I do have a question though - once you start taking over enemy planets, do you tend to leave them the way they are or do you convert some of them into economy worlds?
I personally convert every planet I take over into an economy planet. The planets I initially colonize are the only planets that I keep factories on, even then once my income is high enough to support buying instead of building, I convert my original colonies to economy worlds as well merely leaving the Starports. This is usually at around the 500K bc per week range.
Note that this last part is a gigantic galaxy type of strategy. I would expect it to be reasonably possible on huge galaxies as well, but this is clearly not something that would work well on smaller galaxies and fewer planets. There needs to be a critical mass of income that can allow this.
That's not to say that some aspects can't be used on smaller galaxies. I would expect that the idea of using your colonized planets as your production base and immediately converting *all* enemy planets into cash cows is pretty universally applicable. It's just on medium and smaller galaxies I don't think you could ever get to the point of converting your original production planets into economy planets.
But the whole point of an economy planet, or a production planet, or a research planet is that you don't waste tiles on the wrong types of buildings. There's no point in having factories or starports on economy and research worlds, there's no point in having research on economy or production worlds. The only exception is that it is reasonable to have some economy buildings on production (or even research) worlds.
Specialization and concentration is the key, but again this can be a galaxy size strategy. On a tiny galaxy, with only your home planet and a single colony or two, there's really no way you can specialize your planets. Even on a gigantic galaxy in the early stages of the colony rush you need to make concessions to generalization. But once you get started you can overbuild your planets to pretty much however you want. It's not uncommon for me to completely build a colonized world and then later totally rebuild it with a different focus. It's also not uncommon for me to completely rebuild a planet twice or even three times in the same game.
Well, to do that you would need a class 32 planet and several economic resources to mine, so as I've said before, doing well in this game relies too much on pure luck.
No you really don’t. The PQ32 is nice but early in the game my income was ten times that of my closest competitor. I could gift him that planet and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. In fact I didn’t colonize that planet to begin with, I merely took it from whoever did. With better luck my income could be twenty times my closest competitor. With worse luck maybe only five times.
I have one final comment about 'luck'. In my day, I've played a fair amount of high stakes poker and there's no doubt that any single hand (or any single tournament) is extremely dependent on luck, but over the long run of many hands there’s really not all that much luck involved. Certainly there is luck in this game, but the smaller the galaxy and the fewer the total resources the more luck is involved with getting the good stuff. The larger the galaxy, the more planets and resources the less luck is involved because it tends to even out more.
One strategy that seems to have been extremely successful (we’ll see how successful when I actually finish the game) was to slow down on my rate of colonization so that I built fewer (but stronger) planets. This strategy also allowed me to be able to pick and chose the resources in the galaxy that I wanted pretty much uncontested. Of the 6 economic resources in the galaxy I got four of them right off the bat and kept them the entire game. Same with military resources I got 4 of 6 and kept them. No other race got more than one. This was a tremendous advantage and was well worth giving up an additional 50% of colonized planets to get. This has been the first suicidal game that I’ve actually felt ‘in control’ throughout the entire game. All my previous games I felt the need to tiptoe around, paying off stronger races to not kill me while gradually building to the point where I could actually compete. This game, I didn’t even have to ask them for money, they were lining up to give it to me.
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