Your First Three Turns of SuperNova

[Spiff]

This is the second of four threads on SuperNova, along with Getting Started: Setup, How to Organize It All, and Expanding Your Empire (Turns 3-10+). For more info on the game, see the SuperNova summary and links posted by Raven. This post details reading your first turn.

Your initial turn sheet arrives with a mind-boggling amount of information in those (roughly) 35 pages. Don't panic: you don't need it all, and reading it gets much easier as you go. Here's how to sort it for the first time.

Page 1: The due date and your remaining balance are the important details here. Don't be fooled by the prominent, colored graph of your racial modifiers: they don't change (until you access advanced technologies), and they have little impact on your turn planning (for a good while).

p2-3: A scan of your home System. One planet is your homeworld, and the others you can access without going through a Warp gate. Your colonists will prefer planets similar to your homeworld, particularly in atmosphere. See How to Organize It All for tips on recording the key details.

You'll also get a PMAP of terrain features and an ORB of your homeworld. The former is mostly for flavor, though future PMAPs can help you fine-tune colonization strategies for other worlds. An ORB tells you what empires have a presence there: you do!

The GEO survey is more valuable, listing resources available on your homeworld. See How to Organize It All.

Next is an ANZ, information about a resource or technology. These will come up automatically as you research new things. Then there's a description of your Bastion defense installation, which you can skip over.

Then there are about 15 pages detailing technology your empire has at start and can research. You can skip all of this - with one exception - to access the info any time from the excellent SuperNova Wiki. I actually made a copy of the pdf and edited out all these pages, along with several of the final pages (Ship Design Report, Force Battle Plan, Installations Report, and Research), since none are needed for your first turns.

The one important page here lists your Imperial Advisor Report, including four useful details, only one of which you need here: your Excess Power, available for new installations. There's other useful info here, including your number of Stripmining Complexes, your Industrial Capacity (roughly 100,000,000 - on the right side, more about this below), and the Legendary Characters on your homeworld, but these are more easily read elsewhere. Stripmining Complexes and Industrial Capacity are repeated in the Colony Report, and there's a Character Report.


Then your pdf says bit about researchable items, then comes your Fleet Report. You really just need the Fleet Number and number of ships, but here's how to read the whole thing.



Fleet #101 ('101' is how you'll identify it for orders), named '101st Recon Group,' in your home system of Galactica in orbit over planet 3 (and not at a WarpPoint). Ignore the Rules of Engagement and other items on the far right for now. It has 73,500 fuel (and room for 84,000 total). It can Jump through Warp Point gates and has 2 Action Points each turn; future ships you build will mostly have 1 Action point, at least for awhile. There are 8 ships in this fleet, of the Pathfinder type (in the broad category of an 'Express Boat,' which you can ignore). Key info: 8 ships in fleet 101, at Galactica-3.

Next is an Army Report - ignore it - and a Colony Report. Take your number of Industrial Complexes and multiply by 25 to get your Industrial Capacity. That's the figure of 100,000,000 or so from the Imperial Advisor Report. You'll use that number in planning, along with the total of 1,000 times your number of Stripmining Complexes.


On your homeworld of Galactica-3, you currently have orders to produce 5 things each turn. 'Tooled' means 'repeat this every turn.' 5050 is the number of your population group on Galactica-3. When you colonize another world, it will have its own Pop Group number. The numbers 510-550 are the order in which these get made. If you add, say, Lumber, you can assign it to your production queue at number 20 or 320 or 400, so it gets made before any of these, or 600 or 7000 or the like and it will get made after. Note that there are two ways to produce things, from your queue and through installations like Iron Mines and Gas Refineries. More on that in How to Organize It All.

Next is the list of items in your Imperial Stockpiles. You'll have millions of Construction Materials, used to make new installations, and millions of Raw Resources, used to produce things in the queue pictured above.

Then comes your Shipyard Report, where you'll have several Pathfinders awaiting production. If you have only one Shipyard Slip, only one can be made per turn. You can add more Slips later.

Warp Points Surveyed will list all the Warp Points in your home system, gateways to further worlds. The relevant info is the WP number listed first, on the left-hand side. Then it lists your home system, where they are all located, along with the places to which they connect. These are adjacent star systems for you to explore.

