Approaching the mid-game. Couple of questions

[towerbooks3192]

Finally feel that I left the early stages of pre-warp and now approaching to mid-game. Here are a few questions

-I was wondering if it is a good idea to automate my constructions ships now?

- How do I improve my income? (I had to use the editor to give me a little money to at least set-up spaceport as my cash flow is in the red (around -40,000). I tried to prioritise building mines on luxuries in the hopes that it would improve my balance.

- When is it best to build resorts and would it help me out of the read?

-Is it better to invade (faster when I have troops ready) or colonise a friendly independent?

- I just had some refugees (Securans) and it is weird that I don't get their bonus but I got a Haakonish bonus instead when I don't have a single colony that has any Haakonish population (I play as ackdarian and got a couple of independent ackdarians and a securan refugee).

- I don't know where I went wrong about my budget but I only have 2 frigates and 5 destroyers that I built (nothing fancy and around 300 ship size used) and about 2 cruisers and a destroyer that I have found and some from the refugees and 2 troop transports (so around 12 ships all in all).

- Does a mining station have to be within my borders in order for me to receive its benefits (got a rephidium source that I have build on and is very close to my border).

[Canute0]

-I was wondering if it is a good idea to automate my constructions ships now?

Depend how much work do you want to have. Personaly i let the most construction ships run on auto. but i keep 1-3 on hotkeys for manual use.

- How do I improve my income?

Your main income are from population Tax.
You prolly found out that a new colony cost more then you get.
So the best way are colonize an independet colonie if they are friendly, or invade them if they are hostile. When you invade you are geting a small reputation loose but when you kill a pirate base you counter this.
Alternativ invade another empire homeworld.

- When is it best to build resorts and would it help me out of the read?

At shadows, Resort bases arn't that profitable then they was before but still useful.
I start to build Resort bases when i researched the Long rang scanner, and the passenger transport ofcourse. Then i build them at any available location that is free and not that too far away.

-Is it better to invade (faster when I have troops ready) or colonise a friendly independent?

Better, not realy but cheaper. A colony ship is very expensive and need long to get build, and the colonisation attempt isn't allways succesful.

I just had some refugees (Securans) and it is weird that I don't get their bonus

You need at last a min. population of these to get a bonus, not sure how much you need.

- I don't know where I went wrong about my budget

Check the firepower of the ships you found compared to your own ship. You should dismantle your own ship until you research some more tech and can build better ones.
Or dismantle the found ships for a research bonus. But i would keep them and try to destroy pirate bases with them.

- Does a mining station have to be within my borders in order for me to receive its benefits

Did you mean the bonus from luxury resources ?
That doesn't matter, but the resources need to delivered to your colonies before they give the bonus.

[Bingeling]

There are no massive benefits to mines apart from not having shortages. You probably get some trade bonus if foreign powers buy from the mine (or your colonies/spaceports), and the civilian maybe save some money in not having to buy at foreign stations.

The colony bonus is for having that resource in inventory at the colony. The colony wants luxuries (at least 10 I think) to be well developed, and there is in addition the bonus ones for your race.

Why do you have little money? It is hard to tell from here. A screenshot of the empire screen (that shows numbers of everything) could help. Or you could try the thing from the other money issue thread and upload your savegame somewhere.

[towerbooks3192]

ORIGINAL: Bingeling

There are no massive benefits to mines apart from not having shortages. You probably get some trade bonus if foreign powers buy from the mine (or your colonies/spaceports), and the civilian maybe save some money in not having to buy at foreign stations.

The colony bonus is for having that resource in inventory at the colony. The colony wants luxuries (at least 10 I think) to be well developed, and there is in addition the bonus ones for your race.

Why do you have little money? It is hard to tell from here. A screenshot of the empire screen (that shows numbers of everything) could help. Or you could try the thing from the other money issue thread and upload your savegame somewhere.

Tried a few screenshots and I don't know where to find them. I would try to upload them once I get around to it. So what screenies do you need? I don't even know where to find the save files. I am on my PC right now and that file is on my laptop so I will try to upload it later once I figure it out.

Those new ships from the refugees and the ones I found were having some pretty advanced components and I should recheck how much they cost. I reckon it must be my large spaceport (I think I added some more components like some more research labs and 3 plants to one manufacturing something (forgot the component parts).Should I change its components and make it more efficient or something? I might revert it back to original and then just upgrade components to the latest ones available. From the top of my head, I think my frigates cost around 800-900 and my Destroyers cost around 1100 but I am pretty sure it was less than 1500.

As for mining stations, I just updated the components, add Life/Hab and reactor as needed and the very important energy collector then I also added a long range scanner to each of them.

