Initial Colonizing

[tetleytea]

There is one catch to it: there's no nearby Minor Civ. That's starting to hurt in 1.0.4.

[jshelr]

Just reporting I've had good results colonizing 13-14 level planets that are close to the home planet. They upgrade decently. Close by might be more important than high level. Also, at lower difficulty anyway, you can sell tech to lagging civs and minor races at a pace that more or less pays your full research bill.

[LDiCesare]

I feel the map is a bit too random, so initial map layout makes initial colonizing a matter of luck. I don't like to restart or Ctrl-N, would hate to save and restart after knowing the map, so I'd like to be able to lower the randomness of the map.

[tetley]

I'm winning Crippling consistently now (1.04), and I think colonizing 13's is a bad idea. 14's, though, I've found are pretty good for farming population, to feed your transports. That way you can leave your real planets alone.

13's and 14's both are probably good for culture-flipping, though. You can develop to 15 and sell it a couple times, if you're pretty sure you can flip it back quickly. I've haven't found that incredibly profitable in 1.0.4--looks like if you have a starbase in the sector, maybe the AI won't want it at all.

On the other hand, colonizing 13's & 14's in your neighbors' star systems to culture flip them is good. The Genius/Incredible AI recognizes culture attacks with starbases, and will declare war on you. But if you take a planet first, maybe he won't; especially if you can flip the sector ownership.

Looks like the trick with selling a PQ15 planet, declaring war and invading, and stealing a tech still works. But you can't steal Battleship/Dreadnaught anymore in 1.0.4.

[jshelr]

I've found colonizing the sub-15 planets allows you to control population growth on your core planets and keeps approval rate over 50 without focusing so much on low taxes and "happiness" social improvements. As pointed out, you can then use the pop on the low rated planets as invasion forces later.

[tetleytea]

Yeah, the key to farming population on enhanced 14's is realizing there's a 200million/turn cap on population growth. (although with some of the later-game Pop+10 techs I question that) If you have 5 planets, you're never going to grow by more than 1 billion/turn no matter what you do. The 14's let you increase that, at an upfront cost.

[Zootx99]

I usually start the game, then just stare at the screen because I have no clue what to do..:-)

[Tacit_Exit]

Originally posted by Zootx99
I usually start the game, then just stare at the screen because I have no clue what to do..:-)

Thanks Zoot. You just made me spit coffee all over my monitor!