Source
r/EndlessSpace•
embercom

List of Quick Tips

  1. Expand to key choke points & strong long term systems.

  2. Only colonize planets that can maintain happiness and growth when you are just starting out.

  3. All new systems should focus on growth. Once you cap growth, switch to production, science or dust depending on the strengths of your system.

  4. Grab the heroes that can get +20 food, +20 production and +20 happiness to jump start new systems. Clone them if you are Horatio.

  5. Build kamikaze ships for defense early game. Equip them with just enough missiles to blow up a ship without flak. They are cheap to produce and destroy anything lacking flak.

  6. Send out sacrifice ships to check for when an AI is switching their weapons or defense so you can adapt. Most AI's only focus on one offense and one defense tech early game.

  7. Research all techs counter clockwise starting with the cheapest and most useful techs. Occasionally aim for more expensive techs that have high strategic value, such as those that fix a deficiency in your system or reveal resources.

  8. Explore as much as possible and have at least one ally in order to gain access to trade routes. This will help a ton with dust and science.

  9. Park weak ships on nearby unoccupied systems to prevent pirates from spawning.

  10. When you colonize a new system, build food, production, happiness and then dust improvements.

Posted Jul 12, 2012, 7:07 PM UTC · edited

3231
DimlightHero•

Get Planetary Institute as soon as possible on new systems.

6
CodeNameSly•

I don't understand why the AI never builds these. Seems to be a bug, since it's essentially a bunch of free awesome stuff.

2
Vandrel•

Do you mean AI control for your own systems? Because if I remember correctly they've built them for me before.

2
CodeNameSly•

Nah I mean when you conquer enemy systems they never have it built.

3
yev001•

Not sure it its a tip or not, but play with creating a custom race.

The races start off with ~2-3 techs, each tech costs 10 points which is very expensive (considering its only a 4 turn head start).

You can remove those techs and add more useful stuff. E.G remove 2 techs is 20 points 8 turn head start and adding scientist 2 is 20 points. Over the course of the game Scientist 2 will give way more benefit.

5
EvOllj•

An early head start is just as cummulative in its returns as a constant percentage bonus in the same direction.

What else to research first?: Default races start with a tech that they would research early anyways. Getting the 20 points just gives you the option not to reaearch it as the first or second tech. But researching something else first is barely ever the better option.

A +20% science bonus on all systems keeps you focussed on planets that are low in production and high in science, while not having that bonus keeps you flexible there.

0
yev001•

An early head start is just as cummulative in its returns as a constant percentage bonus in the same direction.

That depends on the duration of time the game will occupy.

A +20% science bonus on all systems keeps you focussed on planets that are low in production and high in science, while not having that bonus keeps you flexible there.

That doesn't make sense

2
MaGoGoHoratio•

Sell new techs to friendly AI for dust per turn. Then lower your tax rate and watch your happiness soar. Repeat process till you have a ridiculous amount of dust.

5
G_Morgan•

I play empire. I don't care about my citizens happiness. Only their wallets. People exist to give me money for stuff.

2
MaGoGoHoratio•

Ya, but your ships are ugly. So there's that.

2
G_Morgan•

Your ships are dead because you don't have enough doom rays. Ugly > dead.

6
SeriousDan•

A function of the game I didn't know until a friend told me: You can move pop between planets in a system. I'm not exactly sure how food (surplus) improves pop growth but Tier 1 planets (terran/jungle/ocean) seem to get pop faster. This way you can combat overpopulation on your faster growing planets and move them onto other planets in the system that don't grow that fast.

5
reilwin•

There's a formula for it on the wiki, but the way it goes is the more surplus food you have, the more growth; the more population you have, the less growth.

2
splepage•

Formating!

    1. Expand to key choke points & strong long term systems.
    1. Only colonize planets that can maintain happiness and growth when you are just starting out.
    1. All new systems should focus on growth. Once you cap growth, switch to production, science or dust depending on the strengths of your system.
    1. Grab the heroes that can get +20 food, +20 production and +20 happiness to jump start new systems. Clone them if you are Horatio.
    1. Build kamikaze ships for defense early game. Equip them with just enough missiles to blow up a ship without flak. They are cheap to produce and destroy anything lacking flak.
    1. Send out sacrifice ships to check for when an AI is switching their weapons or defense so you can adapt. Most AI's only focus on one offense and one defense tech early game.
    1. Research all techs counter clockwise starting with the cheapest and most useful techs. Occasionally aim for more expensive techs that have high strategic value, such as those that fix a deficiency in your system or reveal resources.
    1. Explore as much as possible and have at least one ally in order to gain access to trade routes. This will help a ton with dust and science.
    1. Park weak ships on nearby unoccupied systems to prevent pirates from spawning.
    1. When you colonize a new system, build food, production, happiness and then dust improvements.
4
Grognor•

  1. disagree. Production and food are tied, to me. Production gives you improvements, which include food growth. I guess you could go the other route and go with food giving you production, but with a lot of infrastructure giving you straight-up bonuses, I think it's worth bulding those as early as possible (+10 production +6 on everything, +40 research).

