Home » Primary Racial Traits » SS » SS - hyper producer or hyper growth
SS - hyper producer or hyper growth |
Thu, 20 February 2003 12:27 |
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Crikey | | Crewman 1st Class | Messages: 21
Registered: February 2003 Location: England | |
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I am new to Stars and so I apologize if I am treading already trodden ground. However, I am having difficulty deciding between an SS race based upon hyper producer or hyper growth.
With hyper producer the race starts out slowly and weakly and so any conflict must be avoided if you want to survive. The main bonuses for SS arrive in the mid game with the highest tech gadget being the Robber Baron Scanner (but is this really a game changing gadget?) Also, SS are an offensive race and need to attack to succeed so this means that they would do better if they start their offensives in the mid game where their advantages are greatest but involves being very weak at the beginning.
For the side of the hyper growth (ie 1/1000 pop efficiency and reasonable factory settings) they start a lot stronger and are able to use their stealth advantage against low electronics tech opponents early on in the game. This hyper growth strength also continues all the way up to the late game (spanning SS strongest period) at which time their advantages are not as useful. (people have higher elec tech, research bonuses not as helpful).
Given these arguements and those of your own is it better to have HP or HG for an SS race?
Thank you for your time.
Crike
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Re: SS - hyper producer or hyper growth |
Thu, 20 February 2003 16:21 |
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I'd say HG. While HP gives the best results when the best tech becomes available (the robber barron isn't game changing but if used right will make your enemies cry lots.)
I say HG though because when your neighbours find out you're SS (and they will - VERY quickly) then chances are they'll want to wipe you out - as such HG gives you the *hopeful* advantage.
ALso HG allows you to play like a true SS and attack before your enemy knows you're there.
Personally I'd play -F and do lots of invading quickly... your enemies wont see those invasion freighters coming... handy huh?
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Re: SS - hyper producer or hyper growth |
Sat, 22 February 2003 12:47 |
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yucaf | | Master Chief Petty Officer | Messages: 100
Registered: December 2002 Location: India | |
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Hello,
If you want to play SS, you should know that you can counter your economic weaknesses by diplomacy. SS excels at it!
You have plenty of stuff and information others want to get. In my limited SS experience, I have found neighbours very happy to become friend or even ally. Of course, in a "no diplomacy" game, SS is a bad choice, but if you have enough players in the universe (I would say more than 4), SS is a fun PRT to play. Being sneaky does not mean you are less honest than others.
Being sneaky can also mean "better be friend with that guy"... Your neighbours do not know how good you are and who you are allied to... And it's much harder to verify.
That being said, HP is perfectly playable for SS, economically it makes sense (since HP is very hard to achieve with SS without loosing the specific advantages of the PRT), and you can easily buy time to get on track.
Of course, like in any game, you can be unlucky and all players go gang on you... Risk is part of the excitement, no?
FWIW,
YucaF
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Re: SS - hyper producer or hyper growth |
Sun, 23 February 2003 02:11 |
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Crusader | | Officer Cadet 2nd Year | Messages: 233
Registered: January 2003 Location: Dixie Land | |
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Gentlemen, please, at the risk of sounding like some sort of pompous know-it-all ...
SS is economically weak? Not necessarily. Sure, you can't do the fancy things with the economy like you can with JoAT or CA, but it ain't no 90 pound weakling either.
To wit! and as a public example, please all take a gander at the Morloks, denizens of the dark and evil underworld.
PRT: SS
LRTs: IFE, OBRM, NAS, LSP
gravity .31 to 3.20
temperature -120 to 120
radiation 20 to 80
1 in 4
19%
1 res per 1200 colonists
factories 12/9/16 4G
mines 10/3/15
weapons cheap, all others expensive, tech 3 checked
5 advantage points applied to surface minerals
What is to dislike here? A 100% world yields 3028 resources. It is fast growing, with a bit of a slower start because of LSP, but 19% growth to help overcome that. You start out with the Fuel Mizer and the medium freighter, so moving pop off the HW is not an issue. If played properly, this race can achieve 20k to 25k resources by 2450 in a testbed, so you can call it a "monster" race if you want. With tech stealing, the expensive tech fields don't hurt as bad as it would some other races.
