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Jays Tutorials for Cluster wars - Roy Bean - 07-18-2013 And so, here we go. For Turn 1 After you've downloaded the central command, and are looking at the yellow screen immediately click on (upper right-hand), the help section > Website > Manual. This will open up to empyrean cluster wars manual, read the center column. After you've read that, look down a little farther, and click on Introduction ,then on Playing the Game ,read thru through these sections (lightly – you really no not need a deep understanding of anything yet). You can skip victory conditions for the moment, but it's basically to defeat everyone else. After reading this, you should look at Turn Sequence and Orders. Reading this will show you the order in which things happen and you will get a good sense of what things you can do. Trying to make sense of all this at this juncture is pointless, just remember where it is so that when you want to look something up, to understand it more fully or precisely, you can do so. Directly to the right and over a bit you will see the assembly chart, don't bother to open it yet. It just gives you more information about the items listed below it, such as what they are composed of and what they do. For the moment, just looking at the names of these items will give you an excellent idea of what they do. The details can be dealt with later. Below that you will see the population chart. This lists all of your minions. Let's take a moment to go over your population, because it is quite important and is the only irreplaceable item in the game. You will always want to try to grow your population, as it is the only limiting factor for production and development. Constructors-- as you begin to view all the different items in your possession, you will see they come in basically 2 categories, Those Requiring Assembly and, those that do not. Every item has a mass or a weight -- described as mass units. You can work any of these out under Units Characteristics Chart's at a later date. The point is you need constructors to assemble them or to disassemble them or to scrap them. One construction worker can assemble (ASM), 500 mass units. You will also see Police, and, Special Agents. These are used to keep your population in line. At the least, for the time being, it would be a good idea to keep the percentages/ratios the same you were started with. This goes for payment to any population also. You also see Professionals. These are the heart of your game, all factories, mines, research facilities, hyper engines transporters use them, thus, the more of them that you have, the better off you are. They increase a number of different ways, 5% graduate each year (four turns) from soldiers, and 5% graduate from the amount of trainees each turn. Trainees are drafted from your pool of unskilled, ideally you would like to draft almost 100% of your unskilled into trainees (however you have to leave some to make construction workers, or Police, etc.) Then you see Soldiers. These run some of your military equipment, but they can mostly be replaced by military robots, you will want the robots when you have a military presence, more on this later. You also see Unemployables, they just kind of stand there, taking up food & space, but they are very important since your unskilled population will increase, from them at a rate of about 5% per turn, also you will notice at some point that you have a birth rate and a death rate. Yearly (a game year is four turns). Your population is birthed as unemployables and your death rate applies across all forms of population (POP). Remember in the future to grow your population at every opportunity you get. You will understand these opportunities later on. I would say we now know enough for us to get started, by looking at some of our possessions and having them, explained to you, The easiest way out (now that you are in the manual) is to close everything and then reopen central command. The box in the upper left-hand corner should say CWT2, make sure that's the one that selected, then press the download turns button, and when the download box opens up click on download. The dialog box opens up, under:"files found find true " click okay. Follow directions until you are able to click on the open Empire button. Then do so. You should see four entities to the right. The numbered open colony is also your home colony. It is, as its name suggests, an open colony or city, this 1st one is also your home world and can have up to 250,000,000 people (25 happens to be the number of Hab Points that you are sitting on) each Hab-point can have up to 10,000,000 people. (Note when the habitability is exceeded the planetary death rate goes up.) Let's click on it and see what you have got inside. The colony display has a number of tabs. The 1st section, you should click on is Stats.Glance through this section, you will see the total population its birth rate, it's death rate, various different pay rates for different types of population, and all the different stats for your home colony, as the game progresses each turn, you probably want to take a quick look at some of these stats, but for the moment, just get an idea of what they are and where they are. After you've done that, let's take a quick look at your inventory, which can be seen under the inventory tab. This lists the stuff your colony has. Among the things you will see, are hyper engines, space drives, light structure, life support units, etc. these are the items you need to build spaceships. You also see factories, and automation, and mines. These are the building blocks of your economy. We will get back to this section later, when we want to get going and to get a few things done. The next section, you should take a look at is the manufacturing tab. Here you will see the amount of assembled factories you have, and what they are producing. What you see in the 3rd quarter now, these will come out next turn and become part of your inventory (these quantities of items, which are listed as finished have been added to this turns inventory). Next ,take a quick look at (click on) the activity Tab. Among other things, this will show you how many professionals you've used each turn, and how they were used. I’ll have more on this later. If you click on the system tab, also known as system data, you will see your colony number, any other colonies that happened to be at the same orbit. Such as, in this instance your orbiting colony, which is where you produce your light structural units, and any ships that happened to be in the same orbit as you, such as the 2 ships you have started with. This tab also shows what type of planet you are on and its habitability number if it has one. Now we going to discuss how to get you through turn one.(While you are learning the game and its hardware) Your economic advisers have suggested to you that you build your economy as fast as possible, so let’s take a look at some of the ways this can be accomplished. You’ll notice, when looking at your home colonies inventory, that you have 8,000,000 factories - 1, so it should be fairly obvious that you should assemble them, (we will go over how to execute and write the orders later). In central command you will find under the Ruler’s tools, a current technology status tab, this tab shows you both the highest technology level that you have in all of the game items, and also the highest levels that have been obtained by any other player’s (this would be under the column in the far right named Max (for maximum level thus far obtained by any player). You will also discover here (or in the unit characteristics chart) that a factory 1 will produce 20 times its tl in mass units. So,a factory 1 will use some combination of metals and nonmetals, (depending upon the item produced) to equal 20, and 8,000,000 factory ones will use the total of 160,000,000 metals / nonmetals per turn. Now when you look back in your inventory, you will see that you have over 2,000,000,000 metals and nonmetals, not to mention what you can mine . So the point of this is that you should use up your resources via production as rapidly as you can and as fast as you can replace them. Since you seem to have so much of them to start with,(later in the game, you would be using an excess of 1,000,000,000 units per turn) the fastest way for you to use them is not simply to assemble the factory -1’s, but to expend your research (you have 12,000,000 in storage) to go to a higher TL level of factories, and build them at that level. (Look up the EXP order in the manual.). When you do the math, you’ll see that the highest factory level that you could go to is TL 5, (and these factories once they have been built will produce 100 mass units per turn) this would use 10,000,000 of your 12,000,000 research points-- another option might be only to go to TL -4 this would use only 6,000,000, and would leave you another 6,000,000 to use for other things like increasing your life support levels ,or structural unit levels. It is key that you use the vast bulk of the factory -1’s to produce a higher level factory. The following is a typical concept of a very reasonable turn 1. This will be followed by Instructions on how to write orders using the central command order writer. Turn 1 concept: 1) Expend your research to go to factory tl level fives.( or 4’s) 2) Assemble, all of your automation 3.( Aut replaces Usk , 1,aut-3 replaces 9 Usk) 3) Assemble approximately 8,000,000 factory-1’s making factory -5’s 4) Draft as many trainees as you can, from your Usk pool.( until you build up sufficient supplies of automation you will need some to run your fct’s ,mines,& lab’s) {Fct’s & Mines both require 1 Pro & 3 Usk each to run them wile labs require 3 Pro’ & 1 Usk.} 5) Do a survey to see what type of mineral deposits you have on the ground. 6) Do an interior system probe to see what if anything is in the system with you and to see what type of planets are in your home system. 7) Do a distance system probe to see if any star systems are within the range that you can see (10 light years). If you are an inexperienced or new leader, following this scenario will provide you with at least an equal footing to any of the other players and will gradually familiarize you with the orders. (How to write or execute them follows next) 1) Click on the Cen Com2 icon. 2) In the upper right-hand corner you will see the select game name. Select CWT2. 