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Dog of Justice

Join Date 03/2007

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Getting the most out of focus

Did you know that...

- When using 1/99/0 spending, you should focus military on your shipbuilding planets? Your military production bonus does NOT apply to "repurposed" social production; but refocused production does benefit. This is extremely important if you like the +50 military production racial pick.

- There are often significant benefits to be gained by fiddling with the 1/99/0 setup? Usually you can get an additional unit or two of military production, without giving up any social production, by switching to something like 8/92/0. It seems minor, but sometimes it'll save you an entire turn. In fact, with a high military production bonus, it's frequently worthwhile to sacrifice some social production (remember to focus social on all your new colonies, to minimize this loss) and raise the military spending % further to save turns.

- You can pick up a lot of "free" research points by selectively using focus research to minimize social production overflow?

- Completely ignoring factories and going with 0/0/100 spending, focus military or social depending on the planet, can be incredibly powerful? This may not be advisable in Suicidal difficulty since I'm under the impression that you're better off stealing lots of tech via invasion there, but in lower difficulties this lets you pull away from the opposition remarkably quickly. It may work better with the Krynn than other races since you can afford to pay for a lot more all-labs planets early on.

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I'm curious, do you actually win playing this way? Are you on tough or higher? Maybe I missed the point, but I can't seem to find any benefit to what your saying ... or maybe I just don't understand what you mean?

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Except for the last one, absolutely. A little micro on your focus sliders can shave off turns of production. One big item DoJ left out was that you can constantly redirect your asteroid mines to shave turns off of ship production. One asteroid can make the difference between "2 turns" and "Next turn".

I would never in a million years go 0/0/100 and re-focus research, though.

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I would never in a million years go 0/0/100 and re-focus research, though.

Okay, I admit I was deliberately just trying to be different there.

(Though you can beat at least Crippling difficulty with no factories...)

I didn't mention asteroid redirection since it didn't directly have anything to do with focus, but yes, that's a useful early game micromanagement tactic as well.

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Yes, you can win at any level with this. My last two (or was it three?) suicidal games I built no research buildings and did all the research through focus.

The benefit is that you receive 100% utilization on all your buildings VS less than 100% when you split between research and social buildings.

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Yes, you can win at any level with this.

I agree. I almost always play with either all research buildings or all factories. I wrote an AAR where I go step by step getting this strategy to work.

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I've almost finished a game where I went 1/1/98 on tough difficulty, 9 AI races, maxed CPU usage.

My research was through the roof, economy was solid just ship production was somewhat slow. I didn't need many ships though since I played Arcean with their super warrior ability. Upgrading existing ships was all I needed most of the time.

It worked like a charm until the point I got invention matrix. At that point my economy collapsed. Despite 80% taxrate (2 moral starbases helped a lot) I made heavy losses. Trade didn't help much due to some wars and to make things worse almost no tourism thanks to some influence reducing events.
I was alternating between a few turns normal production/research followed by a round of saving every penny.
The solution: I lowered my spendings and traded some weak players a few tradegoods for planets. Most of them were < PQ 5 and I missed the techs for them. Neutral alignment upgraded the planets, I sold their junk manufacturing buildings and rush-bought Stock Markets. Couple of turns later, I once again had a solid income and supreme research.

And then the Plague mega event came. Two turns later I had the cure, but AI did never bother to research it. They all went from hero to zero ^^

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100% factories I understand, but--100% labs?

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100% factories I understand, but--100% labs?

It actually can work better than all factories, depending on your map settings. I wrote an AAR where I illustrate using this method, and in the notes following I went through the math of all labs and all factories vs. using a mix. You actually get the most production per tile for your entire empire using all labs, although all factories is a little more versatile.

I prefer the all labs approach myself, but it is harder to use, which is one reason I have an affinity for it.

See

WWW Link

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Without factories, how do the labs get there?

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Completely ignoring factories and going with 0/0/100 spending, focus military or social depending on the planet, can be incredibly powerful? This may not be advisable in Suicidal difficulty

Its actually the way I prefer to play on Suicidal, because it gives you a huge advantage even there. If you are good enough to win on suicidal, you are good enough to handle the money this tactic requires, and I would go so far as to say I recommend it as the preferrable strategy for that difficulty level on large, medium, small and tiny maps. I have never tried it on the top two map sizes, and it may work less well there. I don't pretend to know.

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Without factories, how do the labs get there?

Focus. (the best choice)

Rush buying.

Or build one or two factories, then build over the planet with labs and build over the factories. This is harder, because you need to baby your sliders while your production points go from social to research, so what your percentages need to be on each slider and where you need to be sending your focus changes. I believe Iztok was working with methods to build labs quick... say an initial 1/24/75 until the labs are built, then build over the factories and go to 0/0/100.

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Without factories, how do the labs get there?

Two options: Put focus into social production or just buy them.

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Okay, I read your AAR. Why would you want to flip from research to factories? I would think the other way around makes more sense. Get your factories up and do your colony rush; that gets you more planets. More planets means more research. Then go 1/99/0 and flip your factories to labs the old fashioned way. That's not far off from what I do a lot of the time.

Another question: I noticed you don't make extreme colonization techs a priority. Yellow planets don't get a 50% penalty on research, like they do for production. Wouldn't the 50% non-penalty be one of the better reasons for going all labs and getting those planets?

Maybe one reason I'm not seeing it very well is because I always play on Normal tech setting. It sounds like you tend to play on the extreme tech settings, like very slow & very fast.

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You can do it both ways, start with one and flip to the other and vice versa. The reasons to leave all labs is if you can't handle the higher money it takes, or after you finish the tech tree.

In that game, I was forced to switch because I ran out of money. That is why I commented that I was playing clumsily in the report. It depends on the situation you find yourself in, I never use just one strategy in every situation. It really works both ways.

This does still work on all of the tech settings. I normally set tech to random, so I have experience with all five settings, and have learned how to adjust my play style accordingly.

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100% factories I understand, but--100% labs?

It actually can work better than all factories, depending on your map settings. I wrote an AAR where I illustrate using this method, and in the notes following I went through the math of all labs and all factories vs. using a mix. You actually get the most production per tile for your entire empire using all labs, although all factories is a little more versatile.

I prefer the all labs approach myself, but it is harder to use, which is one reason I have an affinity for it.

See

WWW Link

Wow, that's a great AAR. Learned quite a bit from it.

For the highest scoring Suicidal Gigantic all abundant/very fast tech rate games that I don't have the patience for (don't intend to ever play any maps larger than Medium, heh), I think that x/y/0 completely outclasses 0/0/100 since you can colonize so many planets that even a "25%" research rate is huge (especially with very fast tech rate), and being able to build Constructors and Stock Markets at roughly triple the speed is a big deal as well.

But for more average settings, I can believe your claim that the two approaches are roughly evenly matched. And all other things being equal, doing more with a manageable quantity of very high quality resources is more enjoyable for me than just brute-forcing my way to victory. (Though I will note that I just finished an x/y/0 game and found that Psyonic Beams are almost as good as weapons requiring ten times the research; they weren't fully outclassed until I had gotten to Positronic Torp II, long after the game was effectively over.)

Truth be told, I think the DA focus mechanism, from a game balance perspective, makes absolutely no sense and should be fixed if Brad cares to maintain the integrity of his economic model. But it's an interesting kind of broken, especially when you try to engineer swapping from one extreme to the other within a single game. I'll miss it when it's gone.

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