The MISSING COLONIES OF MAN
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STRATEGY GUIDE
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Guide to The Colonies of Man By: C. D. Clagett, The Ultimate Admiral So, you sent in your race choice in the game a little
late, with the result that all of your top choices were already taken.
Uncertain about which of the remainder you wanted to play, you sort
of chose the Missing Colonies of Man. After looking more carefully at
your ship list, you're not sure you didn't make a mistake. Your main
torpedo carrying combatants are either a wimpy 2 tube/4 beam Tranquility
Class cruiser or your 4 tube/4 beam Cygnus which is better but has very
low hull mass, small cargo capacity, and a fairly small fuel tank. Weighing
in under 100 kt, a single mine hit splatters the Cygnus into its component
atoms. Your tech 9 Iron Lady Class frigate, with 2 tubes/8 beams is
also relatively low mass and worse, has a glass jaw in that its crew
of only 99 makes it an easy capture for anything firing a lot of high
tech torpedos. Even high population Cyborg worlds without a starbase
can capture it. The Patriot Class light carrier has a good punch, but
has such small cargo capacity that it generally only punches once against
a reasonably formidable ship that doesn't actually defeat it. The Scorpius
Class light carrier has more mass and more cargo room, but it only has
two bays and so is almost useless against anything with more than 4
beams. Your premier capital ship, the Virgo Class battlestar, is formidable
enough but it is the Sherman tank of the heavy carriers; all the other
heavy carriers have ten rather than just eight bays and defeat it rather
handily. Two high tech weapon battleships can take one battlestar out,
giving the enemy an even trade since the second battleship survives.
The Cobol is a neat ship with its bioscanner and fuel scooper, but nothing
to brag about as a combatant. Do you have any reason for optimism? You
better believe it. If you have made it through all of the above except
for the last line your problem is that you have failed to recognize
your strengths along with your weaknesses. This is not an unreasonable
mistake. The Colonies' strengths and the value of their special abilities
are not as obvious as those of most of the other races. This article
examines the strategic implications of the Colonies' strengths and weaknesses
and makes recommendations with respect to specific strategies and general
campaign directions for the Colonial player. Handling Your Population In the beginning... you are weak. But then, so is everybody
else. What you do in the first twenty turns, however, will have significant
impact on how strong you are at turn seventy or one hundred. The game
default in Host version 3.22 has your homeworld start off with a moderate
tax rate of eight percent. This is ruinous. Set the tax rate to zero
immediately ! Your colonist population growth rate is determined
by the planet temperature, modified by the colonist tax rate. The equation
term governing clan growth with respect to taxes is 5/(5 + T) where
T is your % tax rate. This term is multiplied by the growth rate potential
determined by planetary temperature to yield actual growth rate. Therefore,
if taxes are zero your clans increase at the maximum potential rate.
If taxes are at 5%, growth rate is halved; if 10%, the growth rate is
reduced by 2/3. A 50 degree planet with a zero tax rate grows at 5%
per turn; this is the best possible growth rate. A 27 degree planet
with zero taxes will only grow at about 1.5 % per turn. Now, a 5% exponential
growth rate gives you a doubling time of about 14 turns, provided you
are not removing clans for colonization, which of course you will be.
Let's say your colonization efforts remove clans from the home world
such that your doubling time is a constant 20 turns; by turn 60 you
will have undergone two doublings, your home world will have a population
around 4 million, and it will be producing 2000 clans per turn. Your
actual growth performance if you have set taxes to zero early will be
much better than this. Now, setting your tax rate to zero will make
a little bit of a money problem for you in the beginning. You can make
up for this by building the maximum amount of factories and selling
supplies. Your max allowable factories will grow by up to 3 per turn,
but perhaps not at all on turns in which you remove several hundred
clans. Your object for the home world is to get it to 150,000 clans
(15 million colonists) as soon as possible. Its main export, along with
ships, will be clans. Resist the temptation to tax your homeworld until
you are at 15 million colonists. This point is more crucial to you than
the other players. The Cyborg's clans are his tax base, but he gets
the vast majority of them from assimilated natives. Everybody else's
tax base are the native populations on colonized worlds. You alone will
have the capability of exporting many millions of colonists from your
home world. No one else will have the fuel to support the movement of
this much mass, in addition to supporting movement of warships and freighters
loaded with minerals. You alone will be able to establish multiple multi-million
colonist worlds like the Cyborg, which you will then tax like he does.
