Hello everybody



I've been playing some games lately and I noticed I had a very poor early mid game developement compared to hard / serious AI. Even if I catch up if I'm not dead before, during a huge part of a game I'm very late considering score, population, FIDS, science and military power. I don't have any idea on how to fix that. I usually roughly got the same number of solar systems than AI players but it seems that I can't manage them properly. I've been trying to build the most food, to conquer as much systems as I could without many concerns of approval, and also the opposite, I tried to max out a few systems before I build colony ships and expand. But nothing helped me to be competitive with the AI so I guess I'm missing something big.

Usually building colony ships and expanding is better than waiting for every system to be full(Which in fact can be fatal on bigger systems). And are you building all the good improvements ASAP? What technolgies are you researching? Do you use Heroes to boost your best and develop your worst systems?

I'm researching alien grafting then heavy isotope refineries. Then I'm getting tech for Tundra and Arid colonization, and mostly rush food and approval upgrades. I'm using a hero to boost my best world to pump out colony ship in order to enforce weak / newly colonized systems. I'm also building every relevant upgrade to the system.

applecat144 wrote:
I'm researching alien grafting then heavy isotope refineries. Then I'm getting tech for Tundra and Arid colonization, and mostly rush food and approval upgrades. I'm using a hero to boost my best world to pump out colony ship in order to enforce weak / newly colonized systems. I'm also building every relevant upgrade to the system.

That sounds pretty good though I think it's almost always more effective to get refineries first since you lack industry as much as food early on(Or even more even) and go for a refinery ASAP after having built the food exploitation and finished researching the tech.

Ok but I guess it's a minor tweak. Thing is that whatever I do, I'm very late to every AI player regarding population if I leave the game at turn 30, or 50. For instance if I take a look at the game I'm in, at turn 52 I got a population of 70 people when the last AI before me is already at 136. It's almost twice as much as me.

applecat144 wrote:
Ok but I guess it's a minor tweak. Thing is that whatever I do, I'm very late to every AI player regarding population if I leave the game at turn 30, or 50. For instance if I take a look at the game I'm in, at turn 52 I got a population of 70 people when the last AI before me is already at 136. It's almost twice as much as me.

You're probably not expanding fast enough then; food is one important part of getting more population but you can have all the food in the galaxy if your planets are full.

Ok, so thanks to your advices and some other on the steam forum I practiced a bit and managed to grow my population at a good rate. Thanks