3) Click on open the Empire. 4) At the top you will see Rulers Tools, when you click on this, choose the order writer. (The display is sizable,so size it to your liking.) 5) The upper left-hand corner you will see a dialog box with a arrow, when you click on the arrow it will show you a list of all the possible orders. The 1st order you are going to write is the expend order. EXP Scroll to and then click on the expend order. You will be asked if you are using prototypes, the answer is no. You will see you Colony number in the yellow box to your left use the cursor to click on your home colony number, back at the top of the display, you will see “enter amount”, write in its place 10,000,000-- the best way to do this is using the shorthand 1E7. Otherwise enter 10000000 do not use commas in the numbers. In the 3rd box at the top of the page, when you click on arrow, you will see select item and a list of items, select the item Factories. Click on the add box, and you will see your order as it is written. That should read C#,Expend,10,000,000,factories The # sign should be your colony number. Next turn, when the orders are processed you will have used 10,000,000 research points and you will see you now have factory 5 ability. Now do your next order. You should use the assembly order. ASM Again, pick your colony number in the box, then in the upper left (go to select order) and scroll down to assemble. Once assemble is in the box move over to amount ,enter 8e6, in the 3rd box labeled as select item, select Factories, when it asks if you are adding onto an existing group click no. The box with TL is highlighted, since the factors you are assembling are TL-1 level, type in 1. Next there is a dialog box under the item that you have picked –factories-this box is asking what the factories that you have assembled are going to build, pick factories, since that is indeed what we are about to build, next to it you will see aTL, replace it with the Tl of the factories that we are going to build, which is 5. Click on the add box to the center left, and then you will see the order as it is written. That should read C#, Assemble 8,000,000, factories – 1, factories – 5. The next order, you should write, will be to assemble, all of your automation – 3. As before, choose your home colony number, then you select the order assemble, under quantity mode, select ALL, this will enter the amount ALL in the enter amount dialog box. Then pick the item automation, then select it, once you’ve done this, the TL box will open, since you are assembling your automation – 3, enter the number 3. The next 3 orders will give you an idea of where you are, and what’s in the ground. Then add the order to order file by using the add button to the middle left. As before you will see the order appear in the center of the screen. This would be the point at which I should advise you that if you have miswritten or added an incorrect number somehow, you can highlight the order by clicking on it with your cursor, this will cause a series of buttons to become active in the top center of the screen, and you can click on the delete button, which will erase the highlighted order. Next in the order writer, select your home colony, in the select order box, pick Survey\Sur. If you don’t want to scroll all the way down, just enter the letter S and the list of possible orders that start with the letter S will come Up. Then hit the add button, and you will see the order C#,Survey, planet. Next Turn, when you are looking at your home colony, you will see the results of the survey in the system data Tab. The next 2 orders are the PRB, or probe orders. In order writer, pick your home colony #, in the Select order dialog box select probe\Prb, and in the clear dialog box to your right, click on the arrow and you will see “system” and “orbit”. For the 1st of these 2 orders pick system, when you have done that, a small box will open, this is the distance box, the maximum distance that you can probe your assembled sensor ones, is a maximum distance of 10, so enter 10. Then hit the add button. You should see the order appear C#, probe, system 10. Next turn, Under “rulers Tools”. You can pick the space navigator, and you will see the coordinates for all the star systems, within 10 light years of you. Now repeat this process, only this time instead of system you will select orbit. This will open to boxes to your left. A and Orbit,--Select All ( as opposed to A,or B etc. and in the Orbit dialog box also pick All. Next turn, after the orders have been processed, and you are looking at your home colony, pick the system data tab and you will see what is in each of your home system’s orbits. The final order, for this turn would be the draft order DRF. You should look up the draft order later, but here is how you write the proper order for this turn. From the “select order” dialog box pick draft, use your home colony #. As for the amount, you should be drafting FROM all of your free unskilled (or I should say unused). If you do the calculations, this will come up to a number somewhat over 48,000,000, Or for simplicity sake, you can just pick 48e6. In the 3rd dialog box on top when you click on the arrow, you will see a list of population, which you can draft, select trainees. In the “Race” box, pick whatever your race number is. Your race number is the number that follows your population type. Such as professionals – 1, or professionals – 21 - your number will fall within this range. Your final set of orders will be to have your home colony pick up (PUP) all your light structural units – 2, from your orbiting colony, and then to transfer (TRF) from your home world, the amount of metals and nonmetals that you have used in your orbiter, to your orbiter. You should be able, by now to figure out how to write these orders on your own, but if you fail for some reason, it is of no great importance. Next turn we will double the size of your orbiting colony, build ships and begin exploration. RE: Jays Tutorials for Cluster Wars Turn 2 - Roy Bean - 07-20-2013 Turn #2 basic concepts. Advise from your economic counselors. Continue to assemble all of your newly produced automation-3. Continue to draft all of your free of your free unskilled laborers into trainees. Pick up all of your light structural units-2 from your orbiting colony. Transfer 1e6 metals& nonmetals to your OBC. (Look at how Transfer & Pickup orders work) Assemble all two million of your remaining laboratories-1. Assemble all of your newly produced factories-1, (500,000) producing such useful items as hyper engines – 2, space drives – 2, structural units-2, Sensors -1 or-2, robot probes-1 Double the size of your orbiting colony. Address the shortage of food that is occurring, ( your population is eating 1/4 of 1 food per Pop per turn)—look up food requirements—and you should be out of food this turn. Assemble 1,250,000 Farm-1’s. You could also use the Ration order to reduce the amount of food that they eat, however this would start producing “Rebels”. You could get away with this for a few turns, but it would be problematical. If you want to accomplish all of the above will need to shut down some, or all, of your mines – 1, since you otherwise won’t have enough free professionals. When you look at your open colony, go to the Stats tab, and see how many professionals you have, and how many are being employed. I believe you will see about 5,000,000 free professionals, you will need 6,000,000 in order to run the 2,000,000 laboratories – 1, and another 500,000 in order to run the newly produced 500,000 factories – 1, and more to run the farms you need to assemble. Advice from your Military Counselors. Carefully examine at the results of your system probe, (This will be under “System Data” in your home colony) Perform a probe of your system again. Perform a survey of your home world again. (Next turn we will add these to standing orders, so that we don’t have to write them each turn). Perform an intensive probe of any objects or ship, or colonies you see in your home system. --- What is that in orbit 1???—Maybe we can capture it Build and move ships to explore and survey the 9 other planets that you see in your home system. (Surveys occur after moves) (You will be using the “Designer” -in “Rulers Tools” to help accomplish this task). Build ships, and jump them, to explore any stars that have been revealed to you, by your system -10, probe. (Since both system probes and distance probes occur after jumps are made, you will write these probe orders for all the ships jumping). You can find the star systems that have been revealed to you by your system 10 probe last turn by using the Space Navigator (found under “rulers tools”). Hyper engines can travel or jump the distance of 3+ the square root of their TL. Your hyper engines – 2 can therefore jump a distance of 4.41. Assemble about 50,000 factories building robot probes – 1. You will find these very useful in the near future. Rpv-1 can perform surveys and you can launch them from a ship, (or a colony). That means if you had them in your home colony now you wouldn’t have to build 9 ships to go out and perform the surveys you could just launch 9 robot probes.