Conquered races - additional benefit: forced migrations and growing of planets

[God Emperor]

Havent seen this one mentioned before but am interested to know whether it is possible in the full game (waiting for my copy).

In my current game (small map), I havent founmd any planets larger than 10 facilities for me and am surrounded by five other players. I took out the Phong player on turn 33 (using transports equipped with satellites - he he he). Thought I would try and relocate his people to all my colonies which had his atmosphere (carbon dioxide)and move my people elsewhere.
All of my crappy colonies which had only 2, 3 or 4 space suddenly grew to 10,15 or 20. Six planets later, I had gained room for 80 research centres and will now be able to make a bid for no1 position (currently held by the Jraenar who were blessed by having dozens of large compatible planets).
Conquering another race has even more benefits than I thought.
Newbies, take note!!!
God I love this game! Cant wait for my full copy!!

[Instar]

Heh, I pointed this out a while back! Its on a couple strategy pages. When HB was up my strategy was there.

[jpinard]

I don't understand. Your old planets grew?

[Daynarr]

No, they didn't grew.
When you colonize a planet, the atmosphere determines if you will be able to use it to its full capacity or just 1/5 of it. When you start your race has only one breathable atmosphere (e.g. Oxygen). So you should look to colonize oxygen planets to use its max potential.

You can colonize other planets with different atmospheres, but they will be 'domed' (people will not live freely of the surface, but in small domed cities), and they will have only use 1/5 of planets full capacity.

When you conquer (not destroy) colonies of other empires, you will also conquer their population. Now, if that population breathes different atmosphere (e.g. Hydrogen) you can use that population to colonize worlds with Hydrogen atmosphere. After that these Hydrogen worlds will use its full capacity with conquered population just like Oxygen worlds use theirs with your population. This way you can increase the capacity of your colonies.

Of course, the maximum capacity of planet is also determined by its size. That can't be increased.

[God Emperor]

Daynarr's absolutely correct.
I got the idea from a trick I used to pull in MOO2 where I used to export captured Sakkrans around the galaxy (they had a subterranean trait that increased planet capacity. Caught a few of my friends out with it......

[MoonDragn]

I just got this game for christmas and so far I have been addicted. In my first game I started out with 1 planet, low tech, being used to strategy games like Masters of Orion I imediately started building tons of colonizers and expanded to every planet in my system, not just the ones my colony can breath. I had emergency build turned on and was building colonizers like crazy. By turn 20 or so I met a race 2 systems away. I took my fleet, a group of frigates, made one transport with small troops and went to his home planet, blew up the defenses and dropped a bunch of troops on his home planet. I then issued a message asking him to surrender and he did. So by turn 30 I had about 20 planets.
I started to build more colonizers from his home planet and thats when I found out the atmosphere/breathing thing for races(mind you I never read the instructions, I just jumped into the game). Its intresting in this first game, after a few hundred turns, I got a message that the sun in my home system was gonna explode... I tried like mad to research stellar manipulation thinking maybe I could do something to stop it. Well it was hopeless, I never got to the tech levels, the sun exploded along with my home planet and everything in the system... by this time I had about 5 systems with every planet in each system colonized. Looking back, had I been higher level in Stellar manipulation I wonder if I could have built a dyson sphere that could have stopped the star from exploding or would have still have gone?
Anyway I started another game, this time 1 planet, medium tech cause I was determined to get high enough in stellar manipulation to find out if I could have done anything to save my planet. I read some of the documentation, and this time I was in the middle of the quadrant, I rapidly pushed all the races back... after 3 or 4 days of no sleep I managed to conquer most of the quadrant. I captured one race of each atmosphere breathing type and have spread them accordingly to all my planets. I did not find any races that lived normally on zero atmosphere so those are the only planets that are small. This definately is a valid strategy for all of the games. It beats waiting to reseach those atmosphere improvers.
Even now, I got them research but whats the point when I can wipe out the rest of the universe with just 3 dreadnaughts?


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