NewB questions about games at beginning

[dfsutherland]

I see messages in this forum that talk about building interesting things in the first 10-50 turns. This never seems to happen for me!

In every game I've played so far (a dozen or so, all single player), I have the following sequence at the start:

My home planet comes pre-equipped with

A govmnt DEA, including Empire and System seat
An Industry DEA
One or two mining DEAs
1 or 2 BioHarvest DEAs
A couple of planetary buildings that help with ship construction

All this has a maintenance cost of about 4500AUs. I have an income of a few hundred AUs.

So... Over the first 2 or 3 turns I have no production points (no $$ to buy them with). And most of the DEAs get torn down due to lack of maintenance. I usually wind up left with:

One or two BioHarvest DEAs
One mining DEA (if I'm lucky)
Nothing else :(



Even packing all I can into building some industry, I'm hard-pressed to get as far as a single Industry DEA built in the next hundred turns!

Am I doing something wrong here? Is this normal? What gives?

For troubleshooting information, I'm using version MoOIII version 1.2.0 for the Mac, running on OS X 10.2.6. Gobs of available memory.

[zanzibar]

yes, you should set empire taxes to somewhere around 14%, and the other one to roughly half that. Now, don't forget to set your sliders for research, military, and planetary grants to be all equal (level 2). This should all be done on turn 1 on your empire finances screen. Now, depending on your race, you want either corporate, unity, or monarchy for government. Make sure you have that. It would probably be a good idea to colonize a nice planet in your home system with that free colony ship you get (this way you know you got a sure thing, instead of sending a ship out into the darkness to possibly get destroyed by a gaurdian or other empire's system defenses. Now, on your home world do this: add a military DEA. Make sure you have 3 mining and 3 manufacturing DEAs. Also add a research DEA. Start production on system colony ships if you have other planets in your home system you wish colonized. set your military slider to 20%. Set your economic development to 35%. Set your research to 10%. Make sure you are on a limited war economy. Start training of a few scientific spies. Make sure you send economic agreement proposals to your neighbors... *whew* you are almost done!! Load a development plan, or make one... now hit turn!! You should be now on turn 2... now keep the sliders on your home planet the same until all DEAs are built, then adjust them how you want. Also, as you get more money on an empire level (turn 3 and later) bump your military and research sliders toward level 3. Once these sliders are at level 3, bump research, military and planet grants equally. Oh, and don't forget to keep planetary taxes around 15%. Tell me if this fixes your problems!! :)

[dfsutherland]

Higher tax rate helps a little, but doesn't solve the problem.

The maintenance cost of the stuff I start with on my home planet is ~4500 AUs. The TOTAL PLANETARY GDP is 1300 AUs. 2 turns into the game, I have nothing left but two BioHarvest DEAs.


Is this normal?? It sure seems rather odd to start off with a bunch of stuff that you lose immediately because you can't pay for it...

Oh yeah, if I set the tax rates where you suggest, I get almost immediate unrest leading the people to tear down the farming DEAs as well. Then they all starve. :( (playing unmodified humans, that is).

[Da_Blade]

How the hell do you end up with getting a starting maintenance of 4500 AUs?

I think i know a solution: delete all mods before you start a new game. <sarcasm>That might help.</sarcasm>

[Strifeguard]

@dfsutherland
Okay, you're experiencing a bug in the game.

I don't know it's cause, and I've seen it discussed in the Bugs/Suggestions forum. I've even experienced it myself.

Unfortunately, I cannot tell you the cause, only that the solution is to start a new game. You didn't do anything incorrectly, this has nothing to do with your setup, etc. this is just a mistake in the code.

Basically, your maintenance at this point should be less than 100 AUs, probably even less than 90 AUs. However, as you've stated it's 4500, this is the problem. Your GDP should start off at about 1300, and increase to just under 2000 in 3-4 turns. Of course, this isn't happening in your game because the bug has resulted in the tearing down of your planet's infrastructure.

Loading from saves won't help, because they're affected too. Just start a new game, and hope it doesn't happen again. As I stated above, I saw this once, I started a new game, I haven't seen it since (that was 5-6 games ago).

[dfsutherland]

Da_Blade: No mods at all!

