Sins of a Solar Empire/TEC Economic Boom Strategy

From EncyClanPedia

The TEC have a very strong advantage in the early game, thanks to their ability to amass great heaps of wealth in a relatively short amount of time. (if played properly) Therefore, the best idea for a player who is using this race, is to expand quickly, and try to set up a booming economy as fast as is possible. The ideas you'll find here are best used on Large Maps in the single player skirmishes; but they'll work very well on 20 planet sized maps too.

Contents 1 Starting Moves 2 Your First Colony 3 Fast Expansion 4 Cowabunga Dude: It's Turtle Power! 5 This is my Economic Boom Stick 6 Making enemies disappear by throwing money at them.

Starting Moves

• Your first move, should always be the construction of a Capital Ship Yard. This is so you can take advantage of the free first Capital Ship to create a Capital Colony ship like the TEC's Akkan Battlecruiser

• Your second move should be the creation of your first extractor. I always find Crystal to be the biggest clog in my economy's bandwidth, so I always build it first. If you're going for a more military approach, perhaps starting off with a metal extractor would be a better idea. (Remember, in the 36 seconds of build time + the travel time for the ship to make the next extractor, you'd have earned an extra 18 resources off of the first extractor.) We minimizers and maximizers have a thing for this kind of micromanagement.

Note this next move should only be taken into account, if you've started off with a Terran planet.

• Your third move should be the purchase of 100 Crystal from the Black Market. (You can do this as your first step if you want. It doesn't matter in Single player)
  • Follow it closely with the upgrade of your Civilian Infrastructure to it's maximum level. (This will greatly increase the number of credits you earn from your Home Planet within the first five minutes of the game, allowing you to buy more Crystal from the Black Market before the price reaches 1000+)

• Finish up with the creation of two Arcova Scout Frigates, and the remaining two Extractor's once you have enough credits for the projects. Make sure to send the Scouts in seperate directions, with Auto-Explore enabled.

• After you've finished your starting manuevers, try to build a couple of Cobalt Light Frigates while you're still waiting for your Akkan Battlecruiser to be created. Of course, once the Akkan Battlecruiser is created, take the Colonize skill, and then build a Fighter.

• Scruttle the Capital Ship Factory. It's useless to you in the furthest-system from the front lines anyways, and the resources you get from it are pretty nice. Besides you'll need the room for the future Economic Boom.

Your First Colony

Hopefully by now your scouts have found you a nice juicy Asteroid to colonize. The entire purpose of colonizing an Asteroid, over a Terran, Desert, Volcanic, or Ice planet is the fact that it typically has a very small militia guarding it in comparison to Terran and Desert Planets. More importantly, you won't require any additional technology to colonize an Asteroid, like you would with a Volcanic or Ice Planet.

If there is quite literally no Asteroids within your vicinity; try to colonize the weakest defended Terran or Desert Planet instead. It'll take longer unfortunately, which will impede your economic boom.

For the sake of this strategy guide, we'll pretend that you have ideal conditions, and an Asteroid right next door.

• Send your Akkan Battlecruiser through the Phase Line first. The point in doing this, is to make the Akkan Battlecruiser the Damage Sponge over your rather weak Cobalt Light Frigates. Once you notice the Akkan Battlecruiser taking the focus fire of the enemy militia, send your Cobalt Light Frigates through, and proceed to Focus Fire on the Militia's Siege Frigate only.

• Once the Siege Frigate is destroyed, you can then feel free to colonize the Asteroid, while the Light Frigates mop up the remnants of the Militia.

• During this process you should have amassed a very nice chunk of change. Build as many Cobalt Light Frigates as you can, without going under 450 credits, and 150 metal. Remember you need to upgrade the newly Colonized Asteroid so that it doesn't net you negative returns in Credit production.

• Proceed to create extractors for the asteroid when the Credits are available.

Fast Expansion

• Send your Akkan Battlecruiser to the nearest Colonizable Planet.
  • Remember to colonize planets in this order. (lower and raise the ranking of each of these planets based on how far away the planet is from your fleet accordingly):

1. Asteroids (Easiest way to earn a fast +.45 metal/crystal per second)
2. Weakly Defended Terran Planets (If the militia shows all 1's, go for it first. These are credit producing machines.)
3. Weakly Defended Desert Planets (If the militia shows all 1's, go for it first. These are credit producing machines, although less desirable than Terran.)
4. Ice Planets (Crystal is far more important in the early game.)
5. Volcanic Planets (Metal isn't as important in the early game.)
6. Heavily Defended Terran Planets (If there are 3 Heavy Cruisers, forget about it. Save this for last, cause it'll take too long to take.)
7. Heavily Defended Desert Planets (If there are 3 Heavy Cruisers, forget about it also. Remember, Desert Planets are less desirable, the goal is speed here, remember?)

If the planet is two phase jumps away, then lower it's importance on this chart. Remember, the key here is speed, and phase jumping 3 lanes takes far too long, even if it's for an Asteroid.

Cowabunga Dude: It's Turtle Power!

• On a small map of 20 planets, once you've got four or five planets under your belt, it's time to bunker down.
  • On a 40 planet map or higher, stop at seven planets.

Don't bother yet with the production of Hanger Bases yet. (You aren't Advent) Focus instead on getting Repair Bays and an overlapping Turret Network up first.