You will never have as many large population worlds as the Cyborg, but
in the mid-game when the cyborg worlds are fully assimilated your tax
base of colonists will continue to expand at significant rates, far
faster than anyone else's. As you enter the mid-game and have several million colonists
on the home world, you will want to begin establishing multiple worlds
with multi-million colonist populations. Put these populations on uninhabited
planets having moderate temperatures, preferably in the 40-60 range.
In that temp range, growth of taxed populations, while small, is at
least non-negligible in absolute terms provided you have a few million
colonists. How you generate these worlds will be discussed later. Ship Strategy in the Early Game The very first ship you need to build is your Cobol.
Whether you increase your engine tech to 8 and build hyperdrives is
immaterial for your first cobol since a Quantum 7 driven cobol can travel
indefinitely at warp 8 and still make a small surplus of fuel even if
fully loaded. You will want to install hyperdrives on your early medium
freighters. I do not recommend the small freighter due to insufficient
cargo capacity. Set your cobol's mission to Sensor Sweep and begin collecting
bioscanner reports. I recommend starting a log of bioscanner reports,
since you will lose old reports if HCONFIG.EXE is set to delete old
messages. If you choose, you may simply make notes on the planets in
the starchart window. When you do this, it is helpful to note the turn
in which the bioscan was done. If you later get another scan of the
same world and the number has increased, you know that the planet is
colonized. If it is decreased, you know it is either colonized by the
Cyborg or the natives have been induced to fighting and killing each
other by whoever else is there. Send your early ships out with 20% of
cargo devoted to clans and the rest to supplies. On each new planet
you arrive at, set down 1 clan and 4 supplies, and keep going, beaming
up fuel if you need it. Don't head for home until empty. Sell 3 supplies
the next turn and build one factory. If there are natives present, leave
the tax rate at zero until you can get enough clans on the ground to
collect non-trivial amounts of taxes. The growth rates of natives are
determined identically to that of colonists. Several turns of zero taxes
will substantially increase your collectible taxes when you finally
arrive with people, and fifty turns down the road the results of your
restraint are multiplied many fold. Always try to take the long view.
In the larger ship picture for the early game, you will need to build
many Cobols. These are the ships on whose backs your logistical and
operational juggernauts are going to ride. Defense: the First Requirement If your game is set up so that you are not close enough
to see your neighbors immediately (and hopefully your nearest neighbor
isn't a cloaking race who wants nothing more than to destroy the Colonies)
you will enjoy the luxury of developing your logistical infrastructure.
The more you develop your logisitical infrastructure, the faster you
will develop combat power when the need for it arises, although I wouln't
wait until you see the enemy warship inbound. In that case, you waited
a little too long. When you begin to bump up against other players'
races you must figure out who is going to be an ally and who will be
an enemy. More discussion on allies will follow later. You have ships
that are excellent as components of your defensive infrastructure, ships
that will do nothing but stand by and wait for another race to attempt
the invasion of your terrritory. The first that comes to mind is the
Lady Royale class cruiser. With four beams and one tube, it will defeat
few if any of the ships that are likely to be used in offensive operations
against you. But don't worry about that, because that is not what you
want it for. The Lady Royale is light, with a hull mass of 130 kt, and
has a large fuel tank (670 kt). Its cargo capacity is only 160, but
if we're talking about torpedoes, that's a lot of torpedoes. The Lady
Royale is an EXCELLENT interdiction warship, the more so because it
is cheap. For less than 1200 megacredits you can build Lady Royale with
heavy phasers and Mark 7 torpedoes. I favor Mark 7s at the high tech
end of torpedoes because the cost ratio of megacredits to mines yielded
is better than with Mark 8s. If your limiting factor is money, build
Mark 7s. If your limiting factor is minerals, build Mark 8s. For the
Colonies, megacredits are going to be the limiting factor more often
than minerals. The heavy phasers are for mine sweeping, not combat.