In reply to Canute:

I don't know why the Securan bonus didn't take effect as I recall I had two auto-saves after I settled the Securans and as I have said, I got All ackdarian indies and my ackdarians and the only other bonus I have is the Hakoonish and I don't have a single colony or territory that has some Hakoonish indies nor did I invade any Hakoonish empires.

As for invade or colonize, I know I get reputation hit from any alien empires where I have an indie colony of their race that I have invaded or colonise but do I still get the penalty when I am the only main Ackdarian empire in the game? I know that for example I have controlled a human independent colony therefore I would have relation penalties with human empires because of that.

I think I could scrap a few of my destroyers and see how it goes and it might help with the maintenance since I had to station 2 fleets to different parts of my empire due to the annoying occasional pirate raids.

Question: What is important, access to wide varieties of luxury or access to more of a single or a few luxuries? (e.g having 1 source of danta fur and terralion down vs having multiple sources of terralion downs)

[Bingeling]

Since you colonies want 10 different luxuries, I would not prefer multiples of a single source. Having two of each does not hurt, though.

For screenshots I use the snipping tool included in windows. If this is possible to you may depend a bit on how you run the game.

To find save games, enter this link in a "windows explorer" (the address field when you browse any folder):

%AppData%\Code Force Limited\Distant Worlds

There is one folder for each patch.

[towerbooks3192]

ORIGINAL: Bingeling

Since you colonies want 10 different luxuries, I would not prefer multiples of a single source. Having two of each does not hurt, though.

For screenshots I use the snipping tool included in windows. If this is possible to you may depend a bit on how you run the game.

To find save games, enter this link in a "windows explorer" (the address field when you browse any folder):

%AppData%\Code Force Limited\Distant Worlds

There is one folder for each patch.

Running on windows 8.1 on my laptop and I have problems locating that folder. Can't shake off that Civ mentality where only 1 source of luxury is effective and additional sources of the same luxury could only be used to be traded.

How do I know what I am earning with free trade agreements and how do I make other empires sign the agreement with me? Is free trade agreement really helpful?

[pycco]

Yes having more than one source of a luxury resource is very good. if you can get all the sources of a luxury you can get a monopoly on it and the price will go very high.mining station can eat your income very quickly, in my experience it is best to making mining stations very cheap no defense,i make 4 station types all together with and without lux. a fleet is the best defense it can move and engage enemy's all over the system easily for about the same cost as a system full of mining stations with defenses. as for construction ship automation i would strongly suggest not doing it, the ai likes to build stations at crazy places all over the galaxy which makes your resources take a long time to get to your planets. in the beginning of the game it is very important to drop tax rate at home world to as low as you can if you play with tech trading on trade techs to stay in the green and let your population grow, when the population of the planet is at max population tax them.

save games are in user folder in app data roaming code force limited

[Bingeling]

App data is probably a hidden folder by default. Unless they changed things it is at the same level as documents, downloads, and friends.

See for instance: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/zxue/archive/2012/03/08/win8-howto-19-show-hidden-files-folders-and-drives.aspx

On how to find the options to make them visible.

The advice in the previous post is way advanced, but there is no need to build a massive amount of mines. 1-2 sources per resource, and more for the strategic ones that are used in the normal ships (military and civilian). And of course, many fuel sources never hurt. With multiple colonies you will have quite a few sources on those as well.

On normal or easier settings it is no problem running constructors on auto, but I would avoid giving the AI too many of them. 3-4 should be enough as long as you don't tax it with repairing your military wrecks. Also, if it starts building mines in remote areas where you can't defend them, consider scrapping them before pirates does that. Notice that the reason why it does this, is that you may lack sources for something useful.

You need to decide whether you want to design everything yourself or not. A trap in "self design" could be too expensive designs, but an experienced designer could of course save some money compared to the default AI designs. One feature of the manual design crowd, is that they make the game sound way harder and more complex than it needs to be.

Tech trading is a good idea, it can give nice cash. I usually don't do that though, mostly due to not wanting more cash [:'(]

[pycco]

ORIGINAL: Bingeling

App data is probably a hidden folder by default. Unless they changed things it is at the same level as documents, downloads, and friends.

See for instance: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/zxue/archive/2012/03/08/win8-howto-19-show-hidden-files-folders-and-drives.aspx

On how to find the options to make them visible.

The advice in the previous post is way advanced, but there is no need to build a massive amount of mines. 1-2 sources per resource, and more for the strategic ones that are used in the normal ships (military and civilian). And of course, many fuel sources never hurt. With multiple colonies you will have quite a few sources on those as well.

On normal or easier settings it is no problem running constructors on auto, but I would avoid giving the AI too many of them. 3-4 should be enough as long as you don't tax it with repairing your military wrecks. Also, if it starts building mines in remote areas where you can't defend them, consider scrapping them before pirates does that. Notice that the reason why it does this, is that you may lack sources for something useful.

