[geoschmo]

Originally posted by trooper:
political savvy : totally useless, has to be set to the minimum.

Unless you are talking about a two player game I would have to strenously disagree with you here. T&R treaties with five other empires that are roughly the same size as yours effectivly doubles the economic output of yoru race. Dropping your savvy will put you in a serious hole against the other empires. However, in a small game where you aren't likely to make treaties, minimizing this is just fine.

Farming and refining aptitude : not critical ressources, must be low.

"Must be low", not at all. "Can be low", most definetly. It depends on your style. For myself I prefer dedicating all my early game colonies to research almost exclusivly. I have tried dropping my organic and radioactive numbers down and I consistantly end up running short in those resources at inoportune times. However, it is entirely possible to drop them and make up the difference by building some resource facs on your early colonies instead. So it's a matter of what you like I guess.

Repair aptitude : not many effects on the game, must be low.

You can usually offset lowering the repair apptitude by building repair bases. However this requires adjusting your research priorities to get repair. In a low tech start with one starting planet, this could be a problem. Again, it depends on the game and your style.

Intelligence, cunning, combat skills, maintenance : have bo be set to the maximum.

COmbat skills are and maintenance are a big plus as is intelligence. However setting all these to there maximums is going to cost more than you are going to get back from decreasing your other characteristics. If by maximum you mean as high as you can afford, then yes. Many people don't raise their intelligence, prefering instead to just build more research faciliites. Of course if you've already decreased your resource production that may not be an option for you.

Cunning is not one I would recomend increasing, unless your plan is to be a race that depends heavily on aggresive intel projects. And if you are, prepare to be disaponted. It's a lot easier to defend then attack with intel. You can make up the difference between you and the other guys by just building more intel faciliites. Some people suggest that cunning can be safely minimized. That's probably true, but you'd have to build even more facilities then. A more reasonable tactic I think is to just leave that one to it's default setting.

Geoschmo