Rather than attempting to intercept and destroy invading enemy warships,
use the Lady Royales to interdict the enemy's movement within your territory.
Make no mistake, you are exceedingly unlikely to destroy anything with
mines. Your purpose is to prevent him from moving somewhere you don't
want him to, like away from your interception warships, or if he does
so, to damage him and force him to use up any onboard supplies. Any
ship reduced to warp 8 or less because of lack of supplies to repair
with should be a sitting duck for you. In an ideal world, you would
like to be able to converge on any invading warship or squadron of warships
with at least three interdiction warships loaded with high tech torpedoes.
Your second class of interdiction warship is the Cobol. By turn 50 you
will have them everywhere anyway, supplying fuel to your massive logistical
operations. Put a few torpedoes on a good fraction of them. If you are
really strapped for cash, go with Mark 4s. At 13 megacredits a copy,
they are very inexpensive, and they have the highest mine/megacredit
ratio of all torpedoes. Voila! A standing, always ready movement interdiction
force. The last component of your defense force will be your carriers.
Initially, these will be Patriots unless you are fortunate enough to
develop unmolested, in which case you will have Virgos. These are your
interception warcraft. By the second half of the first hundred turns,
you should have several starbases. While for logistical reasons it will
be best to build most of your heavy carriers at your forward starbases,
do not be reluctant to build some at your rearward starbases just because
the commute to the battle will be long. These ships will constitute
your interceptor force while they are moving forward to the front lines,
to be ready in the event that your front lines are penetrated by enemy
warships. You will vastly prefer intercepting an invader from ahead
to chasing him from behind, slogging your way through any minefields
he cares to lay. Once the carriers do arrive at your front lines, they
augment the output of the forward starbases. Take the long view; a commander
occasionally needs to exercise patience. Passive Defense: The Neutronium Wastelands You have one other defense which will be absolutely
unavailable to other players. You have the capability of turning your
forward areas--and any other areas you choose, into a fuel wasteland.
How rigorously you pursue this policy is up to you, but you disadvantage
yourself if you omit it altogether. This passive defense, which only
the Colonies are capable of implementing, renders your territory extraordinarily
difficult to penetrate in depth by warships of heavy mass or limited
fuel capacity, i.e. short fuel tank range. The way you go about this
is simple. Strip planets of fuel beyond what you are actually going
to use for the transport of minerals and megacredits by freighters arriving
no more than half a dozen turns or so in the future. This requires careful
management on your part, but is not as difficult as it might seem at
first glance. Most planets don't produce that much fuel. For those that
produce a lot of neutronium as well as a lot of the other minerals,
well, just use that to fuel your large freighters. For those that yield
a lot of fuel but little other minerals, you can either have your battlestars
fuel up there, or send a fuel carrier to move it to where it will be
used. In general, you have few potential uses for fuel carriers but
this is one of them. The only way to overcome this defense is to send
fuel carriers with the invading ships. On seeing this, you should start
salivating with anticipation. You have merely to arrange for those fuel
carriers (hull mass 10 kt) to drive through a few minefields. Can you
say "component atoms"? Now, this defensive tactic can be defeated
by the invader if he decides to tow the fuel carrier behind his larger
warship, thus removing the danger of the fuel carrier hitting a mine.
