I’m sure there’s a trick (there’s always a trick to the randoms) but in the early expansion phase where my weapons just bounce off or miss the trappers I send in one colony ship, let it get trapped, then follow up with the rest of my fleet.
On dealing with the swarm:
Two ships can win this, just drive near an asteroid, the swarm impacts against them and dies. Destroying their asteroid, and thus the swam, takes more ships, or two cruisers.
On alien relics:
When dealing with a relic don’t destroy it, disarm it over the course of a couple of turns (you can actually do it in one if you’re really well practised) and you get a four turn research bonus instead of just one. Have a repair ship with you and I believe you can get tech from it, though I’ve never done this myself.
The easiest example is ship building. The money for a ship is taken immediately, no matter how many turns it takes to build one. This means the best ship building strategy is never to build them in one locale queued for X turns, but rather in several places, co-ordinating their build time against journey time for whatever rally point you decide upon. You need need to keep track of which ships at which locations were going where. As the hivers it gets worse because with gates everyone can go everywhere so you’re best building every fleet at every planet, but then you need to keep track of which ship was going where when it’s build, and all you have to do that is the planetary note system, which isn’t exactly a great system…
In SP you probably won’t bother, but in MP you’ll have to if you’re playing to win because otherwise the other guy is putting out his fleet four times faster than you, and since you’re going to be on a time limit each turn you’ll need a fast mouse hand.
Not anymore with the expansion. The swarm have evolved and are not quite as mindless as before. They won’t run into or shoot at the asteroid hive anymore. You also don’t want too leave them alone for too long since they now duplicate and spread. If you’re the kind ofperson who like wide open maps (30+ stars per player) you may run into quite a few swarm hives once you finally get to the outer reaches.
Sounds sweet… especially as they were such a non-threat waste of space before.
I don’t understand why you need to do this, but maybe I’m missing something. I guess it makes sense if you’re not saving money, but I usually keep a large reserve of funds so I can pump out ships when I get a new design I wish to upgrade to. Does this really matter if I have a cash reserve? I’m confused.
Ah, ok. Though I would guess that this kind of small advantage is far outweighed by important strategic expansion/tech/fleet composition decisions (or how lucky you are with nearby resource-rich, colonisable planets). But all things being equal I agree.
I’m really getting into the Zuul at the moment. A Zuul hammerhead/armor cruiser fleet gives new meaning to ‘alpha strike’ (this is with only shaped nuclear missiles! Once I get fusion people are really going to be in trouble). And who knew slavery could be so much fun :)
I have ten credits and each ship costs one credit. I build them all at one world. It costs me ten credits on turn one and they’re all built by turn ten. Alternatively I build them one per world and then ship them to my rally point. It takes one turn to build them and one turn (assuming hivers) for gate travel. My ten ship fleet is ready to launch, yours is eight turns away from being ready.
Who will win?
Take a more mobile race, like the Liir with their ability to stop in Deep Space so the rally point can be an enemy planet, and you’ve got yourself a deadly advantage.
I’m trying to get into this game and have some questions–
First, how do you set up a rally point?
Also, why is it I research stuff and then all of a sudden all progress stops?
Can anyone recommend a starting out strategy? I keep going deep into the red.
Thanks in advance
I’m guessing these two are related. Research spending is the money you have left after you pay for colony and ship upkeep, interest payments and savings. If, say, colony upkeep (light blue wedge of the pie) is eating up almost all your income, you can’t do any research.
It’s easy in SotS to over-expand. Depending on how close a colony’s environment is to your ideal conditions (the climate hazard), you can pay a hell of a lot of money to maintain that colony until you can terraform it. A few colonies costing 50k a turn will cripple your economy in the early game. If it takes you 60 turns to fully develop the colony, that’s 3 million gone.
Things to do to lower the cost of developing the colonies:
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Don’t colonize high climate-hazard planets before you can afford them.
