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!

[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.

[LGM]

10 Colonizers in 11 turns is worth it! In the early game you want to grow as fast as possible. build cheap Colonizers that you can build in one turn and upgrade them the following turn. The best way to do this is leave off some engines until you get the cost down to where you can build them in one turn under emergency build. After you have built 10 colonizers, you can build more colonizers at one of your new colonies. On your spent world, you can scrap the Ship Yard since it is worthless for 10 turns anyway and during those 10 turns you can build units and replace the scrapped shipyard with another facility type. Keep your shipyards on the perimeter of your empire so you can keep building more colonizers. Hardy Industrialists works well with this strategy. View Small and Tiny red plus worlds as prime shipyard sites to replace the one that you will exhaust using emergency builds. Once you start using up your resources you can slow down how many ship yards employ emergency builds. You can also put queues on hold when resources get low. However, once war becomes likely you cannot afford to have your shipyards in a spent state. I would recommend emergency builds to be used heavily in the first 20 to 30 turns and occassionaly to recolonize an area swept of enemies where you want to get those planets colonizes ASAP.

[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.

[rdouglass]

I definitely agree w/ LGM. In large-map games, early expansion is critical and is well worth the emergency build downfalls...