Tips needed for playing Hive

[Xian]

Can someone please go over how to make a specialized base i.e. an energy park?

[CEO Aaron]

Well, when most folks talk about a _specialist_ base, they mean crawling nutrients to feed your citizens, who wind up being converted to scientists and thinkers and such. The advantage of such a ploy is that the specialist citizens do not contribute to your drone population, and the labs/psych/econ they generate is immune to waste due to bad efficiency ratings.

However, it sounds like you're asking how you create a Super Science City, or other energy-park fed dynamo. The process for this is fairly simple. You need a small army of formers and supply crawlers to start. Get yourself a wide open piece of land, and start planing solar collectors and eschelon mirrors, then start crawling the squares for energy. Obviously, the crawlers must be homed in your Super Science City for maximum benefit. To really get the best results, have the following wonders all built in your SSC:

Merchant Exchange: +1 energy per square counts for crawled squares too!

Longevity Vaccine: Not useful for more labs, but if you run Free Market, the +50% econ will net you a ton of cash.

Supercollider: +100% labs for this base. Duh.

Theory of Everything: See Supercollider.

Network Backbone: Still more labs, this time for Commerce and Network Nodes of every base on Planet.

Space Elevator: Doubles Energy Reserves at this base for HUGE cash!

With all of these projects built, and of course all the usual tech and econ base facilities, the energy you crawl will be multiplied many times.

[Flubber]

JUst one addition to CEO Aaron's very good explainantion of a SSC . . . I often like to make my SSC a port somewhere within my empire. While you cannot get as much energy per square from sea tiles as you can from land tiles ( with high altitude, echelons and solar collectors) you do get a great return on invested former time since all you need build are tidal harnesses.

[CEO Aaron]

Originally posted by Flubber
JUst one addition to CEO Aaron's very good explainantion of a SSC . . . I often like to make my SSC a port somewhere within my empire. While you cannot get as much energy per square from sea tiles as you can from land tiles ( with high altitude, echelons and solar collectors) you do get a great return on invested former time since all you need build are tidal harnesses.

A very good point, with the following caveat: Remember that while your former time will be shorter, tidal parks are much harder to defend than a land-based park, and your trawler fleet will cost considerably more minerals to deploy than a land-based fleet. Tidal parks do have other useful strategic advantages, however. Having a fleet of trawlers surrounding your coastline will make it very difficulty for invaders to approach undetected, especially if you spend the extra resources to equip them with deep radar.

Another energy harvesting option worth mentioning is, if you have easy access to the poles and a horde of formers, is to pokadot the polar caps with boreholes, and send crawlers to those. The boreholes are more expensive in terms of former time, but few players will be looking for them, allowing you to crawl them with relative impunity. The poles are often rife with rocky terrain, so I usually mine the alternating squares, and send off crawlers to harvest those minerals as well.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the PTS pod factory/ booming gambit for Yang.

It goes like this,

Ingredients - minimum of 2 crawlers
- 1 colony pod
- 2 unworked boreholes
- PTS special project

Directions:

Take colony pod and establish base near two unworked boreholes. Rehome crawlers to newly esablished base and set to convey mineral resources of borehole to new base. Set Base production to colony pods. A new colony pod should be produced every a minimum of every 2 turns.

Take colony pods and send them either to A) established bases and hit B to add a population point to the target base or B) send them out for further new base sites.

On turn 5 or 6, ie. the third colony pod you be asked if you want to disband the base. Do so. Take new colony pod and repeat the process. Rehome crawlers, reset productions to colony pods etc.

Rinse and repeat.

If you choose A) choose to establsih a SSC and use new population points to fuel specialists. Note by adding population points in this matter one does not need consider hab complexes or hab domes to achieve large populations. Also note: amount of useful specialists (i.e. specialists whose main function is to NOT reduce drones in another words any specialist other than doctors, empaths, and transcendi) is capped. IIRC it can not be more than 18-20, any more than this and the specialists are doctors, empaths, or transcendi (if transcendi who cares as they are the best specialist anyway)

[Lazerus]

what about creating a man-made lake near the centre of your territory if theres already water there to have 1 base working the land squares for energy and a second science base trawling the seas ??
I suppose it would be harder work and prob not worth it in my opinion since just having the sea park near a base with a few good interceptors and then some needles for checking to see if theres any ships would be better. If the enemy wants to keep kamikazing ships to get rid of 1 trawler then he'd be losing far more minerals.
So would it be wise to have all my inner ring bases get enough nutrients to support them and switch all people to engineers or thinkers (would have to buy facs) and have all outer ring bases crawl minerals to keep expanding military wise ?

[Capt Dizle]

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the PTS pod factory/ booming gambit for Yang.