Ignore the Diplomacy Report for now, which will be blank until you make Alliances.

Under the Character Report, you see your Legendary Characters, all of whom need names. The exception is your leader, named in your Setup Sheet.

You can skip the next parts of the Ship Design Report, Force Battle Plan, Installations Report, and Research. Researchable Items can be useful in planning, along with the information available at the SuperNova Wiki.

Taken together, these the key parts of your first turn report are the

• Scan of your home System on p.2-3
  
• GEO survey of your homeworld
  
• Imperial Advisor Report listing of Excess Power
  
• Fleet Numbers and the number of ships in each fleet
  
• Colony Report with your number of Stripmining Complexes, and your Industrial Capacity
  
• Industrial Production Report, listing what you make each turn
  

That's it. Get those six pieces of information and you're ready to plan orders!

[Spiff]

Planning Your First Turn(s)

Three priorities for your first turns

1. Start exploring
   
2. Increase production on your homeworld
   
3. Build ship components
   

Begin by making new fleets from your big fleet, so you can explore more.



Now move 1 ship into each new fleet



You can then send some through Warp Points with
   MOVE    Move to Warp Point         101      Galactica                50505
   WARP    Warp Movement             101

and others to survey nearby planets with
   NM        Naval Movement             108               G 2a
   GEO      Geological Survey            108                  a

Use your own fleet/ Warp Point/ planet numbers, of course. And note that MOVE means move to a Warp Point while NM means Naval Movement to a planet! At each planet, you can follow with a CSV next turn, to see how well your colonists would do there, before moving to a new planet.

Also, set your Research Priority with the SRP order. I list all 25 research slots on a separate page of my planning spreadsheet; see How to Organize it All. You get diminishing returns with multiple orders for the same tech, so consider 25 different technologies. (The formula is the square root of the number of slots assigned, so you need to assign 4 to gain 2 points instead of 1). You can see your choices under Researchable Items. Prioritize anything with 1st or 2nd Generation, an Mk II Jump Survey Sensor, plus one spaceship armor and one spaceship weapon. See the SuperNova Wiki for details on your options.

If you have General Research Points left over from your setup, these will be applied to your first listed 1st or 2nd Generation tech. 1st Generation costs 3 GRP, 2nd costs 12 (and 3rd is 27, a possibility with bonus points Pete may grant on each SuperNova anniversary in September). You can then slot a new technology the next turn.

That may take most of your 40 orders. Don't worry: only this turn needs that fleet reorganization. And later on, you can automate many of your ship commands through Convoy Orders, so they act without costing you any orders each turn.

Now comes production information, in case you have spare orders or want to do an 80-order turn (I did, for my first two turns. Payment is for blocks of 40 orders).

In SuperNova, there are two kinds of production. First, you can build mines and refineries and the like to extract resources. On each planet, you can efficiently extract 5 x the yield of a resource. So if your planet yields 400 Iron, you can build 2000 efficient Iron Mines. Iron and Lumber are especially valuable, so build these to your max amount:

   CON      Construct Installation        2000         Iron Mines, pop group 5050
   CON      Construct Installation        2280         Lumber Mill, pop group 5050

These next resources are also useful, though you don't need to maximize them at start:

• Crystal Refinery
  
• Radioactives Mine
  
• Gas Refinery
  
• Chemical Refinery
  
• Petrochemical Refinery
  
• Light Metals Mine
  

They''ll be used for electronics and other ship components. 200 of these may be good for the first few turns.

Building new installations takes Construction Materials and available workers (listed as 'Unemployed' in your Colony Report). You have plenty of both at game start. You may also have enough Excess Power, but consider building new power plants (hydro, if your homeworld has hydro potential, otherwise fission) for future growth:

   CON      Construct Installation        10            Hydroelectric Power Plant, pop group 5050

The other kind of production can be done wherever you have Industrial Complexes, like on your homeworld. Your Industrial Capacity is 25 x your number of Industrial Complexes (listed in the Colony Report). Each time you combine materials, it uses one point of Industrial Capacity per material. You can see at the SuperNova Wiki that Construction Materials take 1 Timber and 1 Steel each, so making them uses 2 points of capacity (and it consumes 1 Timber and 1 Steel).