If he tows, however, he cannot simultaneously lay mines to annoy any
warships which you may have pursuing him from behind; all options have
their downsides. It is essential to remember that cobols on intercept
missions do not make fuel. Therefore if you plan to use them to refuel
ships which are engaged in interception missions, I recommend cruising
through the area you think the pursuit will go, and then when the fuel
tank is reasonably full set your mission to intercept your intercepting
warship. One turn of no fuel production will not appreciably reduce
the fuel in its tank, especially if the other ship's movement brings
it close to the cobol. All you need do is have a care to avoid the invading
warship, which will almost certainly be able to swat your cobol like
an insect. Deep Raiders Squadrons: The Bitter Edged Sword of Colonial Wrath Master this offensive strategy, and your less perceptive
opponents will learn entire new dimensions of the meanings of suffering
and frustration. The concept is exquisitely simple. How you actually
implement it is a little more difficult. In essence, this involves manuever
warfare. Although your ships can be defeated by many of the top ships
possessed by other races, and you might feel that you have less combat
power than the other races, you must bear in mind that the efficacy
of force is at least as dependent on where and when it is applied as
it is on its magnitude. The big picture of what you are trying to accomplish
here is simple: you have almost unlimited fuel, whereas for everybody
else this is as scarce commodity. Therefore, you must make it an even
scarcer commodity by forcing him to chase you with his warships. Each
100 kt of ship mass that you force the enemy to set in motion at warp
9 will result in a cost of 8 kt of neutronium. Big whoop, you think.
You can well believe that it is. An armed and fueled battleship may
well tip the scales over 1000 kt total mass. Since he'll never catch
you with just one (and even if he did, you'd spank it), you will have
caused him to pursue or intercept with two and probably more battleships.
This adds up in a big way, turn after turn. You have presented your
enemy with not just a problem, but a dilemma. Each of his options contains
a major downside for him. If he chases you fuel becomes even more limited
for him, and unavailable for his large freighters. If he doesn't chase
you his planets will be destroyed. There is no attractive choice for
him here. Do not make the mistake of using these squadrons to attack
the planets along your mutual territorial borders, for the purpose of
pushing back the border. This would resemble the trench warfare of WWI.
If you do this you have failed to understand the objective here. Your
purpose is not to take some particular piece of ground, but to damage
his economy in general, by tying up and causing him to squander precious
resources, and hitting targets as they become convenient. At some point
you will also have to engage his ships and start destroying them because
eventually they will become too numerous to maneuver between and induce
to giving chase. Your objective here is to destroy ships faster than
he can replace them. If you have more starbases than he does or can
build at yours more often than he does at his you will eventually attrit
him down and it will be all over except for the shouting. What you need is a squadron of ships capable of indefinite
movement without replenishment, and capable of indefinitely re-arming
itself in enemy territory. The most basic combination is a battlestar,
a gemini, and at least one but preferably two cobols. The battlestar
is the muscle, the gemini maintains a full complement of fighters aboard
the battlestar, and the cobols provide fuel, sniff out targets, and
lay mines to deter pursuit. The reason two cobols are preferred is so
that in case pursuit is relatively close and there are enough ships
that some missions may be set to minesweep, you will be able to lay
a minefield that is just barely too far away from the pursuing ships
to be swept. Simply calculate the number of mines that will produce
a minefield with radius one light year short of that needed to bring
it into minesweep range (set by HCONFIG.EXE) and transfer torpedoes
between ships so that one of them can lay the exact amount of mines
needed for the optimum field. You need the gemini because in most cases you won't
want to have the battlestar devoid of supplies from having built fighters.
If you have multiple battlestars (by which I mean at least three) in
the group then this is less of an issue. There is one glaring problem
with the basic configuration of the Deep Raider Squadron. Your torpedo
race enemy will promptly reason that all he has to do is gang up on
your lone battlestar with two of his battleships. In the case of the
Fed, even though that second Nova Class Dreadful is at 85% damage all
weapon systems still function and so it will handily mop up the rest
of your squadron after finishing off the battlestar. The second Dreadful
survives the battle, and you have just traded four ships for one. Needless
to say, this is unacceptable. The Expanded Deep Raider Squadron There are two main ways to expand the basic Deep Raider
Squadron. First, and most importantly, you need multiple battlestars.
