Emergency Build from the Start?

[Saxon]

As the longest serving poster who still asks newbie questions, I feel I have to ask another one.

When starting up a game with ancient race, is it worth putting your ship yards up to emergency build? My thought is that you will have slower yards for a while, but hopefully you will get the benefits back by cranking out colony ships for the first few turns and then having many planets building and producing.

I am in a two player PBEM and the scores are turned on. I suspect my opponent is doing the emergency build plan (Hi Gerry, if you are reading this) and I wondered what people though about it.

[PsychoTechFreak]

If you have got about 125% build rate from the race characteristics, you could try to turn on and off emergency build every turn without the slow build phase problem. This brings you ahead one turn (better than nothing).

1. emergency build a colony ship in one turn
2. turn off emergency for one turn
3. jump to 1.

[CW]

When I have at least three good valued homeworlds and resonable tech, I tend to put one on emergency building 10 construction bases, one building some baseline but usable defensive warships, and the Last one building bare-bone one-turn colony ships at normal rate. I could pump out 1 construction base every turn and by the end of the 1 year period I'm actually outputing more even with two homeworlds on slow build.

[Saxon]

That is a nice system and one I will think about next time I get to choose my race. However, this time we took identical races and no AI races, so that it was all about him and I beating each other up!

[Saxon]

CW,

Hmm, I see I have to go and fiddle with my ship design, I have three turn colony ships… Thanks for the info. I do like bases, thought I tend to overbuild and then hit economic a crisis that drives me to distraction. It is the only time I can think of that it is good to get a fleet destroyed, as your economy revives overnight.

By the way, what does CW stand for? We use it all the time at work, it stands for Case Worker and your initials on the board remind me I am supposed to be doing something besides reading about SE4.

[CW]

Saxon, yes I agree it is very easy to overbuild, but if you get it just right you will shoot right past everybody else because you are building more and sooner.

CW stands for Charlie Whiskey which is my call sign in combat flight sims which is also my initials.