07-30-2013, 10:32 AM
(07-30-2013, 04:10 AM)ixnay Wrote: I just submitted turn 3 orders (with 10 minutes to spare...) I would ordinarily add to my colorful narratives, but I'm on vacation at the beach and would rather sleep after the exhaustive exercise my kids are putting me through. So here's a quick recap of what I did:
First, I noticed that my "doubled" orbiting colony was short of unskilled labor to run the light-structure factories, or rather it was short of automation. This is because on turn 1 I noticed I had 360,000 Automation-1 units lying around so I assembled them, but they were really intended to be used as part of the tutorial on a later turn (to help double said orbiting colony.) My "doubling" went through except the automation units weren't there. I haven't checked, but I suspect my turn 2 results will show that my "add-on" orders didn't find enough automation.
So I corrected that this turn by adding an equivalent amount in hi-tech automation-3 units (each of which is as good as 9 of the old units!) I also added considerable space to the orbiter, but did not double the factory base. This is because my food situation will soon affect that orbiter as well as my ships. It has a stockpile, but I can't add to it until my home-planet farms catch up on topping off the home-planet stockpiles. So I don't want to add more population to an underfed orbiter.
And what about those ships? I could have committed them to conducting surveys without food, and have 25% of their people die. But I decided it was wholly out of character for me. Besides, they were just surveying my home system planets, which will doubtlessly be surveyed soon enough. I also pulled back the one scout I sent to the one other system within range. Didn't want to kamikaze him on the large alien base out there.
I AM kamikaze-ing the one unfed scout in orbit 1, along with my 2 original well-fed scouts, in that all 3 ships are invading the alien outpost. I have no idea how this will turn out, but I'm excited to see the next turn's results.
I continued with my program of greatly expanding consumer-good production, which had been ignored by the tutorials until now. So I think I'm drifting farther and farther away from the tutorial track to the point that they are serving merely as an example for me. Still enormously helpful. I am leaving all other production the same. I doubled my mines, finally -- I believe I have enough professional labor to run them now.
And I am spending my accumulated research on Laboratory-5 tech. This means that the factory group producing labs will be able to retool and upgrade to lab-5 when the current lab-4 production run is complete in 2 turns. At that point, I will assembled the lab-4 and start making close to 4.5m research points a turn, on top of the 2m my old labs are currently spitting out. I don't know what I'll spend all that on first, though Mines and Farms are pretty high priority.
If all goes well, I'll have another post in a day or two reviewing my results.
IXNAY,
It sounds like you are getting the HANG of it. Too bad the tutorials were not timely. I had nothing to do with this game setup, other providing an algorithm to generate a more "globular" cluster design. It seems that the initial setup was indeed engineered such that there is only ONE PATH to success in the initial turns. I made a few boo-boo's myself so don't feel bad. Relax and have fun while you can.