-- Just imagine how useful these would be if you jumped into a star system that had 20 or 30 planets. Now let’s take a look and see how you can use the order writer to accomplish these tasks. As for writing assembly, transfer, and pick up orders your experience from last turn should be sufficient for you to easily accomplish these tasks. A new order that you not familiar with would be the mine change order MCH, this order will let you move mines from one group to another , and or to shut down or start up mine groups. If you would want to shut down for instance 3 of your existing mine groups,(presently each mine group has 500,000 mine-1’s on each of them, but each group can hold up to 1,000,000 on any single a deposit.) You would have to use this order Here is how we would write the order. Using the order writer select MCH. At this point I would like to let you know that you don’t have to scroll down all the orders until you reach the M’s, you can just hit the letter M on your keyboard, and it will scroll automatically to the M’s. Once MCH is in the dialog box, and you select a colony (that would be your home colony of course) 2 other small dialog boxes will open up. One will contain the group numbers (this shows that the mines on existing groups in your colonies)-on your home world, as on all planets, you are capable of having up to 20 groups,-- . The 2nd box will show the deposit numbers, and will also show start up, and shut down. For this exercise, I would suggest you write 3 separate orders, and shut down deposits 4 , 5 and 6. This will free up 1,500,000 professionals, and that along with the 5,000,000 that you already have free will enable you to assemble and run your 2,000,000 labs, and 500,000 factories – 1,however you probably need to shut them all down,to allow for the additional farms you need to assemble this turn. During the next 2 turns, when you have more professionals available,- because of trainees-, you will be able to start up the mines that you have shutdown, and perhaps to assemble some more upon the deposits. Now let’s take a look at the designer and see how we can use it to easily double the size of your orbiting colony. Under “rulers tools”, let’s select the designer. Now that the designer is open, on the top bar select Design Types. This will bring up the menu, on the menu pick orbiting colonies. Once you have selected orbiting colonies, the Use Colony button will become active, press it. Just below it and slightly to the right a dialog box will be open, with it you will see a list of all the orbiting colonies that you own. Presently, this list will consist solely of the one orbiting colony that you own. When you press it a copy of all the items in the orbiting colony will now list on the left. Structural units – 1 should be the 3rd one down. (By the way, if you were using an existing design to build a ship, the structural units would correctly be the 1st item on the list), you will need to move structural units to the top of the list, you can do this by moving the cursor to the structural units. Click on it, and 4 buttons will light up to the right. Now click on the “Top” button, and that will move your structural units – one to the top of the list. The reason that this is important is that when designing a ship, or a colony, the 1st item must be structural units in order to house the remaining items when we either setup or add-on the design.. You now have an exact copy of your original orbiting colony, but let’s make another change before you use this design. 2nd from the bottom of the list is structural units-2, since this is an exact copy of your existing orbiter, these represent the 25,000,000 units that you have just produced and are in cargo, you won’t want to add them onto your existing orbiter, so move the cursor to them, click on them, and once they are highlighted move to the top bar and press clear. They should disappear. Now moved to the top and click the Name button, once the dialog box appears, name this “old orbiter” then click on the save button, and this will save your design. Next turn we will learn more of the functions of the designer when we double the size of the orbiter once again and also modernize it, but for now this is sufficient. Once you hit the save button, exit the designer answering yes to all the save questions. Now open the order writer, choose add on from the order list (AddOn\ADN) click on colony from the actor side, moved the cursor and highlight your home colony, left click on it, then on the right-hand side, activate the colony button, and a list of all the colonies, which you can “add on”to, or transfer to, or pickup from will appear. This list, of course will be the sole other colony, which exists next your home world colony, and that is your present orbiter. Highlight it with the cursor and left click. Now moved to the top, and from the item list scroll to the bottom and you will see a list of available designs that you have saved, the design that you have named old orbiter should be there. Highlight it with the cursor, move the cursor to the add button on the far left, and press it. You should see your home colony writing the list of orders that will add each item on to your orbiter. Next turn you will see that you have successfully doubled the size of your orbiter. Incidentally on this list you will see that you have added on both unemployable’s and unskilled to orbiter, you don’t really need to do this. So as a side exercise, although this is not necessary, the order writer has a delete button, you can move the cursor and highlight, individually, the lines that contain these items, then, hit the delete button and they will disappear. Now let’s look at how we can build some ships. Will go through basically the same process with the designer only this time we will select ships instead of orbiting colonies. To briefly repeat, go to rulers tools, then designer, then design types, menu opens, select ship, pick one of your existing to ships, once your list of items appears to the left move your light structural units-1 to the top of the list. The one other change you want to make here will use the edit function of the designer. Move your cursor to the item sensors – 2 click on it you will see to your right 3 dialog boxes. The 1st one should say sensors, leave this one alone. The next one is the TL box, and it should be the number 2 representing the TL of your sensor. Let’s change this to 1. (By highlighting the number 2 and changing it with your keyboard to the number 1)The 3rd box is the quantity of sensors, let’s change this to 11. Now hit the change button and you will see that you have changed your sensor level from 2 to 1 and your quantity of sensors from 6 to 11. You have enough items in storage in your main colony to make exactly 10 duplicates of the ship. Now, Name your design, for instance, let’s name it “Round 1”and then save it. Now we will see how we can we produce 10 copies of the ship. Go to rulers tools, from the list, pick temporary ship control. The temporary ship control ID box should open up.(Each new turn will have to remove previous temporary IDs that we have set up on the prior turn, but in this case there should be none to remove.) Choose creator type, which in this case will be your home colony, so pick colonies, in the box below the current turn number, enter your home colony number, and then in the number of temporary ship IDs that we wish to create box, which in this case is 10, and enter that number. Then click on the ad IDs box and you should see a list of temporary IDs in this case numbered 1 through 10. Now exit by clicking the X on the temporary ship ID control box. Now we have 10 temporary identification numbers that we can use to add our ship designs onto. (Next turn the computer will give them their own individual numbers, which will last them for the rest of the game, or until they are destroyed or junked. Now go to “rulers tools’”, pick order writer, pick add-on from the 1st dialog box, click on colony from the actor list, up comes the list of all your existing colonies, highlight your home world click on it, and on the far right side (which is the target list) click on temporary ship’s, and up comes a list of the temporary IDs that you have created this turn. In this case they should be 1 through 10. Click on the “Ranged” box, once it was checked, we are allowed to write orders to a whole range of ships, again in this case, 1 through 10. Use the cursor to highlight ships 1 through 10. Then pick on the “Add on” order from the upper left-hand box, once that has been selected, under the item list, scroll to the bottom and pick your ship designs named “Round 1” (the quantity dialog box by the way, should have in it the number 1 since we are adding on one copy of this design to each of the temporary ship IDs-- we could make a ship twice as big or 3 times as big. By adding on 2 copies or 3 copies.— Now hit the “Add” button, and that of the orders will be written. Now we have to do something with our ships, let’s move 9 of our 10 ships to our unexplored inner orbits. Here is how we do this. From the order writer pick the move command (upper left-hand box) and 3 boxes will opened. The system box, which is A through D, in this case our only choices is A(since we only have one start in our current system) and the orbit box which will contain the numbers 1 through 11, pick the number 1. The distance box will also open pick the distance named close. From the actor list highlight temporary ship’s, and up comes available temporary ships, which in this case is 1 through 10. Pick ship number 1, that the Add button, and you should see the order written T1,Move,A1,Close . Repeat with each following shipT2,T3, etc. until you have sent one to each of the 9 vacant orbits.(You do not need to send a ship to the orbit in which you reside since you can already see and survey what is there). * if you send out ships with no food on them the pop will die over about 4 turns, but this would still enable you to conduct some much needed exploration ,and even to return them from the inner orbits and save them. This should leave you with 3 free ships. (The one temporary, which you have not used, and the 2 ships you have started the game with). Let’s begin to explore outer space with them. Under rulers tools select interstellar navigator, when this opens up look in the select systems box, up will come a list of all the systems that had been revealed to you by last turn’s system 10 probe. In this case will be using our at home system, which is 0, 0, 0. Highlight it then in the choose system box press that button and that will bring the highlighted system into that box again in this case it would be 0, 0, 0. Then in the enter distance box, enter the number 99, this will show us all systems, within 99 light years, once we click report, however, since we have only probed and were able to only probe to a distance of 10, we should see all the systems, within 10 light years. We see lots of stars for us to try to explore. Go back to the distance box and this time, enter the number 4.41, since this is how far hyper engines – 2 can carry us. Click report, and you should see the number of systems that are within range. This number can be as low as 1 or as high as 6. We have 3 ships available, so let’s jump them out and begin exploration. Go to the order writer, pick the order jump, under the actor list, click on ship, you should see your 2 available ships. Highlight the 1st ship, under the distance box pick close, an under this star list, find the coordinates of the nearest system (revealed to you by the space navigator) highlight it, and hit the add button. You should see the jump order for that ship written. Repeat with the 2nd ship to the 2nd nearest system, and then what your last ship, which is a temporary ship,-so you have to hit the temporary ship button ,then, jump it out to the 3rd remaining system.