Galactic Leadership Style

[Atrocities]

Laid back and Friendly

When I play a Single Player game, I often like to play with a large Dense quadrant (Ala Fyron FQmod 2.0) with the best planet and player settings. I often start with low tech, and high cost. I like the 5k racial points, and often play a custom race which I save often to build up exp points.

My GLS is a moderate to conservative. I seldom explore rapidly, I like to keep my area of influence small and build up gradually. I dedicate to colonizing habitable planets within a five system or more radius around my home system as fast as I can. Each planet has a SY/RSB/Storage/Cargo/and at least 1 of each Mineral/Organic/Radioactive production facilities. The rest of the space is for Research facilities.

Each planet will have both defensive satellites, and weapon platforms.

I research physics first, then move onto other interesting things. I often research Gas/Ice around turn 50 or so after I have maxed out on DUC's and CM's. PD and PPB. Shields and armor are a must as well.

As the game progress, I often choose to be nice to my neighbors as I discover them. But if they turn out to be hostile, I expend all resources defeating them and blockading their Homeworld. I then force them to surrender.

Once I have established a strong resourced storage and production ability, I begin to concentrate upon exploration and conquest. By this time I would have researched fighters, mines, sat, troops, and ship construction to at least level 2 or 3 each.

I plant mines and sats at each WP that I want to control, and eventually have a few patrol ships there to mop up any ship that comes thru. I keep the sats and mines at maximum levels and as the WP becomes more and more contested, I deploy more and more ships to defend it.

One of the biggest flaws in SEIV is the diplomacy. Without warning, a Partnership Ally with a Brotherly standing declares war upon you. That I hate. From that point, that race will always be at war with you.

If Aaron fixes one thing for SEV, it must be diplomacy& politics.

I like to be friendly as long as I can toward the AI, but in the end, usually by turn 100, all things are bad.

Now when I play MP games, I play by differant tactics. Those are mine alone, and have served me well.

[Arkcon]

Likewise, I like to get resource extractors to level 3 fairly quickly, so I get plenty of resources from my few planets.

[Fyron]

Monoliths are a lot better for maximizing resource production.

[Phoenix-D]

Monoliths also are more expensive and take longer to build.

Plus until you have a functional converter, they're ussually overkill. Especially since if you have a planet that's, oh, 140/10/90, a mineral miner will get a lot more minerals than a monolith, and you don't need the extra rads or pitiful amount of organics that badly.

Phoenix-D

[Fyron]

Well... converters go hand-in-hand with Monoliths.

Mineral Miners can only make 100 more minerals than Monolith IIIs can.

[Phoenix-D]

"Mineral Miners can only make 100 more minerals than Monolith IIIs can."

Ah, but isn't that 100 times the empire bonus, times the bonus of the planet they are on?

Phoenix-D

[Slick]

Assuming no racial construction bonuses, Emergency Build, or population bonuses to construction (which would apply somewhat equally to either situation):

A Mineral Miner III costs 2500/0/0 and produces 1000/0/0, assuming 100%/100%/100%. Assuming a construction rate of 2000/2000/2000, it can be built in 2 turns. Assuming 100%/100%/100%, it will break even after the 3rd turn after it was built for a total of 5 turns to break even.

A Monolith III costs 10000/5000/5000 and produces 900/900/900 assuming 100%/100%/100%. Assuming a construction rate of 2000/2000/2000, it can be built in 5 turns. Assuming 100%/100%/100%, it will break even after the 12th turn after it was built for a total of 17 turns to break even.

Another negative to Monoliths is that in the time it takes to build 2, 5 Mineral Miners can be built, which pushes back the break even point much further when comparing.

A Resource Converter is more helpful to a Monolith, but will benefit the empire no matter what your facility structure is like.

Bottom line: If you need resources NOW, do not use Monoliths. However, if built on planets that have high resource percentages in 2 or 3 of the resources (when you have the time & resources) , in the long run they will outproduce individual resource facilities after a long break even time.

Slick.

[Instar]

For me I usually get a set of home sectors, get decent defense and get into the race for max tech really quickly (I usually get everything researched in a relatively short time) and then use max techs and massive fleets to attack and conquer the galaxy
Im usually weaker in the beginning, due to the excessive research planets. I usually build all mineral miners on a good planet, and I start building Monoliths on crappier planets, or when it doesnt matter anyhow (Im getting over 1million of each a turn sometimes, so I dont care, just as long they keep coming)

[Fyron]

17 turns is the short run. Think ahead. Monoliths, while taking a little longer to build, make 2700 resources! At 50% conVersion (level 1 converter), that translates to 900 + 1800/2 = 1800 minerals, as opposed to just 1000 from a Mineral Miner. And so what if it takes longer to build them? You should have tons of planets before even beginning to convert to a Monolithic economy, so you should have enough full planets to build ships on. As long as you are at peace, you can build Monoliths with no worries!

[couslee]

granted, i have not even got that far in my game yet, but isn't storage also going to be a factor? It don't matter if I am producing 1m organics a turn if my organics storage is maxed out. You can only keep what you can hold.