quote:
It's now a major problem for me since my planets have a 20% production penalty because of their low happiness levels. I also have no natural population growth so my homeworld populations are getting lower and lower... I'm going to have to start trading / stealing population from other empires soon.
Unless you have some way of boosting happiness and reproduction artificially, or you plan to continually steal population, I do _not_ recommend setting happines & env resistance to minimum levels.
I've started a 2000 point game where I took every one of the five, 1500 point racial tech areas
. I've had to set everything else to minimum levels, except for ship construction (100%), ship defence (125%) and mineral production (80%).
Currently, I have no planets with pop growth, but I've got 12 colonies in 4 systems, covering the center and top left corner of a medium sized map.
Basically, I've been trading everything. I sell ships for technology, then upgrade the ships I'm selling
I've bought organic, crystalline, temporal, and then created kick *** ships to sell to my AI friends for planets, population, tech etc