But Timber takes 2 Lumber (in SN, 'timber' and 'lumber'  are reversed from typical usage), and Steel takes 2 Iron. So making 1 Construction Material uses 6 capacity, 2 for each of the three steps. Making 100,000 takes 600,000 capacity.

You can also use your capacity to transform Raw Resources into basic materials, at a cost of 10 capacity per unit. So if you want 200,000 Lumber (to make 100,000 Timber for your Construction Materials), you can get it from Lumber Mills or you can make it by transforming Raw Resources, at a cost of 2,000,000 capacity. That's a lot, but unused capacity is wasted, so you'll likely want to do a bit of both.

Where should you use your extra capacity?

Before you start adding Build orders to your production line, consider clearing the handful of default orders already in place with
   EB    Edit Build    CLEAR ALL      your home pop group #

Now you're ready to build. Along with Construction Materials, your most valuable materials include those for ship-building: steel, refined crystals, processed radioactives, synthetic materials, electronics, and a bit of transaluminum. Here's an order to make 2 million Iron and Lumber from your Raw Resources, in addition to what you get from Iron Mines and Lumber Mills, plus 1,000,000 each of Timber and Steel, then 1,000,000 Construction Materials

   BI     Build Item     100     Iron, Tooled (meaning, 'Yes, I want it made each turn)       2000000
   BI     Build Item     110     Lumber, Y    2000000
   BI     Build Item     120     Steel, Y        1000000
   BI     Build Item     130     Timber, Y     1000000
   BI     Build Item     140     Construction Materials, Y    1000000

The first numbers, 100-140, mark where in the production queue these go. That matters, because you want the Iron & Lumber before you try to make Steel & Timber, and you want both of those to make Construction Materials.

If you made the other mines & refineries suggested above, you can also make 10,000 to 20,000 of the key ship components like this
   BI     Build Item     200     Refined Crystals     20000
   BI     Build Item     210     Processed Radioactives 20000
   BI     Build Item     220     Transaluminum       5000
   BI     Build Item     230     Synthetic Materials    15000
   BI     Build Item     240     Electronics  15000

Now you're ready to write your orders.

[Spiff]

Here's a brief guide to using SuperNova: Rise of the Empire (SNRote) for entering your orders. Get SNRote from the SuperNova downloads page.

If you have access to a Windows computer, great. If you work on a Mac, you can still run SNRote with the excellent CrossOver program, as detailed in Raven's clear instructions for SNRote on a Mac. It takes several steps to set up, then it runs seamlessly.

Once you have SNRote ready, launch it and Update your Data. Make sure you put the SN Turn Entry Data for the current turn (unzipped) into the SNROTE folder, as this will tell the program your available Warp Points, Planets, Fleets, and the like.

Select your Empire (some players have more than one) and begin entering orders, using your spreadsheet of Turn Plans as a guide. (It's much easier to edit plans on a spreadsheet, so it's a good way to draft your orders first).

SNRote will auto-complete your entries, and that's handy in two ways. First, it's fast, since you can type 'mo' and then Tab ahead as the program enters 'MOVE/ Move to Warp Point.' Also, it serves a check against errors if it doesn't auto-complete when you think it should. For instance, you could enter movement to WP 50505 in the Galactica system, then see that SNROTE doesn't offer you 50505 as an option... so you check and see that 50505 is in the Raliens system, not Galactica, and you can enter the order correctly.

Your first SRP Set Research Priority order will take longer to enter, as you could assign all 25 slots. After that, entry is faster because you'll enter new info only for changes, entering '0' for slots that stay the same.

After a few turns, you'll enter orders much faster. Here are some helpful tips to remember:

• You can hit 'Enter' on your keyboard to save most orders
  
• MOVE is when you want a fleet to go to a Warp Point. NM is when you want to go to a planet.
  
• WARP doesn't take an Action Point, so even a ship with 1 AP can MOVE and then WARP
  
• BI Build Item to add a new item to your Production Queue
  
• EB Edit Build to change the quantities of an item, or to remove it entirely
  
• The Orders Supplement tells you the syntax for any given order
  
• Do NOT use commas when entering numbers (like '10,000' or '2,000,000') because the program uses commas to separate order parameters. Extra commas may clog your orders.
  

