Advanced play guide
From DarkGalaxy
This page is aimed at players with some experience looking to improve their game play and covers more complex ideas and DG in more detail.
Pictures need adding and the layout needs improving/standardising.
Contents |
Building up planets
This guide should not be followed blindly, planet building in your empire is all about dynamics and asessing situations. Sometimes the planets needs more workers, sometimes less, sometimes you'll need more production planets, some times less. The whole clue however, is to maximize output given the situation you are in.
First, lets start of with some terminology.
Resource planet: A planet which is optimized for the production of resources only. Production planet: A planet which main focus is production of ships and soldiers.
Concerning score
The goal of the game is of course to get as much score as possible, the 2 ways to get score is to a) generate resources or b) generate population.
1 metal gives you 0,004 score, 1 mineral gives you 0,006 score, 1 food gives you 0,012 score, and 1 energy gives you 0,012 score. 1 worker will give you 0,01 score. Obviously you can't focus your empire on the generation of workers alone, since these require space (living quarters and habitats) they eat your food (which you obviously need for soldiers production) and optimalizing on background of workers takes away the focus on resource generation, which you obviously need for ships.
Resources = Ships. For example, 1 Battleship will give exactly the same score as the resources used ((300 000 *0,004) = 1200 (600 000 * 0,006) = 3600 1200 = 4800)
What this basically means, is that you could generate resources all round, without producing a single ship, and there would be no difference in score had you produced ships instead. As most of you understand, this is also impossible, as you'll need the ships to defend your planets, escort invasion fleets etc.
So, what DG is all about in the end, is the balance between resource generation and ship/soldier production in order to maximize score. This crystalizes itself in the planetbuilding.
The Building of Planets
This way of building planets is what most of the experienced players in DarkGalaxy do. Easily said, it's about: a) Maximizing resource output on resources planets b) Transporting these resources to a production planet c) Produce ships/soldiers on this production planet
Why not produce ships and soldiers at every planet? a) Space for light weapons factory, shipyard etc. takes up space that could be used for cores, hydro labs etc. b) All ships require both metal and mineral, soldiers also require food. Generation each of these resources on 1 planet is bad because: - You have different abundancies on each planet (%). It's better to specialize on the resource which has the higher abundancy, then focusing on all resources. More on that later. - Transporting all resources to one or several production planets makes it easier to balance the resource ratio. If you want to produce battleships, you need a 2 mineral: 1 metal ratio to that planet, doing this on a resource planet makes maximization impossible.
So, how do the "experts" do it? (Please bear in mind, different situations, different ways of doing things)
All resource planets include ONLY what is essential for the resource production.
Say you have a planet with these abundancies: Metal 100% Mineral 70% Food 80% and Energy 60%
Obviously it would be best to focus on the metal. This should be done by producing a metal refinary, a strip metal mine, and as many core metal mines as possible. The planet should also have a strip mineral mine and a mineral processor, but no core mineral mines. Obviously, also build a hydro dome, a food replicator and hydro labs. The same is not necesary for the energy output (energy can only be used for scans, and can not be converted into other resources like they could in the previous code, there is no use in maximizing the energy output, however a solar station could be in order instead of building many solar arrays).
Level 1 buildings (solar generator, farms, metal and mineral mines) should be avoided at all costs. For example, 1 core metal mine produces more metal then 3 metal mines, you do the math.
Ship producing structurs, barracks and research labs should also be avoided, they take up space from the resource generation structures. Same with Leisure Center, Hospital, etc. Fusions should also be avoided, its much better to build solar arrays/station.
Living Quarters should only be made if the focus of the planet is to maximize food output (then you need the orbital space free from habtats) Apart from that, build habitats to house your population. Try to avoid having excessively high populations, as these decrease your resource output. There is no goal in itself to have much pop, it's only a meassure to prevent the planet from being taken. But, in the long run the increase you get in resources will enable you to build more ships and soldiers, which is a much better defence for you then workers on a planet.
JumpGate and Hyper Space Beacon should be built if researched, this will decrease travel times for both transport fleets and warfleet should you need to defend a planet.
Example of a resource planet with the focus on metal:
The obvious counterpart then is a mineral planet:
Logistics
The resources generated on your resource planets, should now be transported to one or several prod planets. I use 1 big production planet for general ships and soldiers, and 1 small for battleships. How you balance this is up to you and what is most optimal given the situation.
How to transport? Use the transport ships you have, the most used is the trader since it gives level 3 travel time and takes less time to research then the hulk, but same time as the merchant. I use 1 transport fleet per planet, numbers of traders in 1 fleet according to its resource generation in the time it takes to fly from resource planet, to prod planet, and back to resource planet. The queues are on repeat so I don't have to do anything manually. Makes DG much nicer. Naming the transport fleet the same name as the resource planet is nice to avoid confusion.
