Colony in enemy territory

I just noticed something VERY nice. With cargo 1 you can load ten small mines plus 14 million population into your colony ship. When the colony plants the mines are in cargo. Launch some and the enemy gets blown up instead of glassing you the next turn. If this is a bug I sure hope it never gets fixed !!

[Dracus]

Any ship with cargo module can carry any type of cargo. When a colony ship is converted to a colony what ever cargo you have is moved to the planet. Now it gets tricky...If you carry more cargo on a colony ship then the planet can hold the weird things tend to happen. Sometimes you get errors as the game does not know what to do witht he extra cargo. Sometimes the ship will not colonize.

Another thing I just noticed. I can refit my small transports to minelayers 12 plus 2 cargo. So a minelayer counts as a cargo component. I suppose the same is true for satellite bays, but I do not use them anyway.

[dumbluck]

Fighter Bays, too.

Edit...

Oops. They still count as cargo, but a word of warning: The AI will not load fighters into fighter bays unless they are on carriers. Only carriers

[This message has been edited by dumbluck (edited 29 May 2001).]

Sending a colony ship alone into Rage territory is NOT a good idea. Lacking better tech (turn 8 low tech) I sent a small transport with 6 minelayes 2 cargo with it. Carries 42 small mines plus 15 and 4 population in the colony ship. Launches up to 12 per turn. Do not launch unless you have to because you will really need those mines when the colony plants.

Assuming you have plenty of minerals, then building a yard facility and six base yards puts you ahead on mine production within 24 turns, with a profit per turn of 30-10 mines with yard 1. You just need to have a starting stockpile big enough to withstand 3-4 mine sweeper attacks. Plus you can build ships really fast when the time comes....

While laboriously and very carefully replaying my first 30 turns, something occurred to me. I found a strategy that works in 255 system quadrants a dozen games ago, and stuck to it. I call it the blitz strategy. Basically, if you try to have a fleet and resource production at the same time which is sufficient to conquer all the AI, then your score will reach Mega Evil Empire long before you are really ready. So what I hit upon was not building the fleet until I had fully developed facilities on all the colonies the AI would tolerate - generally 39 or so. With 39 huge proper atmosphere you have about 22 x 39 = 860 facilities of which about 475 (200 resource, 225 research, 50 intelligence) can be production so the remaining 385 are x 40 storage. I split it 7 million minerals and 2.5 million each organics and radioactives. Some slots on each world are unused. Generally I exceed the quota in resources and start scrapping to build storage around turn 75-85 as I approach 500k score. By turn 120 I have done all the tech I need and my stockpile is ready, so I start a dreadnought in every yard, etc. See my posting in the strategy thread....

I feel like knocking myself in the head for being so stupid. It just never occured to me - as you approach 500k, running a surplus SCRAP the spaceport on one of your fully developed worlds and continue building facilities on the newer worlds. You can have 385/475 = 80% more production on the blitz turn simply by rebuilding the spaceports! After that you can get another 30% by building the robotoids. You still need some storage as a cushion, but nowhere in the range of millions.

The same applies to bases and ships if you learn the tech before your worlds are developed - mothball and reactivate at the blitz for a huge jump in score. Dominoe surrender may be an unfair strategy, but I like it. Let the least useful empire live while you colonize all planets in the quadrant to boost your racial score....

Something else occurred to me. I can get the tech for baseships by turn 40-50. So I will build a yard baseship for each of the uncolonized sphereworlds and load 100 population and remainder filled with mine layers and mines. The baseship parks and builds then mothballs a colony ship. Then it builds small base space yards, which in turn build more. When all the sphereworlds are ready, they plant on the same turn, and let the ax fall where it may. Unless a minesweep 100 comes along, the colony is safe. When plenty of mines are stored, switch production to WP. When near the blitz, build 300-450 Large troops. I should be able to blitz turn 120 as usual !

Also once the sphereworld yards are done, the baseship can shift to the nearest regular world and repeat the process with a seed population from the sphereworld....

[This message has been edited by LCC (edited 30 May 2001).]