What's going on in your empire/planet/battlefield?

[joeclark77]

I've been through the corundium crunch, the duranium crunch, the gallicite crunch, but I'm experiencing a first in my current game... the human being crunch.  After 30 years I've expanded my production and research installations so much that the population of Earth can't support them.  Only about 700 million people live on Earth with 200-300mm each on Mercury, Luna, Mars, and Io.  I have a worker shortage of about 100 million.

I happen to have a conquered alien race with 1.4 billion population a single jump from Earth, and they're not doing much of anything worthwhile.  I have lots of colony worlds out there seeded for humans, so now we're rapidly re-purposing them to take alien colonists.  The upside is that it's a lot easier to terraform planets for these critters, as they prefer a lower oxygen content and temperature.  Meanwhile I'm transporting research labs to colonies near and far, and have moved all my manned mines off-planet, but it's going to take years to rebalance everything so that Earth's industries and shipyards are back up to full efficiency...

[Theodidactus]

I've been through the corundium crunch, the duranium crunch, the gallicite crunch, but I'm experiencing a first in my current game... the human being crunch.  After 30 years I've expanded my production and research installations so much that the population of Earth can't support them.  Only about 700 million people live on Earth with 200-300mm each on Mercury, Luna, Mars, and Io.  I have a worker shortage of about 100 million.

I happen to have a conquered alien race with 1.4 billion population a single jump from Earth, and they're not doing much of anything worthwhile.  I have lots of colony worlds out there seeded for humans, so now we're rapidly re-purposing them to take alien colonists.  The upside is that it's a lot easier to terraform planets for these critters, as they prefer a lower oxygen content and temperature.  Meanwhile I'm transporting research labs to colonies near and far, and have moved all my manned mines off-planet, but it's going to take years to rebalance everything so that Earth's industries and shipyards are back up to full efficiency...

I'm just now starting to have the first signs of this problem and it's NOT PRETTY politically. Mars briefly surpassed earth in total population and now everyone's rushing to the outer colonies. Massive unrest and worker shortages. Earth will soon become just another place to live and the current political hegemony will collapse.

Civilian leaders of the right caliber and skill can avert this somewhat, but probably not enough. take solace in the obvious demographic positives: for the first time in human history, there is more work to be done than there are people able to do it. Demand is finally realistically factored as unlimited and your race (kicking-and-screaming, probably) enters the post-scarcity age. YOU get a job, and YOU get a job...EVERY-BODY GETS A JOB!

[Theodidactus]

Nov. 28th, 2115. The United Nations of Earth makes first contact with a sentient, living race of aliens...on or near future-thanksgiving. With the real-life date this event occurred on being november 27th the day before present-thanksgiving.

[DatAlien]

Discovered a new alien empire that eradicated half of the Mobile Battlegroup 2 while on rout to rejoin the other half and leave the system and I don't have the minerals to replace the loss

[joeclark77]

You'll just have to annihilate them and take THEIR minerals, then...

[Shininglight]

Just started a conventional game with 4.5 billion people. Colonisation has finally begun and so has terraforming, mars is looking to grow very quickly. As an aside my technological growth is vastly outstripping production, i can't build a ship without it being obsolete by the time its finished, I started in 2125, its now 2142 and i'm at stellarator technology while my ships are still using nuclear pulse. Oh and there's only 3 of them. Two colony vessels and a geosurvey ship, the grav survey boat is already on its way to the production line. The civilian liens have a larger fleet than me. It looks like this is gonna be a fun one.

[Theodidactus]

i can't build a ship without it being obsolete by the time its finished,

Several people point this out in their campaigns. Take solace in the fact that not only is this perfectly normal for other players. It's normal for ships, and VERY normal for spaceships and related technology. One of the biggest limiters to putting more hardware into orbit is that most of it becomes obsolete within a year of getting up there. not even joking.

[joeclark77]

Several people point this out in their campaigns. Take solace in the fact that not only is this perfectly normal for other players. It's normal for ships, and VERY normal for spaceships and related technology. One of the biggest limiters to putting more hardware into orbit is that most of it becomes obsolete within a year of getting up there. not even joking.

It forces you to make a strategic decision when to build and when to wait. An important part of the game IMHO.

[Shininglight]

I think once i get to Stellerator i'll stop and focus on production of civilian ships. I'll build a token military to hold whatever jump points i may need to defend in the event of  a hostile force existing so i won't be totally destroyed in only a short while.

