Disclaimer: The thoughts and strategies used in this build might be well-known for a lot of people, however this has worked extremely well for me and I thought I'd share it. If this is old news to you (yes, you there!) I'd like to hear some ideas on how to optimise this build. Also this needs an administrator hero in your first 3, some people might object to restarting in order to have one.



That said, let's get the build itself out of the way first.



Affinity: Horatio.



Appearence: Whatever floats your boat, however if you pick UE you get bonus FIDS for coolness.



Positive traits:
  • Cloning 3/3 (25)
  • Crowded Planets 2/2 (20)
  • Dust Archeology 1/2 (2)
  • Growth Plan 3/3 (40)
  • Mineral Rich (5)
  • N-way Fusion Plants (4)
  • Xenobotany (4)





Negative Traits:
  • Anarchists 2/2 (-15)
  • Dust Impaired 2/2 (-4)
  • Feeble Warriors 2/2 (-5)
  • Fragile Hulls 1/2 (-3)
  • Offense First 2/3 (-4)
  • Sloppy Sawbones 2/2 (-4)





As you may have figured out by now, this is fairly focused on food and quick population boost, a few things to note however. Using the Horatio affinity gives you an arid planet as your home. This has some disadvantages, mainly the lack of industry, hence the mineral rich anomaly. It does have advantages though, since with mineral rich you can set it to produce dust after the first 2 improvements which can be quite important in the early stages. It starts as a colony (obviously) so it doesn't have the penalties associated with producing dust on an outpost.



Now, after you've fired up the game and listened to the music for a few moments you're ready to go. First tech should be Soil Xenology (the one with the freaky cow icon that has no eyes). This should be researched exactly the moment you've built your Heavy Isotope Refineries, enabling you to follow up without any delay.



Get yourself a nice administrator hero (the second class doesn't matter really. Corporate is nice, not required though, you can get one later) and park him in your system, then send your fleets out to look for T1 (Terran, Jungle, Ocean) or Tundra (or, if you really have to, desert) planets to settle.



The hero won't have much impact on your first colony, but once you've found a nice place for your second one he should be level 3 with the nice +15 Production Bonus, and this is where the avalanche starts to roll. After a few turns and levels (always give him the food improvements) you'll be able to park him in a newly colonized system, massively improve production and get the population to 5 or 6 within 2 or 3 turns... so far nothing original though. This is where the Dust I mentioned earlier comes into the picture.



The Horatio affinity gives your hero and his clones insane "mobility". You want to move him but he still is on downtime? Clone him. No room anymore? Fire one on a system that is established well enough and THEN clone him, effectively removing the downtime of the hero for a dust fee.



A friend compared this to the same strategy using the cravers, I'll want to do some testing in order to compare them. +25% could be better than infinite hero boost, then again horatio's planets don't get exhausted.. no idea which is better.





That's it really. Keep going until everyone starts to eye you warily then suggest cosmetic surgery to them so they can be as pretty as you are. Usually I end up with around 10-15 systems on turn 50 with all of them at or near capacity regarding their population. Have FIDS, have fun. I'll record a video of this tomorrow propably for those who'd rather watch than read.



Please don't hit me if this is too basic and everyone already does it smiley: smile



gabs



Edit:



tl;dr version - don't just use the affinity to slowly build up lvl 20 heroes, use it frequently to hire&fire as much as you can afford for maximum flexibility