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Originally posted by Shoujo:
Hello, I've been lurking since I got the game a few weeks ago, but seeing as though nobody has said anything about some questions I've had I finally decided to register...
Welcome to the Boards.
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1) Other than for role-playing purposes is there any point to getting Religious Tech or Emotionless?
The only useful component you get out of Religious tech seems to be the Talisman. That seems a bit costly for 1500 points 
Other techs get useful facilities and more components.
Why emotionless? (3000 POINTS!!!) I've only had people riot when there's a plague...
There's plenty of decent shrines for the religious trait. As rdouglass mentioned there's the nature shrine and fate shrines. The nature shrine is much cheaper than climate control and value improvement plants and you only need one per system rather than one on every planet. There's also the death and war shrines which can be useful for combat inside your systems.
Emotionless is pretty expensive, I personally would rather dump points into other things. But your population does get angry from other things like enemy ships in you systems, random events, and anarchy Groups.
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2) Any reason to use baseships?
They get the largest weapons mount possible, but get a 40% defense penalty, and are slo~w (even with sails).
It's pretty easy to turn a baseship into a roving force of destruction or a massive mobile factory for repairing and building ships and units supporting fleets deep behind enemy lines.
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3) Is it just me or is getting greater than 80% for organics and radioactives extraction a total waste?
Unless I'm building organics intensive facilities I never run out of these two resources.
I'm not sure I understand greater than 80% value is a waste? If you pick out planets with higher organics and radioactives values then you don't need as many farm and refining colonies. I've run out of organics before when I'm doing something like building 30 atmosphere converters simultaneously. Radioactives can be important depending on what weapons you put on your ships.
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4) Are storage colonies necessary?
I've seen people recommend these things, but I can't see the point... If a planet has low resource value it usually gets turned into a research or intel colony. My RTS mentality tells me that if I've got excess resources I should build a fleet and start declaring war...
Stored resources are good for using as gifts,trades, tributes. You also need them to upgrade ships and bases. Excess resourcess are also a nice thing to have if your like me and a have a shipyard on every colony, I find early on its easy to overextend my production if every colony is building something and send myself into negative mineral production.
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5) What weapons do people use after phased shields show up?
I've never managed to play a single game long enough (early-mid game is fun, but late-game just becomes tedious) for this to be a problem but just in case...
Personally after the phased polaron's lose their advanatages I swap back to anti-proton beams. Same weight, lower cost, similar damage, and longer range at the higher levels. Even when I'm using PPBs I usually have graviton hellbores and null space projectors as the "heavy" weapons on my capital ships. Sometimes I'll use quantam torps too since they have decent damage and are direct fire. Some of the improved AIs available for download will research phased shields pretty fast also.
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6) Any point to keeping Ground Combat above 50%?
Unless you're into capturing planets it seems incredibly useless. If it affected your ship-capture rate I may reconsider... Usually I just find blowing things up to be easier 
If I'm really lazy I just use Intel and Puppet Political Parties...
Right now if you don't use planetary captures it probably isn't much use to you. However, if Aaron or one of the modders ever gets the AI to start conducting planetary assaults on a regular basis... Plus it could be tough recapturing your own planets if they ever run a PPP on you or do you just intel those rebel colonies?
[This message has been edited by jc173 (edited 22 May 2001).]