(This of course supposes that you had 3 systems, within 4.41 light years. For each of the ships make sure you write the order which will have the ship probe the system in which it arrives. At this point, let me remind you that there are 3 types of probe orders. 1) A ship or a colony can probe, system-this order will let you probe up to the distance of your highest TL, So a ship with a sensor 10 can probe 10 distance units, but any ship or colony can always probe up to 10 distance units as long as it has at least 10 sensor ones, or the equivalent or greater (such as 2 sensor fives, or 6 sensor twos). 2) A ship or a colony, can probe orbits. 3) A ship or a colony can probe other ships or colonies-- have your home world probe of all the colonies it can see. RE: Jays Tutorials for Cluster Wars Turn 3 - Roy Bean - 07-20-2013 Turn #3 basic concepts. Advise from your economic counselors. Continue to assemble all of your newly produced automation-3. Continue to draft all of your free unskilled laborers into trainees. Pick up all of your light structural units-2 from your orbiting colony. Assemble all of your newly produced factories-1, producing such useful items as hyper engines – 2, space drives – 2, structural units-2, Sensors -1 or-2, robot probes-1. Once again, Double the size of your orbiting colony, -from 200K fct-1 to 400K- However this time we suggest using the more modern, Lfs-2, Lstu-1, and Aut-3. (We will upgrade our saved design of our original orbiter) Don’t be hasty expending your research, it is very important that we save it and go to a higher level of laboratories in 2or3 turns, when our high-tech factories come into play. Our Min-1’s are really not very useful, and should be scrapped in the near future, However, until we have need our professionals for some other purpose, (like running, our factory – 5’s that’ll come out in 2 turns, or our higher-level laboratories that we will begin to manufacture in two turns, and will appear in 6 turns) we might as well use as them to run as many mine – 1’s as we can. So, figure out how many free professionals we have and use them to start up as many of your min-1’s as you can.—MCH- Startup order. We have noticed that our population is using up more consumer goods per turn than we are currently producing. We will be able to easily address this once we have more high-level factories produced.--If we try to solve this problem with our factory-1’s we will undoubtedly industrialize our planet much too slowly-- In the meantime consider lowering our pay rates slightly. (Using the Pay order). Hopefully all of our food shortage concerns have been addressed, if not, make sure that we attend to that. Advice from your Military Counselors. Carefully examine at the results of your system orbit probes, (This will be under “System Data” in your home colony) Perform an orbit probe of your home system again. Perform a survey of your home world again. -- (add these to standing orders, so that we don’t have to write them each turn). We should try to invade and capture the alien ruins colony in orbit 1, maybe we can pick up some useful artifacts. It might be a good idea to build a backup ship and send it with more invasion equipment , however we can do that next turn, after we see the results of this turns invasion.( so that we would know exactly what to send, if we were not successful on the 1st try). Evaluate the results of the intensive probe we did last turn. Use the ships that you have built, (and moved), to and survey the 9 other planets that you see in your home system. (Surveys occur before Moves, so you need to be over the planet and closed to 0/0/0 to perform a survey using transports) Robot Probes -1 will come in very handy for this in the future. Build more ships, (re design them), and jump them, to explore any stars that have been revealed to you, by your system -10, probe. You should see (or be at) as few as 1 or as many as 6 star systems, within range of your hyper engines – 2 (4.41 light-years). Probe both systems and distance as best you can (since your ships have a limited number of sensors, it may take more than one turn to complete this in some cases) Keep on mapping and exploring, and therefore expanding your horizons. If you have arrived at, or are planning to arrive at, nearby star systems, use the Space Navigator, to see what systems are in jumping range from them, and send out more ships accordingly. -- Remember that if you had 11 sensor-1 or equivalents, on a single ship that arrived in a binary star system it would take several turns to probe both the A and B system, and then to do a distance 10 probe. (Since both system probes and distance probes occur after jumps are made, you can write these probe orders for all the ships currently moving jumping).—{ These orders work from a stationary ship as well. However, you always get the results from wherever the ship is at the end of the processed turn} Assemble another 50,000 factories building robot probes – 1. Assemble more factories making Sen-1 or 2. Let’s see how you can use the order writer to accomplish these tasks. We will deal with the simplest problem 1st, which is solving our consumer goods shortage. In the order writer, choose the order” Pay” in the upper left-hand dialog box, then use your home colony, as the actor. You should see 2 more dialog boxes open up, one of which is labeled enter, and the one on the far right has the different types of population in it, and also the selection for all. Pay order can work in 2 different ways. 1st, you can select a type of population, for instance, professionals. Professionals are currently being paid .375. You can lower this amount to .3 for instance, by entering .3 in the dialog box. Then hit the add button. And you should see the order written (Colony ) #,Pay,.3,Professionals. Repeat the process for soldiers and for unskilled, loading them respectively from .25, and from .125 to .2 and to .1.---. Please notice that we have kept the ratios in proportion as you should. (Remember to use the decimal points.). There is a 2nd way that you can use the pay order to reduce pay. And that is by choosing ALL, instead of a particular population type. The number that you place in the entry box in this case represents a percentage of the prior pay. This means that if you entered the whole number 80, you would be paying all types of population, 80% of what they were previously been paid. The order would appear Colony #, Pay, 80, All. This is the preferred method of reducing pay since you only have to write 1 order (instead of 3—one for each types of population) Remember, that by lowering your pay rates, you will begin to get rebels, and then you will need police and special agents to deal with them. Now let’s take a look at the designer and see how we can use it to easily once again double the size of your orbiting colony. Under “Rulers Tools”, let’s select the designer. Now that the designer is open, on the top bar select Design Types. This will bring up the menu, on the menu pick orbiting colonies. Once you have selected orbiting colonies, the instead of using the “Use Colony “button like we did last turn, choose and bring down the menu from the “Select Design” dialog box to your far right. (Make sure the designer is expanded large enough so that you can see this box) Once you have done that, you will see a list of all the orbiting colonies designs that you own. Presently, this list should consist of the one orbiting colony design that you own, which you named and saved last turn –“old orbiter” When you select it a copy of all the items in the orbiting colony will now list on the left. Structural – 1 should be the top. +++ Always make sure your light structure is on top if it is not, make it so+++ Let’s make a few modernizing changes before you use this design. First before we make any changes, let’s consider a few things. We can always make changes and the save them with the design, however generally when we are using an existing design we will very often want to keep the old design too, (not particularly true in this case however you will need this exercise} so, the way you get to keep both the old and newly changed design, is as follows. Now that you are looking at “old orbiter” hit the TEMP button on the top bar. Temp stands for template, and what you are doing is using the old design (while keeping it intact) as a template for a new one. Now moved to the top and click the Name button, once the dialog box appears, name this “Modern Orbiter” then, we can make our changes ,and once they are mare made, we can click on the save button, and this will save your new design, and keep the old one too. Now for the changes— We should have previously changed the structure-1 to light structure-1 (or to the equivalent amount of light structure-2) but just in case we haven’t, ---the structure-1 are far too heavy and are best used for scraping in the later turns as a source of raw materials. Once that is done change the 360,000 Automation-1, to its equivalent of Aut-3 (which is 40,000 Aut-3) Here we have no choice since we are totally out of Aut-1. And finally let’s change our 150,000 Lfs-1 to its 37500 Lfs-2 equivalent. (To change an item in your design, Hi-light it, then hit the EDIT button (which will now become functional). You should now notice that that line in the design that you have just hi-lighted has become blank, and the Item, TL level ,and quantity boxes on the far right contain whatever was in design line you just highlighted. Whatever changes you make to them will reappear in the blank line when