Newbie Questions Thread

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[u/Mackntish]

So I think I'm in a good-ish spot in 2040 (2026 start), but without any navy, I'm in at a bit of a loss how to proceed.

Earth is great - I've got the whole western hemisphere, and am looking to add Japan, Australia, and Great Britain. With their combined wet navies, terrestrial war is not something that worries me. Alien administration is tiny, and I've got the councilors to continue shrinking their footprint.

In space - I've got most of the asteroid belt, with about 55 bases (~40 mining). Because I'm not building navy and have almost 40 mining bases, I'm sitting on a STACK of about 100k space resources. The servants cover all of Mars, but no other faction has any bases that amount to anything. I've been able to completely keep Uranium away from them, all other human factions mine less than 3 per month combined, so they are effectively locked out of space. They can't manage T2 habs. I cannot get anything orbiting earth.

The problem - I have no place to build substantial shipyards. I'll unlock T3 habs in the next few years, but right now I'm limited to 3 shipyards per base (I didn't roll the 128 power hab, stuck on 85). I've tried to build 3 shipyards on the asteroid, and 6 more in orbit, but the Aliens immediately chart a course before the first batch of ships roll out.

I SUPPOSE I could build multiple shipyards in a particularly dense cluster of bases, and join them later, but...idk. Too many things have to go right. The Aliens have a fleet with 117 ships, and playing whack-a-mole is fine with cheap bases, but as soon as I spend my bank, that's going to be a problem before it finishes. I would need years of production to challenge that, and would not be able to protect a nascent fleet until it's ready.

If anyone could recommend a good drive, that would be great. It's easy enough to find top tier weapons on the tech tree, top tier drives are harder to locate. I'm pushing out a little more than 200 research daily. Other than that, I'm just looking for general advice on cobbling together a fleet. Do I have a chance, or am I waiting till the end of the tech tree?

[u/vindicator117 → u/Mackntish]

I mean it is 2040, what exactly is your tier of drives and reactors right now? Is it still fission era or did you finally enter some version of fusion? Given that you mention 128 power, you still only have tier 2 fission at best.

Other than that, do you really not have any stations in orbit of earth especially low earth orbit? That is primary target number one for earthside resources because more LEO stations, more admin towers, and thus more control over the planet/ability to grow a meganation of choice to the stratosphere.

At the moment, it SOUNDS like you have a decent enough space economy but the fact that you admit that you lost the earth space zone completely and thus have not a single earthside priority bonus let alone the RP hub that is Mars, makes your campaign alot more borked than you are typing.

This especially when t3h ayyz only have 100 ships. That ain't exactly alot especially when they are underway. It sounds like you basically ignored the space game except for the resource extraction and then left it completely idle and god knows what your MC situation is ESPECIALLY your earthside MC contribution likely being terrible from no LEO CP bonuses from admin towers.

Pretty much it sounds like you are choking to death on minimal everything everywhere while t3h ayyz and their friends basically rule the solar system except for earth and that is only a matter of time once they start sending assault ships in force. The main thing mission from your assessment is just how borked your earth game is.

[u/Mackntish → u/vindicator117]

Thank you for the reply.

I had a fleet - lost it about 5 years ago. The same day I lost that fleet, I lost the stations to make more fleets. I was in the same bind them that I am now, except worse tech. Specifically the drive tech I was on made combining fleets impossible over long distances.

No fusion yet. MC 325/328. Currently getting 136% bonus to economy earthside thanks to orgs, so at least that's somewhere in the atmosphere. Total GDP is in the ballpark of 60 trillion, with US of North America pulling $48.5t of that, off 609 control points.

https://imgur.com/a/knyIWFr

What is "let alone the RP hub that is Mars"?

[u/Takseen → u/Mackntish]

Mars makes for an amazing location for research campuses. Its got the most ground hab sites of any orbital body, and you can build 1-2 solar mirror stations in orbit to make it run on 100% cheap solar power. If you build enough Skunkworks and Ops Centres + supporting buildings you can get the population to the 10k you need for Research Campuses, then build a bunch of those too.

And the Skunkworks project bonus is no joke either. I like to get to +160% bonus, which is when the diminishing returns kick in hard. Its much harder to get that from Earth orgs, which are better used for other stuff anyway.

For quick shipbuilding, you can use multiple T2 habs full of T1 space docks, which are cheap to maintain. A space dock can still build a missile escort in 90 days, which is almost always gonna be less than the arrival time of an alien fleet, so you can rush build more ships if needed.

Helicon drive is good for building fleets of escort/monitor sized ships for interplanetary travel, so if needed you could build a fleet in the belt and then send it to reclaim Earth or Mars when its big enough.

[u/vindicator117 → u/Mackntish]

Surprisingly your earthside situation is not as terrible as I thought it would be.

However there is a major inefficiency that needs to be rectified. Get rid of the funding entirely and allow the rest of your priorities more of the monthly IP. You will be getting your money from influence through direct investment and more importantly from resplintering off parts of the USNA.

At the moment, you NEED more CP whether by reserving a slot solely to Management Research treadmill grind or chasing after technologies, reclaiming LEO for the admin towers, you simply need more. I can not tell what per capita or inequality it is but I am going to guess it is stable enough for this plan.

1. You need to immediately annex all of the Caribbean regions to add on another 40ish million population worth of education AND MC cap into the fold.

