4 questions

[Pocus]

Why some ships cant be put on sentry?

When a green/red planet is not the first (a moon), then you dont have a visible clue. Do you know how to circument the problem?

Is population really that important? You only get an handful of percent bonus when you add pop to a planet. Seems much effort for a poor bonus.

How do you filter/handle your ships so that you can play fast turns, but without forgetting important fleets?

[Fyron]

"Why some ships cant be put on sentry?"

Could you be more specific? That question can not be answered with any certainty. It might be that your ships are in a system with enemy ships in it. If so, you can not place them on sentry in sequential turn mode games because sentry is cleared when an enemy ship enters the system.

"When a green/red planet is not the first (a moon), then you dont have a visible clue. Do you know how to circument the problem?"

Click on the sector and look at the moon.

"Is population really that important? You only get an handful of percent bonus when you add pop to a planet. Seems much effort for a poor bonus. "

Yes, population is important. A 30% bonus to construction and production on _every_ planet in the empire is a huge bonus.

"How do you filter/handle your ships so that you can play fast turns, but without forgetting important fleets?"

Use the next fleet button to cycle through fleets. Fleet all ships that can be fleeted.

[Suicide Junkie]

If there is an enemy in the system, the sentry order would be cleared immediately...

If there is a little number to indicate moons, just click the sector with the planet/moon system.
In unmodded games, 99% of the time, the moon will be a vaccuum world. (none atmosphere)
You can usually tell what kind of atmosphere the planet is by it's colour.
Blue/green=oxy, Green/Brown = CO2, Red/Orange = H2, Purple/Blue = Methane, Grey = None

Population helps, but in the unmodded game is usually not critically important.

Fleets are one of the most useful tools. Also, find chokepoints, and plug up warppoints with stacks of ships. If you only have two or three systems the enemy can attack, and you aren't chasing down little intruders all the time, it is much easier.
Use waypoints to have ships built at your spaceyards automatically move to the front line resupply depots/staging area.

[Ragnarok]

Originally posted by Pocus:
Why some ships cant be put on sentry?

Are they low on supply? You cannot sentry ships if they are low.

When a green/red planet is not the first (a moon), then you dont have a visible clue. Do you know how to circument the problem?

I go to the Planets screen (F4) and select "Colonize/Breath" This will show you all the planets that you know of that are your atmosphere type and can breath. Is this what you mean?

Is population really that important? You only get an handful of percent bonus when you add pop to a planet. Seems much effort for a poor bonus.

Yes population is important, having those small percent bonus' can make a huge difference when playing a competitve game. Keep those levels as high as you can.

How do you filter/handle your ships so that you can play fast turns, but without forgetting important fleets?

Can't answer this one because I don't know how I do it, I just never do forget about the important fleets.

I hope those help.

edit: I knew I was going to be beat to it but I tried anyways.

[ April 29, 2003, 18:51: Message edited by: Ragnarok ]

[Pocus]

ok, thanks all, you're fast!

Sentry : Yes I believe it is a mix between ships in enemy system, or ships with low supply. In fact I would have liked a guard order, so I can filter rapidly all ships in guards when I open the ship list.

red/green star : the problem is I like to check on the map the nearest green planet available to a given colonizer. Sometime the planet is a moon, and I dont see her. Not a big problem, I also use the planets list.

But the bigger problem is that the RSY letters are hidden too when you have a colony which is a moon. That's a bit cumbersome. I then usually launch some mines, so I least I see my empire icon when I glance at a system, but still I would have liked to always have a visual clue on planets with RSY abilities.

Populations : Yes was speaking of solo play here. In MP, I remember my olde stars game when I always had huge cargo fleets to optimize my mineral distribution. Still thats certainly a design decision to have only a +100% bonus when your world is at 20 Billions pop compared to 1 Million ...

[Ed Kolis]

Mods such as P&N and Proportions attempt to make the difference in production rates between a 4000M homeworld and a 50M fledgling colony... mainly by cutting the fledgling colony production rates by about 90%

Slows down the game and makes population MUCH more important!