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Use 4 colonizers at once to start a colony. This starts you off with 4 times the population and 4 times the infrastructure, so you are further along that exponential growth curve. This can get you to profitability much faster. This is especially important on high climate-hazard planets, as your population will only grow slowly on those.
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Focus on infrastructure in the early stages of colony development. More infrastructure improves your construction rate, which allows you to build more infrastructure. It’s only once you’ve built up a significant chunk of infrastructure that you can terraform at any reasonable speed.
Any chance this will show up on Steam at some point?
Edit: Let me explain the question and add another. I have history with Steam. I have no experience with GamersGate or D2D. All things being equal, I’d rather get something like this from Steam than roll the dice with someone new and load my system up with yet another download management client.
Anyway, assuming one does buy from GamersGate, can the expansion be installed over the retail version of SotS?
Edit the Second: Sheesh, Rorschach already answered my second question in a preceding post. Sorry about that. :P
There are no rally points, you need to do it by hand. Hence Quitch’s comments about sometimes needing to micro.
To add to Mike’s points, also target high resource worlds (>5000) if possible, as they will develop a lot quicker. And overharvest until you’ve built a decent bit of infrastructure.
I hate to overharvest, but it does make sense. The Zule seem to have at least a minimal amount of overharvesting all the time, which I think would drive me nuts.
It’s on GamersGate. I bought the original from them and didnt’ have any problems. (Really the only 2 direct downloading services I wouldn’t recommend are EA’s in house one and Direct2Drive.)
I’d expect this to appear on Steam momentarily if it isn’t already. Steam is usually pretty quick about adding stuff like this.
NinjaEdit: The original version never appeared on Steam so I wouldnt’ expect the expansion to, either. I’d definitely recommend GamersGate over D2D.
using direct2download right now.
The expansion will update any other version of the SotS base game either downloaded from the same service, another service, or purchased in stores.
Population plays a bigger role in colony development so the idea to bring multiple colonizers is very sound, just beware of traps. Desirable worlds for colonization have high size (population and income) and resources (industrial output and construction) and low hazard rating. Don’t be afraid to abandon a colony that’s eating up your income. I like to keep colony upkeep (light blue) under 1/2 total budget. I’ll go to 2/3 if it’s a difficult start and I need worlds. Bio techs like Suspended Animation and Atmoshperic Adaptation and others are very helpful in speeding up colony start up time.
yikes…
Thanks folks, I’m doing a lot better in my latest game. I’m researching my fourth tech (never got that far before) and am on my 43rd turn. When do I start seeing other races? I only set up 2 other races, should I have used more?
And yes, this game needs a number of ui improvements that you would think they would have gotten to by this time. It’s very frustrating to send my extended range ships out and have to check which planets I’ve already explored! It could not be difficult to show the unexplored planets’ names in purple or orange or something. Rally points, a way to show the explored planets in the management view with compressed information, a way to show the explored planets without the cost prohibitive ones showing up, etc etc.
At any rate, I’m enjoying it so far, looking forward to some real conflict at some point.
It depends on the size of the map and how quickly you and they expand. Two humans on a small map will run into each other faster than two hivers on a large map.
It’s very frustrating to send my extended range ships out and have to check which planets I’ve already explored! It could not be difficult to show the unexplored planets’ names in purple or orange or something.
On the main view, planets change from stars to planets once you’ve explored them. If your scout was killed before you got to see the planet, they become this black sphere with a red X. I guess you could use some other screen, but the positions in the main screen are pretty important.
Rally points, a way to show the explored planets in the management view with compressed information, a way to show the explored planets without the cost prohibitive ones showing up, etc etc.
Yes, all of these would be good. Though I think you can sort by climate hazard, to weed out the ones that are cost-prohibitive. Rally points would be very nice though.
At any rate, I’m enjoying it so far, looking forward to some real conflict at some point.
I expect you would start running into them very soon, unless you picked a pretty big map.