Three or more is ideal, but even two will give you a favorable trade
against battleships. With three or more, you need not fear engaging
two battleships because you will lose one battlestar and he will lose
both battleships. When you are down to two battlestars, your next engagement
with two battleships will leave you with only one and your next engagement
after that against two battleships will be your last if the enemy is
the Fed. Against the battleships of a torpedo race other than the Fed,
the remnants of your squadron may be able to finish off the second battleship. The second way to expand the basic squadron is to add
Tranquility Class cruisers and Cygnus Class destroyers. I always put
heavy phasers, for minesweeping, and usually Mark 7 tubes on them. The
Cygnus is a pretty good little planet buster against anybody but the
mid- or late-game Cyborg, and the Tranquility has great cargo capacity
as well as a good fuel tank. Why is cargo capacity important? Because
you will use it to steal his bloody minerals and dump them into space;
you therefore want a ship with deep pockets. I preferentially take the
molybdenum, since that is the rarest mineral in the game. That brings
us to the other thing you do with the Deep Raiders, which is scour any
planet you hit clean of fuel, and savor his pain. Whenever possible,
arrive at a planet with plenty of room in your fuel tanks; dump it into
space the turn before you hit the planet if necessary. You have two
options of use with the Cygnus. First, you can keep it with the rest
of the squadron until such time as the battlestars are destroyed, and
possibly take out a batttleship damaged by the battlestars. This is
a viable course against any enemy but the Fed. With his weapon systems
advantage, any dreadnought that survives the battlestars will eliminate
the rest of the squadron also, unless it runs clean out of torpedos,
and maybe even then. The second use for the Cygnus is to let it peel
off to hit targets of opportunity. Against any but the Cyborg, this
ship will be more than adequate to destroy a planet, assuming no starbase.
Scorching the Planets! Whenever you conquer a planet, you get one clan on that
planet. You have a few options at this point. If the planet is uninhabited,
you may riot your clans by jacking the tax rate and getting happiness
below 40 of you're playing version 3.5. This will cause a loss of four
factories and six mines per turn. Rioting by itself causes loss of three
factories and five mines per turn. This is cumulative with the fact
that you don't have enough clans to support all the structures, so you
lose an additional mine and factory each turn for a total of four and
six. It is unlikely that you will do this for very many turns before
he gets around to taking the planet back. On an uninhabited world, therefore
I recommend removing the clan, making the world unowned. If the world
has natives, get the happiness down close to zero and then set it to
100%, especially if the world is deep in enemy territory. If it is a
border world and you think you might possibly develop it by bringing
in clans, you might not do this. In version 3.5, if the happiness of
either colonists or natives goes negative, you lose 30% of both per
turn, rounded up to the next integer in the case of clans. This means
that one clan will only give you one turn in negative happiness before
the planet becomes unowned. Two clans gives your two turns, and three
clans will give you three turns. All the while you have set tax rate
to 100%. You are gutting the enemy like a fish. This is an exponential
decay curve with a coefficient of 0.7 raised to the Tth power, where
T is the number of turns in negative happiness. Two turns of 30% loss
reduces the native population by 51%, and every two turns negative will
reduce it by an additional 51%, so that after four turns he has only
about one quarter of the native population he had before you arrived
to do your dirty work on him. To find the percentage of natives remaining
after any number of turns of negative happiness, raise 0.7 to the power
of the number of turns; it's positively awful. After your clans have
died off in the melee, and his planet is well into negative happiness,
he will get around to re-colonizing. The huge roaring sound after a
mere two turns of 100% tax rate will be that of his taxable population
going down the toilet on a rocket sled! His sense of urgency at re-taking
any planets you have attacked will soar. Note that the ship to planet
combat phase in the turn happens before taxes are applied and happiness
recalculated. So, if he re-takes the planet the turn you leave for other
targets (assuming you haven't lingered) you have not done very much
to him except eliminate tax collection until he re-colonizes. If this
is all you are accomplishing, however, don't fret over it. You have
set him back badly on that world and if he has to re-colonize every
planet you attack, and your bioscanners will lead you to the fat targets,
you have seriously degraded his overall economic efficiency. If you
have forgotten to send clans along with the squadron, pull up the clans
from any uninhabited worlds you conquer and drop them on the inhabited
worlds you take. This will give you a second turn with which to keep
tax rates at 100%. The Colonial Clan Conduit, or... The Titan Rising Because of your extraordinary lift capacity, you will
want to export clans off of your homeworld. Once you homeworld begins
to have several million colonists on it, you will be extremely tempted
to begin taxing the clans there. Resist this temptation. Build yourself
a bunch of colonization squadrons consisting of two cobols and one super
transport. Their combined capacity is 3100 kt, and the output from the
two cobols will keep the three of them going indefinitely. Pick a world
with moderate temperature, preferably within three or four turns movement
from your homeworld, and begin cycling the colonization squadrons to
between the planet you've chosen and the homeworld. If your homeworld
tax rate is zero, and you have at least 6.2 million colonists there,
you can remove 3100 clans every turn and not have any decrease in the
homeworld population. Not inconceivably, you will eventually have six
or eight of these little squadrons, and your chosen world population
will grow by 3100 clans every turn, or almost every turn, apart from
natural increase. At a 10% tax rate, that's 31 megacredits. Raise several
planets like this to several million colonists each, and your tax base
will be rapidly expanding late in the game, when even the Cyborg may
be levelling off. Now, in addition to taxing your native populations,
you can tax your colonists. Just continue building super transports,
with cobols to fuel them, and while you may never rival the Cyborg in
total clan mass you will begin to approach him, reducing his money advantage
over you. Allies and Enemies The secret to dealing with many of your enemy opponents
is analyzing their strengths and nullifying those strengths if possible.