Example of a transport fleet:
Production Planet
The production planet(s) needs enogh workers to handle your resource generation per tick. My prod planet has 3,75 mill workers atm, and manages my output of 1,2 mill metal and 700k mineral per tick without problems as long as I build low time production ships, like fighters, bombers etc. That's why I use a second planet for my Battleship production, so that the resources don't get stocked up on one production planet in the time it takes to build a battleship. Some also do a seperate prod planet for soldier production only.
Example of a prod planet:
You will obviously notice that I have a strip metal mine and a metal refinary. This is because the metal abundancy on the planet is quite good, and the 400k extra workers I could've gotten out of making living quarters instead is not needed.
Planet Selection
When searching for planets, you should always think about what your empire needs at the given time, and some time into the future. If you need metal, find a metal planet, if you need a prod planet, find a prod planet.
A resource planet is characterized by having atleast 2 good abundancies (anything over 80% is in point of view good, but this is also decided by the situation) The best is having a good metal or mineral abundancy, and a good food abundancy. The more ground/orbital space the better.
A production planet is characterized by having alot of ground space, but not necesarily good abundancies, though this might be an advantage non the less.
Note: This thread will probably be updated with more juicy stuff once the community points out some of its flaws. It is however one of the most respectable ways of increasing resource generation and effectively produce ships and soldiers.
Short summary: Maximize the dominant resource on each resource planet. Transport the resources to a production planet. Build ships and soldiers, and take more planets
Hope it's helpful.
Last, on popular request. What you can achieve by specializing planets:
My output per tick.
Planets: 44 - Ground/Orbit: 51/34 Metal ... 41,584,017 ( 1,304,727) ... Best/Avrage 150%/133% Mineral . 29,503,812 ( 739,914) ... Best/Avrage 150%/125% Food .... 10,290,612 ( 186,073) ... Best/Avrage 150%/125% Energy .. 7,960,102 ( 12,648) ... Best/Avrage 148%/80% Pop ..... 35,138,216 (798,596 average)
I'd also like to point out that doing this with planets in Home Galaxy is possible. Here is one of mine
Demolishing
Hawk's guide explains how it is best to only have one type of core mine and no lvl 1 mines, however it is quite rare to come across such nicely built planets and even more difficult to build such a planet from scratch. Therefore you will at some stage need to demolish buildings to achieve this zen perfection.
Clearly if you still have room to build core mines without requiring land clearances then it is better not to demolish your lvl1 mines yet. It used to be the case that demolishing all the lvl1 mines was a very awkward task and so people used to demolish a lvl1 mine in between building a core, before they ran out of space. However with queues and the queuing tools it has become much easier to get rid of the lvl1 mines and so it is only worth queuing the demolition of lvl1 mines early if you are too busy/lazy to do it all at the last moment.
It is only sometimes worth demolishing one type of core for another due to the opportunity cost of the situation. This is because the cores actually cost a certain amount to be built which may take many ticks to recuperate, also the time spent demolishing the first building and then building the new core could be spent land clearing and building an extra core. Therefore if the resource output for your empire is balanced it is probably not worth demolishing a core to make a different core unless the other resource is about 10% higher. It should be noted that if your overall output is imbalanced then the cut of %-difference for deciding to demolish will shift.
If you only have a few planets, demolishing structures so each planet is optimized for a certain type of output can make your empire more vulnerable as it is putting "all your eggs in one basket". However, in the long run it is likely to pay off, especially if you are in a relatively safe position.
Assuming your overall output is balanced it is worth building a strip for the lesser % output instead of cores for the better % if (better %)/(worse %) is about 2 or less. (This isn't 3.33 as strips are relatively expensive to build).
Managing fleets and queues
Attacking
Defending
When is it better to get soldiers instead of colonists for defence?
Every 50,000 colonists you house in a LQ/Habitat take up 1 ground space/orbit space, 10 energy/tick and most importantly of all, eat 100 food/tick. In addition there is the time to build the housing which could be spent on resource structures and the small cost of the housing.
Each soldier costs 20 food (and 12 met 8min) to build. Therefore if instead of having 50,000 colonists you used the food to build soldiers you could build 5 soldiers. If the space used to build a habitat had been used to build half a hydroponics lab (now, now children, be sensible) then, for simplicity, your food output would be 200/tick higher, therefore allowing you to produce enough food for an extra 10 soldiers.
As a defending soldier requires the same number of soldiers to kill as 15 colonists you will have been better of using soldiers to defend after 200 ticks (50,000/(15*(10 5))).
However, this calculation does not take into account the cost in terms of mineral and metal for the soldiers (about 30% of the cost in terms of score). More importantly it doesn't take into account the fact that the soldiers could have been used to take an additional planet for yourself and therefore actively damage your opponent.
Therefore in my opinion, as the best defence is a strong offence, I would suggest that players build a hydro lab instead of a habitat for defence if they expect to keep the planet for more than about a week if they build a hydroponics lab.
- If you already have so many colonists that all your food output is already eaten then little of the above applies, though you might want to consider if you built your planet correctly earlier on in the round.
