by daggaz
So I've been playing this game off and on the last year, and have read through these forums to beef up my strategy, and one of the rules-of-thumb I came away with was this:"Don't populate systems with only one planet."
Another adage you often hear is
"The action track outpaces the economy track."
Ok fine, but I still found that I struggled to manage my turns and often found myself coming up short (beer doesn't help in this game, I should add). In order to find out why, I finally took some time to analyze the action economy and what that adage means, and I realized the system is quite simple yet key to everything, and you can understand it fully from the economy track alone, which looks like this:
28 24 | 21 18 15 12 | 10 8 6 4 | 3 (2)
Now you can see I have added vertical lines dividing the track up. These indicate "total-action-zones", corresponding to these values in the same order:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4
28 24 | 21 18 15 12 | 10 8 6 4 | 3 (2)
What these mean is that at the start of your turn, look at your income and find the corresponding total-action-value. Assuming you do not have racial action handicaps (orion, eridani, etc), and assuming that all of your systems contain ONE population cube generating money, this is the number of actions you have before taking another action costs you money and potentially bankrupts you, assuming you do not change your economy.
So most races start the game with 4 actions. If you populate a single system with a standard orange planet and pass, the next round you will have 3 actions, etc..
Here is the trick. If you influence a system which does not generate money, subtract 1 from the total-action values (this is where Orion gets owned, that's their homeworld). For every extra action disc you get thru tech (adv robotics, quantum grid), add 1 to the these values, for every missing disc, subtract 1 (Eridani). And for every system that uses more than one cube from your economy track, add 1 for every cube over the first cube.
There you have it. You start your first turn of the round and look at your track. Your income for the start of the round tells you what total-action-zone you are in, and your balance of systems/discs tells you how large that total actually is. Where you end up on the income track this round then tells you how many actions you will have the next round.
One last trick: If you influence systems, then the influence action pays for itself AS LONG as you remain within a given total-action-zone and AS LONG as you drop 1 cube on an economy planet per system. If you land on the last value, the bonus is exactly negated meaning you will have a net income of 0.
Now we see how the action track outpaces the income track and have a system for quickly determining how many actions we can take, and how many bonus actions we can afford when influencing economy systems. We also now understand, that the rule-of-thumb about two planet systems is incomplete. If you populate a two-world system that doesn't generate income, you will lose a lot of potential actions. You need a very good reason to take this system, or you need to have a large bonus in your action economy.
Advanced economy, adv. robotics, and quantum grid are critical technologies if you want the ability to grow the rest of your economy and respond to threats.
Orbitals are also undervalued, as they can transform a brown/pink system from a ball-and-chain into an economic powerhouse, provided you use them to generate income and don't waste it on science. Note that you do not have to put the orbital in that system to gain the effect; you can put it anywhere. Drop an economic orbital on your most well guarded system and it affords you one economically disadvantaged system anywhere in your empire.