Beginner Strategy (Lost Empire)From EncyClanPediaThis strategy was written by Panpiper. I remember my first foray into this game and how lost I found myself. It took me several hours and time on the forum to even clue in to the fact that I needed to set up trade.
Starting OutStarting MovesYou start the game with 10,000 minerals and food, one scout and one colony. The resources are sufficient to purchase a couple extra scouts and build two more colony ships. It will take quite a few turns for your solitary homeworld to produce enough resources to start pumping out ships every turn, so you need to make these starting resources count. One of the first things you will notice is that building a ship will take a long time, this because your starting homeworld is still very small. The very first thing to do is take your five or six leaders and set them on 'space engineer'. Look again at the time it takes to build and you will see it has improved dramatically. After you have spent your initial resources on building ships, remember to put these leaders back on 'education' so they can get more skilled for future tasks. Once you have some decent resources flowing in, enough to support shipbuilding every turn, consider building a starbase or two. They will significantly increase the building capacity of the world they are built at, freeing up your leaders for other tasks. My advice is to promptly build two more scouts (ship upgrades coming soon) followed by two colony ships. Send your initial scout to the nearest large concentration of stars, remembering that the idea is less to actually explore each star as it is to get each star within your scout's sensor envelope. Do not neglect visiting the stars that are revealed as being planets you wish to colonize however. The visit will both establish a fuel station on the planet, extending the range of your ships, it will also claim the planet as your own so the AI won't colonize it before you get to it. Do not visit crappy stars unless you need a fuel station there to extend rage. Leaving the crappy stars alone will both save time for your scout to be claiming good planets, as well as not 'blocking in' AI empires. If the AI races can establish a few fuel stations inside your empire's space, you won't get the negative three diplomacy penalty from impeding their expansion. Colonization StepsWhat you do with your first three colony ships is absolutely crucial. Do not just send them to the closest three worlds. There are two things you want, resources and population. You want population in order to improve your research. You want resources in order to build ships. However with resources you can build more ships, which can get you more population capacity. With population only, you cannot get more ships and your growth is limited. So my advice is for those first three ships to not colonize inhabitable planets exclusively, but rather to colonize the three planets that will net the largest concentration of resources possible. If one or more of those planets happen to be inhabitable, that's just a nice bonus. Don't wait too long to send out those ships however. If there are clusters of stars nearby that your scouts have not yet revealed, assume there will be a good planet among them and start one or more of your colony ships in their direction right away. Once you have a colony, open the planet screen for both it and your homeworld. In the bottom left corner is a section for 'trade' Click the each of the trade buttons and then using the page down key, cycle through all your worlds and make sure all of them have their trade buttons clicked. Every time you colonize a world from now on, click those trade buttons, and every once in a while, cycle through all your planets to make sure you haven't forgotten any of them. Trade is extremely important, it will ultimately net you half the resources of your empire. Buy the way, you will get the best trade from the colonies that are furthest out. The natural tendency is to want to concentrate your empire so your fleets can better defend it. However in Lost Empires, you actually want a far flung empire. Planet missiles, minefields and starbases are your key to planetary defense, not roving fleets. DiplomacyOnce you meet an AI race (which depending on the distance setting you chose for the game could be almost right away) you need to put leaders on the diplomacy mission. Pick the leaders best suited to the task. If you have had the time for your leaders to get educated, consider putting them all on diplomacy at least for a while. If you've only met one or two AIs, Negotiate an 'open borders' treaty and locate your diplomats on their worlds instead of leaving them to affect global diplomacy. Your diplomats will generate 'goodwill' each turn which you can spend to negotiate treaties with the AI. These treaties have two functions, one is the treaty effect itself, the other more important effect is the positive effect treaties have on the AIs attitude adjustment each turn. You really want to keep that positive for as long as possible, so you can concentrate on building up your economy/research/defenses, without them attacking you. Also remember to set your own attitude towards them to 'alliance'. Once you find their attitude slipping inevitably towards war, make sure that the turn before they get to 100% negativity, you have 50 goodwill points left. The turn before they hit war, negotiate an non-aggression pact with them, which will get you twenty more turns of time to build up. ResearchResearch is possibly a whole other thread. The earliest research in my opinion should be designed to quickly get you better engines so you can speed up your exploration and colonization. Set your research to only two things, the 20 point to research Crystal Energy and something else that costs 20 points. On turn two or three the research aught be done and a new field open up so you can research solar sails, the next engine in line. Put all your research on just solar sails then when it is done, redesign/upgrade your scouts and redesign your colony ships. Spend a turn or two getting the cheap colony techs, and anything else that costs 20 to 40 points, then go back to researching nothing but technologies in the engine field. After researching several other cheap engine related technologies, another engine tech will be available. Research that then upgrade your scouts again. Again spend a few turns beefing up your colony techs, and then start thinking in terms of government. You really want to get the highest level government available (tech 19) as soon as possible. It will make a HUGE difference to the growth of your empire as well as help keep many of the AIs friendly. Further AdviceI play these days on hard and probably need to notch that up again to get a challenge. My latest game at turn 142 I am generating almost 3 million minerals and food each and almost 2 million research points, nearly 20 times that of any other race. I am number one in everything except pollution and have achieved all victory conditions except the Path of Enais. The trick to it is fairly straight forward. Do not disperse your energies trying to do all sorts of things. You need to expand. Winning a 4x game requires you to expand. The better and the faster you expand, the better you will do. The whole of your effort for at least the first 50 turns should be a single minded devotion to expansion. Research only engine technologies, colony techs, leader skills and government for at least that long. Spend nothing on building up moonbases, spend everything on colony ships and upgrade them with better engines as you research them. Build plenty of scouts and manually give them their destinations each turn. Do not colonize everything close to you. You want to explore far and wide. Colonize every inhabitable planet you find as fast as you can (claim them with your scouts), the farther away, the better. Trade from a far flung empire is vastly better than the trade from a close in empire. Expect to have 50 to 100 colony ships in space at some point, headed to a claimed planet. Use most of your leaders as diplomats, keep all beneficial treaties active at all times and you should be able to keep the AIs friendly for 100 turns. After turn 50 or so you will be generating enough research to afford to put some of it towards defenses. Build maximum ground missiles and minefields on all your planets. Also build several starbases over each planet equipped with 15 fighters each. By the time the AIs go hostile on you, any planet they decide to attack will be more than capable of stopping them cold, especially if you get a few turns warning (so you can build more starbases). Make sure by then that you have gotten a level in one very high tech beam weapon.
This article was rated 2 time(s) with a score of 5.0000 point(s) (until 08:46, 9 May 2008). This article has been accessed 131 time(s) (until 08:46, 9 May 2008).
|
 |
|