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| Some (hard-learned) tips on playing AR |
Thu, 19 August 2010 06:01  |
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 iztok |
 | Commander |
Messages: 1202
Registered: April 2003
Location: Slovenia, Europe | |
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Facts
- AR survivs or dies on early minerals.
- Testbeds differ badly from the real game with competent opponents.
Consequences
- Testbed will give you significantly better performance, because in it you don't need to build lots of scouts to keep tabs on your neighbours, scout catchers to deny info to them, skirmishers, armed orbitals...
- If you happen to have choosen Advanced Remote Mining, bulid some Potato Bugs on rich planets. Despite they're weak miners, three of them can double mineral production on that planet, and they'll pay back for them in 3-5 turns. The rest of their mining turns, until you'll be able to build there better miners, are pure mineral gain. It will also take way longer to reach a better buildable miner, than you're used to achieve in your testbeds: the maxi-robo-miner isn't buildable at Docks.
- If you've started without ARM, consider building some Space Stations over rich planets to build there robo-maxi-miners. In real game it will take significantly longer than in testbeds, to reach Ultra Station to start building robo-supers from them.
- Don't save too much on minerals. If opponent's colonies are close, you simply must have there ships to check what they have in orbit, or else you're risking losing your colony(es) to a surprise attack from there. It doesn't need to be a suicidal chaff for checking. The old scout-catching DD (speed 1.5) on a disengage orders does a surprisingly good job at that.
- Use slots for orbitals wise. Two are already taken by a Starter Colony and a starting SB. Don't ever be caught without at least one free slot for emergency upgrades. Any upgrade taking more than 2 turns is also risky - you can't delete the design to free a slot, if it exist or is in a build queue somewhere. This is especially true for yellow / red colonies with their low resources output. Better lose one such colony, than one or more established planets. You may even consider not upgrading the Starter Colony there at all, until planet turns green, defending with ships on
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[Updated on: Sat, 21 August 2010 13:36] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: Some (hard-learned) tips on playing AR |
Sat, 21 August 2010 14:08  |
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| iztok |
| Commander |
Messages: 1202
Registered: April 2003
Location: Slovenia, Europe | |
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Hi!
Some more thoughts:
- About the only advantage and AR has in early game is good early resources, which usually result in good early techs. But if you're hit with a bad planet draw, you'll not be able to get better tech to fight with it more "metal" other players can mine to throw at you.
- As an early defense Docks work quite fine, until opponent(s) start fielding CCs. At that time you'll need to upgrade Docks to Ultra Stations. If you don't or can't, expect heavy losses.
- Despite you get 50% discount on upgraded (identical) items when changing the type of an orbital (and 50% discount on items on orbitals overall), is upgrading a fully equipped Dock to identically equipped Ultra Station quite an expensive task, in minerals and in resources. Make sure you have minerals there or en-route before you start an upgrade.
BR, Iztok
[Updated on: Sat, 21 August 2010 14:11] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: Some (hard-learned) tips on playing AR |
Sun, 22 August 2010 17:34 |
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I am itching to reply to some of your tips and about my own experience playing AR the first time... but since we are still right in the middle of our AR-only/no communication game, I fear I can't do so without breaking our rules.
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| Re: Some (hard-learned) tips on playing AR |
Wed, 01 September 2010 17:35 |
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Hi ,
I am not an Expert in Ar but maybe I could help you out.
1. Depend if you still can us diplomaty maybe in a Medium univers
in small I dont think so. Ant if it an all enemy Player with no diplomaty and komunication even Medium will be hard. Noone will a Mineral fountain he could not us and with the Kill Starbase order you have big problems.
2. I would say you should go for a more groth(16%+) AR 1 immune. You must be fast in resourses tech and at least in mineraloutput special in a small. But best you play some other race special in a small univers.
3. dual immune AR are real stong because they get at least there resourses by the planet value. But for the small univers I would go for something faster. And when you start playing AR you should a game where you could ally with someone you can offer a lot so there will be someone joining you.
Hope this helps a little.
ccmaster
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| Re: Some (hard-learned) tips on playing AR |
Fri, 03 September 2010 17:55 |
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| Marduk |
 | Ensign |
Messages: 345
Registered: January 2003
Location: Dayton, OH | |
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I mostly agree with ccmaster here, though I believe AR is a little stronger than he seems to think. Small you could do with diplomacy and a lucky start, or if all your opponents were HP races. Medium you could do without the diplomacy if you had the lucky start, or without the lucky start if you found a good ally.
Higher growth, 1-immune is definately the fastest as he says, and is going to be your best bet in a small (or medium with enough other players).
I find dual-immune far too slow for my tastes. You are giving up either too much growth rate or too much efficiency. I have begun to wonder if balancing medium growth and medium efficiency might work for a dual-immune AR even though it doesn't for any other kind of race. I expect not but I will try if I ever get time.