You play them like any other HG race. Grow for 4 to 8 years (I'm assuming AccBBS), build 10 to 20 scouts for initial expansion scouting, followed by building 100 to 200 mines for minerals and then start building colony ships and freighters. Move pop, keeping the HW from 25% to 33% capacity until about year 20 to 30, allow the HW to grow up to 50% capacity and move pop off to keep it at that point. Offload germ to help the colonies build their factories. Acquire new technology. Oh yeah! These guys can rock, and they are just made for exceling in those middle years when everyone is starting to feel a bit froggy and looking for wars of expansion. Then, all you gotta do is look those big JoATs and CAs in the eye and say, "Bring it on, big boy, but I got capital ships too and YOU don't know where they are! Do ya?! HUH? DO YA!?!"
What? You don't like that? Oh, you want something quicker out of the gate, catching your neighbors while still growing. You want something that doesn't rely on factories for it's economic strength. We can oblige you, pilgram. How about the Gypsies?
PRT: SS
LRTs: IFE,OBRM,NAS,RS
gravity: immune
temperature: -104 to 104
radiation: 34 to 66
1 in 5
19%
1 / 1000
factories 5/25/5 4G (don't build any)
mines 10/4/10
weapons & construction cheap, biotech expensive, all other normal cost. No start at tech 3.
13 adv. points applied to surface minerals
Auto build queue consists of auto 10 mines and 1 terraform.
Grow, expand, locate a nearby neighbor who looks to be struggling or simply growing much too slowly and attack with whatever works at that point, because this race is meant for speed, not capacity. So, you have to grab more space at the beginning than most folks. You will have some initial trouble getting pop off the HW, but that is not necessarily a really bad thing so long as you don't let it go too long. That's why you have cheap construction, so you can quickly get the medium freighter or privateer that you need for moving, but first get the extra level of prop for the fuel mizer again, so your scouts can move quickly and locate those green worlds. The really bad weakness about this race, in my opinion, is the lack of ISB, but some bright genius out there can probably figure a way to get around the lack, or can figure how to get the points to take ISB. I mean, I know how, but I'll leave it as an exercise for you.
Did you catch the 1 in 5 habitat along with gravity immune? You gotta a real pop growing bunch of aliens here, my friends.
HP? Yes, SS was just made to be an HP. A standard HP works just fine. Then there is the non-standard HP that takes a bit lower economy settings in favor of cheaper research settings. Take your pick guys. If you want examples, just shout it out. I'll be happy to oblige you some more. It's just that you really do have to be a diplomat to survive during the early years as an HP SS. If word gets out, then you will not last long, my friend. No one wants to be around an HP SS from around year 70 an beyond. They will therefore all make sure that there are no HP SS around in the universe after year 70 or so.
So, now you see, it is not a problem getting SS to be competitive in the economic realm. They can manage well enough. Will they rank number 1 or even number 3? Well, not if there are capable players playing the economic PRTs in the game. So how do you win? Yes, that is the question you need to ask. You start learning SS tactics. You will know scan ranges, almost in your head, according to you cloak percentage. You will learn what a cloak unit is, and how it applies to fleet cloaking. You will know how many stealth bombers it takes to cloak a missile battleship, and you will learn how to ease a starbase-killing raiding fleet to within a 1 year jump of the target planet without being spotted by scanners. You will even learn how to slip past a network of randomly moving scouts as they attempt to detect your rogue infiltrators.
And even more importantly, you will learn that you can do all these things without once commiting a backstab. In fact, you may well be the most honorable race in the game. And why not? You don't really have to be devious and untrustworthy, because you have a fleet or two that can kill a planet in only 1 to 3 years time but no one can find them.
Citizens, THAT is POWER. And your enemies will feel in in their bones.
The Crusader
[Updated on: Sun, 23 February 2003 02:13]
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Re: SS - hyper producer or hyper growth |
Sun, 23 February 2003 19:35 |
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yucaf | | Master Chief Petty Officer | Messages: 100
Registered: December 2002 Location: India | |
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Crusader wrote on Sun, 23 February 2003 02:11 | SS is economically weak? Not necessarily. Sure, you can't do the fancy things with the economy like you can with JoAT or CA, but it ain't no 90 pound weakling either.
To wit! and as a public example, please all take a gander at the Morloks, denizens of the dark and evil underworld.