You need to decide whether you want to design everything yourself or not. A trap in "self design" could be too expensive designs, but an experienced designer could of course save some money compared to the default AI designs. One feature of the manual design crowd, is that they make the game sound way harder and more complex than it needs to be.

Tech trading is a good idea, it can give nice cash. I usually don't do that though, mostly due to not wanting more cash [:'(]

ya i don't tech trade either but it help if your are unfamiliar with the game. galaxy size and such depends on how effective auto is in my experience. i always need 5-7 mines of each or i get huge shortages that take years to fill. i also play on the biggest galaxy size with all races. Manually doing things is way more complicated but adds a lot to the game.

what design do you use for mining stations? maybe i am not building them very effectively.

[Bingeling]

5-7 sources for the core strategics. Steel and friends. Look at the construction summary of some military ships and spaceports to identify them (button in the design below the middle part).

For the others, 1-2 sources should be enough.

Of course, with a giant empire more mines are needed. If something keep killing the mines, a few in reserve would not hurt.

[towerbooks3192]

Will try to restart and keep tech trade ticked next time so that I could have an option to do it just in case. I am currently having a dilemma between making a ship/base efficient but not effective and vice versa. I checked the game and I noticed that troop maintenance is eating around 33k of my budget. I didn't know how much I spent on troops but I remember recruiting a lot on my homeworld but not much on the other colonies that I have. I don't know what is an efficient number of troops that could garrison on colonies that is enough to fend off invaders and raiders.

Couple of more questions:

-Tips on how to effectively invade planets (been having trouble with ground invasion)

and

- Is it alright to leave mines/civilian ships bare bones as in keep the small storage/basic reactor/small fuel cell or at least upgrade to standard storage/basic reactor/standard fuel cell. I reckon one of the other things that is killing me are the mine maintenance as I updated the components and I think I installed some shields and armours on the mines.

[Bingeling]

Civilian maintenance is paid for by privates. Mines are also privates, while construction ships are state. Mines should not be killing you unless it also kills the civilian economy (do they have money?).

I usually leave troop recruitment on auto, and book some more when I feel it is urgent. If you scroll through my AAR from Shadow launch, you can see my economic overviews at the end of posts. It seems I had approx 100k ship maintenance by the time troop expenses reached 33K.

http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3327097&mpage=1&key=

When invading you want 2-3 times the defensive strength (or more). The attack strength on troop in a fleet is shown in the selection window. There are bonuses from armored attack, and space control (among others). Click the battle line to get an overview once battle has started. I would come with 2-4 times the amount of troops (don't forget that different races has different troop strength), and on the big invasion maybe drop a pre-party to scout for defense strength before dropping 100 troops to get killed by bad judgement

[pycco]

tanks and special forces help a lot, also try bombing it to soften it up before invading it.Raids 3 units can stop them, for invasions tanks and planet defense are needed to survive without committing huge amounts of infantry. personally i prefer the combat bots,they build so much faster and are cheaper,but are noticeable weaker. for combating pirates hit and run invest in warp stopping tech. if your civilian sector has more free $ it builds more freighters. what you build on what is up to you, if you notice a design not preforming like you think it should change it. keep an eye on the civilian sectors income if they go negative your whole empire will crawler to a stop.

[towerbooks3192]

I reckon this might paint a clearer picture? Before ending my session yesterday I kind of tried invading another empire's capital but I failed since I don't have even the basic bombardment weapons. I also managed to destroy a large and small spaceport of the pirates on the upper map and manage to snag myself a mortalu and dhayut indie though I don't have enough money to set up some spaceports. that troop maintenance is killing me and to think that I am not at war!. I only have around 2 refugee ships and 2 of my what remained from my initial fleet. I had to borrow 3 cruisers from the editor then just erased them just to defend my base since that pirate band still has a base somewhere. I don't know how I could turn this thing around.

[Bingeling]

Way many colonies and little income, though I am not that good at empire economy at a glance. By latest economy theory, don't build a lot of spaceports. Where it could be good to use some manual design is to make a small and cheap star base design to build above the colonies. If they are roamed by pirates I guess they are shot down, though. Currently you can not afford even that.

From my Ikurro AAR, at approximately 12000M population I had 4 colonies. 8872M at the capital, having almost all the revenue, giving 72K taxes. Try to pay attention to the capital population, are they being shipped off as migrants? I have seen that happened a long time ago, and it was an economical killer.

If this happens you could probably solve it by raising the taxes on your small colonies to make them less attractive. At this point you want the capital population to rise, since that gives revenue to tax. Once it is full, you want it to remain full, but also to send some away (since it is still increasing). If they migrate out of the empire (look where passenger ships are heading with your migrants), you are in trouble

Another thing that probably helps my AAR game compared to yours, is that I played with "expensive research". That makes it take a longer time to get into space, which allows the capital population to increase more before there is much chance for expansion.

