23-06-2004 23:51									#31
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Seeing as you're staying in Free Market, getting an early Pop as Morgan is laughably easy, at least for me. I usually concentrate on heavy forestation and crawl an average of 3 forests for minerals per base, bringing the average base output to 15 or so. This yeilds ordinary crawlers on a 2-turn curve, which I accelerate by rushing with cash. True, there's some wasted cash there, but it's a scheme which allows me to crank out SP's very quickly.

Sik and Blake, thanks for your thoughts on terraforming, I think I'll give the forest/borehole model a try, and compare it to a strategy which uses condensers. Give both games 100 turns, and see where I wind up.

One thing I do know is that at Transcend, 7 tiles is more than enough per base. Morgan's largest strength in this game is the huge amounts of base-square energy that are available in the early game, a feature which is strengthened immensely by 1 square spacing.

I also think I'll try avoiding clean reactors, focussing on achieving treefarms and pop booming first, since I honestly think that will work better with an all-tree approach. Because I focus on clean as an early lynchpin tech, my pop booms tend to appear late. Most of the growth I get early comes from grabbing PTS as my thrid SP (after HGP and WP).

	24-06-2004 11:36									#32
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quote: Originally posted by CEO Aaron Seeing as you're staying in Free Market, getting an early Pop as Morgan is laughably easy, at least for me. I usually concentrate on heavy forestation and crawl an average of 3 forests for minerals per base, bringing the average base output to 15 or so. This yeilds ordinary crawlers on a 2-turn curve, which I accelerate by rushing with cash. True, there's some wasted cash there, but it's a scheme which allows me to crank out SP's very quickly. Sik and Blake, thanks for your thoughts on terraforming, I think I'll give the forest/borehole model a try, and compare it to a strategy which uses condensers. Give both games 100 turns, and see where I wind up. One thing I do know is that at Transcend, 7 tiles is more than enough per base. Morgan's largest strength in this game is the huge amounts of base-square energy that are available in the early game, a feature which is strengthened immensely by 1 square spacing. I also think I'll try avoiding clean reactors, focussing on achieving treefarms and pop booming first, since I honestly think that will work better with an all-tree approach. Because I focus on clean as an early lynchpin tech, my pop booms tend to appear late. Most of the growth I get early comes from grabbing PTS as my thrid SP (after HGP and WP).

That sounds like a really strong game plan. By beelining for Hybrids and pop booming immediately once they are in you might be able to run all the way to hab limits fairly early in the game. One thing I haven't been able to figure out is whether to run one longer and later pop boom, two pop booms, or a continuous pop boom. A lot of the answer is faction, player and game specific, but I'll have to run some labratory tests to get a better sense of the thing generally.

Let us know how your games go.