PRT: SS
LRTs: IFE, OBRM, NAS, LSP
gravity .31 to 3.20
temperature -120 to 120
radiation 20 to 80
1 in 4
19%
1 res per 1200 colonists
factories 12/9/16 4G
mines 10/3/15
weapons cheap, all others expensive, tech 3 checked
5 advantage points applied to surface minerals
What is to dislike here? A 100% world yields 3028 resources. It is fast growing, with a bit of a slower start because of LSP, but 19% growth to help overcome that. You start out with the Fuel Mizer and the medium freighter, so moving pop off the HW is not an issue. If played properly, this race can achieve 20k to 25k resources by 2450 in a testbed, so you can call it a "monster" race if you want. With tech stealing, the expensive tech fields don't hurt as bad as it would some other races.
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Thank you for that long and interesting post.
However, I'm sorry but I have to disagree: with 4G per factory, 1/1200 pop efficiency and LSP, you will be behind economic races no matter what. And having all your tech (but weapon) expensive won't be compensated by the spying bonus, because you cannot rely only on that to get the techs. You need to research as well and for what I can see, you will be behind in ressources and therefore in research with that design. Economy is more about speed than planetary capacity (except for HP designs of course)
The point here is not to try to get 25k by 2450. We know SS can do it. But remember that CA can do twice as much (or even better) without difficulty. When you will be trying to get that yellow cloak, he will be pushing his BB's on your worlds if you play SS as an economic race.
There is still a clear weakness for SS: his worlds are not cloaked, therefo
...
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Re: SS - hyper producer or hyper growth |
Fri, 06 June 2003 14:29 |
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Crusader | | Officer Cadet 2nd Year | Messages: 233
Registered: January 2003 Location: Dixie Land | |
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I'll try this again. The first copy "disappeared" on me. That is the second time I've managed to make that happen. It is a sequence of keystrokes after placing a smiley in the post that does it, and you would think that I would figure out to stop doing it.
But I'm slow ...
First, allow me to apologize for not responding back when this was all fresh. The new job and a new game of Stars! got me busy. Then, just about the time I managed to get a handle on both of those, I went and had a "serious heart attack", as my doctor put it. Is it possible to have a "not-so-serious heart attack"?
Yucaf: All you say in your response is true, and I would never dream of disputing it. However, in my opinion, the points that I make are also true and, in my opinion, undisputable.
Plus, I like hearing myself talk, or type even. Surely, all those on this forum can relate to that little bit of truth-telling.
Crikey: First, allow me to congratulate you on your handle. I like it! Then, to quote John Wayne, "Never apologize! It's a sign of weakness!" You may disagree with me anytime you wish. It is a free ciber space. Ain't it?
The points that you make are well taken too, and quite true. I'm not sure that I understand the remark about needing more planets instead of better planets as a -f, but maybe it's just me. Seems to me that a 1 in 5 hab range with an immunity is just better than a 1 in 3 hab range without an immunity for a race that relys on only pop growth for resources. Although, going 1 in 3 without an immunity would allow for even better research settings, which would be good for SS.
As Yucaf said, FWIW,
Respectfully,
The Crusader
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Re: SS - hyper producer or hyper growth |
Sun, 28 September 2003 10:17 |
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mcvos | | Crewman 3rd Class | Messages: 7
Registered: September 2003 Location: Netherland | |
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Sorry to jump into this old thread, but I'd like to vent my opinion about this.
Of Crusaders races, I'm not overly impressed with the HG design, because I can reach 20k with my 1/1000 18% growth SS with better tech settings. But HG is worth playing for a SS. You won't be as big as a CA or a JoaT, but you do need some economy to fight them, and a good SS can afford take on much bigger enemies.
What I am impressed by, is the -f race. -f compensates for one of the biggest weaknesses of the SS PRT: the planets. When you're -f, you can just abandon your planets and move those people to your other planets, or keep them in cloaked freighters ready for an invasion. SS is very good at attacking, -f is very good at attacking, and a -f SS can afford not to defend.
I've never been able to design a satisfactory -f SS, though, but those Gypsies look really good. 19%, 1 in 5, 1 immunity, good tech settings, and all the right LRTs. Sure, a CA or JoaT -f will be a lot bigger, but this should be playable. Just remember to attack, and to never stop attacking.
mcv.
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