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Thank you Fenrisfil, although I only own RotS

Ice, I thought that was a guide about creating guides
I will take a look at it. Looks very helpful!

edit: Oh, and something else. Troops. I think I can load them on a ship via the extenden right click menu, right? But how do I get them to attack a planet?

edit: What does a good small/medium/big spaceport design look like?

ORIGINAL: F0rdPrefect

Thank you Fenrisfil, although I only own RotS

Ice, I thought that was a guide about creating guides
I will take a look at it. Looks very helpful!

edit: Oh, and something else. Troops. I think I can load them on a ship via the extenden right click menu, right? But how do I get them to attack a planet?

edit: What does a good small/medium/big spaceport design look like?

Lol. Well the design/espionage tips still stand along with checking for crazyness in AI designs (I didn't start playing until Legends so don't know what the RotS AI was like), specifically make sure it's using racial techs and the right "fork" choices (the tech level 3/4 techs where there are multiple options).

You get your troops to attack the planet simply by selecting either the troop carrier or the fleet it's in and right clicking on the planet you want to invade. You can also do it via the extended menu for either the planet or the system (the later being handy if the planet has an annoyingly large space port making directly clicking on it difficult).

As for spaceport design, well that's probably more down to personal preference. However I normally try and make sure I have a lot of long range weapons on my medium/large space ports so enemies can't just sit out of range and pound on it. Mostly you want to consider exactly what role you want each size port to perform and how many of each you are likely to build.

For me the small space ports are more about providing their utility roles rather than defence, so I make them as slimline as possible (while not leaving them too vulnerable). If the AI isn't putting long range scanners on them I will add those but I usually remove all the research labs as I'll be hitting those targets elsewhere.

Just downloaded Legends, will try it after dinner. Looking forward to it!

Have fun F0rdPrefect!

ORIGINAL: Fenrisfil

Starting in pre-warp I micromanage everything except taxes.

Micromanaging taxes on your home world is by far the most influential task regarding long term development.

The thing to do regarding taxation is to keep your homeworld's tax at zero for as long as you can afford. When you do need money, tax as heavily as you can without your population rebelling - I like to keep their happiness at zero or slightly above, as there may be some risks involved when pushing it lower.

If you come into the situation that you feel you need to tax your homeworld before it has reached max population, you should consider to establish a colony or two (expensive and time consuming, and depending on your technological development not feasible early game) or invade an indy or neighbor to encourage your civil sector to spend money on transport ships, just to get cash reserves so you can lower taxes to zero for a time again.

This switching between no tax and 'maximum tax' will let your homeworld's population rise faster to the maximum level than any other strategy. Your homeworld will for a very long time be the only worthwhile source of money (unless you take over a rival empire's homeworld), and the taxes you do earn are totally proportional to the population of a given planet (times development level, times corruption factor and so on...), so the faster you have it max out there, the more you'll get back later, with big, fat interest.

This is, arguably besides controlling exploration manually, the one most important aspect of this game where micromanagement pays off. Neglecting it is equivalent to raising the overall difficulty (which may be completely desireable, regarding how easy it can become when you micromanage too much).

All good advice, I will try to micromanage as much as possible in my next game I think (only dowloaded the game a couple of weeks ago and have just started playing my 2nd game), so I'm quite a noob to DW, but loving it so far!

I micromanage everything, which takes about 20 minutes per game day once I have a couple thousand ships and several hundred colonies...

Lonnie Courtney Clay