| Flagpost Colonizing |
Tue, 03 June 2008 11:44  |
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 Effluviant Walrus |
 | Senior Chief Petty Officer |
Messages: 91
Registered: May 2008
Location: New York, US | |
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Is it generally considered worth it to make small "flagpost" colonies to stake a claim on good planets before your homeworld has enough pop available to send a real colonizing fleet? I was thinking that on the plus side, it establishes borders quickly, possibly avoiding a territory war, but it also just screams to be pop-dropped and spends resources building colony ships that could have been spent building up homeworld infrastructure.
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| Re: Flagpost Colonizing |
Tue, 03 June 2008 12:42  |
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Well, ther are two schools of though on this. One is to get out there and get the planets you want, the other is to wait. There are advantages and drawbacks to both concepts.
Being pop dropped is one and goes hand in hand with the reduced HW infrastructure.
On the other side, many players will be reluctant to simply start dropping on colonies since it is very likely to produce a very early enemy right on their border. Genrally, they will probably start trying to make a border agreement.
What I like as the best early expansion strategy is to stake out and colonize the best farthest planets you can find and then get pop as fast as possible to them. Keep the planets closer to HW for later colonization. Granted, if I have a 70% or better world close to HW, I will colonize it probably as my first planet and as soon as I get 150k on HW I will start moving some small amounts of pop to that planet since it will be a very good breeder.
So, my advice is something in the middle that uses some of both strategies.
Ptolemy
Though we often ask how and why, we must also do to get the answers to the questions.Report message to a moderator
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| Re: Flagpost Colonizing |
Tue, 03 June 2008 12:51 |
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| Adacore |
 | Chief Warrant Officer 2 |
Messages: 156
Registered: February 2005
Location: Shanghai | |
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If only all games could be like the testbed I ran over the weekend when I had five 80%+ planets within a year of the HW...
Although that's probably just begging to be forked by massive fleets, and thus really hard to defend.
[Updated on: Tue, 03 June 2008 12:52] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: Flagpost Colonizing |
Tue, 03 June 2008 17:25 |
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| vonKreedon |
 | Lieutenant |
Messages: 610
Registered: March 2003
Location: Seattle, WA USA | |
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Chiming in to agree that if I see planets with just a Santa Maria worth of pop I tend to assume that the player is meat and take the opportunity to colonize via pop drop since that both saves me the expense of a colonizer and might give me tech.
OTOH, I definitely ascribe to the outside-in strategy, but this IMO requires colonies capable of putting up OFs. So, all of my colonies tend to be a colonizer + at least one Priv worth of pop;e.g., 27,500+. Since my HW usually produces in the vicinity of 50,000 new pop a year very quickly I generally wait to hit that point and then start sending out one/two colonization packages a year to the best outside planets.
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