Where do I begin

Here's some basic ideas to work from.

On the military front, you need to fairly quickly work towards having a basic defender. This just needs to be a tiny hull (or even a cargo hull if you want to be really cheap) with 1 weapon on it..... make sure you start producing these fairly quickly and put 1 into orbit around each planet. This will give you enough of a military rating to keep the wolves from your throat for a while. Naturally, you need to follow this up fairly soon with some small fleets of slightly stronger ships (small hull at the least) to patrol your borders. The AI attacks because you are weak - delay the inevitable by maintaining a military.



For economy, the simplest way to get money is by having a large population. Tax is the mainstay of your economy, so you need to get to work encouraging your little blighters to bonk like bunnies.

The best way is to use custom skills of Population Growth and Morale (and Super Breeder to really lever this tactic). Then the objective is to get as many planets colonised as quickly as possible without spending all your starting funds.

Personally, I rush buy some inital factories, build colonisers and set my sliders to 50/50 research and military at the start. With a lot of planets, I just build the factory by focusing some social where necessary - but all planets get a starport in the early game as I need them all producing defenders quickly and then constructors/colonisers where appropriate.

The most important factor you need to think about though is your tax rate. By getting a planet to 100% morale through lowering the tax, you can get a hefty increase in pop growth.

Micromanage your tax at the beginning of the game. Once you have claimed the worlds you want, set your sliders back to a more balanced distribution to start building some social and keep your morale at 100% for as long as your treasury holds out.

This will give you a nice healthy taxbase and will quickly pay for itself.

Once you get the hang of this, you will out-colonise the AI *and* stay in the black throughout the early colonisation phases. By mid-game your economy will really kick in and your research and military will quickly out-distance the AI (up to Intelligent anyway.

First of all, you should know that I am still playing DL, so my advice might not necessarily apply to DA, and that I usually play on Tough or Painful difficulty.

I usually set my sliders to about 20%/40%/40% (m/s/r), with some slight changes as need arises. My main economic strategy is to periodically sell some low end techs to other civs to supplement my treasury, so that I can run a deficit in income (which almost always happens when you run at full capacity). Also, don't let your approval drop to low, higher approval means faster population growth which means increasing economic capacity. Personally I think that 60% approval is the absolute minimum to satisfactorily increase my population, but thats more of a hunch than anything, I haven't done any tests. In any case, the higher the approval the better.

For research I devote my secondary planet (the one in the same system as your home world) to research buildings (its too small to be satisfactory for anything else), and I only build research on other planets if there are bonus tiles. This has proven to be adequate to keep me technologically competent. Speaking of technology, try to research economics and morale techs to help alleviate your economic strain.

Personally, I don't bother to keep up with other civs' militaries early on, because it is totally irrelevant without planetary invasion (unless you have starbases that can be destroyed). With good diplomacy I can usually avoid war by paying small tributes or otherwise gaining favor (which is much cheaper than building a military in the short-term; it can backfire though in the long run if you're attacked anyways).

But other than that, just try to grab as many colonies as fast as you can, skip over the small ones in favor of landing large, high PQ planets (I would skip anything lower than PQ 8). You can always go back for them later, and if the AI gets them they will soon flip with your influence.

Thank you. Let me jump on a specific item. I read in a strategy guide that your approval rating was unimportant in the early game. The logic was since you are a dictator, it did not matter. Apparently that is not true.

The section of the manual you are recalling was meant to refer to how approval affects your government, your political party, and the nice bounuses you get from your party being in power. BTW, if your party is out of power, all of their bonuses are applied in the inverse! ugly! But the Imperial model civ-wide government doesn't have to worry about going out of power.

Approval ALWAYS affects pop growth rates, and quickly. The premise is that there is a lot more pop on the planet than is actively participating in the interstellar culture, and you are gaining or losing 'galaxians' from the underlying culture depending on whether they see a benifit to interstellar activity or not.

To maintain growth (on a per planet basis):
100% approval = +100% pop growth
75%+ approval = +25% pop growth
41%+ approval = normal pop growth
20%+ approval = no growth
19%- approval = -10% population (Note: NOT the wimpy pop growth rate of change)

Biggest factor on approval is total planetary pop. Short guidance - as a beginner, keep it at/under 16; the 1-maxed-farm level for colonies is a fine place to leave 'em while warming up to the game. Planets over 20 can only be managed by game gods, and they aren't really cost efficient.

Many players swear by getting/maintaining initial pop growth to 100% asap as perhaps THE major goal of early play, to run up tax revenue to help balance costs. I think there are several strategies where relying on normal growth at a 41-45% approval rating is just fine, however. Try it both ways.

In any case, once your home planet reaches max pop, there is no point in maintaining THAT planet (your major pile of population, and the major contributor to overall morale) at high morale. 33%, or even 25% will work just fine for a maxed out Imperial world.

The impact on approval of even the most minor fiscal events is very great (+/-10%+), however, when your general approval rating is near the lower limit. I prefer to set taxes to keep a stable planet at 30%+ approval.

One thing that approval does NOT affect is influence and planet flipping. That is a separate mechanism, based on separate values.

drrider