To edit an order, click on Edit Orders and heed the advice: Edit Orders is used mostly to delete and renumber. To change an order, you'll Delete the row of the mistaken order, then return to Order Entry and enter it correctly. Then return to Edit Orders to assign the old number to your new entry, and click Refresh Order Listing. You can now return to Order Entry from where you left off. It sounds harder than it is, and you can get the hang of it pretty quickly.

All done? Save your orders, then email them as an attachment to supernova@rollingthunder.com. Turns for Draco (your 'galaxy,' separate from the older Andromeda Galaxy) run every other Tuesday and the results come a few days later.

[Spiff]

Your Second and Third Turns

If you ran 80-orders for your first and/or second turn, you may be ready to build a new ship and prepare to colonize new planets. That's covered in Expanding Your Empire.
This post covers ways to maximize your production, prepare ship components, and explore new systems.

But first, here are five miscellaneous orders you may find helpful.
   PRIV    Privacy
                  is a toggle. Use this order if you want to change your settings from 'players can contact me via email' to 'players must contact me via in-game message'
   XLFE    Live Fire Exercises          
                  trains your military. The 'X' means do it each turn. Issue this once when you have room for a spare order.
   FNAME   Rename Fleets
                  allows you to rename up to 5 fleets.
   NAME     Name Legendary Character
                  lets you name up to 5 of your legendary characters. You'll do more with them later on.
   PAP        Political Action Proposal
                  lets you ally with any friends you have in the game. You can also set it to various levels for other empires you discover later on. No hurry on this, as the galaxy is big.

On your homeworld, a single installation of each of these types will give you a bonus of one sort or another (details at the SuperNova Wiki), so consider CONstructing them. None are crucial, so fit them in whenever you have a room for another order.

• Imperial Port Authority Complex
  
• Top Gun School
  
• Naval Gunnery Range
  
• Imperial Naval Academy
  
• Imperial Naval Military College
  
• Science Center
  
• Science Institute
  
• Science Lab
  
• Science Station
  
• the 'Imperial' versions of these last 4
  

Now back to production. For ships, it will help to have each of these items in your Production Queue. I've also suggested target amounts but these are really rough - don't worry if you produce less.

• Electronics  25,000 (see the SuperNova Wiki for components)
  
• Mk I Nuclear Jump Drive   3
  
• Mk I Nuclear Engine 3
  
• Mk I Computer System 3
  
• Fuel Shuttle 2
  
• Survey Lander 2
  
• Colony Beacon 2
  
• Fuel Tankage 15,000
  
• Cargo Bay 75,000
  
• Colonial Berthing 75
  
• Type A Science Lab 3
  

In the meantime, while your PathFinder are out discovering new worlds, you can make use of two essential orders
   SS   System Scan
               useful when you first land in a new system, to see what planets and Warp Points are there
   SURV   Warp Survey
               'unlocks' a Warp Point for all of your ships, if you have enough sensors to survey it. A single Pathfinder can survey an 'A' or 'B' Warp Point. For higher levels, you'll need new ships, detailed in the next thread, Expanding Your Empire.

[Spiff]

From here, see either How to Organize It All for tips on record-keeping or Expanding Your Empire if you're game to colonize new worlds.

[Hobknob]

This is the second of four threads on SuperNova, along with Getting Started: Setup, How to Organize It All, and Expanding Your Empire (Turns 3-10+). For more info on the game, see the SuperNova summary and links posted by Raven. This post details reading your first turn.

Your initial turn sheet arrives with a mind-boggling amount of information in those (roughly) 35 pages. Don't panic: you don't need it all, and reading it gets much easier as you go. Here's how to sort it for the first time.

Page 1: The due date and your remaining balance are the important details here. Don't be fooled by the prominent, colored graph of your racial modifiers: they don't change (until you access advanced technologies), and they have little impact on your turn planning (for a good while).

p2-3: A scan of your home System. One planet is your homeworld, and the others you can access without going through a Warp gate. Your colonists will prefer planets similar to your homeworld, particularly in atmosphere. See How to Organize It All for tips on recording the key details.

You'll also get a PMAP of terrain features and an ORB of your homeworld. The former is mostly for flavor, though future PMAPs can help you fine-tune colonization strategies for other worlds. An ORB tells you what empires have a presence there: you do!

