I learnt that automated formers apparently don't do a terrible job, which was quite useful to know. Still, I'd like to be able to confidently manage my formers and know that I'm doing the right thing. ... Interestingly though I played a few turns of a game at the weekend and I placed a city near to a mineral resource, but my automated formers completely ignored it! Surely they would think that improving that tile would be a very high priority?
The AI is very dumb. Look at the automation tasks like "build road to..." or the combo tasks like "build farm, solar collector and road." Then you are saving yourself from having to give several separate commands (and sometimes you forget what you wanted later on). Warning: the automated formers can build roads through fungus before you have the ability to.
Also, I struggle to determine for myself when it is best to go farm+solar, farm+mine, or forest. I am sure this comes with experience though. I am thinking about immediate benefit in the early game.
It depends on what your base needs and what stage you are. Before resource restrictions are lifted, the best bets are improving bonus squares (because resource restriction doesn't apply to bonus) E.g. a mine and a road on a bonus mineral rocky square yields
7 minerals, which will turn the base into an early industrial power house.
Rivers are great because they add +1 energy to anything else.
Forests are great all around things because:
(1) they give you 1-2-1 (on a river 1-2-2, on a bonus square, 3-2-1, 1-4-1 or 1-2-3).
(2) they spread. Besides saving terraforming time, they will also take over fungus squares.
(3) they reduce ecodamage.
(4) they are boosted by the tree farm and hybrid forests facilities.
Generally, for a base to grow (especially if you are in an active expansion mode), you can only afford to have one square that is producing less than two nutrients. With nutrient restrictions, you can choose
(1) a rainy square (preferably rolling for 2-1-0)
(2) a moist square with a farm (if it is rolling, you get 2-1-0)
(3) a bonus nutrient square (if it is rolling, you get 2-1-0, 3-1-0, 4-1-0 and with farm, you can even have 5-1-0 -- rainy (2), bonus nutrient (2), farm (1))
Then you can add solar collectors to these nutrient producers. In the early game, nutrients and minerals are the most important. When you are producing as many minerals as you can without creating pollution, energy becomes more important.
Most experienced players consider farm+mine to be awful. Some experienced players doubt the wisdom of farm+solar collector. Everybody loves forests.
Also in that same post I learnt that you can spread out unit support costs by setting a unit's home city to somewhere else. I haven't yet done this though, it seems quite a chore for perhaps not a great deal of reward, after all, if I designate my higher production cities to be military cities, they can take the production hit whereas my economic cities cannot. Right?
You are overlooking the fact that each base gets a certain number of units that are support free. If you can support two free units per base (at +0 support) and one base has three units and the other base has only one unit, you can gain +1 mineral per turn by re-homing a unit from the first base at the second base.
Generally, I send a garrison unit with a new colony pod. When I establish a new base, I re-home the garrison unit at the new base. It is a slight chore but it becomes automatic.
Same thread post 6 made me appreciate the fight against the environment more, I never really considered that it is a significant part of the game just to survive in this alien environment.
This is especially true if you've chosen abundant native life in your setup. Darsan, one of the greatest modders ever, considers the native life to be the 8th faction. While it can be a challenge to survive, you can also exploit native life. If you attack a native life unit, you may capture it (if you have a planet rating > 0) and use it (it treats fungus like roads, it can heal fully in fungus, it attacks everything with psi combat, so it is a great equalizer against an advanced tech faction) and it has no support costs in fungus. And if you don't capture it, you can earn a lot of credits if you kill it. Plus your unit may gain morale.
One favorite tactic is to send obsolete units into the fungus to troll for mind worms. It is a win-win. Either you get energy credits or you get rid of a support drain. The lucky elite survivors are then upgraded and used against your enemies.
The same post also made me consider that building +50% economy buildings quite so frequently was probably a waste, in the early game at least (and so far I haven't ever gotten very far).
In the early game, I focus on more colony pods and more formers and the necessary units for garrisoning bases, exploring territory and attacking any neighbors. I will build recycling tanks (adds 1-1-1 and costs nothing) and recreation commons (suppresses two drones and costs one credit per turn upkeep) as needed.
Maniac, the second best modder ever, has made a persuasive argument that once you can build supply crawlers, that forest plus supply crawlers are more cost effective than building network nodes and energy banks.
Also I've discovered a few things that are positive by myself. For instance I like the diplomacy much more than in Civ4. I bought the comm. freq. for Yang and for a while didn't bother speaking to him. When I finally decided to have a chat he was angry with me as I predicted and made a tech demand. I refused and he pronounced vendetta upon me. This would never happen in Civ4. The lesson: diplomatic visits are often not worth embarking upon!
Diplomacy is much better developed. The ideology you've chosen is a great factor in which AI will work with you and which will fight you.
Keep reading those Vintage Club threads. And then post your questions here. Veterans like me, petek, Darsnan, and Maniac love helping people like you enjoy the game. (And there are a few newer people, like Russia4Life and Buster's Uncle that will share their opinions with you. And I've neglected to mention eclipse4449 and others.)