Strifeguard: Thanks for verifying that this is a bug. It's happened to me in every game I've started so far. That's why I was posting to find out if that's really the way things are supposed to be.

I'll try starting a few more games. If none of them work right, I'll report it to MacSoft as being clearly a bug in their port.

[Strifeguard]

Hmm, I don't know why it's happening to you, but it's VERY unfortunate. I don't have a Mac, but I've seen it happen. Granted, it's only happened to me once, and never again, if you're seeing it every game, you should probably report it as a show-stopping bug.

[Doomshade]

You might try a complete and fresh reinstall too. Can't hurt.

[dfsutherland]

The problem seems to be a bad download of the recent patch. When I DL-d it again, the file checksummed differently. Sooo.... I trashed my installed copy of the game, re-installed from the CD, then did the patch from the freshly downloaded update.

Now, everything works fine. Boy, the game is a lot more fun when you can actually DO something in the first 150 turns. ;)

[Ron_Lugge]

Originally posted by zanzibar
yes, you should set empire taxes to somewhere around 14%, and the other one to roughly half that. Now, don't forget to set your sliders for research, military, and planetary grants to be all equal (level 2). This should all be done on turn 1 on your empire finances screen. Now, depending on your race, you want either corporate, unity, or monarchy for government. Make sure you have that. It would probably be a good idea to colonize a nice planet in your home system with that free colony ship you get (this way you know you got a sure thing, instead of sending a ship out into the darkness to possibly get destroyed by a gaurdian or other empire's system defenses. Now, on your home world do this: add a military DEA. Make sure you have 3 mining and 3 manufacturing DEAs. Also add a research DEA. Start production on system colony ships if you have other planets in your home system you wish colonized. set your military slider to 20%. Set your economic development to 35%. Set your research to 10%. Make sure you are on a limited war economy. Start training of a few scientific spies. Make sure you send economic agreement proposals to your neighbors... *whew* you are almost done!! Load a development plan, or make one... now hit turn!! You should be now on turn 2... now keep the sliders on your home planet the same until all DEAs are built, then adjust them how you want. Also, as you get more money on an empire level (turn 3 and later) bump your military and research sliders toward level 3. Once these sliders are at level 3, bump research, military and planet grants equally. Oh, and don't forget to keep planetary taxes around 15%. Tell me if this fixes your problems!! :)

I disagree wtih several points here...

I tend to slash my empire taxes to minimal 1-2%, and system to 0. This leaves planets with MUCH more money, and they can really build stuff with it!

Also, I tend to reserve my colony ship untill I've found a system for it to colonize... Maybe because my production maxxed race can turn out syscols so quick.

[zanzibar]

well, the reasoning behind landing your 1st colony ship on turn 1 is...

1) you get a few extra turns of planetary development, population growth then if you send it into the unknown

2) it's not gonna possibly get destroyed by a gaurdian or what not while you look for a nice planet to land on.

I guess I play too many competetive MP games... 5-7 turns of production really makes a difference in these games ;)

Hrmmm... I haven't tried it with next to zero taxes... I'll have to do that ;)

[Rockstone]

Originally posted by dfsutherland
I see messages in this forum that talk about building interesting things in the first 10-50 turns. This never seems to happen for me!

In every game I've played so far (a dozen or so, all single player), I have the following sequence at the start:

My home planet comes pre-equipped with

A govmnt DEA, including Empire and System seat
An Industry DEA
One or two mining DEAs
1 or 2 BioHarvest DEAs
A couple of planetary buildings that help with ship construction

All this has a maintenance cost of about 4500AUs. I have an income of a few hundred AUs.

So... Over the first 2 or 3 turns I have no production points (no $$ to buy them with). And most of the DEAs get torn down due to lack of maintenance. I usually wind up left with:

One or two BioHarvest DEAs
One mining DEA (if I'm lucky)
Nothing else :(



Even packing all I can into building some industry, I'm hard-pressed to get as far as a single Industry DEA built in the next hundred turns!

Am I doing something wrong here? Is this normal? What gives?

For troubleshooting information, I'm using version MoOIII version 1.2.0 for the Mac, running on OS X 10.2.6. Gobs of available memory. I cant help you sorry i'm a pc user.