The other thing I wonder about for a dual-immune is whether or not UR would be worth taking. In a much older topic in the academy, it was proposed that UR was worth more to an AR since they get an immediate and direct economic boost from terraforming. Building ships at established worlds and scrapping them at colonies that need to be terraformed can have a fairly big impact. What gets me thinking is that scrapping the starting ships would boost energy tech faster, generating possibly significant extra resources in the first several years. You don't lose much in the way of minerals, and even rebuilding the ships later won't cost that much extra in the way of resources. In effect, you would be borrowing against future production to invest in your starting economy, and you would definately come out ahead. Combine the colony terraforming boost with the faster startup and UR starts to look worthwhile - maybe - and might be enough to get a dual-immune AR up to a speed I could accept.
I am still playing around in the all-AR game I am in, but there are a few things I am willing to say at this point. First, colonize reds like mad. Use 1000 pop, for the maximum gain from tech artifacts (1000 and 2500 produce the highest gains, and you can't colonize with 2500 using a single ship thanks to travel deaths), and reclaim the minerals deposited on the surface. Continuing to scoop up minerals over time adds up to a lot more than were spent on the colonizer and it doesn't take very long to get to the break-even point. All those small colonies produce a *lot* of resources when you add them up over enough years. And those reds are producing more and more resources and minerals as I pile on more and more population.
Second, don't concentrate all your mining ships on the world with the highest concentrations. Yes, you produce more minerals that way. But it becomes much harder to use them when you have to distribute them all over your empire. I figure it is best to have about half of your miners concentrated at one or two mineral-rich worlds, and the rest distributed throughout. That gives you some minerals everywhere and means that distribution of minerals becomes much simpler.
Third, don't bother with mass drivers except as weapons. I have had the ability to build MD10s for a while now, and I haven't bothered getting warp 10 engines; but I still think the ships are better. The ships can gate, can change destinations mid-way, and cannot be intercepted as completely (100% of the minerals pulled from a packet rather than one-third of the minerals as salvage, assuming no SS theft). A group of ships can be split up to deliver to several destinations where a mass driver can only deliver to one system per year, and costs as much as several ships. And, of course, you need another mass driver to receive the entire packet.
Fourth, having your enemy go with Kill Starbase orders can be a good thing. I won a battle without losses because the enemy didn't have enough to take out the base in a single shot, and I was able to butcher his invasion fleet in part because my un-grouped ships weren't attacked. I would have still won anyway if he had gone with the usual armed ships first, but my losses would have been high.
Fifth, it is amazing how much population an AR can produce on ultrastations and especially on deathstars. Losing a colony orbital with, say, 500k population isn't at all costly. So go ahead and load up colonies with a lot of population for faster terraforming even if they are in danger. Not in the first, say, 30 years or so of the game, but once you have several ultrastations up and plenty of shipping for moving pop around.
Sixth, remember that deaths on reds come from hab values and ignore overpop, and the resource formula remains the same regardless of overpop. For some reason I got it stuck in my head that I might as well upgrade my reds to ultrastations and deathstars. On the border that might be true simply to make it cost more to take the colony out, but not deeper in where you don't expect attack. I've wasted thousands of resources and thousands of kT of minerals. Still worthwhile putting gates in the bases in many cases, but not to upgrade. Save the upgrades for green systems that can use the extra safe capacity and are worth defending.
One out of five dentists recommends occasional random executions to keep the peasants cowed and servile.Report message to a moderator
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| Re: Some (hard-learned) tips on playing AR |
Tue, 14 September 2010 06:05 |
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| iztok |
| Commander |
Messages: 1202
Registered: April 2003
Location: Slovenia, Europe | |
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Hi!
| mlaub wrote on Wed, 01 September 2010 21:32 |
1. Is a Small or Medium universe with all enemy status possible to survive? Assuming you will be attacked from a good race/player.
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IMO it all depends on minerals you'll be able to "collect" before the attack happens. But vs. a determined non-AR race I'd say there's no real chance, because an AR needs lots of tech and quite some minerals to become competitive, while others need just weap-5/6 and DDs to severely cripple it, or weap-8/9 and CCs to remove it from the game. 
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3. Thoughts on a dual immune ~12% low eff race?
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IMO 12% is rather low. In this all-AR game I fielded a dual-immune 13% PGR, 25-divisor, 1-in-3 hab AR, but I had to lower the PGR to get the RW points to meet the leftower RW points "requirement". Started as the last, but at some point in the game even climbed to the third place, probably because I settled quite a lot of red planets in "my" uncontested corner. However I never really recovered from a terrible hab draw I got (only 3 green planets in 2 W-9 jumps, instead expected 8-9), and got gradualy "removed" from the game by a player, who made less mistakes than I did, and who had better luck with planets, what with an AR always turns out as better tech and more minerals. I simply couldn't beat that combo. 
BR, Iztok
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| Re: Some (hard-learned) tips on playing AR |
Thu, 16 September 2010 15:24 |
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| mlaub |
 | Lieutenant |
Messages: 744
Registered: November 2003
Location: MN, USA | |
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Cool. Thanks for the replies!
-Matt
Global Warming - A climatic change eagerly awaited by most Minnesotans.
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