Posted by: lennson
« on: April 15, 2017, 07:10:41 PM »Trying to min-max things can have interesting results if you are playing against your self though.
Depending on your starting population (the following seems to mostly be the case for lower than normal starting population) I find it can be really helpful to rush out a survey craft and a freighter to get infrastructure to start a colony. The civs seem to be happy to take it from there provided you have the techs ready (cryo and cargo handling).
The idea is to get the civs started on building civ mining, which appears to start once there is a non-homeworld colony. With a wealth boosting admin the civs can greatly speed development up by effectively giving you "free" mines (normally a conventional start has overflowing money till construction and research are built up anyway) allowing more focus on construction without running out of minerals.
I had this inadvertently happen once where I wanted to play two sides against each other and the one that happened to have an admin develop a huge wealth bonus (I think it was 60%) became very far ahead simply due to the flow of resources from civ mines.
Depending on your starting population (the following seems to mostly be the case for lower than normal starting population) I find it can be really helpful to rush out a survey craft and a freighter to get infrastructure to start a colony. The civs seem to be happy to take it from there provided you have the techs ready (cryo and cargo handling).
The idea is to get the civs started on building civ mining, which appears to start once there is a non-homeworld colony. With a wealth boosting admin the civs can greatly speed development up by effectively giving you "free" mines (normally a conventional start has overflowing money till construction and research are built up anyway) allowing more focus on construction without running out of minerals.
I had this inadvertently happen once where I wanted to play two sides against each other and the one that happened to have an admin develop a huge wealth bonus (I think it was 60%) became very far ahead simply due to the flow of resources from civ mines.