Food Production Bonus Tiles

[Ganraeln]

I have to admit this game is pretty deep. I wish the wiki information had been included in the .pdf game manual though - I can understand the printing costs for the paper being cost ineffective, but it would have been nice to have the information about key game mechanics provided easily to the players (in a place that won't disappear from the internet in a few years).

Anyway, to the main point. Maintaining morale seems pretty critical in this game. From my research, it appears that the higher the planet's population, the exponentially more difficult it becomes to keep a decent morale rate. Since population is the key ingredient to generating tax income, this is a quandry. Once your population goes over 15 Billion, you're pushing a 50% morale hit, PLUS the 50% penalty on morale producing buildings and other morale bonuses. Ouch.

This tells me that on most planets, those that I don't want to have to dedicate tons of tiles to Morale buildings, I don't want my population to exceed 15B. One farm, and one farm only (and that, only on decent >10 PQ planets).

And such is the state of my current game (not much experience here, this is my first gigantic map after playing tiny to get my feet wet): Several of my planets have a food-boosting resource tile! What to do with these? If I build a farm there, once I research up to the highest food-producing technology (and DON'T tell me not to do that ever - if that's the case, why bother having the techs in the game?), I'm guaranteed to hit the 25 Billion population mark. ACK!!!

So, am I missing something here? Should I flat out ignore these tiles for farms, and just put some other building there, placing the farm in another tile? It almost seems as if the farming specials are useless, unless accompanied by an approval (morale) special on the same planet (and even then, it may not be worth it).

I'm looking for ANY reason to maintain a high population planet in this game. Tax is no good - tax is calculated on the square root of population, so economy-boosting buildings are better than morale-boosting buildings. Population generation for transports is no good - if growth is capped at 75 Million (not counting bonuses), then once you get to 2.5 Billion on a planet, your growth rate stagnates. So I'd rather take one transport each from 5-15 Billion planets, than try to maintain morale on a >25 Billion planet just so I can pump out transports there. Ugh.

What about influence? How is influence calculated in this game?

What do you guys do? How do you generally develop a PQ 4 planet? PQ 5? 6? and so on? And do you always, sometimes, or rarely place farms on farming specials?

Inquiring minds want to know.

[Daz]

I tend to specialize. I take the planet that has the best preconditions for farming and build farms and morale improving stuff. Economic capital also.

Small planets <8 become research planets or farming if they have that farming bonus tile.

If I have a farming bonus on a production tile I build a farm. Yes, I do have problems with morale, but in the later game there's a lot of imrovements and galactic wonders to deal with that.

And yes, I would also like to have some insight into the game mechanics.....

[V1m]

Food tiles

Well you don't HAVE to upgrade the farm on the bonus square - you can cancelt he upgrade manually.

You also don't HAVE to have morale at 100%. The major reason to do so is to increase your population growth....

[Jestre]

Another strategy is to use high pop planets as training grounds for troops. Just send all troop ships to the high pop planet(s) and load them up. I usually have one high pop planet every game and use it to populate my troop ships in this manner. You can keep the pop under control this way and always have a stockpile of troop ships built up for when you need them. Also when you capture a good planet you can move full troop ships onto the captured planet to build up its pop.

[Daz]

Originally posted by Jestre
Another strategy is to use high pop planets as training grounds for troops. Just send all troop ships to the high pop planet(s) and load them up. I usually have one high pop planet every game and use it to populate my troop ships in this manner. You can keep the pop under control this way and always have a stockpile of troop ships built up for when you need them. Also when you capture a good planet you can move full troop ships onto the captured planet to build up its pop.

Good one. But I tend to take troops from several planets cause they repopulate faster. If you just take 20b troops from one planet they will repopulate, like, never...

That reminds me of Aphrodisiac being a brilliant warmongering wonder...