Strategic Help for a trapped newbie

[Spyder]

In your position I would immediately divert most of my research to planetary usage (atmosphere converters) and Stellar Manipulation (wormhole manipulators & some other cool stuff). I would also consider researching the third colonization tech.

This would get you the tools with which to expand in the systems you currently own, and, allow you to escape to other systems while leaving your protective black holes in front of your primary systems.

While you are doing this research, I would begin colonizing all the huge & large planets and prepare for the atmosphere converters. Keep trying to get a few ships through one of the black holes...eventually you'll get one through...and colonize something on the outside and begin expanding from there. One of the very first changes I make to my colony ships is when I get Light Cruiser I make a brand new colony ship out of a light cruiser. This gives me much more space for cargo (people) and gives my colonies a jump-start.

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Spyder, Chairman of the Arachnid Consortium

[This message has been edited by Spyder (edited 02 March 2001).]

[Taqwus]

Don't forget that you only need to send *one* armored ship through the FWP -- a repair ship. Let it accompany a horde of normal colony ships, and it'll repair the damage (albeit slowly; may take multiple turns depending on repair shipony ship ratio. So you could send more than one if desired).

Also, the SM tree gives you Monolith Facilities. *Very* expensive to build, but worth it in a long game because they're so much more space efficient. And when combined with value improvement plants and (1) resource converter, so much the better...


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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[raynor]

If you decide to build monolith facilities, you will get many, many more resources if you first fill the planet with level I or level II resource production facilities before you go back and start replacing them with Monolith III facilities.