To do this, you'll of course, need a Military Research Laboratory. So build one in one of the colonies that have no logistics being used yet. *Note: Because this is a "Boom" Strategy, it would be wisest to remind you that you should spread out the placement of your Laboratories, Frigate Factories, and Capital Ship Factories so that you have at most, 1 per planet, with only Frigate Factories and Capital Ship Factories at the front lines.

Proceed to research Repair Bay and Quick Gauss Capacitors to 1 point each.

• For each asteroid, then build two Repair Bays so that they're over-lapping each other (So they can repair each other), trying to cover as much of the gravity well as you possibly can, then build one Quick Gauss Turret in the space between the planet and the edge of the Gravity Well's building zone, in a manner so that the circle doesn't actually cross over into the planetary no-fly zone. Picture coming soon.
• For each planet, build two Repair Bays so that they're over-lapping each other, covering about 50% of the gravity well facing the Phase Lanes the enemy is most likely to arrive from. Then build one Quick Gauss Turret inbetween them, in the space between planet and the edge of the gravity well's building zone, much like the Asteroid. Picture coming soon.

For the frontline planet furthest away from your fleet, proceed to upgrade it's Tactical Capacity. Then proceed to follow any particular defensive template that you like the most. Just remember to Always have at least two repair bays at any given time, regardless of the defensive template that you're following. Repair Bays are crucial to prolonging the lifespan of your defenses and by-relation, your Planet.

• While your defenses are being built, I'd suggest you build a second Military Research Laboratory.
  • Research Javelis Prototype.
    • Research Basic Provisioning to expand your fleet cap. Don't bother going for a second capital ship yet.
    • Build as many Javelis LRM Frigates as you can afford, until you feel secure enough to begin the ground-work for your economy.

This is my Economic Boom Stick

Now is the time to build some Civic Research Stations. Four of them to be exact. Yes, I know this is expensive, but this is why we've been hording up Crystal like a mofo. At this point in the game against the AI, Crystal is worth at least 700 on resale. So you should have plenty to build the stations, and buy the research needed, while still having some leftover to make up for any Credit or Metal deficiencies.

I suggest you research the following in this order: (I bet this'll take you about 20 - 30 minutes to go through.)

1. Trade Ports
2. Orbital Refinery
3. Interstellar Networks
4. High Density Zoning 1 + 2
5. Advanced Civic Design 1 + 2
6. Deep Core Metal Mining 1 + 2 (Go for metal first. It's almost Mid-game, and Metal is more important than Crystal now.)
7. Rapid Hydrometallurgy 1 + 2
8. Efficient Crystal Sorting 1 + 2
9. Automated Mining Rigs 1 + 2
10. Nuclear Smelting 1 + 2
11. Huge Cargo Holds 1 + 2
12. Improved Arid Colonies 1 + 2 (If you have any Arid Colonies. Very, very, very low priority.)

Then follow this advice as you're going along.

• Build Trade Ports on every single planet you have. (Build up Logistics Support if you have to.)
• Build three Orbital Refineries in a planet that connects to the most planets via Phase Lines, to get the best bang for your buck.
  • Try to fill up any gaps of planets that're un-used by Orbital Refineries as best you can.
• Build Interstellar Networks on opposite sides of your empire to fill up any cultural gaps. Build an extra one on your front-lines to prevent Culture Bombing from your enemies.
• Build up the Civilian Infrastructure on every single planet.

Making enemies disappear by throwing money at them.

Congratulations, if you've made it this far in the tutorial, you've officially made yourself the powerhouse, and are now free to follow any specific tactics that you desire. This is the mid-game, and you're already making End-Game resources, while your enemies are probably still struggling to get their economies set up. Be wary of siege assaults on your planets (protect the credits!), but what is the most dangerous is Culture Bombing from the Advent (Credits is important!). I suggest at this point, building up your fleet to a respectable level, and abusing your wealth by throwing wave after wave of fleets at your closest neighbor. You can afford to go for the 66% or even 75% fleet levels, so why not do it. Sure it'll slow your economy down; but once you hit 30k credits, you start running out of things to spend it on.

It'd be wise to even build a bunch of Frigate Factories on the front-line planets, to pump out streams and waves of ship reinforcements.

When attacking an enemy, aim for his economic targets. Remember, hes still struggling with his economy, so crippling it, will remove him as a threat. Drop Siege Frigates on his planet to kill his population (Credits). Blow up his Broadcasting Towers (All Resources), Trade Ports (Credits), Orbital Refineries (Metal/Crystal), Extractors (Metal/Crystal) in that order. Kill as many Capital Ships (Prevent them from gaining high levels.) as you can, and ignore the little guys. Who cares if the little guys decimate the first wave? Regroup a new wave, before he can even get his hanger bases rebuilt. As long as you're killing his economy and one Capital Ship for every fleet that you (Might) lose, you're winning the war of attrition without giving your enemy an uber-ship in return. Remember, you pretty much have unlimited resources at this point, while your enemy most likely does not.

Keep hitting his economic structures until he falters. Feel free to colonize planets you've recently destroyed; just don't waste your resources building it up. Let him counter-attack, and instead waste his resources trying to build it up, while you hit his other bread-basket colonies.

--Dairuka 00:23, 22 February 2008 (PST)

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