«

[Wicky]

Found a tactic which is quite cool. Limit the droid production to the mothership only!!

Because the only resource which needs a single, one-time investment to found a new colony are droids, but every other resource is gained as side-product when you produce something.
Think about it: Droids are not a "raw material", they are re-usable and won't be wasted. So the spendable resources like ore, power and life support shall have to be produced on the planets, while the unique resources droids/population stays on the goddamn mothership.

I have just restarted Alien Legacy for the 4th time, and having each colony produce a little bit of everthing turned out to be a macro-managing nightmare. If pipelined ships send too much of something to the mothership then factories can lack maintenance causing them to shut down. And then all hell breaks loose, factory temporarily shut down releases its droids, which are then sent to the mothership automatically, all you can do is laugh when the automated system fucks up and keeps following orders, ROFL

TL;DR It's not a good idea to produce droids on colonies and auto-transfer them to the mothership. Your factories might stall, causing the entire production line to shut down.

[Eagle of Fire]

I went with a completely different approach: have every colony produce only robots (mainly for their own use) while the flagship produce almost exclusively ships.

My logic behind this was that the only resource you cannot afford to lose is your ships. You can rebuild colonies, search for resources, etc with a ship... But if you have no ships and no ship production capacity, you're done for.

So my colonies were pretty much self sufficient, and if the shit had to hit the fan I simply evacuated everything to the main ship. Starting with robots. I know this might sound weird to say, but the colons reproduce free and faster than what you can build robots. xD

[Wicky]

So the colonies are basically like an exponential growing biological organism? (the more you have, the more colonies can be newly founded)

Hm, that looks like a better tactic than mine, thanks. At the moment I'm about to restart again from scratch, because everytime I have 5 colonies all chaos breaks loose. I just discovered that the exploring ships can be given some electricity to found a space-station and distant colonies, unload it to convert to energy/fuel and fly back

[Eagle of Fire]

I did that too at the start but forget about that: build SS (Space Stations) in orbit of the world/moon/rock you wish to explore. Same as having a colony on the surface except that you can land wherever you want free of charge instead of always starting at a fixed point on the world/moon/rock...

[Wicky]

Bit ranting, the micromanaging is crazy
The colony list should be sorted alphabetically.
The transportation of huge amounts should automatically assign more ships when cargo of the first ship is full.
The ship mission assignment values should not reset to 0 after each launch, so you can send 8 ships to 8 asteroids with the same parameters (just have to change destination)

And last but not least important, the basic maintenance of each building should be kept when pipelining stuff in automatic mode. Once I pipelines all ore away, and the ore mine (who needs a little bit of ore to function too) stalled production. Then it's robot workers got released, of course these were freely pipelined away too ! LOL, before I noticed the crazy pipeline, an entire colony had shut down, and everything was transported to the Calypso again.


I restartet again and went with huge relief from Micromanaging. I use mass drivers in EVERY colony. It slows down the ore piling up. Then, have 1 factory on each colony slowly produce ships, when everytime one is finished, have it bring the rest surplus (like robots and humans) to the Calypso.

[Eagle of Fire]

It is exactly to prevent such a thing that I specialized all my colonies. Some colonies were built with the sole intention to mine it so it would produce so many ore my ships could not lift them all at once. After a while I just sent more ships to compensate, on a single trip, to grab the extra ore.

When you have several colonies sending ore to the Calypso like that you don't really need to bother with ore management anymore. Mass drivers are in theory very interesting but their output is very low and it take a slot both on the Calypso and on every colony afterward. I ended up not building any, in the end.

[Wicky]

Well, trust me if one factory has output 25 ore per 15 days and it raises total colony net surplus by 25...
and a mass driver has 25 "send away ore" per 5 days and it lowers total colony net by 25..
then don't trust your eyes. The ore net worth display is buggy!

Please consider that Mass drivers are not as weak as their description reads! From my experience, a colony with +110 ore can barely keep it's ore level with one of those. And they're quite easy to redirect towards space stations who mine energy or research, without ore income. Plus, they can transport ore to the Calypso while she's en route on long distance flights, and she (the Calypso) can redirect all incoming ore to another station itself as well.

[Eagle of Fire]

Maybe, but just reading your description make me thing it is way too much work. You already have to micro manage your ships so it is not like I would not have done it in the first place.

Plus... Moving Calypso? What for?

[Wicky]

So far my network constists of ~20 colonies and 3 space stations, who are doing research. Never mind that you can upgrade your buildings to level 5 and they produce so much, that you have more resources needed to beat the game 3 times. Not! I play with self-imposed rule that everything must keep growing when I'm away. That means, every colony produces robot+ships and sends surplus to space stations who must be supplied with mass-drivers so they don't run out of ore.
Crazy, but it's cool when you can be absolutely sure that every colony always has extra material, robots, humans and produces their own ships to carry this surplus to the Calypso within the blink of an eye. That's relaxing!

Here is a trick I found out by accident - the biota will not get aggressive unless you build more than a certain number of buildings on Gaea or Rhea. I built 8 colonies on Gaea, totalling nearly 50 buildings, and the biota did not activate until 1500 turns had passed. You can upgrade existing buildings on the planet as much as you want, and build space stations, and fill them with buildings, including Calypso, and you won't have to worry about the biota or anything else except overcrowding on the Calypso, until turn 1500. I have yet to build colonies on other planets - I will see if that triggers the biota.

Captain Picard