you hit the change button. --- Once these changes have been made you will notice that your ship is a bit lighter and you have some spare room to add more fuel (if you wish) which will give your ship greater range and lasting power-- Once you hit the save button, exit the designer answering yes to all the save questions. Now open the order writer, choose add on from the order list (Add On\ADN) click on colony from the actor side, moved the cursor and highlight your home colony, left click on it, then on the right-hand side, activate the colony button, and a list of all the colonies, which you can “add on” to, or transfer to, or pickup from will appear. This list, of course will be the sole other colony, which exists next your home world colony, and that is your present orbiter. Highlight it with the cursor and left click. Now move to the top, and from the item list scroll to the bottom and you will see a list of available designs that you have saved, the design that you have named Modern Orbiter should be there. Highlight it with the cursor, in the quantity box, change the quantity to 2 (so that you can Add On two of this design, move the cursor to the add button on the far left, and press it. You should see your home colony writing the list of orders that will add each item on to your orbiter. Next turn you will see that you have successfully .once again, doubled the size of your orbiter. Next we should Survey (SUR) all of the planets in our home system. When performing a Sur with a ship that has no RPV-1 to launch, it is necessary to be within 1 Distance unit (DU) of the ground. This mandates our using the Tactical Maneuver order (TMV) and to maneuver the co-ordinates of 0, 0, 0, and then do the survey. Go to the order writer, select TMV, from the order list, on the actor list, pick ships, when you hit the ship circle, a list of all the ships you own appears. You can the enter the co-ordinates to which you wish to maneuver to, in the three co-ordinate boxes above, (in this case 0, 0, 0). Then you can select any ship (or by checking the ranged box any group of ships you highlight), and have them maneuver to 0, 0, 0. In this case pick & highlight all the ships you have moved to the inner orbits. When you hit the Add button, you should see all the highlighted ships TMVing to 0, 0, and 0. Next use the SUR order than have all of those ships perform a survey (SUR Order) Please note that when you moved your ships to the inner orbits or anywhere for that matter and chose a distance modifier of “close” your ships appeared within 10 distance units of the ground. All the ships we will ever build therefore need a minimum speed of 10 so that they can always Dock to a ground colony or to an orbiter, to effect transfers, pickups or add-ons. All of these orders require you to be no farther than 1 DU from the target or actor. Now let’s look at how we can build some more ships. I will go through basically the same process with the designer only this time we will select ships instead of orbiting colony. To briefly repeat, go to ruler’s tools, then designer, then design types, menu opens, select designs, pick one of your existing ship designs (most likely you have only the one we saved last turn). Repeat the TEMP, and Naming process like we did for the orbiter. Let’s name this ship “Round 2” Then use the designer to modernize this ship as best we can.—like making sure we are using the right # of sensors and that the Tech level of the ships sensors are the same as the Tech level of the sensors that we have available to us within our ground colony. If everything went right last turn, you would have used up all your sensor -1, s, and therefore need to change your design to one containing at least two sensor-2. We might not want to have as much population or Life support on these ships, since we really don’t need more than about 15 Pros, or more than a few Police or special agents.(if any) We will want to replace our SLS-1 with SLS-2. However the really important thing was the Sensors previously mentioned. Build at least as many ships as necessary to Jump to whatever star systems were reveled to be within hyper engine range of your home system. (You might have been able to do this last turn) For arguments sake, let us say that there were 2 star systems, within the range of your home world. One at -2, 0, 0. and one at 0, 3, 0. The minimum we would do here, would be to build two ships, (using the order writer to create two temporary ship’s, and then to add-on 1 of the designs which we have previously named “round 2”) and then use the Jump order to have these “temporary” jump to those coordinates. Ships go from star system to star systems using the jump order (JMP), (limited by the range of the hyper engines) or from orbit to orbit using the move (MOV) order. The near maximum we would do here would be to use our space navigator to see how many star systems were within range of our hyper engines from -2, 0, 0, and from 0, 3, 0. Then for arguments sake, let us say that there were 3 new systems, within the range of each of these 2 systems; we would then jump out 6 ships, to each of the prior examples. Our final effort should be to try to invade and capture the alien colony in orbit 1. Your assault craft and /or your assault weapons must be within 1 distance unit of the colony which you are invading. Therefore it if you have an armed scout ship above the alien colony, you must either, dock to it, or maneuver to the coordinates of the colony (0, 0, 0.) -- Docking to the colony is the preferred method; you will get an explanation of why this is true in the new future but for the moment let’s just concern ourselves with executing the invasion— Assault craft do not require transports to move them into combat, and assault weapons do. In theory you should have a ship above the colony that has assault craft on it. The concept is to use the dock order to connect to the colony,(DOC) and then use the invasion (INV) order to begin your assault. Look up the invasion order, and invade the alien colony with all of your assault craft. Good luck, --however if our invasion fails, next time we will build a ship from scratch, which will be big enough to do the job.— We will get an invasion report next turn,(whether the invasion succeeds or fails) and then build our next ship accordingly. The orders should look like this our ship#, Doc, Colony #. our ship #, INV, Colony #. All,Assault craft. All,Soldiers-# End Here is how we accomplish this. In the order writer, choose the invasion order, then on actor side, choose ship, and a list of all your ships will appear, choose, of course, and highlight the ship that is doing the invasion. Then on the target side, choose colony, and a list of all the colonies below that ship will appear. In this case it should just be the sole alien colony that is there. Then click the order button to your middle left, and this will bring up the quantity and item dialog boxes. For the quantity choose ALL (or enter the number of assault craft that you are invading with in the quantity box) in the item box , scroll down to Assault Craft, and then enter the TL that you have (in this case 1), hit the Add item button , and all your assault craft will have been added to the order, then in the item box choose all your soldiers, Hit the ADD Item box .once you have added your last item, hit the END button and you are done. RE: Jays Tutorials for Cluster wars - Roy Bean - 07-31-2013 Turn # 4 basic concepts. Advise from your economic counselors. Continue to assemble all of your newly produced automation-3. Continue to draft all of your free unskilled laborers into trainees. Pick up all of your light structural units-2 from your orbiting colony. We are becoming increasingly aware that light structural units are the most valuable (useful} low tech item we can produce in the short-term future, and also while we are waiting for our big load of high tech factories to come out. Towards that end, we should consider throwing every spare factory into that effort. Also, try to make sure you have enough sensors, and robot probes. They are cheap (to manufacture), and we need thousands of them If we had discovered any artifacts, we should use at least some of them to increase our tech levels. (We need to make sure we have saved enough research to boost our lab levels at the moment, our high-level factory production arrives.—likely next turn---) All of our 1 mines should soon be assembled and running on all 6 deposits, however assembling factories, presently, is a priority over assembling low level mines. The majority of our economists believe that it is possible to go out as far as turn 10-12, before we need to be producing high level mining equipment. But of course there are a great many variations on this theme. We should have geological surveys of all of our interior planets, and we should have arrived at and have begun scouting our nearest neighboring star systems. If we have experienced some failures or some tardiness in accomplishing our short term goals (and if we haven’t it some point we surely will), the best thing we do, is simply to try to correct them as quickly and efficiently as possible. Very shortly, you will need to begin moving population to our other in-system habitable world. This would be a very good thing to do over the course of the next 5 turns wile we are waiting for our high level laboratories to come out. We should probably use the designer to establish the look of a 20,000 hyper engine – 2 colony building ship. We probably won’t have enough light structural units to build such ships, for at least another turn or two; however, since this ship would only be a design at the moment, it is good to be prepared. We also realize that we do not have enough life supports at present to move any appreciable quantities of population; however population can also be moved by loading it into a ship, and then unloading it to the destination colony. This maneuver results in a considerably higher than normal death rate (look it up), however it is certainly well worth doing, since we will be reaching our habitability limits, on our home world shortly. Advice from your Military Counselors. Carefully examine at the results of your system orbit probes, and your system-10 probes. We should be