You have pitiful revenue. You need to adjust your expenditure to it, and you can afford almost nothing. This must be a lovely example on "how to expand fast and break the economy".

Do something like: 1 troop at each colony. 8 at the capital (you can probably get by with 4). Scrap all small spaceports. Retrofit the home spaceport to medium. Retire/scrap 3 constructors. Retire all troop transports.

If that does not get an effective positive cashflow (with bonus cash), you are in trouble. I would leave the spaceport retrofit for last and hopefully discover that I can do without it.

If pirates rule your skies, you are in trouble. Hope or some friends out there that want to be better friends and send you some gift. If you are wimpy, scout for possible tech trades. But even with this you need to cut expenses dramatically.

[DeadlyShoe]

your real problem is the appallingly low tax revenue compared to GDP (only 5.6% effective tax rate)

this is either due to incredibly bad happiness or the negative tax effect of too many planets

you need to dump your colonies by any means necessary. I forget if you can abandon colonies, but at the least you need to manually raise taxes on everything but your homeworld and best/most strategic colonies. witha ny luck they will revolt.

[towerbooks3192]

Will do. Never realised that I am shooting myself in the leg by rapidly expanding. This is a lesson that I learned the hard way but its alright. As to dumping my colonies, I don't know how I should dump them. Now I am learning more about what to do and what not to do and I will make sure I would avoid the same mistake that I did in this current game.

I have a few more questions especially to those who play on the largest map size:

What are the ideal research, pirates, and monster settings? I am leaning towards very expensive, a lot but average distance and normal monster. I just installed the extended mod so this is going to be interesting.Also,I was wondering, what is a good way to know it would not kill me to have more colonies again? I will try very bare bones right now. Is there any disadvantages at keeping the reactor of private ships to basic?

[Bingeling]

I think the basic reactor is very inefficient. It may give higher fuel bills, fuel shortages, or something like that. Also, learning the hard way can be fun, but not if you don't discover what is the main problem.

What is the ideal settings? It depends on what you want [8D].

With slow research (the slower the more visible):
You may get some help in delaying expanding (since you can't), but you may also find that pirate battles are much harder. I see some prefer to pay the pirates off though (but I don't deal with pirates once the home spaceport is up). With a longer pre warp the pirates has more time to milk independents, and empires need more time catch up to them in tech (they research much faster, and start behind).

I would try to either save your game without dumping colonies, or start a new one.

For your own knowledge, I would suggest to monitor your passenger ships a bit. Are they transporting migrants? To where? With civilian vectors on, you should see the travel vector of the selected ship marked, which helps seeing where they are headed.

As for the "pain of over expansion" I have never really noticed the "cost of a colony". They won't help for a while, though, and any effort spent defending it is of course an expenditure.

Very bare bones, 4 troops on capital, no others. That should leave you in the "plus" with my suggested retirements...

[towerbooks3192]

ORIGINAL: Bingeling

I think the basic reactor is very inefficient. It may give higher fuel bills, fuel shortages, or something like that. Also, learning the hard way can be fun, but not if you don't discover what is the main problem.

What is the ideal settings? It depends on what you want [8D].

With slow research (the slower the more visible):
You may get some help in delaying expanding (since you can't), but you may also find that pirate battles are much harder. I see some prefer to pay the pirates off though (but I don't deal with pirates once the home spaceport is up). With a longer pre warp the pirates has more time to milk independents, and empires need more time catch up to them in tech (they research much faster, and start behind).

I would try to either save your game without dumping colonies, or start a new one.

For your own knowledge, I would suggest to monitor your passenger ships a bit. Are they transporting migrants? To where? With civilian vectors on, you should see the travel vector of the selected ship marked, which helps seeing where they are headed.

As for the "pain of over expansion" I have never really noticed the "cost of a colony". They won't help for a while, though, and any effort spent defending it is of course an expenditure.

Very bare bones, 4 troops on capital, no others. That should leave you in the "plus" with my suggested retirements...

Cheers!

I will put all your teachings to heart and strive to improve on my next game. I installed extended and now started and I had a hard time with pirates but they stopped bothering me after I paid them off and after I built to defense platforms armed with torpedoes. I set the research to very slow and used my spies to get to work by stealing most techs. I got Armour, shield and reactors through espionage and I only need to wait for the standard fuel cells to make a decent ship at least to defend myself from the space monster event.

[Bingeling]

Space monsters can be kited. Send you small fleet to attack it. Observe what ship is the target of the monster, have it run away (that is, move away from the monster). Watch for the monster changing target...

4-5 crap escorts can kill a normal space monster this way. The early ones often attack something at your capital, you just need to aim to place the fleet so that they get their shots off...