The GEO survey is more valuable, listing resources available on your homeworld. See How to Organize It All.

Next is an ANZ, information about a resource or technology. These will come up automatically as you research new things. Then there's a description of your Bastion defense installation, which you can skip over.

Then there are about 15 pages detailing technology your empire has at start and can research. You can skip all of this - with one exception - to access the info any time from the excellent SuperNova Wiki. I actually made a copy of the pdf and edited out all these pages, along with several of the final pages (Ship Design Report, Force Battle Plan, Installations Report, and Research), since none are needed for your first turns.

The one important page here lists your Imperial Advisor Report, including four useful details, only one of which you need here: your Excess Power, available for new installations. There's other useful info here, including your number of Stripmining Complexes, your Industrial Capacity (roughly 100,000,000 - on the right side, more about this below), and the Legendary Characters on your homeworld, but these are more easily read elsewhere. Stripmining Complexes and Industrial Capacity are repeated in the Colony Report, and there's a Character Report.


Then your pdf says bit about researchable items, then comes your Fleet Report. You really just need the Fleet Number and number of ships, but here's how to read the whole thing.



Fleet #101 ('101' is how you'll identify it for orders), named '101st Recon Group,' in your home system of Galactica in orbit over planet 3 (and not at a WarpPoint). Ignore the Rules of Engagement and other items on the far right for now. It has 73,500 fuel (and room for 84,000 total). It can Jump through Warp Point gates and has 2 Action Points each turn; future ships you build will mostly have 1 Action point, at least for awhile. There are 8 ships in this fleet, of the Pathfinder type (in the broad category of an 'Express Boat,' which you can ignore). Key info: 8 ships in fleet 101, at Galactica-3.

Next is an Army Report - ignore it - and a Colony Report. Take your number of Industrial Complexes and multiply by 25 to get your Industrial Capacity. That's the figure of 100,000,000 or so from the Imperial Advisor Report. You'll use that number in planning, along with the total of 1,000 times your number of Stripmining Complexes.


On your homeworld of Galactica-3, you currently have orders to produce 5 things each turn. 'Tooled' means 'repeat this every turn.' 5050 is the number of your population group on Galactica-3. When you colonize another world, it will have its own Pop Group number. The numbers 510-550 are the order in which these get made. If you add, say, Lumber, you can assign it to your production queue at number 20 or 320 or 400, so it gets made before any of these, or 600 or 7000 or the like and it will get made after. Note that there are two ways to produce things, from your queue and through installations like Iron Mines and Gas Refineries. More on that in How to Organize It All.

Next is the list of items in your Imperial Stockpiles. You'll have millions of Construction Materials, used to make new installations, and millions of Raw Resources, used to produce things in the queue pictured above.

Then comes your Shipyard Report, where you'll have several Pathfinders awaiting production. If you have only one Shipyard Slip, only one can be made per turn. You can add more Slips later.

Warp Points Surveyed will list all the Warp Points in your home system, gateways to further worlds. The relevant info is the WP number listed first, on the left-hand side. Then it lists your home system, where they are all located, along with the places to which they connect. These are adjacent star systems for you to explore.

Ignore the Diplomacy Report for now, which will be blank until you make Alliances.

Under the Character Report, you see your Legendary Characters, all of whom need names. The exception is your leader, named in your Setup Sheet.

You can skip the next parts of the Ship Design Report, Force Battle Plan, Installations Report, and Research. Researchable Items can be useful in planning, along with the information available at the SuperNova Wiki.

Taken together, these the key parts of your first turn report are the

• Scan of your home System on p.2-3
  
• GEO survey of your homeworld
  
• Imperial Advisor Report listing of Excess Power
  
• Fleet Numbers and the number of ships in each fleet
  
• Colony Report with your number of Stripmining Complexes, and your Industrial Capacity
  
• Industrial Production Report, listing what you make each turn
  

That's it. Get those six pieces of information and you're ready to plan orders!

Just a couple of additions here.  
- Each industry is good for 250, not 25 as reported above.
- The colorful graph is the related to your lifeform choices.  The bars are proportional so you can't compare bar length between empires unless you have a known quantity to establish a baseline.  While this is good to know, it is also of little value at this point as noted above.
-

[Hobknob]

First few turns - Just a couple of comments here of what I would recommend in addition to or instead of the excellent advice already given.