earnestly searching for nearby habitable systems, alien artifacts, and signs or sight of other civilizations Perform an orbit probe of your home system again. Perform a survey of your home world again. -- (add these to standing orders, so that we don’t have to write them each turn). We should have done this last turn in case something went wrong, just make sure it gets done eventually. Evaluate the results of any of the intensive probe’s we did last turn. Build more ships, you should be able to build at least 5 scout ships each turn, until you have been able to build more sensors. This of course will not nearly be enough, but we must do the best we can until our production levels rise. Remember Since both system probes and distance probes occur after jumps are made, you can write these probe orders for all the ships currently moving jumping. — These orders work from a stationary ship as well. However, you will always get the results from wherever the ship is at the end of the processed turn} Assemble another 50,000 factories building robot probes – 1. Assemble more factories making Sen-1or2. ============================================================= Now let’s put theory to practice Our effort last turn was to try to invade and capture the alien colony in orbit 1. This effort should have been successful, if not let’s get to it. We will succeed. Now let’s examine the fruits of our effort and see how we can begin to take advantage of it. If all went well, we should have captured some transport –5’s, some assembled Farms – 2, and some assembled automation –10, and 21 assembled sensor -5’s. The 1st thing we need to do is to disassemble at least 45 of the farms and automation. (They need to be disassembled because we would like to have at least 20 of each of these items to use as prototypes. To be used as a prototype, an item must be either a non assembly type item, or in a disassembled state. The transport-5’s fives are a non assembly type item, and thus can be used (as prototypes) as they stand. The sensor – 5’s, are an assembly item, and since they are assembled, they must be disassembled before we can use them as prototypes. When you look at the disassembly order, you will notice that 10% of all items disassembled are lost in the process. Therefore, when you start with 21 sensor – 5’s, you will lose 2.1 of them, the computer will round this up to 3, and you will be left with 18 of them. When you write and expend order, the order writer in central command, will ask you if you are using prototypes. Obviously, if you have them, answer yes. Prototypes will save you 4% of the cost of the expend, for each unit of prototype available, with a maximum use of 20 prototypes (for a total possible savings of 80% of your research normally needed). This order is most easily accomplished when the prototypes and the research that you are using to perform your expend are in the same colony. In that case, the computer will just draw the amount of research you need from your stockpile and allocate it properly. I.E., we have 20 transports – 5 (to use as prototypes), and our current level of transports is at TL-2, normally we would use 9,000,000 research points to go from TL – 2, to TL – 5, but since we do have prototypes, we could save 80% of that, (4 x 20) and therefore need only 1.8 million research points, and the computer will draw it from our current supply of research. The order would be written like this: You select your colony #, then select the EXPEND order, the computer will ask you if you are using prototypes, you answer yes, you put in the number of prototypes you are using anywhere from 1 to 20. (Saving anywhere from 4 to 80%) then the item you are expending for, then its TL. The order should look like this: C#, EXP,20,TPT-5. However, and this is a big however, If you have prototypes, and they are are not at the same colony where you have your research, you will still be able to use them, but there is a two step operation, which must be performed in the following manner. You need to calculate the amount of research you will need, from the colony were you have the research, (in this case your home colony) then Answer NO to are you using prototypes—then you expend that amount of research. In this example 60 is the home colony and 99 is the alien ruin or colony were you have the prototypes C60, EXPEND,1,800,000,TPT. Then From the colony were you have the prototypes write an expend order Answer YES to are you using prototypes? and use up to 20 of them C99, EXPEND,20,TPT-5. Since we can’t possibly have enough research to expend on AUT-10 we suggest you bring some home for later use, when Research is more plentiful, do the same with the SEN-5. You might also EXP for FRM-2, since that would only require 200,000 RSCH (using prototypes) Notice that 1,800,000 RSCH for TPT-5’s and 200,000 for FRM-2 add up to a nice even 2 million RSCH points. Moderators note The use of prototypes only permits expending to the exact level of the prototype, thus you can use AUT-10 prototypes to go to level 10 and only to level 10, You cannot use them to go to a lower level such as 5 or 6. Only colonies can write an EXP order (not ships). Useful tips about Central Command. As your empire grows, and as the number of ships you own expands exponentially, the easiest way to view your possessions is to sort them by “Location” when you first open CC. Also use the check box feature -- CBK --in CC. This feature allows you to check or uncheck the box next to the s/c identity. You will find this a very useful way for you to note just which particular ships or colonies you have written orders for. When you have dozens or hundreds of entities to write orders for this feature is indispensable. Each new turn comes with all the boxes unchecked, but if during the course of order writing you check some boxes and then close CC, when CC is reopened they will still be checked. The filter button in the order writer will show you all the orders you have written, for the current turn, for any individual ship or colony that is selected (on the actor side in the order writer), when you hit it. The display button will simply show all of the orders you have written for all ships or colonies. Previously, our economic counselors suggested building a 20,000 hyper engine – 2 ship, in the future. Here is what our 20,000 hyper engine – 2 ship might look like. Light structure – 1, 140,000,000. Light structure – 2, 50,000,000. Hyper engines – 2, 20,000. Life supports. – 2, 100,000. Space drives – 2, 33,200. Assault craft – 1, 1000. Food, 150,000. Fuel, 4,000,000. Transports – 2, 250,000. Police 10,000. Professionals, 300,000. Special agents, 10,000. Soldiers, 125. Consumergoods, 5,000,000. Farms – 1, 250,000. Unassembled Automation – 3, 90,000, Unassembled. Constructors, 50,000. Unemployable’s, 19,000,000. In this example, the 19,000,000 unemployable’s are in the ship, this is just so that we can see the ship’s speed and lift capabilities (in the designer). In actual practice, you would create the ship and then load the 19,000,000 unemployable’s into it ( after creating a cargo hold). When you set up the ship in the designer, as a new design, name it, POP Mover, and save it for later use. RE: Jays Tutorials for Cluster wars - Roy Bean - 08-16-2013 Turn # 5 basic concepts. Advise from your economic counselors. Advise will decline, and extinguish over the next four turns. Continue to assemble all of your newly produced automation-3. This turn, depending upon how many FCT-5’s you assemble, you may not be able to draft any unskilled laborers into trainees.(as a matter of fact we may need to shut our Min-1’s for a turn or even Disband (DSB)a few trainees, so that we will have adequate unskilled labor available for our factories). Disbanded trainees (they are disbanded back to unskilled labor-at the start of the turn) are available for use, as unskilled, the very same turn. Please check our pro count too. If we are careful though, we can assemble all of our Fct -5’s and still keep some or most of our FCT-1, running too. Here are the basic concepts of what we would LIKE to do. We would like to keep all of our Fct-1’s running for four more turns and then replace them with our NEXT load of FCT-5’s. We would LIKE to assemble all of our newly produced FCT-5’s either all at once or over the text few turns. We do need to begin high level Lab production, if we have enough RESH saved to go to LAB-5 then that is our highest priority, if we do not, our only consideration is whether to go to Lab-4 now, or to wait 1 turn and then go to Lab-5. Hopefully you can make ten to twenty million ( 2e7) Labs in either case. 3,600,000 FCT-5 ,which is about ½ of our assumed maximum produced factories should make 2e7 LAB-5’s. You will need to at least double your consumer goods production. Your 2,400,000 Fct-1 are kept intact and we should assemble another 480,000 fct-5’s also making consumer goods. (because of the short term automation shortage you may choose to do this in ¼ production.