Setting up production

[Bloog]

I'm unclear how to set up production. Minerals, population, production, manufacturing . I believe I messed up this game. But I have no idea how to avoid this next time.

Playing on easy. Human, non-senate, turn 200. Tech levels are about 30. I'm completely boxed in by guardians and want to break through them. To do so, I would deploy IF dreadnoughts: X-ray missiles (9 racks of 5), cloak, ECCM4 as weapon of choice. Hits for 12k per salvo.
Price : 180k for 10 .

Even worse, my core planets only have 1000 hammers. Argh !

I added the zipped save-game.
The supposed guardian hunters are named "Gu xxxxx" (3 ship classes for armada building). The two star lanes leading away from my empire are blocked by guardians.

Feel free to flame my game

 

[Lucky]

A few things:

1. You produce too much minerals! Change some of your mining DEAs on the bigger planets to Industry DEAs. (see 5.)

2. You spending for military production is VERY low. The planets that produce ships should have the Planet AI turned OFF and at least 30% to spend in the military production queue.

3. Your ship production is too high. Meaning that you don´t need to produce 10 ships at once if you want to assemble a fleet. You don´t need more than 40 IF ships against a guardian, produce them one by one or at max x5.

4. You don´t need that much PD ships if at all. And PD ships should definitely not be the biggest size you have. The biggest ships are you capital ships, LR and IFs. At least 2 levels smaller, so BC in your case, should be PD ships, they are only for support after all. And at least another 2 levels smaller are your recon ships.

And most importantly:

5. Learn to use the Development plans accordingly. All I see is mine, reseach and farming. No priority for industry at all. Then it´s no wonder you don´t have that many "hammers".

Setting primary, secondary and tertiary as the same point is not how it´s intended anyway. Also I don´t suggest using the SPECIALIZED tab in the empire screen. Use NATURAL, that will give you the best results unless you know what you are doing.

So, in order to get reasonable production times, do the following:

a. Switch off the Planet AI on the planets that produce ships!
b. Crank up the military queue slider for each producing planet to at least 30%!
c. Destroy some of your mining DEAs on those planets, change them to Industry instead, watch your ore requirements though!
d. Don´t build ships x10, especially not your biggest and newest ships, use many planets and build them one by one instead!
e. Don´t build DN PDs!

And for future games:

f. Use your Dev Plans better, try to cover every planet and every prioritization!
g. Watch your planets and micromanage DEAs if necessary!


Another thing is, why the heck do you have some fleets in the backwaters of your empire???
They just stand there and do nothing.
Use System Defense ships properly and keep your fleet concentrated on choke points. And better yet, don´t keep such a large standing fleet unless you plant to use them! Put them back in reserves where they cost less money. You can have them at every mobilization center anywhere in 1 turn!

That´s about all I could discover in 5 minutes.

 

[Bloog]

Thanks man. I'll put that to practice !