  2. That's +50 food... there is two of those abilities :P. I usually skip the hapiness... with +50 food you want to move that hero around, and you want to make sure that colony stays happy once you do.

  3. Counter clockwise? I hand pick every tech based on my situation. If I have time to build infrastructure or it's one of the highly strategic ones (ex : +10 prod, +6 everything, or +40 tech) I'll pick that, otherwise I go for passive bonuses and usually pick cheaper techs because by the time you get done with a tier on one tree the same tier on other trees should be dirt cheap and still very useful. In time of war obviously it's worth spending a few turns upping your weapons, too.

  4. Disagree. I favor infrastructure with static bonuses as you can get more out of them faster, in my opinion, and then build the improvements that gives you food very quickly. In any case your administrator hero should travel the galazy jumpstarting systems with his +50 food, so to me that is not a priority.

4
embercomOP•

Feel free to add to the list, preferably in small bite size sentences.

3
pie_in_your_face•

Nice tips, but try and use

  • separate lines for each tip.
2
embercomOP•

I'm on my phone. I'll fix it when I get home.

1
SpinnerMasterEndless•

Use

  • An asterisk at the beginning of a line (hit enter twice to goto a new line) will make a bullet point.
1
[deleted]•

Or

  1. Numbered lines (eg 1., 2., etc)
  2. If you really want to keep the numbering
1
Sc4Freak•

Another protip: dust improvements are almost completely useless, unless you're constantly running a very high tax rate.

Tax rates don't work the way most people expect. They're a direct multiplier to the dust output of a planet. If you have a 0% tax rate, the multiplier is zero... so if you run a 0% tax rate, that improvement you built to give +1 dust per pop is now giving you exactly 0 dust per pop while still costing you a maintenance fee.

That means that if you run at a low tax rate (which is usually the optimal strategy, because of the huge bonuses to FDIS for happy systems), dust improvements almost always cost more dust than they give.

Take for example the Careful Sweeping improvement. It gives +2 dust per turn per explored moon, and costs -3 dust per turn. If you're running at a 100% tax rate, you only need 2 moons for this to pay off. If you're running at a 50% tax rate (which is still very high), you need 4 moons in a system for this improvement to give a net positive return. If you're running at a 10% tax rate? Good luck finding a system with 15 moons, because that's what you'll need for this improvement to pay for itself.

And trade routes are also kind of situational - they can give nice bonuses but aren't suitable as a foundation for your economy. If you go heavy on the trade routes and end up going to war with a bunch of AIs, you can easily see your entire economy collapse once those trade routes disappear.

3
Xenolith5•

Actually the tax rate is not the dust multiplier.

Refer to this table.

10
Sc4Freak•

Oh, I didn't know that! From my observations I had assumed it would be a 1:1 mapping. So it's not quite as bad as I thought. But it's still skewed in favor of low tax rates since the multiplier isn't linear, and the conclusion is the same for low tax rates.

2
yev001•

I see what you mean. So 0% tax rate = 0 bonus? All the tooltips are geared at 50% tax where multiplier is 1....

It would be a nice addition if tooltips gave a forecast of FDIS gained based on current happiness/tax, rather than making you figure it out yourself.

I'm at work now and cant check. Will your empire earn 0 dust at 0 tax?

2
Sc4Freak•

Yes, I was wrong about the 1:1 multiplier, at 50% tax the multiplier is indeed 1. But at 0% tax, the multiplier is still 0x.

So, yes, if you set your tax rate to 0%, your planets will produce zero dust. That means that at a 0% tax rate, improvements, exploitations, anomalies, population etc. have zero positive effect on a system's dust production (because the dust production will be zero).

But the key point is that maintenance is not affected by tax, so if you run a low rax rate (say, between 0-15%) then dust improvements almost always cost far more than they generate in return.

2
Grognor•

That explains how good they looked to me :(

I never really noticed that. Considering what Xenolith said though, I think I'll hang on to my xenotourism thing and other +1 per pop.

For trade routes, it depends on your diplomacy, I find. Or if you are pilgrim :P. Never make any alliances if you are using trade routes a lot. But I find the bonus too good to pass up. A corporate hero with trade routes will give you a lot of research, which will stick around even once your economy goes "down" for an hypothetical war. Just don't sign any alliances, because someone's archduke is bound to get assassinated and you don't want any of that.

2
[deleted]•

[deleted]

1
yev001•

I've never seen a hero that gives any happiness.... Which attribute gives what? Wit & the other one only give FIDS bonus.

3
ibwardHoratio•

Heroes that have the labor skill (cant recall its name, not corporate but the other econ skill) can unlock propganda master or somethinglike that which provides a large happiness bonus. This becomes availible after moving up the path that increases their labor points.

There are two levels of the skill.

5
splepage•

Administrator I believe.

5
Grognor•

Yes, that is it.

http://endlessspace.wikia.com/wiki/Abilities#Administrator

1
DimlightHero•

Nevermind, I was wrong.

0
[deleted]•

[deleted]

1