 5 of Yarrow, the Alkari artifact planet. We should try to grab that one soon before the Alkari get to it. There's also an Arid planet down there (Esper) that would be good to grab.

We can't grab Proteus (the minimal 15) yet as it's out of range. However, there is an Ultra-poor down there we could grab instead.

Gion is close to max factories. We could put Klystron on research to keep our investment going, get Gion maxed out, and build a couple colony ships there to fill out our back lines.
 
Zed,

I didn't notice that Jinga was within range of Yarrow... There is already a colony ship heading towards Esper, but it could be diverted towards Jinga instead if that is more desireable.

A question about using Klystron to fund our research... Seeings as Klystron produces to0 few BCs (due to being an ultra-poor planet), I don't think we'd be able to get more than 10 BCs out of it right now... Would it be better, once Gion maxes out (population and factories), to shift our research to Imra instead or perhaps the artifacts planet?

Also, by "Gion is close to max factories", do you mean that it has almost topped out (both pop and factory-wise) or do you mean that we should just produce colony ships from it while allowing the population to grow and then once we've completed a ship, build up the factories again. Rinse and repeat. If the latter, that I definitely messed up during my turns as I shifted Gion to research instead of having it produce colony ships when it had more factories than its population could use (and have since left it producing almost exactly the number of factories its population will be able to use next turn...). If so, the next leader should change this and shift our research over to Imra.

JMB
 
Re: Klystron -- Klystron can't handle all our research on its own in the long term or even intermediate term. What it can do is make a small contribution. That would be enough to keep our existing research investment from decaying, but not much more. This is just a stopgap measure, but expansion takes priority over research at this point in the game. At some point, Imra will reach the halfway point on factory development, and since we expect to continue to use it as a population source, Imra will then be able to contribute RP as well. We want to wait for Imra to be at half its max factories, though, so we can get the most use out of the planet that we can while it continues to act as a pop source. Moreover, there are a limited number of backyard colony ships we will need out of Gion before it too can go primarily on research. IIRC from my brief look at our artifacts planet, it is still on early days as far as development goes; I would like to see it max out its development before we go on research there, to get the most bang for our buck out of that planet. Unlike Imra, we won't want to be stripping it for population to use as colonists.

Gion is close to max both for population and for factories. I would build it up to max factories and simultaneously build up its population with a bit of ecology spending -- we can't really afford to send population back from anywhere else to Gion since that population is all needed for outward expansion. Since we are close to max on Gion, a couple turns of spending there to build pop should be affordable and better than waiting for it to grow naturally at the top end of the curve.
 
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