Overall Strategy and Massive Confusion

[MikeRMcCartney]

I'm still in the process of playing my very first game. I'm at turn 130, with a small empire (51 planets), and only a couple of dozen ships. My problem is that, even though my empire is small, I have a hard time maintaining my overall strategy, ship movement, troop movement, population movement, and so on. I only get to play about 3 or 4 times a week, and when I get back to play, I can't remember what I had my fleets doing. What do you guys do to maintain your strategy? I read about some of you playing multiple games at one time, you must have some trick to keeping it all straight. Thanks for any help.

[Puke]

for moving population, there are a couple things. some people just dont do it. other people trust the AI minister for population transports and colonization. if you want to do it all your self (manage different races for breathing different atmospheres and such) then it helps to give long orders rather than changing the ships order on each leg of the trip. tell it to go somewhere, pickup, go somewhere else, dropoff. then, you can scroll through the ship list each turn and look for ships without orders, and give them somewhere to go.

for fleets, NAME them something meaningful, and only use a couple fleets per front. station the fleet at a training planet or at a rally point, and send new builds there as soon as they roll out of the factory. once a ship gets to the rally point, you know its supposed to be in the fleet. once the fleet is big enough, send it on its way.

if you want to manage production yards better without wondering which system is supposed to be supporting which front, try renaming your spaceyards and construction bases in a similar manner as your fleets. that way they will all sort out in the construction list and you can have them build whatever is needed on their front without wondering where they are and how close they are to the appropriate fleet.

i find the hardest part is keeping tract of other human players, and remembering who you had made which deals with. especially when two empires in different games use the same race picture and shipset. for this, there is no help that i have found.

back in the VGA Planets days, we used to keep wall-chart printouts of the galaxy map and stick pins in it here and there, as well as a notepad of friendly-codes for each game / empire / ally. you think SE4 is hard to keep track of!

[capnq]

When my plans start to get complicated, I keep written notes, with each game on a separate sheet of paper. I keep track of the sheets by labelling them with the same name as the save game file.

[Skulky]

I have abotu 6 games i am activly involved with in addition to the homeworld and awakening scenarios. I have trouble remembering human relations sometimes, especially if it is the same player from game to game. I take notes on paper, and you can add notes to systems in the map window, not too useful though. Remember renaming your planet is not too great with humans, if they are ancient they will seee the rename and know where you are, and even if they aren't and can see the planet they willknow more about youempire. fleet renaming is good, ships names are seen, classes arn't. Also, use waypoints as much as possible for rallying forces, they are a lifesaver for organization...does anyone know if you can send all ships built at X planet to Y waypoint?

[Phoenix-D]

Yes, you can. It's on the same screen you set things to be built at.

Phoenix-D

[BeeDee10]

If you are worried about other human players figuring out what your ships and planets are being used for based on their names, then I'd suggest coming up with a naming system which is _personally_ meaningful but which would be somewhat cryptic to someone else. For example, in one particular game I've been giving my colony ship classes letter designations; the "Colonizer C" class is for ice planets (after "cryogenic"), the "Colonizer H" class is for gas giants (after "Hydrogen"), and the "Colonizer L" class is for rock ("Lithosphere"). The next time I upgraded my colonizer designs, however, I switched them all around; rock colonizers became "Colonizer G" class (for "ground").

You can even go beyond cryptic and actively mislead a human opponent with names. Give your colonies suffixes like "mil" or "sci" or "stor", but instead of having mil be military bases, sci be science worlds and stor be storage worlds, have sci be the storage worlds, mil be the science worlds, and stor be the military worlds. Of course you'd have to keep track of this; keep notes.

That's the number-one biggest thing. Keep notes. I've got one game which is on turn 120 where I've got a 500KB text file that contains every diplomatic message I've sent or recieved; it's easy to search for the names of systems to find out who promised you what and when. You can also keep notes on a system-by-system basis within the game itself by using the built-in map, but I haven't found that as useful; I keep forgetting to refer to it. Making a habit out of it would probably help, but I think it's just too hard to search them easily.

If one of your neighbors is the Crystal Mentality, don't start producing warships with a class named "Crystal Breaker." Alternately, go ahead and name them "Crystal Breaker" if your _real_ target is actually the Rhodon Network which lies right next to the Crystal Mentality's space (you might want to let the Crystal Mentality know about this ahead of time, though, or it might draw erroneous conclusions). The Rhodon Network's scouts will see them and perhaps start massing its forces along the Crystal Mentality's border in order to scoop up some territory because they think you're going to hit them instead, leaving their border with you wide open.

If you act dumb, a lot of players will assume you _are_ dumb. You can exploit this.

But I digress. Keep notes.