Building a Better Tomorrow, or Build Queues on Bigger Maps

[Fried-Psitalon]

Whether or not you begin your "build cycle" right at the beginning or later after your first massive expansion wave, sooner or later most of us turn the build queue on and start thinking about our long term building projects.

What I'm curious about is exactly what people build, and the order in which they build them. The focus here is on BIG maps- obviously, in smaller maps the situation is very different.

My typical planet development queue goes something likes this:

Planet Quality (Soil/Habitat Enrichment)- first to encourage greater population growth, better taxation, improve morale if I've 'overstuffed' a colony right off the bat. This also has the added bonus of allowing for more colony ships to move out if need be- say, you discover a group of habitables that you missed before.

Power Plants (Fusion/Anti Matter) - the second one depends on your research order, but at least the first. These before manufacturing centers in order to improve economy at the same time as manufacturing.

Manufacturing facilities. (Manufacturing center.)
Useful, minor hit to the economy, makes future improvements easier.

Banking facilities. (Banking center, economic exchange, stock market, etc.)
I want money generation ASAP. As we all know, the economics of this game can make or break you, so revenue is the first thing I'm going to direct my new high-end production facilites to produce.

Research facilities. (Research center, info net, neural net, research center 2, etc.)
If you have a thousand stone axes and the other guy has one machine gun, producing more axes won't help. Prior to morale/influence structures, I get these built. I just make sure to have the banking facilities first to PAY for these.

"This and that" facilities. (Medical Center, embassy, news network, and so on.)
Generally, I only build the "little bonus in several areas" structures on very nice planets. The upkeep on some of them isn't made up by the +economy on the weaker planet types, and the bonuses themselves aren't that significant- better to do the specialist structures first.

"Culture/morale only" facilities. (Cultural Exchange Center, Entertainment Network, etc.)
I'm a firm believer that you DO NOT need to build the morale structures if you properly manage your taxes and research the morale-builder techs early! I'm playing on Painful now and STILL don't see any need for it on gigantic maps. I also tend to avoid the culture-magnifying structures; I prefer to build starbase modules. No maintenance on those, while some of the cultural improvements are quite expensive to keep up. In extreme cases, I may build the culture-only improvements on border cities, but I certainly don't want that wasted upkeep in my center/rearward portions of my empire. Besides, if you colonize aggressively, the little cultural bonuses from the "This and that' buildings and your research/economic structures will give you a solid cultural backing anyhow. Cultural Exchange Center? No thanks.

There, simple enough. Please bear in mind that this is aimed at BIG maps- anything below medium (and probably medium included) is obviously going to be a different world. Please feel free to share your thoughts.

[Eric S]

I'm still on challenging, but I might move up soon, but I'll chip in my advice as well. Keep in mind, this is for my playing style, which means large maps, peaceful coexistence as long as it's allowed, heavy trading (trade routes and tech).

I agree with most of your analysis, especially the morale boosters, except for the Fusion power plants. If I've got both techs, I almost always go with Anti-Matter power plants instead. Larger manufacture bonus, smaller econ bonus, and a third the upkeep. Of course, they take more to build, so I move them down in priority. Fusion power plants are fine for bigger planets, where I'll use both, but on the smaller ones, the two extra BC/turn means that if the base econ isn't 40BC per turn, the extra 5% econ bonus over the AM power plant still isn't paying for itself, so the extra 5% manufacturing bonus of the AM power plant is pure gravy. Still, if I'm not funding to 100% capacity, I don't build either one, or the manufacturing center. Why build, and then pay for maintenence, on more capacity when I can't even finance all my existing capacity? On big planets, you can still come out ahead by getting free capacity (40% of capacity gained by improving is free if you fund the corresponding non-free capacity), but on smaller planets, the maintenenance fees will outweigh the small free capacity they gain.

I tend to do manufacturing center (if I'm already 100% funded) then the easy econ, then PQ, then the hard econ improvements. If the planet has a low class (anything below 16), I'll move the PQ improvements to the head of the list.

I'll usually take my 5 or so best planets and build all the starship quality/manufacturing boosters on them. Since I'm not a warmonger, 5 highend planets can usually spit out all the military I need. In fact, one is usually enough if I'm not at war, and I'll use the others to grab wonders/trade goods.

While you can go crazy with the larger planets, it pays to be frugal with the smaller planets. That 3BC/turn for a Fusion power plant is going to do a lot more good on a planet with a base econ of 50 and a base manufacturing of 60 than it will where the numbers are 3 and 5.