Typical start:
- Set homeworld's prod slider to 100% planetside = 0% shipyard. You don't build ships early anyways.
- Choose planet tiles to maximize tile and adjacency bonuses. Homeworld probably concentrates on mp and rp. Wealth I think you can defer to a colony planet later on. (But Beta might monkey-wrench all that.)
- I think you always have a class-4 colonizable planet within range. (For Terrans, it's Mars.) Decide whether to colonize that with your starter colony ship, or wait for a bigger jackpot from early exploration. It is debatable whether a Mars-class planet will replace its own colony ship fast enough to be worth the delay in building it up first.
- Turn-spree or click-hell. Decide whether you want to optimize per-planet, per-turn to "exactly" finish 1 item with zero waste ... or just shrug it off and waste a few %. Rule-of-thumb: if all of your queues, on average, finish 1 item every k turns, and you waste, on average, 0.5 turns of excess production per queue in each turn-of-completion, then your empire "wastes" 1/(2k) of its total production (so for k = 10, you waste 5%). The AI on smart settings does not. Hence, you can plan to just kick the AIs' collective butts by 6%+, and win anyways. The click-hell approach trades off your play-time (and mouse clicks, to do binary search over and over again) for less waste. (Later on, don't play multiplayer with the other kind of player, or you'll all go nuts.)
- For early ship exploration, try spiraling outward. That way you're guaranteed to see all good stuff near you before you get lost far away.
- Survey every space junk, artifact, ship graveyard you can find. The bad ones are only money. The good ones are a free ship!
- Early ship builds are basically constructor and colonizer. Customize both by deleting unneeded engines and life support -- no sense paying for a range of 29.9 hexes when its destination is only 5 hexes away. You can make a double-constructor, i.e. with 2 constructor modules, which is cheaper than building 2 ships. (Warning: in Alpha 0.31, you must actually own 2+ starbase improvement techs in order to double-upgrade, which does give you 2 modules -- you can save these as long as you want, and upgrade instantly as soon as you finish a juicy new tech. If you move a double-ctor into a starbase when you have only 1 possible starbase improvement, it will simply dock there, and remain a separate ship -- boo. Maybe that's changed.)
- Colony ships deduct 2.5 bp (billion pop) each, which is a hefty chunk of your source planet. Hence I crank growth and food. N.B. when you have multiple planets feeding 1 shipyard that completes a colonizer, you cannot control (at all?) from which planet it takes them. Workaround: Manage the shipyard and remove N-1 of the planets for that turn only. Then there's no ambiguity.
- Plan starbases carefully -- later on, they cost you proportional to the number you own (and you cannot scrap a starbase), i.e. the total cost is quadratic(!). (Proof sketch: the sum of linear is triangular: SUM{i} (i) = n(n+1)/2 = O(n^2).) On medium maps, your midgame ships can easily reach the far edge of the map. On large maps, you'll eventually use forward starbases to let your scouts advance.
- Look for 2+ colonizable planets within "single starbase effect" (which incidentally got reduced from 6 hexes to 5 hexes). One starbase with manuf / research bonuses will apply to all colonies in range.
Early tricks:
- Unanchor your shipyard, and drive it around. It's got range-5 or range-6 sensors. Even at 1 hex per turn, it can help you map a huge swath of nearby space before you bring it back. You probably won't need to build a ship for the first 20 or so turns, while your homeworld is still building up its tiles anyways. By the time you're ready to build ships, you should also know where to put your shipyard. It can be anywhere within 6 hexes of your homeworld (+ your Mars if you took that path), so the difference between a good placement and a bad placement is up to 13 hexes, which is 3.5 extra turns of movement for a fast constructor / colonizer.
- (Very) rarely, you may have your Scout + Surveyor near enough to make a fleet before you survey an artifact. Jackpot is a bonus to "all ships in fleet", e.g. +25% sensors or +25% movement. (In my last Alpha 0.31 game, my surveyor got up to speed 12 and range-7 sensors before I colonized my 3rd planet!! that was a very, very fun ship)
- Do not survey a wormhole
Your surveyor will be thrown halfway across the map, on average, and then it can only come straight home -- you'll lose control over it until then, and it might get shot down by Drengin's Lost Cutter)
My Alpha Terran start:
- Colonize Mars. Build all mp with it: 2 factory, 1 farm. Later, scavenge a factory to a Solar Power Plant. When it finishes building, have it churn out ships.
- Research +% growth, then +food, then manuf/research. You don't need to fight for a while, so weapons can wait. (N.B. Beta planetary approval confounds this -- now you can trade off early production for massive growth bonus from high approval. So maybe research food techs first, which incidentally got better because they lower your population pressure, which makes approval easier to maintain.)
- Build a starbase within range of Earth/Mars. Add manuf/research improvements to it as fast as you research those techs.
Beta confounds:
- Approval bonus: For early game, this means you can trade off production for wealth/growth. At the all-manuf or all-research extreme, your approval bottoms out to 70% or below, which is 0% or +10% bonus to growth/production/influence. By setting enough wealth to offset your "population pressure", you can get to 100% approval, which is a massive +50% bonus. Offhand, I think this is worthwhile even just for the growth alone. But it needs more experiments.
- You can easily see the growth bonus from turn-to-turn. Normal growth is +0.10 bc (billion pop) per turn, so +50% means +0.15, etc.
- I don't see the production bonus adding in anywhere. I think it just quietly adds it to your next turn's production, but is not itemized in the tooltip list. If you go from 100% approval to all-manuf, next turn you'll see your total mp drop significantly. I think that's due to dropping from the +50% bonus tier down to the +10% or =0% bonus tier.
Clearly, more experiments are needed. Preferably with Malevolence.