19-08-2004 03:23									#31
	Avatar Enlargement: We've got the solution

Pre-orbital spaceflight, most minerals come from working boreholes. No facilities are really needed, although creche is useful, both for growth and to reduce energy loss.

Post-orbital spaceflight, I don't build any new boreholes. Nutrient squares are much more productive, and creches, hab complex and dome become my priority build. With a 6-N square, I get 6 more people (due to matching from sats), which give me 6 more energy, 6 more minerals, and 6 more specialists! Furthermore, I don't have to work a single square (use crawlers to gather all nutrients), so my cities can be 100% specialists (no drone control needed).

As for facilities, you can ignore drone control, and forest stuff, but all other facilities are useful. As I said, creches, hab complex and dome are the priority for pop boom. I usually build genejack factories first, to speed production of the other facilities, depending on if I have time before hitting a hab limitation.

I usually build every mineral multiplying facility first in my biggest base as early as possible, even before spaceflight, triggering some fungal pops. You can look at it like every fungal pop is like getting an extra hybrid forest built, since both increase the clean mineral production limit by 1. Once I stop getting pops, I know that I can expand my other cities safely without global warming problems.

So I pop boom, building mineral multiplying and population limit increasing facilities first. Then I build science and energy increasing facilities. Again, you get no value from psych enhancing or drone control facilities, so don't bother building them and paying maint on them.

At this point, there is an interesting tradeoff. Working more squares per city means fewer total facilities are needed, and less support for facilities far exceeds any +ECON per city bonus. BUT larger cities need more of each kind of sat for optimal production, and the production output may be so high that a lot of the production is just wasted. Smaller cities give more production centers and less wasted production. Here it is a judgement call. Some people stabilize cities at 18 pop (work 18 N per city), some stabilize at 24, or 30, and some people make some cities even bigger, particularly if they have energy or research multiplying SPs in those cities. Regardless of what you choose, once you have dozens of cities pop boomed to 18 or higher, your only hard decision left is exactly which kind of victory do you want.