Is Emergency Build useless?

LGM · #1 October 7th, 2002, 05:30 AM

I have several friend that I play SEIV with and the standard opening is Emergeny build 10 turns with the home world. Variation: If you have a high shipyard reate, you might buil a few escort ships at normal build for a turn or two and then go crazy building colonizers. You can use the Last couple of turns to build orbital shipyards, however, I only recommend doing that if you have no good places to send a colonizer or if you start next to a possible rival. Generally, you want your construction capability on your frontiers, not in the middle of your empire. You want to stake your claim early on, so you should not even send your first couple of colonizers to colonize in your home system, if you can help it. If you send ships immediately to all your adjacent systems, you will see if there is a danger and you can adjust your building to reflect that (switch to orbital bases, if necessary).

Exception: Only use this if colonization is wide open. If you are only allowing breathable atmostpheres, then you do not need all the colonizers as colonizable world will be relatively rare. You might build a few colonizers initially and switch over to bases in this sort of game.

Taera · #2 October 7th, 2002, 06:09 AM

As i play more and more i use EB less and less. I used to use the kickstart techinque but i found out that the 10 years slow just does not worth the initial quick start. I jsut build 2-3 orbital shipyards that build [all the rest] and use my homeworld for about first ~20 turns to pump out as much colony ships as possible.

Fyron · #3 October 7th, 2002, 06:21 AM

Actually... it is quite easy to run out of resources with whcih to fund the HW and all of those BSYs by turn 11 or later. So... wiht the EB, you don't pay much for the queue of the HW during that slow build period when the resource shortages come up, and you can delay or prevent the shortage.

Taera · #4 October 7th, 2002, 06:28 AM

Is that to me? I dont use EB as much now, only when i need something NOW. Like in emergency war situation.

Captain Kwok · #5 October 7th, 2002, 07:33 AM

Fyron - did you not notice that I posted my stolen tactic of building 5 spaceyards using EB? I believe that is one of your secrets to success...that...and hacking the game files.

geoschmo · #6 October 7th, 2002, 03:27 PM

Basically though to take advantage of this fast early expansion you have to do some things before the game. For one thing you have to spend some racial points raising your construction rate. I figured it out and it requires something like 32%. You can get 5 from picking the engineer culture, but you will need to get the other 28 from either the hardy industrialists and a little added to your construction characteristic, or adding a lot to your construction characteristic only.

Without doing this you cannnot get colony ships on one turn, even on emergency. IIRC the emergency used to be 175% or maybe even 200, and you could get a colony ship in one turn without going so heavy into construction on your racial setup.

Without this you only get your colony ships in two turns, and that means you are only getting 5 colony ships the first year, instead of ten. Does this change the equation do you think?

Geoschmo

Stone Mill · #7 October 7th, 2002, 04:44 PM

I using EB sparingly; but PvK gave good examples:

Quote:

* When there is an emergency in one area of the map (i.e., enemy invasion) and you want as much built as fast as possible, to maximize the response. (Gee, am I the first one to mention using emergency build for emergencies?)

* When something is down to 0.2 years to complete, and emergency mode will reduce it to 0.1. By cancelling emergency mode the next turn, you get 25% more production than you would have otherwise, which is also a good time to buy something cheap that you wouldn't have wanted to spend a whole turn on.

I don't want to give away any BIG secrets of my strat

but it has very much to do with maximizing construction rates by building designs to meet current production output. The colony ship example:
If a colony ship costs 4500 to produce and your standard production rate is 3000, it is quite efficient to use EB... (I believe Pax touched on this as well. But care is to be used and only a small percentage of your worlds should use it at any given time.

For the emergency scenario, if you are in a pretty large galaxy and have control of many systems, you can't defend them all, so you would use EB on frontier systems to produce reinforcements a bit quicker ( and pray the threat is squashed within 10 turns!)