I just finished this and even managed to gain all the techs.
Very neat game, artwork very foreign, a cool storyline, but with horrible micromanagement. Pointless, horrible micromanagement. Why can't my ships bring me ore automatically? Arrrugh!
Still if you make a huge pile of trade ships, enough to transfer 120k at a time, it doesn't make you want to tear out your fingernails along with your hair.
Advice if you're not getting all the techs, particularly aircraft: wait for the opportunity to split the League, and pick the "good guys" as your allies. The opportunity to split the League arises as a result of good intelligence and an earlier act of kindness.
Advice on building the model army: never stop building Twin Lasers. Keep 100 queued up, so that even if you go on a colony-building binge production doesn't stop. For most of the game this single component will dominate your military build decisions.
With ground forces the higher tech item makes the lower totally obsolete. Tanks are so superior to APC's there is no reason to waste Energon on APC's. Aircraft are so superior to tanks there is no reason to waste Twin Lasers on tanks. Missile Launchers are so superior to Aircraft there is no reason to waste Twin Lasers on Aircraft.
In space you want the biggest ships you can build and still utilize all your Twin Lasers. That means a mix of Starfighters, Destroyers, and in particular Cruisers, as plasma guns build very fast. If you have Energon left over, build Hunters, but only arm them with lasers. Your Twin Lasers are too important to waste them on inferior ships.
Someone here said Destroyers were worthless. Not true. They are a means of trading Energon for Twin Lasers. Build them when you have a surplus of the former relative to the latter.
There is a limit to the number of buildings you can build. Never build on a planet lacking Energon, unless temporarily to bulid an Observatory. To kill a colony destroy all buildings, max the tax rate, and let it revolt.
Speaking of Energon, these colonies have it:
Amnesty: Apollo, Mir, Jade, Russell
Phoenix: Phoenix 2
Mirach: Mirach 3, Mirach 4 Moon 1,
Orionis: Orionis 2, Orionis 3,
Lyrae: Lyrae 5 Moon 3, Lyrae 7
Sol: Mars
There are also remote mining sites, but there is a bug that makes remote mining almost useless: you cannot load a ship's cargo hold with more than the max capacity of the mine. In the case of remote mines, that means 10,000 units. Worse still, if you already have more than 10k in your cargo hold and click on either the loading or unloading button the cargo hold quantity will be truncated to 10k!
To load from remote mines you have to visit them first, but stop once you reach 10k and load the rest from colonies.
|