(I mean you can assemble 120,000 FCT-5 per turn for 4 turns or any variation of this starting with at least 120,000 Fct-5’s. The exact same holds true for your automation production, which also needs to be doubled. We suggest increasing your HEN/SPD production by a factor of 5x or 10x. As we have become aware that light structural units are the most valuable (useful} low tech item we can produce in the short-term future, Adding at least 100,000 FCT-5 to your OBC producing SLSU is absolutely mandatory and doubling the entire colony over the next 4 turns is highly suggested. Pick up all of your light structural units-2 from your orbiting colony. If you are going to LAB-4’s you may have enough research left over to go to SLS-3 immediately, at any rate Expending for Light Structure -3 is our next goal. Assembling factories, presently, is still a priority over assembling low level mines. Remember the majority of our economists believe that it is possible to go out as far as turn 10-12, before we need to be producing high level mining equipment. But of course there are a great many variations on this theme. TIP-- If you want to replace a FCT group, (which is currently using FCT-1’s ) with Fct-5’s,it can be done with no loss of production, as follows. Colony #, Disassemble, all, Fct-1,Group # and then Colony # Assemble,(the equivalent amount of Fct-5’s,Group #. EXAMPLE In this example you are colony 99, & have 100,000 Fct-1’s up & producing somthing in group # 7. C99,Das, all,FCT-1,7. C99, Asm, 20,000,FCT-5,7. We should have arrived at and have begun scouting our nearest neighboring star systems. Could we have been so lucky as to have spotted more alien ruins? Don’t forget to probe them; these seem to have some sort of defense. We will want to build invasion ships specific to the results of our intensive probes. Even a failed invasion will yield valuable information. Remember If we have experienced some failures or some tardiness in accomplishing our short term goals (and if we haven’t, at some point we surely will), the best thing we do, is simply to try to correct it as quickly and efficiently as possible. Advice from your Military Counselors. Carefully examine at the results of your system orbit probes, and your system-10 probes.!! Search for useful information. We should be earnestly searching for and finding nearby habitable systems, along with alien artifacts. The signs or sight of other civilizations, or their ships, are inevitable. Evaluate the results of any of the intensive probe’s we did last turn. Build more ships, you should be able to build at least 5 scout ships each turn, until you have built more sensors.(hopefully next turn) This of course will not nearly be enough, but we must do the best we can until our production levels rise. Load your scouts with RPV-1;s as soon as you can so we may survey all the planets we see from a distance. Assemble another 50,000 factories-1 or their equivalents building robot probes – 1. Assemble more factories making Sen-1or 2. Extra Farm-1’s will be needed soon, so start making some if you haven’t already. RE: Jays Tutorials for Cluster wars - Roy Bean - 09-09-2013 Turn # 6 basic concepts. Advise from your economic counselors. Advice will decline, and extinguish over the next three turns. Continue to assemble all of your newly produced automation-3. This turn you should be able to once again draft any unskilled laborers into trainees. Wile we seem to have plenty of Professionals we will need them all in three or four turns when our high level labs come out. If we REPLACE all of our Lab-1 with Lab-4or 5 (10e6) we may still have another 10 Million high level Labs to assemble, thus necessitating 30 Million more Professionals to run them. In the meantime we can run as many of our low level mines as possible. Assembling factories, presently, is still a priority over assembling or running low level mines. Pick up all of your light structural units from your orbiting colony. Add at least another 100,000 Fct-5, producing light structure. We will most likely expend for LFS-3 as soon as we can, but only after Going to Light structure -3. Remember the majority of our economists believe that it is possible to go out as far as turn 10-12,( and probably to turn 15 if we are scraping our old Labs, Mines and Fcts along the way) before we need to be producing high level mining equipment. But of course there are a great many variations on this theme. We should have arrived at and have begun scouting our nearest neighboring star systems. Advice from your Military Counselors. Carefully examine at the results of your system orbit probes, and your system-10 probes.!! Expand your borders, meet other races, form alliances and or reciprocal trade agreements. It is a little too soon to consider conquering others so ,--Search for useful information. We should be earnestly searching for and finding nearby habitable systems, along with alien artifacts. As soon as we begin populating our inner Hab 10 world we must begin to consider nearby systems, both as fertile ground to expand our population, and as a future source of raw materials. Since all home systems ARE NOT IDENTICAL, we will have somewhat different future mining needs. The signs or sight of other civilizations, or their ships, are inevitable. Evaluate the results of any of the intensive probe’s we did last turn. Build many more ships, Load your scout ships with RPV-1’s as soon as you can so we may survey all the planets we see from a distance. Remember Extra Farm-1’s will be needed soon, so start making some if you haven’t already. We should have arrived at and have begun scouting our nearest neighboring star systems. We SHOULD BE SEEING 1 OR 2 MORE ALIEN RUINS within our sphere of influence. Don’t forget to probe them; these seem to have some sort of defense. Remember--Even a failed invasion will yield extremely valuable information. So small test invasions are highly recommended. We will want to build major invasion ships specific to the results of our intensive probes. Surveys may provide more useful info, and we should definitely survey everything we see once our RPV-1’s come into use. RE: Jays Tutorials for Cluster wars - Roy Bean - 09-29-2013 Turn # 7 basic concepts. Advise from your economic counselors. Advice will decline, and extinguish over the next two turns. Continue to assemble all of your newly produced automation-3. This turn you should be able to once again draft any FREE unskilled laborers into trainees. Fuel needs do not seem to be a foreseeable problem, so we should prioritize the mining of metals and nonmetals. Assembling factories, presently, is still a priority over assembling or running low level mines. Pick up all of your light structural units from your orbiting colony. Add at least another 100,000 Fct-5, producing light structure. Now, once we have gone Light Structure - 3, we have the following things to consider, should we go to LFS-3 or BEM-3 (beamer-3). No matter which one you go to 1st, these 2 seem clearly to be the most viable choices. Recommended production would be one or 200,000 FCT-5’s producing LFS-3’s. And later about 250,000,-500,000 FCT-5’s producing BEM-3. Beamers strongly resemble teleportation equipment, and will move goods from one colony to another within the same system (they will not however teleport population). Beamers, you should note, represent one way travel only, they can push out material, but they cannot pull back material. Thus you can beam out mining equipment from colony A to colony B, however, once colony B has completed its mining, it too will need to have assembled Beamer’s (which you can beam out and then assemble), in order to beam its produce to colony A. Beamers will make it much easier to expand colonies that you have set up in the reaches of your home system. Typically what we can do, would be to set up a small OPC, or an ESC, with perhaps 50,000 construction workers and lots of light structural units, and whatever food, fuel, farms or life support that is necessary to sustain them. Once these beachheads are established, we can beam out more structural units every turn, to be assembled by the already present construction workers, and to send out whatever mining equipment and maintenance equipment we deem necessary,(such as mines, automation, life support, food, fuel, consumer goods) needing only to fly out the population (with spaceships) needed to run that equipment. Remember the majority of our economists believe that it is possible to go out as far as turn 10-12,( and probably to turn 15 if we are scraping our old Labs, Mines and Fcts along the way) before we need to be producing high level mining equipment. But of course there are a great many variations on this theme. It is easily conceivable that the 1st level of mining equipment you will increase to, will be at Tech 8 (maybe Tech 6 due to circumstances). We must get population out to our habitable planet ASAP, we can do this by transporting them by a spacecraft, either, fully equipped with life support,(to maintain them) or more commonly, we can move them off planet as CARGO, loaded into our ships cargo hold, and then unloaded down to an established OPC. (or ESC). This latter method, will sustain losses of life due to cryogenic revival, however, it is only in this way that you can move large numbers of population (tens of millions) without the necessity of producing enormous amounts of life support equipment. Loss of life will be 10% of the total population unloaded. Advice from your Military Counselors. As we begin to map the universe, will slowly begin to get a picture of whom and what is out there. (And what level of hyper engine, it might behoove us to go to, in order to more quickly get to a desirable planet. For reasons of habitability points, for reasons of mining value, or for strategic defensive or offensive outposts). Step up your surveying efforts, and get your RPV-1’s out there as fast as possible. Turn # 7 basic concepts. Advise from your economic counselors. Advice will decline, and extinguish over the next two turns. Continue to assemble all of your newly produced automation-3. This turn you should be able to once again draft any FREE unskilled laborers into trainees. Fuel needs do not seem to be a foreseeable problem, so we should prioritize the mining of metals and nonmetals. Assembling factories, presently, is still a priority over assembling or running low level mines. Pick up all of your light structural units from your orbiting colony. Add at least another 100,000 Fct-5, producing light structure. Now, once we have gone Light Structure - 3, we have the following things to consider, should we go to LFS-3 or BEM-3 (beamer-3). No matter which one you go to 1st, these 2 seem clearly to be the most viable choices. Recommended production would be one or 200,000 FCT-5’s producing LFS-3’s. And later about 250,000,-500,000 FCT-5’s producing BEM-3. Beamers strongly resemble teleportation equipment, and will move goods from one colony to another within the same system (they will not however teleport population). Beamers, you should note, represent one way travel only, they can push out material, but they cannot pull back material. Thus you can beam out mining equipment from colony A to colony B, however, once colony B has completed its mining, it too will need to have assembled Beamer’s (which you can beam out and then assemble), in order to beam its produce to colony A. Beamers will make it much easier to expand colonies that you have set up in the reaches of your home system. Typically what we can do, would be to set