new SMAC player with questions

[CEO Aaron]

Okay. I just thought the hab limits were there as a cap to the size of your base, is all. I think of it like the population caps used in RTS games like Starcraft. If you want to produce more units, you need to build supply/housing for them. But to each their own.

I suppose some of my opinion is informed by my proclivities in base management. I prefer to have a large number of bases with parallel development, it makes managing them much simpler, and I've spouted at length as to the merits of many smaller bases over one huge one.

[Straybow]

Growth by food or pop boom is "free." Growth by adding pods is, in essence, building housing for the expanding population. It is odd in that you have to have another base build it for you.

[CEO Aaron]

So you've come up with a way to make a nutrient park instead of an energy park. Don't get PB'd.

[Darrell01]

One downside of this is the base you increase to size whatever cannot build colony pods. I guess it won't matter much if you have one or two bases crawling them out. It kinda makes sense though that there would be "Human Farms" of some sort in a future like SMAC. All of the humanity that is left is a rag tag band with documents, schematics and an ideal or two. Rebuilding the population would be one key for survival of humanity. That's kind of what a faction leader says when they value planned economics. The Colony Pods are converted into housing or whatever. That might be really easy with Industrial Grade NanoPaste.

[timsup2nothin]

I always start a 'human farm' base at the start of the game, usually right on or next to the first nut bonus I find. It produces a scout garrison and then an unbroken stream of colony pods for the duration. I try to put it on a coast so it can switch to sea pods when I run out of quality land. It leaves all the rest of my bases free to be productive while maintaining steady expansion. I find it a lot easier than keeping track of some sort of 'rotation' of pod production.