Shark7
Posts: 7937
Joined: 7/24/2007 From: The Big Nowhere Status: offline
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OK, I'm mid game now as well. Current settings is Hard difficulty, very many pirates at normal strength and respawning, I have 29 colonies, 93 mines (Pirates, Arghhh!), 84 gas mines, and nearly 400 freighters total. The AI is no longer bugging me about smuggling resources. My lowest level strategic resource is chromium with 73.8k in stock. I am running 6 attack fleets of 17 ships each, along with 1 strike fleet with high end abandoned ships, and a large number of frigates and escorts patrolling. In fact, I have 54 escort, 47 frigate and 36 destroyers total. 12 Troop ships, 7 cruisers, 1 capital ship (cruisers and capitals are reclaimed derelicts). 12 Recon, 30 constructor. Right now I have the minecrafter achievment, meaning I am mining more than any AI empire, but my economy is still in 2nd place. My casflow is 323k net, just from taxes. This way is working out far better, I have not once gone into negative income, and I am still stronger than all the other empires individually by mid game. My overall impression is that the freighters and the cargo moving routine is the only real problem...it's just not efficient. Too many times I find freighters (my big ones can carry 10k of resources) are moving from place to place with only a fraction of their capacity filled (in once case a large freighter carrying only 25 of argon with 9975 of its cargo capacity unused). I'm about to redesign my freighters and reduce their loads to a max of 2-3k, since they rarely carry loads larger than that anyway.
< Message edited by Shark7 -- 8/12/2013 8:04:36 PM >
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Distant Worlds Fan 'When in doubt...attack!'
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