02-23-2003, 05:05 PM
I used to go the tech route, but I now go the produciton/population route.
Unification, subter, -1 farming (unification has a bonus that complete negates that), +2 production, and depending on the other negatives I take, a large home world, or a rich homeworld. You can even get away with a +1 production because of the uni advantages.
You go for tech that makes you build faster, auto factories, robo miners, deep core miners, and the stuff that helps you research so you don't lag to far back, spying tech, and pollution control tech to help with the massive amounts of pollution that huge work force will make. You steal what you don't have, you use missle boats early since you ignore the computer tech until later. But when you can make a titan class ship when they are first available in like 10 turns when it takes other races 20-30, that is huge, you can swarm everything, you can take Orion with just some well designed cruisers and battleships (missle are pointless against it though) and the tech advantage that gives you is huge. But even tiny poor planets will have so much production that you can produce anything from anywhere. You make artificial planets and if you are willing to spend a little money (which you get tons of from all the trade goods you can make) early you can buy a couple of the production plants, and in about 20 turns have a fully functional, fully terraformed planet that can not start making you money or weapons and you only had to spend a couple of thousand from the treasury on some early building stuff.
It makes CPU's on impossible a joke to defeat as well. I don't bother to assimilate anyone since I can have my own people have the planet up and running after I have wiped them all out. If you go with warlord for the genetic mutation then you can huge huge huge fleets at the end of the game too. Of course you can often win with just battleship stage tech since you can just keep pumping out the ships and you always get Orion and nice armor first.
I have also seen that being repulsive against the CPU isn't that big of a deal since they seem more tolerant of you spying on them and having little skirmashes with them. It seems that if you had any treaty and you get caught spying you are attacked instantly, and I seem to get more random declarations made against me by races that I have a treaty with as well. Of course you do lose money and you do lose research points, especially the early ones, but I haven't had any real troubles because of that. It seems I get more megawealthy leaders if I am repulsive as well. I guess they are hiding from the tax collectors or something.
So, I guess with all the various replies there are several strats that can let you just munch the CPU if you want
Unification, subter, -1 farming (unification has a bonus that complete negates that), +2 production, and depending on the other negatives I take, a large home world, or a rich homeworld. You can even get away with a +1 production because of the uni advantages.
You go for tech that makes you build faster, auto factories, robo miners, deep core miners, and the stuff that helps you research so you don't lag to far back, spying tech, and pollution control tech to help with the massive amounts of pollution that huge work force will make. You steal what you don't have, you use missle boats early since you ignore the computer tech until later. But when you can make a titan class ship when they are first available in like 10 turns when it takes other races 20-30, that is huge, you can swarm everything, you can take Orion with just some well designed cruisers and battleships (missle are pointless against it though) and the tech advantage that gives you is huge. But even tiny poor planets will have so much production that you can produce anything from anywhere. You make artificial planets and if you are willing to spend a little money (which you get tons of from all the trade goods you can make) early you can buy a couple of the production plants, and in about 20 turns have a fully functional, fully terraformed planet that can not start making you money or weapons and you only had to spend a couple of thousand from the treasury on some early building stuff.
It makes CPU's on impossible a joke to defeat as well. I don't bother to assimilate anyone since I can have my own people have the planet up and running after I have wiped them all out. If you go with warlord for the genetic mutation then you can huge huge huge fleets at the end of the game too. Of course you can often win with just battleship stage tech since you can just keep pumping out the ships and you always get Orion and nice armor first.
I have also seen that being repulsive against the CPU isn't that big of a deal since they seem more tolerant of you spying on them and having little skirmashes with them. It seems that if you had any treaty and you get caught spying you are attacked instantly, and I seem to get more random declarations made against me by races that I have a treaty with as well. Of course you do lose money and you do lose research points, especially the early ones, but I haven't had any real troubles because of that. It seems I get more megawealthy leaders if I am repulsive as well. I guess they are hiding from the tax collectors or something.
So, I guess with all the various replies there are several strats that can let you just munch the CPU if you want
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It's all just zeroes and ones and duct tape in the end.
It's all just zeroes and ones and duct tape in the end.