Newbie - First 20/50 turns

This is really one of the great things about Space Empires...there are SO many different ways to get going, and there is no necessarily "Best" way to go about it, within certain bounds. But I will say a few things are always true....for instance, you start off with little ship building capacity (just the one ship yard on your homeworld). Its tempting to build a scout ship right away and get to exploring, but no matter what your plans are, its critical to build several orbital ship yards to get your industry going...

Everyone will have a little bit different opening strategy and it changes based on what is nearby. I personally like to have a large "industrial capacity" (space yard stations). I also like to explore as much as possible, as early as possible. This lets me know what planets I have to claim early and where all my neighbours are. From there, it really depends on how friendly they are.

There is only 1 research option for colonizing for the early game. You have to research your native planet colonizers. It will take 10 turns of research, from there you can pump them out on your HW. Just remember that for some planets, it might be better to orbitally mine them than to colonize them.

Also remember that especially in the early game, possession is 9/10th of the law when it comes to who controls planets and systems

Once a planet is colonized, it will stay colonized until the colony is destroyed, abandoned, or the planet is destroyed. No one else can colonize it, but it can be taken over, traded or destroyed.

The only thing that will block other people from colonizing the other planets in the system is your military force and political will. Systems can be claimed on the system map in the politics tab. This is a useful political tool, but it doesn't prevent people from ignoring it.

Do the orbital ship yards cost any per-turn maintenance in the proportions mod? Over-building orbital platforms in the early vanilla game is a quick way to bring your empire to it's knees I thought?

Yes they do cost maintenance, how much they cost in maintenance depends on how you design them.

And you're right about Vanilla. When playing Vanilla its common to rely heavily on planetary ship yards. And in proportions, the situation is very different for these reasons:

1. Planet-based ship yards are quite a bit superior...but getting them up and running takes much more investment and time than in vanilla. Consider, for instance: In vanilla you can colonize a planet with a couple million settlers and quickly get to work on a planetary ship yard. In proportions, the construction rate for a colony is terrible until you get a couple dozen million people to it...and it is A LOT harder to get those people there, because even large transports can generally only move 1 million people at a time. So...you're not going to have a large collection of planetary ship yards up and running for some time, because to do that, you would need to build not just several large, expensive colony ships, but also a very large fleet of population transports as well! If you don't get a bunch of orbital yards up and running, you're going to find that rather difficult, and you'll have a resource/production bottleneck. And even if you get that large transport fleet up and running, you won't have anything else...like warships or exploration ships.


2. In proportions your homeworld is MUCH MUCH MUCH richer than in the Vanilla game. It easily produces enough minerals to support quite a bit of industry at the start, especially if you keep upgrading it. In fact, your homeworld will dominate your economy for much of the game, especially in mineral production.


Long story short, in proportions, getting those orbital yards up is critical. But its also key to keep an eye on your resource production and future expansion, otherwise you will as you said over-build platforms and not have the resources to have them build at full capacity. Of course, in a worst-case scenario you can always simply mothball the platforms until you get more resources flowing in.

One thing we all should consider, not only the newbies, is that if we're really having a game with almost 20 people, it will be a very very crowded quadrant. Not that it is a bad thing per se, I actually think I will enjoy a crowded game, but it certainly will have many implications on the strategy. First of all, expect homeworld invasions very early in the game. Get up some defenses from the very start or you may fall victim to another empire just one or two systems away. The first players with a second homeworld are inevitably going to develop into superpowers, eventually swallowing a third or fourth soon enough. So, if your neighbor just conquered that small crappy empire on the back street, be prepared to conquer another one yourself or to attack him before he consolidates his gains. Failure will inevitable mean you are his next victim. The second implication is that with so many people around, alliances and tech trading will be much more important. In the last game I played, Khizlek skillfully negotiated tech trades with everyone and obviously became much more advanced than everyone else. He used that advantage to grow his resource base untill noone could stop him. Hes in this game, so keep an eye on him.