It goes like this,

Ingredients - minimum of 2 crawlers
- 1 colony pod
- 2 unworked boreholes
- PTS special project

Directions:

Take colony pod and establish base near two unworked boreholes. Rehome crawlers to newly esablished base and set to convey mineral resources of borehole to new base. Set Base production to colony pods. A new colony pod should be produced every a minimum of every 2 turns.

Take colony pods and send them either to A) established bases and hit B to add a population point to the target base or B) send them out for further new base sites.

On turn 5 or 6, ie. the third colony pod you be asked if you want to disband the base. Do so. Take new colony pod and repeat the process. Rehome crawlers, reset productions to colony pods etc.

Rinse and repeat.

If you choose A) choose to establsih a SSC and use new population points to fuel specialists. Note by adding population points in this matter one does not need consider hab complexes or hab domes to achieve large populations. Also note: amount of useful specialists (i.e. specialists whose main function is to NOT reduce drones in another words any specialist other than doctors, empaths, and transcendi) is capped. IIRC it can not be more than 18-20, any more than this and the specialists are doctors, empaths, or transcendi (if transcendi who cares as they are the best specialist anyway)

What a waste of borehole energy!
Find a mineral special on rocks and a nearby rocky square and use those instead. Thats 11 mins crawled to 12 but it won't really affect your production and its cheaper on former time.

And you are going to need to the former time to build condensers to feed all those specialists.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the PTS pod factory/ booming gambit for Yang.

While I did stress the PTS as a great project for Yang, you are correct in that I did not go on to explain this tactic. I have always liked it for founding new bases and continuing to sprawl. I may have to try it for pushing the hab limits.


RE sea parks


Since they can go anywhere there is shallow water, I will have the bulk of my trawlers in areas that are more "safe" suchas small seas bounded by land I control. Other than interior areas, I tend to spread the trawlers out to make plinking them more difficult. I will always have a goodly number sent out there specifically as sentries ( the offshore radar platform). When I am being very diligent I even go to each of them individually each turn so that they can do a little patrol before returning to a good (terraformed) tile. Sometimes I will use them as totally dispensible scouts-- when the information they can give me is more valuable than their mineral cost (I do prefer probeships for the scouting role but a trawler causes less offense)

I really like their role as sentries. In the Battle of the Manifold 7 game I established relative peace with a neighbor conditioned on the agreement that neither of us bring military within "striking distance" of the other. Our empires are are about 12-14 tiles apart across the ocean. I have placed numerous trawlers about 4-6 tiles off his coast as an early warning system. They don't gather huge resources there (2 food each IIRC) but they are support-free, are no threat to the other player and provide a great sensor net

[KrysiasKrusader]

Re: Re: Further Meditations on Yang as a Builder

Originally posted by Mongoose

I have NEVER seen any human player bribe a human controlled Hive to leave them alone.

I have not only seen this... But have done this... And not only with the Hive...

Prime reason being that you can't trust another human to take the bribe and leave.

No you can't. This is a major disadvantage of dealing with another human: He is ultimately trying to do the same thing as you are to him - win the game.

However, short to long term agreements can and are made. "Most" of the people that I have dealt with, have been honorable.

More likely, he takes the bribe and attacks you anyway, more vigorously than he might have done - thanks to the new tech and/or ec.

A delicate decision to make. Your reputation will precede you in future games (with the same opponents any way).

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by jimmytrick




What a waste of borehole energy!
Find a mineral special on rocks and a nearby rocky square and use those instead. Thats 11 mins crawled to 12 but it won't really affect your production and its cheaper on former time.

And you are going to need to the former time to build condensers to feed all those specialists.

Point taken.

I stand corrected. Aaah for the rocky min special!!!

But just rememebre the key is to make sure that said rocky roaded min special mine and rocky roaded mine are in close enough proximity to each other and to the colony pod factory base so they can be taken to base rehomed and then back onto the appropriate square when the base is respawned. (Or one could assist using a land transport I suppose)

[Lazerus]

I like the sound of that gonna have to try it once i've got a nice road link to the middle of nowhere or wherever those minerals are

[Lazerus]

About being bribed :
I've only played in 2 ip games and im still early on in the pbem so im not experienced in dealing with people yet but rather then military threats it seems to easiest way to extort other people is simply to let them bid for your vote in council elections. Since without luck i haven't been able to keep pace with the election count of a good Lal player yet (and im abit behind on tech so i can't bribe my own campaign) so if theres a tech rich morgan or zak whos trying to get it aswell then yangs large pop makes him a better choice to bribe then say deirdre (i remember getting something like 4-5 techs in total and if he wants continued support could always ask for a continuous flow )