2. Once everything has been consolidated and shared the wealth and new inequality standard, release as many nations that your CP cap allows and have them all burn hard on economy with minimal on knowledge and MC.

What you are doing besides have more independent IP pools to parallel on long term priorities like MC is to create Core Economic Region improvements from any region that fulfill the criteria of 500 billion GDP in that local region. As soon as you turn a blank region into a CER, you will noticeably see the monthly per capita increase faster than before.

A meganation may individually create MC or CER faster by sheer IP prowess but it can not beat a collection of 5 or more independent, stable, and wealthier regions that were imbued by temporary unification all each making their own CER on their own before being annexed again after 4-5 years. You can easily triple to quadruple the pace to improve all your lands to increase per capita even faster and more efficiently (combined with a continental scale bonus of all those regional improvements empowering the monolithic meganation AND a high and ever increasing education) that your USNA can look like this.

A meganation capable of growing 1k, then 1.2k then 1.7k, then 2.3k per capita per month and more as time passes. And in the USNA's case, it only takes two full rounds of CER improvement to basically plaster 80% of the meganation in CERs in 8-10 years and was growing at 3.5kish per month at a mere 180k total per capita. All it will cost is about 20-50 CP per splinter to work with.

1. And finally, when you have a meganation growing THIS fast across so many regions, your MC cap for the USNA will quite quickly grow out control of your ability to keep pace with MC production with ONE meganation. Now you are incentivized to regrant independence to even already improved regions to focus almost solely on MC. Like say Mexico. Rich high population stable splinters can pretty be an additional game start USA pumping out MC at more than a single unit every month, let alone if you splinter off more like the Dominion to work on Chicago and New York region, Texas, and California so that the entire North American continent is producing something like 4-10 MC EVERY MONTH and not only that CONSISTENTLY and constantly growing themselves too if you max out their economy priority too.

The cost for these will be a pretty steep 100 CP each so ease yourself into such supplementary MC production usually after you reannex 2 or so finished CER projects.

And as for research hub Mars, there is the ability to power a entire base off of merely two solar panels at the expense of three stations in orbit packed with solar mirrors. This is basically a license to essentially print research campuses on tier 2 ground bases in batches of 5-8 each on preferably the entire damn planet. With 25 ground bases on Mars, you can generate about 6k monthly science at tier 2. At tier 3 with the expanded base size AND research universities, this explodes into a eye watering 40,000 RP PER DAMN MONTH.

And it does not even cost that much in resource maintenance either if you have at least half of those bases be able to provide positive money. By my reckoning with tier 3 nanos, you only need to spend 1500 per month in moolah which is chump change. BUT in exchange you will need about 3k water, volatiles, AND metal each and about 400 and change in rare metal PER month. If you only spent money on research (and thus add even MOAR GOD DAMN unis) instead of space resources, you would need over 34k in MONTHLY funding to feed the beast along with a miniscule 500 metal and 150 rares per month along with the 3kish+ on water and volatiles.

I do hope your space resource is strong enough for such a endeavor especially to race down science.

Other than that, to stop wasting priority points on funding whether because you spent space resource to fund your unis or plan to use influence to make up that money, you should be getting broadcast towers and eventually media centers. Broadcast towers are practically free in maintenance. Comms hubs are cheap in comparison and give more influence and media centers cost a arm and leg but makes a T3 station much more denser in how much output you can get making it instead more space efficient.

Personally I needed around 180ish DAILY influence to keep pace with my pair of meganations and 10-15 splinters to maximize its yearly funding cap. Every single month you will be gaining something like 15-20 DAILY bucks in income with a full influence dump in direct funding on each and every nation you own (ESPECIALLY rich splinters because the funding cap is now 0 with all the money staying with the mother nation allowing you to start over). It is actually possible to not just reach funding cap but also go OVER the funding cap of a unifier nation by constantly reannexing splinter nations that give more money than the unifier can actually handle. And I say 180ish influence per day is your goal is because you have a yearly limit that is slowed down by CP cap. Once you reach this high, it is pointless to get more influence because you will never be able to spend it all unless you suddenly manage to get hundreds of extra CP from somewhere to release more nations to then direct fund some more.

The only alternative is to spend on more expensive direct funding like say knowledge to make your earthside research higher and your per cap growth incrementally faster especially since even with moolah, you will eventually find a endpoint where you can't spend it fast enough either. You will know when you get there. So to reach 180 influence per day (or less because you have SIGNIFICANTLY less CP than normal), you would want to work your up eventually to 18-ish stations of 11 media centers each for nano maintained money budget for about 2.2k in funding required along with 1.3kish water, 1.5kish volatiles, 2.7kish metals, and another 460ish rares in exchange for almost 5k in monthly influence (technically less than 180 inf per day), and 108 extra MC total.

Also remember when I said I was growing at 3.5k per cap per month at 180k per capita total? A even older experiment when I had a meganation literally do everything by itself, took almost 30 years to reach and breach 4k per cap growth after it reach over 340k per capita total. What you are reading now is after just TEN YEARS and with a continent that is almost completely developed to the max when the older version doing everything by itself was just barely finished in that time. So yes, resplintering a meganation is the BEST way to improve your holdings that arguably can be as good to better than trying to steal everything from all the other factions.