Some strengths are intrinsic; you can do little about these except adapt
to them. Others are extrinsic. Need for fuel is the most universal extrinsic
factor. All potential enemies are vulnerable with respect to fuel. With
fuel they are all potentially strong; without it they are unquestionably
all weak. Another important one is the tax income advantages of some
races. The Fed, Cyborg, and Lizards fall into this group. The Fed collects
double, the Cyborg converts natives to colonists, who tolerate a higher
tax rate than most natives, especially as population becomes high. The
Lizards have the Hiss mission to quell dissatisfaction. Because this
property is part of the strength of these races, you need to make it
one of your points of attack. For these races it is important to destroy
their tax base, whether natives or clans. The reason that they have
their taxation advantages is because their fleets are expensive. A battleship
loaded with 100 high tech torpedoes can easily cost twice as much as
your battlestar, and possibly even more. Cloaking races do not have
much in the way of special vulnerabilities except that if anything they
may be a little more dependent on fuel availability. Against the cloaker
you will want to assiduously and rigorously pursue the neutronium wastelands
policy. You cannot track down the cloaker's ships to destroy them? Well,
can you find his planets? If you attack his planets is he likely to
use his warships to defend them? Of course he will! All you need to
do is show up loaded for bear, and arrange that the exchange of ships
is at least in your favor. One thing you should bear in mind is that you are without
question the premier candidate for alliance in the whole game.
Your problem may in some instances be that the other players are not
astute enough to know this. Within twenty turns they will likely be
looking for fuel. Point this out, and explain how the cobol works. There
is absolutely nobody in the game whose overall effectiveness will not
be improved by the fuel that only YOU can supply, and in abundance.
