Posted by: Michael Sandy
« on: November 18, 2017, 10:14:59 PM »
Before Transnewtonian tech is researched, I suggest building military academies. This will help produce more civilian administrators and scientists to help boost your economy. Getting the right scientists can basically double your research or more. A good administrator on Earth is equivalent to having a tech level in mining, construction and perhaps shipyard techs.
Especially if you have a good logistics scientist, you should get Improved Command and Control in order to research Sector Control. It is definitely worth it after you have gotten the 10,000 level Construction techs, as a good Sector Command civilian administrator provides almost as much improvement as a single Construction tech level, at a lower research cost at that point.
After Transnewtonian tech is research, your highest priority is converting the economy. Start with construction factories until your duranium starts going down. It is okay to really dip in duranium in order to speed the conversion, and then starting switching to converting industry to mines.
Because ground troops take so long to build, you may want to also keep building up infantry, in order to convert them to cadre to build Construction Brigades later. It doesn't take that many minerals, and you have the facility.
I waffle back and forth on whether it is worth having the shipyard expanded early. It takes more resources to expand shipyards, and when you are watching every duranium to get the fastest economic expansion, spending that duranium elsewhere slows your conversion. My target is to get the Naval Shipyard to about 4000 tons to build my geosurvey ships, which are basically a size 50 commercial conventional engine, a geosurvey sensor and a couple of fuel tanks.
I can then speed the building of geosurvey ships by using industry to build the engines and the sensor ship components. Overcommitting to building or expanding shipyards, adding new slips, can be a mistake. It takes longer and costs more to refit a shipyard that has multiple slips.
It is usually economical to refit the early conventional engined survey ships to size 50 commercial nuclear thermal engines. However, once you refit that shipyard to building grav sensor ships, you generally want a civilian yard for refitting and updating the geosurvey ships.
A major decision that you will want to make early on is whether you build survey ships with their own single ship jump drives, which makes individual survey ships slower, more expensive, less efficient, but has less idle time and less micromanagement required, or build commercial jump tenders, (at least 15,000 tons), which act as mobile jump gates, providing strategic mobility for your early combat fleet.
My feeling is that until you have higher efficiency jump engines, x6 or x8, you really don't want them on every ship because of performance issues.