Alright, that was silly. Still, I'm not one to turn down free colonies. At the very least we've saved the use of a colony ship, which is a large investment this early on in the game.
I'll also colonize Umm II while I'm at it. Though looking back through the screenshots, I realize that Umm I has no penalty to production, and is probably a better planet until we get higher up in the tech tree. Whoops.
The distance that your ships can travel depends on your technology and the proximity of your colonies. With our basic technology, our ships can only move 4 parsecs away from our systems, so to travel further we'll either have to do some research or found more colonies. Since Yian II has joined our empire, we can now explore further.
Sadly not all systems can be winners.
Eh. We'll colonize these later, when we have nothing else to do.
Shit.
Some systems have monsters, which'll attack any ships that they can. Unfortunately we have no ways to deal with these monsters so early in the game. The Space Amoeba is one of the weaker monsters, but currently it'll take 50+ missiles to the face before it dies. We cannot pump out 50+ missiles right now.
However we definitively want to come back once we've climbed the tech tree. Native populations produce the most food in the game, meaning Barcada can easily become the breadbasket of our empire.
Bay II finally manages to build its freighter fleet.
To celebrate, I start shuffling shuffling people from Yian and Umm to Bay II. We want to stuff as many people onto Bay II as possible, since it's our most developed planet right now and the more people it has the more it can produce. Yian and Umm can chug along with minimal population for now. Until Bay II is full, the two systems can chug along and build housing to convert their production into population. I'm not entirely sure on how building more houses increases our population size, but maybe things work differently for bugs.
I could have asked you folks what to research, but our choices are pretty much mapped out in the beginning of the game. To crush our enemies we'll need to research, produce, expand and repeat. Research Laboratories is a very low-hanging fruit we need to pluck. +5 research and more per scientist is nothing to sneer at so early in the game. Since we're not creative we miss out on a crappy computer that'll quickly be replaced, and a not-crappy missile guidance system that we could use. Don't worry though, we can easily... acquire the missile guidance system from another race.
With Bay II's fancy new laboratories, we quickly and easily research reinforced hulls which will increase the toughen our ships at the cost of internal space. To be honest it's not terribly wonderful, but I don't like the other two choices (anti-missiles and fighter bays) and the next level of engineering has something we really need.
Oh, hey. Every so often people will offer to join us for some money. Given that we can easily afford Hawk's fees, we'll hire him. When we attach him to a ship, his navigator ability will allow the fleet he's in to move faster on the galaxy map which is nice. He'll also slightly increase the overall effectiveness of the fleet, which is a bonus as far as I'm concerned.
Unfortunately my plan to stuff Bay II full of bugs isn't working so well. You get five freighters whenever you build a fleet of them, but it takes all five of those ships to move one unit of population around. Plus it takes time to move people between systems, so long story short Yian II is now overcrowded while Bay II is not. Don't worry though. I'll have Yian start work on some more freighters right away. Bay II has been to busy to rectify the problem.
For one thing they've had that laboratory to build, and then I set them to building a colony base. Colony bases are cheaper to produce than colony ships, but can only settle planets within the same system that they were manufactured in. Still, this early in the game we need as many colonies as we can so we can support lots of bugs and eventually take over the galaxy.
Plus I have an evil plan.
Say hello to Bay I
II. Get it? Bay I II? Bay12? Aren't I clever. To be honest I wanted our homeworld to be BayIII, but then I saw our starting system and decided that this will do nicely. Bay III isn't terribly productive, but it can produce food, allowing me to shift population from farming to production or research on our homeworld. So basically Bay III increases the effectiveness of my micromanaging. I knew you guys were useful for something.
Yes. This is why we researched reinforced hulls. Automated factories increase the amount of production we can spit out, which means that we can start producing colony ships in record time. The alternatives were missile bases and heavy armour. Missile bases are a defensive building, while heavy armour is a different flavour of reinforced hull with a couple more bonuses. Both of them pale beside more production though.
We also pick up biospheres shortly afterwards. It's cheap to research, and increases the amount of people we can put on our planets, which is always a good though.
Since we don't really have anybody to fight, I'll be researching neural scanners for the rest of the update. It increases our espionage by 10%, though we're just getting it out of the way now so that we can easily access the next building that increases research. We don't have to research it immediately afterwards, but we should try to pick it up as quickly as possible.
Excellent.
Perfect. Bay II is finally full of people, so we'll be able to build colony ships quickly and grow just as fast.
...
Author
Topic: Let's Master Orion: Spoilers: We're still awesome (Read 25020 times)