Of course, they could try to capture one, or in the case of the Privateers,
to steal one. The Privateers, however, cannot clone, so a single cobol
or even a few of them will not have much impact, especially later in
the game. Try to pick your allies by whose ship types will offer you
correction for the defects in your own line of ships. Speaking strictly
of ships, the Lizards have the least to offer you, since part of what
makes them formidable is their ability to take 150% damage. Consequently,
their ships are not that impressive, especially if owned and operated
by you who will not get the damage tolerance advantage. Don't spurn
an offer of a terraformer without careful consideration. Depending on
your planets, the benefit to you could be huge. Your battlestar, on
the other hand, is a huge improvement over the Madonzilla Class carrier,
and the Lizard player would absolutely love to have a few. Therefore
don't turn your nose up at a Lizard offer of alliance. Just make sure
you understand how he can help you and, equally importantly, is willing
to help you. Except for terrraformers, and cloaking ships which aren't
that formidable in your hands, the Lizard doesn't have much to offer
you in the way of ships. The Lizard can, on the other hand, be most
helpful with mining and tax collection, and these are not necessarily
trivial. The Lizard is just about the hardest player to see the benefits
of forming an alliance with. Everybody else has a ship type that you
can put to very effective use. One word of caution when using the Cobol as a bargaining
chip. For some races it may be your only bargaining chip. Be very sure
of who you are giving them to. If you give Cobols to a race with a tax
advantage who will not mind paying double for the ships, you will eliminate,
or at least markedly reduce his fuel limitations thus improving his
efficiency as an enemy should he intend to betray you. This goes double
for the Fed, who can upgrade a low tech Cobol that you give him. He
will clone it before Super Refitting, thus keeping his cloning costs
down. His end cost of a Transwarp driven Cobol will then only slightly
exceed yours, and with his tax advantage he will be able to afford as
many of them as you have. Now he will have the cash to afford to build
his fleet, and the fuel to drive a logistical engine as powerful as
yours. You are basically toast for this game, and hopefully will have
learned greater wisdom for the next. If you are confident that the Fed
will be a faithful ally, give him a Cobol with Stardrive 1s, lasers,
and Mark 1 tubes. Let him clone THAT before refitting, and the two of
you will mop up the cluster with everybody else. Starbases, Factories, and Merlins One of the reasons you need to distribute your clans
well and initially let them grow unimpeded by taxes is so that you will
have large numbers of factories on your planets. Be careful not to overburden
inhabited worlds with factories. A small number of excess factories
on those worlds can cause you to lose hundreds of megacredits every
turn in taxes because the maximal tax rate that the natives will tolerate
will drop. Load up most heavily on uninhabited worlds, especially those
with moderate temps. As you see, this will fit in with your clan policy.
Your high population worlds will also be your high factory worlds. Do
not sell your supplies. These supplies are the straw that your Merlins
are going to spin into gold. In the game I am playing as of this writing,
I have fourteen starbases and eight Merlins distributed among about
160 planets. Some of the starbases are sufficiently closely co-located
that one Merlin can service more than one starbase. A Ghipsoldal world
is your premier candidate for a starbase, since you know you want it
to produce Transwarps. If you intend to build a logistical ship starbase
there and manufacture only large freighters, the base will cost you
only 2500 mc to raise to the necessary tech levels. Starbases that you
plan to build freighters and lighter warships at actually have a relatively
low rate of mineral use. Amphibian worlds are good candidates for bases
that you plan to build warships at, since you know you will likely build
heavy phasers. I personally like to cluster starbases (I have only done
this in a couple locations, but it works very well); one base will make
battlestars and the nearby bases will make Patriots, Cobols, and Cygnus
class destroyers, etc. The geminis hover over the nearby Bovinoid world.
Deep Raider Squadrons assemble very quickly under these conditions.
Dedicate a Cobol to accompany your Merlins. Provided
HCONFIG.EXE is set to have Cobols produce at least 2 kt of neutronium
per ly travelled, one Cobol can keep a Merlin, even loaded with 900
kt of minerals that it has just made, moving indefinitely. If planets
are widely separated, other races are not going to want to pay the fuel
costs of moving the fuel the extra distance. This consideration is,
of course, immaterial to you. The only reason your Merlins should stop
is to deal with supply backlogs accumulating on Bovinoid or other worlds.
The Cobol supplying fuel to the Merlin should keep moving, laying down
fuel at your future stops. Summary Sure, you have weaknesses. Big ones. But you have strengths
as well, and the key to victory is recognizing them. Assess your enemies
for what makes them strong. Does he have a tax advantage needed to fund
expensive fleets? Destroy his tax base. Does he cloak such that you
cannot track his ships down? Make his ships come to you. Does he have
many starbases producing free fighters? Destroy his bases, many of which
may be relatively weak and used mainly for fighter production; without
those fighters he is toothless. I have not explored in this article
the Colonial weaknesses for purposes of developing a strategy against
the Colonies. That is for another commander to do. If you as the Colonial
player wish to be maximally thorough, you will try to see things through
the eyes of your enemy, so as to anticipate his offensive initiatives.
Ask yourself on a turn by turn basis, if you were he, how you would
attack the Colonies. Then, it only remains for you to be prepared. C. D. Clagett, The Ultimate Admiral |
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