- What has the highest priority often depends on your setup and how you plan on playing your positions. However there are a few things that I would recommend doing regardless of other considerations
- set your research, If you saved points to buy tech then now is the time to use them and the best place to use them is on something that you need right away or want to get a jump down the tech tree. For the most part these are things you need right now and probably not horizon techs for this first buy. (I like Mk II Jump Survey Sensors, then 2nd Gen Space Science and then Mk III Jump Survey sensors.) Whatever you do, have a plan and don't waste points to buy tech.
- The next priority for me is to build your mines. For any of the major items it is worth only spending one order to build all you will need in one go. If you run out of construction materials (CM's) then you just DISM industries to get enough to build your mines. For most things a yield under 50 is not worth much so why bother. In Draco the yields tend to generally be pretty good. Also remember that mines take power so If you build 15k mines you will need 15k power . Also, we find the best number of mines to build is (yield*5)-20
- I also build more shipyard slips. At the start you will build a single ship a turn and that is rarely enough so build more, 5-10 in my view will do for a start. This will allow the pathfinders in your shipyards to complete much faster so they can be used.
- production - You need cargo bays, colony beacons and colonial berthing units, and some engines to colonize.
- Production can only be used once and it does not carry over until the following turn if you leave some unused. So, you should plan on a clean up build. BI iron 100000000 works and you will never have enough iron. Just give it a build priority really high, like 20000. This will ensure that no matter what else happens your industries will try and do something every turn.
- There a number of installations that you can build and you should build them, eventually. I would hold off on them and use them to fill in when you are short on orders. It can be difficult to come up with 40 orders worth of things to do after the first couple of turns, until you have built enough new stuff to make new ships and have more fleets move around.

Turn 2-3
-Priv is not really about how other players contact you. It is about one thing only. Do you want players to be able to get your name, address by doing an REA order. If you do, then leave it to off. If you don't then you need to set it to on.
- for myself, I would recommend building all the ship components listed on turn 1 so you can start building ships on turn 2. There are a number of spreadsheets out there to help with production so if you don't want to make your own ask around and somebody will probably share.
- If you have opted for using points to buy Mk II JSS then your pathfinders are now obsolete so once they have done their job surveying your planets in your home system you should move them back to the HW and scrap them for parts. You can then rebuild them with a Mk II jump survey sensor.

Turn 4-10
- At some point in the first few turns you should have all your planets scanned with PMAP And GEO. The ORB order is almost never needed and is generally a waste of orders, however you should do a few just to see what results you get. Be sure and do one on your home planet too. The CSV is useful in the beginning but after you have done a few they can mostly be figured out and are also a waste of an order.
Once you have scanned all your planets and all the system just outside of your home system you may want to evaluate your situation for a couple of things. The biggest is my book is to determine if the setup is viable. One would assume they all are and one would be wrong. If you are in a system with few planets, surrounded by empty nexus systems then it may not be worth it. If you designed your lifeform to be a colonizer and your staring planet has a temp of 450 and you breathe Sulfur Dioxide, then I would suggest starting over.
Here are a few things I would use to evaluate a setup that I would consider bad-
- A system can have 14 planets, the most I have ever seen and each planet can have 4 moons. That is a max value of 70 orbits so if you are on planet 1 and the only other orbit is moon 1a then think hard about a reboot.
- Are you missing yield for any of the following on the HW, iron, crystal, lumber
- Is your planet temp over 350
- Does you HW lie in some sort of space phenomena, Ion storm etc
- Did you find Death Machine forces in your home system or in the first systems out

Here are the good ones -
- HW yields for iron, lumber are over 600, planet has either a hydro or a geothermal yield over a few 100
- The more planets in a system the better, especially asteroid fields and other planets with higher yields. Ideally all resources should be found in your home system or 1 away
- Numerous WP's out from your HW and if some of them are dead ends with planets that is good to.
- Another planet in your Home system has a lumber yield of 300 or more - A single yield of 500 is better than a number of yields in the 300 or less.

Some choices you will make may either be good or bad depending on your system resources so take some time to evaluate things. It will just cost more to build weapons that require Caldaran crystals if you don't have any available in your system.

Good Luck