[joeclark77]

Heh, nowadays I do the opposite.  Build military first, let the civilians handle commercial shipping.  Attempt to conquer the first NPR I meet while they're still localized to one system and vulnerable to a surprise attack.  In my current game I didn't build a single colony ship until the internal fusion era and ran into the problem I mentioned above (namely, not enough humans on Earth to run all of my installations, too many aliens on other worlds not doing any work).

[Shininglight]

Mars now has a population of nearly 27 million people. I've pretty much run out of metals on Earth, having mined everything. I've now started moving my mining and some of my construction capability to Mars, automated mining colonies have been set up on a number of asteroids and some mass drivers have been set up as well. No real material amounts just yet. I've refitted several survey ships and am preparing to make my first jump. In other news Mars is getting restless so i've started building a couple of troop transports to ship a few brigades of MI and AI over. I've also started exploring the ruins on Mars but no solid results from the Xenologists yet. The civvie lines are enormous with over 30 freighters and colony ships flitting about Sol and setting up wherever they want. Tankers are in production now in order to extend my ship range. And an Orbital Weapon Station is also in the works once i finish designing the components and get a large enough shipyard i'll have a space vessel capable of defending my planets and armed with 100m kilometre range ship killing missiles, size 5, 6, and 10 respectively. Massed Gauss cannons, and Railgun swarms as i've rather neglected my Energy weapon techs. After I've got my Orbital defences up i'll start setting up a proper system defence fleet. Consisting of 10kton destroyers with heavy missile compliments. Hopefully i'll have a respectable space capability before long, enoug hat least to make sure I can defend myself, though of course i'm focusing massively on getting my mining operation running massively. Mass Drivers and auto mines will soon COVER Sol, that and my colonies on Mars and the planned moon base in the future will ensure my power soon.

[joeclark77]

Trying in my current game to establish a new "base" a LONG way from Sol, in a system that's got tons of minerals nearby, as well as my best sources of sorium in neighboring systems. I've built megatons of freighters and colony ships but I guess it will take a decade or more to get my intended installations and an acceptable population there to run the factories, mines, and maintenance facilities. And the project has consumed almost all of my gallicite so it'll take years to pay for itself. I have no idea if this will prove to be economically worthwhile, but it's a worthy experiment. All my other "base" worlds are near sol and within its sector command radius. It will change the strategic outlook if my database doesn't get corrupted first.

In other news I just stumbled upon a pre-TN alien, so I'll have a new source of labor for the corundium mines soon!

[Thiosk]

I've been through the corundium crunch, the duranium crunch, the gallicite crunch, but I'm experiencing a first in my current game... the human being crunch. 

I found the best way to beat the human crunch was through specialization.  Earth starts off with industry, research, shipyards, mines, refineries, financial centers, etc.  The trick is, never ever use any of them on earth except for industry and shipyards. Make an effort to transfer everything off to the smaller worlds. Their smaller pops can provide enough refineries and research centers.  In my last game, I had mars running the research programme-- earth would build and ship over the requisite centers, and Mars's job was to just sit there and grow its pop. Research centers eat so many workers that its almost unfeasible to run a major industrial base and research center at earth.

The other thing I do is I build financial centers on crap colonies. All you do is ship say, 200 factories, to some >100 mil pop world, with enough resources to just set finances to replication.  Within a few years, that world has a financial output with 1/10th the population , and the population is set to work in the financing the massive industry of the earth.

[MarcAFK]

I never found any use for finance centers, It always seemed that even the income from the population required to run the centers was higher than what the centers produced, and the production would be better spent on infrastructure for more population on my unterraformed worlds.
However now that they cost only 120 minerals I might have to revise my theory regarding their use.

Edit: I honestly don't know how I came to that conclusion, as you can support 20 financial centers per million population and they provide the equivalent income 20 million population. Perhaps I was installing my financial centers onto heavily penalized worlds where the support percentage of production was excessively high, perhaps on Venus where the colony cost is so high that it can't even support any facilities untill it reaches cost 16.
Perhaps I had them on Titan where the cost 7 would mean 45% enviromental and the remainder would have been half service industry for a small colony. But even so I still could have supported 5 financial centers per million population dumped there. Possibly there was significant unrest I forgot about.

[Thiosk]

Before 6.0, there was quite a bit of resistance on the forum against financial centers. I never much saw the point until I had a financial crash where I was posting exponentially growing deficit spending. I figured, financial centers don't use much mission critical minerals (its usually just leftover), and my strategy was to dump all the minerals on earth as a massive construction center anyway, so what was the point of five or so mineral-less colonies? THey weren't slated for construction projects, weren't critical for anything, so whatcha gonna do with em?

Financial powerhouses, thats what.  I giggled when my first one started posting more income than earth.