[Taqwus]

Hmmm. In the context of the demo and my warlike playing style, location and sheer quantity seem far, far more important than quality.

Basically I try to grow QUICKLY, the more worlds of any type, the better. I'll overrule the minister at times to colonize in specific systems in order to increase the effective range of my fleets, or to colonize multiple planets in a frontier system at once -- the latter is useful if they will have shipyards, since a fleet can be split up for refitting to decrease total time needed for repair work afterwards.

The demo's not long enough to really max out all my worlds or population -- at one extreme, I had 236 planets by 2407.1 or so, and only ~60 billion people,and that's with +20% pop growth (admittedly, Organic could boost this up a LOT methinks -- think 'replicant center'). Many of the newer worlds still had large build queues remaining.

IIRC, you get more production total from splitting your population into many worlds and building more facilities, than by waiting to max out a planet -- top pop bonus is something like +80% methinks, while with more worlds you can build more facilities in parallel. More planets of any kind also means more potential shipyards, which means more production of colony ships per turn. In the game aforementioned above, I still had something like 50 colony ships heading off to new worlds when the Last enemy surrendered, and more being built... That's not as feasible if you concentrate solely on building a smaller number of high-pop worlds unless you go with a large number of possibly costly shipyard bases, because you also have to be building a war fleet at the same time...



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-- The thing that goes bump in the night