How should i build my planets ?

I usually start my planet out by turning off the governor and building one thing at a time. Most planets get four factories to start out, then a starport, then two each econ and research buildings, then entertainment and farm.

That's just a general strategy, but I hold to it more or less. I might build the research buildings before the econ buildings if I am losing the tech race. I strongly suggest never building more than one farm on any planet and you may need the entertainment building first. Never use the yellow bonus food squares for farms. I always have focus on social until the starport is built. I don't bother with specialization except for capitals, and the econ and political capitals don't need to be specialized, and puting them on the same planet and getting the population as high as you can is probably the way to go. Note that even the research capital needs four factories to produce new buildings at a reasonable rate.

I also do not generally upgrade buildings until all of the squares are used. This is because you can get into a rut of always building upgrades and never filling all your squares.

I can't explain why your all factory planets are out produced by a planet with only four factories. If your manufacturing capital is on the planet with only four factories that may be why. Also, planets will suffer a production penalty if you don't have both extreme colonization techs for an extreme environment--aquatic world, toxic world, etc. But if you didn't have the techs it would be hard to build all those factories unless you bought them all.

For small planets, of 8 or less, I don't try too hard to make them balanced. If they have a bonus resource, use that and tailor the rest around it. If it has an entertainment bonus, use that and build a farm to go with it. The four factory rule still applies however, although three is OK on a small planet. For me, research is the thing I am most likely to leave off on a small planet, unless it has research bonus squares.

For large planets, try to use some of the squares for trade goods. Trade goods are extremely powerful. They also make good research and manufacturing capitals. For mid size and larger planets, I think you should just build what you need at the time. Losing money? Build 3 - 4 econ improvements in a row. Build an extra factory or two to get warships out faster. Use the extra squares to make up for research buildings you left off smaller planets.

Yeah, i have never used the governors for anything, except automatically queueing up upgrades to existing buildings


This is what doesnt make much sense to me. Having a starport implies you will build ships, which should mean you focus production on military, which means your research on that planet will get very little. Why then the research labs ?


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Nope, neither of them had any of the capital buildings


Neither planet had a terrain penalty





Also, a question i forgot to ask
Does population, under any circumstance, have ANY other function than providing tax ? Ie could you, if it was possible, have 0 population on all your planets and still get the same research output, production etc, than if you had 50 bil people on all of them ?

Population affects the amount of work units done on the planet, so if you have only .5 billion people on your class 25 planet, it won't get alot of work done. You can use colony ships or transports to move people to your less crowded planets (Fill colony ship with 500 million people on the way out, and then send it back with only 1 million on board, moves 499 million people at a time). This is also why fertility rate and medical technologies matter.

Pointsource you are wrong. Population has zero effect on production.

See the wiki:
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Hi!

They also provide influence and canon fooders for invasion or defense. Also they give you hard time when elections come around and they're not happy , and some points for social score at the end of the game. They have NO IMPACT on production but providing money for it.

BR, iztok

Yes - but it would be a VERY expensive empire to maintain - either extreme. With very little pop on all worlds, the expenses would soon have you in the RED economically - with too much pop on all worlds, low approval will have you struggling in the RED Economically. Neither empire will be able to sustain itself for long.

Pop only effects, influence, morale and money generation, and as IB points out - is cannon fodder. Pop will have some effect on Trade Revenue; and also Tourism Revenue - which in DA is tweaked somewhat so high pop/influence does let you generate a few extra Tourism credits, especially during the appropriate special events.

IMHO, Balance is the key under the current system. I rarely go higher than 11 Bil Pop worlds - and then only if the world has some good approval bonus tiles, and will be able to sustain a large pop and make money. Otherwise the struggle to keep it in balance is not worth the micro-management to me.

My build strategy is a bit different than Rataan. I will only force buy the 1st Factory on my home world at the start. I otherwise will either force buy research labs or econ buildings. I turn research up to 100%, and use the social focus to build things on a world by world basis. I will only have a few shipyards at first - again, I'll rush buy ships, or use Military Focus to get production points from my labs. (This may be why your all research world with 4 factories is outproducing other worlds - are you settting focus to Military or Social? Research labs will contribute to production AND research if focus is set to Social or Military.)

I eventually will determine a special world for each of my Research and Manufact capitals - (Econ and Political can be the same world, or not) - but the rest will usually be 'general' worlds slightly focused on research earlier, or manufacturing late in the game if trying to survive a war. The good thing is that you can always rebuild over most regular buildings - so you can change a world to research, economy, influence, as needed as long as you have a health economy in your empire.

Lots of good choices - lots of different strategies - also depends on size of Galazy, # of planets, difficulty level, etc - that is why I love the game - it is diverse.

That's about all they can do. They can automatically terraform--change yellow, orange and red tiles to useable green ones and automatically upgrade. I uncheck both boxes and make my own choices. The thing that made me start doing that was that it would always automatically upgrade farms, and that can be a very bad thing. Also, you can and probably will get into a rut where you are upgrading all the time instead of making new buildings on your unused tiles. 99% of the time it is better to build on an open tile than upgrade. For example, building one research building may be the equivalent of upgrading five of them.




I'm not sure what you mean by focus production on military. Most planets should have a starport, or else there won't be any outlet for production except to build and upgrade buildings on that planet. For most of the game it will be beneficial to have nearly all your planets producing ships of some sort. If I don't need warships, then I build constructors or whatever else I can use. Later on, good warships take a long time to build, even with good production capability on a planet.

The point is I try to make most planets well rounded and have each building represented on every planet unless there is a reason not to. Research points generated by research buildings go into the general pool for your empire. Having four labs on one planet is equivalent to having two labs on two planets. The same is not true for factory production. Only the planet where the factory is located can use the production points. Nevertheless, nearly every planet needs several factories, or else it will take far too long to build new buildings or upgrades.

A planet by itself doesn't need research buildings, but your empire as a whole does. You can choose to put most of them on a few planets, or have most planets have research buildings represented. For one thing, with the exception of farm bonus tiles, bonus tiles should generally be used to build whatever building type can use the bonus. If your class 6 planet has a research bonus tile, you should use it.




In the GCII vernacular, a specialized planet is generally accepted to mean a planet that has most of its tiles dedicated to one building type. There is one obvious thing that discourages this in GCII--bonus tiles. They should almost always be used for the type of building that can benefit from the bonus, except for farm bonus tiles, which can safely be counted as ordinary tiles. Manufacturing and research capitals should be specialized, because each factory or lab on that planet gets a bonus. Still, a research planet needs factories to build and upgrade its labs in a timely way.




As others have stated, taxes are the biggest benefit to having a large population and it has nothing to do with production or research. But the population and the taxes they generate are basic to supporting a large empire.

Large population can be used to crank out colony ships and/or troop transports.