up a small OPC, or an ESC, with perhaps 50,000 construction workers and lots of light structural units, and whatever food, fuel, farms or life support that is necessary to sustain them. Once these beachheads are established, we can beam out more structural units every turn, to be assembled by the already present construction workers, and to send out whatever mining equipment and maintenance equipment we deem necessary,(such as mines, automation, life support, food, fuel, consumer goods) needing only to fly out the population (with spaceships) needed to run that equipment. Remember the majority of our economists believe that it is possible to go out as far as turn 10-12,( and probably to turn 15 if we are scraping our old Labs, Mines and Fcts along the way) before we need to be producing high level mining equipment. But of course there are a great many variations on this theme. It is easily conceivable that the 1st level of mining equipment you will increase to, will be at Tech 8 (maybe Tech 6 due to circumstances). We must get population out to our habitable planet ASAP, we can do this by transporting them by a spacecraft, either, fully equipped with life support,(to maintain them) or more commonly, we can move them off planet as CARGO, loaded into our ships cargo hold, and then unloaded down to an established OPC. (or ESC). This latter method, will sustain losses of life due to cryogenic revival, however, it is only in this way that you can move large numbers of population (tens of millions) without the necessity of producing enormous amounts of life support equipment. Loss of life will be 10% of the total population unloaded. Advice from your Military Counselors. As we begin to map the universe, will slowly begin to get a picture of whom and what is out there. (And what level of hyper engine, it might behoove us to go to, in order to more quickly get to a desirable planet. For reasons of habitability points, for reasons of mining value, or for strategic defensive or offensive outposts). Step up your surveying efforts, and get your RPV-1’s out there as fast as possible. RE: Jays Tutorials for Cluster wars - Darth Pedro - 10-20-2013 Turn # 8 basic concepts Advice from your economic counselors: Advice will be plentiful l& forward looking next turn. But will then extinguish Continue to assemble all of your newly produced automation-3. Once again draft any FREE unskilled laborers into trainees. Next turn we would like to assemble all of our high tech Labs coming out, or at least as many as possible. Plan ahead, you will need to replace any FCT-1’s with your new Fct-4’s or 5’s. Start to calculate how many pro’s we can free up to run our new Labs, remember that they take 3 pros each, so we may need to shut down some low level mines, or even farms for one turn. Pick up all of your light structural units from your orbiting colony. Add at least another 100,000 Fct-5, producing light structure. If you went to BEM-3 last turn you should go to LFS-3 this turn, however assembling 200K factories (or for that matter assembling another 200K) for more BEM-3 is the priority now. Next turn your high level labs come out along with a new load of Factories. Our economists have begun thinking in terms of cycles. Here is a result of such theorizing. Labs should be upgraded every 8 -12 turns. The reason being that it takes four turns to produce them, and during the next 4 turns you can use the factories that made them to produce your mines (or some other items) wile simultaneously expending the produced Research to upgrade your economy or war effort. This theory makes 8 turns the minimum time span for lab increases; you may however want to wait 10, or 12 turns to gain various production advantages or to store research for higher upgrades. Advice from your Military Counselors. The Mass-8 alien objects you have begun to view are potentially valuable to you, due to their population and possible artifacts. You should be surveying scanning and poking and prodding them to determine your best chances of conquest. If we don’t get to and capture “ours” someone else just might. RE: Jays Tutorials for Cluster wars - Roy Bean - 11-29-2013 Turn # 9 basic concepts. Final Advise from your economic counselors. Continue to assemble all of your newly produced automation-3. Once again draft any FREE unskilled laborers into trainees. We need to assemble all of our high tech Labs, or at least as many as possible. You will need to replace any FCT-1’s with your new Fct-4’s or 5’s.-as this will free up a goodly amount. Calculate how many pro’s we can free up to run our new Labs, (they take 3 pros each). If you built 2e7 Lab’s you can shutdown or DAS all your LAB-1’s and that will allow you to assemble 1e7 high tech LAB’s, but you will still need 3e7 free PRO’s for the remaining 1e7 or so LAB’s that you have built.We will have freed up some professionals by replacing ALL of our FCT-1’s with higher level factories. It might also be a good idea to retool all the factories you were using to build high tech Labs,) as you will expend for MIN-4-- or as high as MIN-8 --(depending on your research pool size), on turn 11. (On turn 12 you may want to save all your research and then go to lab-10 on turn 13 This means you won’t need these Factories, or their associated PRO’s for two turns.—normal PRO growth will allow you to restart then then, (or after you have achieved enough research to expend for your desired level of mines. Looking to the future, calculate how far you can go before being required to have high tech mines on the ground, to feed your factories, and plan your current factories use accordingly. Realize that when you produce your high level mines, the minimum quantity that you should build would be 6e6, and the maximum would be about 12 to14e6. The excess above what you can use on your OPC will be BEAMED or sent out to mining colonies that you will establish in your inner orbits and will allow for a much greater factory usage on our home world. The better you succeed at this, the greater your production will be, and of course the better chance you will have over your opponents. Our size will certainly be a factor in our conquest of the universe, but it is still only one factor amongst many. REMBER Our economists are thinking in terms of cycles. Labs should be upgraded every 8 -12 turns. The reason being that it takes four turns to produce them, and during the next 4 turns you can use the factories that made them to produce your mines wile simultaneously expending the produced Research to upgrade your economy or war effort. This theory makes 8 turns the minimum time span for lab increases; you may however want to wait 10, or 12 turns to gain various production advantages or to store research for higher upgrades. Advice from your Military Counselors. We repeat The Mass-8 alien objects you have begun to view are potentially valuable to you, due to their population and possible artifacts. You should be surveying, scanning and poking and prodding them to determine your best chances of conquest. Plan accordingly If we don’t get to and capture “ours” someone else just might. Explore the universe; knowledge of what is out there translates into better planning and of course POWER. Turn # 9 basic concepts. Final Advise from your economic counselors. Continue to assemble all of your newly produced automation-3. Once again draft any FREE unskilled laborers into trainees. We need to assemble all of our high tech Labs, or at least as many as possible. You will need to replace any FCT-1’s with your new Fct-4’s or 5’s.-as this will free up a goodly amount. Calculate how many pro’s we can free up to run our new Labs, (they take 3 pros each). If you built 2e7 Lab’s you can shutdown or DAS all your LAB-1’s and that will allow you to assemble 1e7 high tech LAB’s, but you will still need 3e7 free PRO’s for the remaining 1e7 or so LAB’s that you have built.We will have freed up some professionals by replacing ALL of our FCT-1’s with higher level factories. It might also be a good idea to retool all the factories you were using to build high tech Labs,) as you will expend for MIN-4-- or as high as MIN-8 --(depending on your research pool size), on turn 11. (On turn 12 you may want to save all your research and then go to lab-10 on turn 13 This means you won’t need these Factories, or their associated PRO’s for two turns.—normal PRO growth will allow you to restart then then, (or after you have achieved enough research to expend for your desired level of mines. Looking to the future, calculate how far you can go before being required to have high tech mines on the ground, to feed your factories, and plan your current factories use accordingly. Realize that when you produce your high level mines, the minimum quantity that you should build would be 6e6, and the maximum would be about 12 to14e6. The excess above what you can use on your OPC will be BEAMED or sent out to mining colonies that you will establish in your inner orbits and will allow for a much greater factory usage on our home world. The better you succeed at this, the greater your production will be, and of course the better chance you will have over your opponents. Our size will certainly be a factor in our conquest of the universe, but it is still only one factor amongst many. REMBER Our economists are thinking in terms of cycles. Labs should be upgraded every 8 -12 turns. The reason being that it takes four turns to produce them, and during the next 4 turns you can use the factories that made them to produce your mines wile simultaneously expending the produced Research to upgrade your economy or war effort. This theory makes 8 turns the minimum time span for lab increases; you may however want to wait 10, or 12 turns to gain various production advantages or to store research for higher upgrades. Advice from your Military Counselors. We repeat The Mass-8 alien objects you have begun to view are potentially valuable to you, due to their population and possible artifacts. You should be surveying, scanning and poking and prodding them to determine your best chances of conquest. Plan accordingly If we don’t get to and capture “ours” someone else just might. Explore the universe; knowledge of what is out there translates into better planning and of course POWER.