UltraCorps

[fnord_too]

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I'd like to play, although my sleeping schedule is erratic and my availability in a couple weeks might be pretty poor.

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The game we have now has 2 day turns. If everyone commits before then it ticks right after the last person commits, so you can have several turns a day, or not if you are unavailable or need the time to negotiate and scheme. I spend about 10 minutes a turn.

[soah]

my sleeping schedule can often end up being like 6 AM to 4 PM which would be pretty inconvenient for the other players, and in a couple weeks I'm moving and I have no idea what sort of internet access I'll have for a while. I don't want to play if it's going to slow things down for everyone else.

[fnord_too]

I will start the next game with the name POG2 and the password pogpog

Just jump in.

[traz]

I'll sign up as soon as I get home.

Anyone who's playing in the first game...wanna give me a private tutorial on aim later? ;o

[fnord_too]

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I'll sign up as soon as I get home.

Anyone who's playing in the first game...wanna give me a private tutorial on aim later? ;o

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Here is my biggest lesson learned: Understand how your resources refresh and grow, and how purchasing works. There are 2 resorces: population and ultranium (money). Each item you can buy has costs in both these components, and these are the components are planet locked (though you can move them around). Also, you need a license to make something (licenses are planet locked). Every planet starts out with one or more license and you can buy new ones.

[Zurvan]

A few keys:

1. Buy things when they're cheap, leave them alone when they get expensive. Don't fall in love with one or 2 units.
2. Early in the game, you never have enough ULT to buy what you want. Mid-late game, you don't have enough Pop. Late game, it depends what you're building where the bottleneck is
3. Make a few production centres. Your homeworld is obvious, and then have one on key fronts. All your other worlds should be shipping resources to your production centres using autofleets. Your autofleet should be big enough to strip all resources that planet will produce during 1 round trip. Send additional transport to get whatever happens to be there when you take it over.
4. Read the help file on how FP is calculated.
5. Fodder (cheap units) are far more valuable than their FP totals indicate.

[Stephen H]

My comments on this

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A few keys:

1. Buy things when they're cheap, leave them alone when they get expensive. Don't fall in love with one or 2 units.

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Also, learn about the concept of locking in a cost. When a production order starts being worked on, the Ult cost is then locked until the order is finished, even if the economy changes the price later. For this reason, it's very valuable to "Buy Max" when you buy items - especially in a small game, your production impacts the economy pretty heavily.

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2. Early in the game, you never have enough ULT to buy what you want. Mid-late game, you don't have enough Pop. Late game, it depends what you're building where the bottleneck is

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Ult is ALWAYS the bottleneck. Early in the game Pop is a problem too. But notice that Ult is consumed while Pop is renewable. This means that as the game goes later and you have a higher Pop/Ult ratio, you need to be building items that have a high complexity/cost ratio. This is what pushes the drive into the building the high complexity capital ships and their upgrades (I'm building the Megabot v4 upgrades in the current game because 4000 complexity for only 100 or so ult is a great ratio - I can keep my pop all working)
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3. Make a few production centres. Your homeworld is obvious, and then have one on key fronts. All your other worlds should be shipping resources to your production centres using autofleets. Your autofleet should be big enough to strip all resources that planet will produce during 1 round trip. Send additional transport to get whatever happens to be there when you take it over.

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The number of production centers you feel like building is personal playstyle and to some degree race dependant. There's value in both building a few huge centers and several smaller centers. But in general I think this is a good idea.

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4. Read the help file on how FP is calculated.
5. Fodder (cheap units) are far more valuable than their FP totals indicate.

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Learn about the combat system in general. FP is only loosely related to combat; it's a first-order attempt to gauge a fleet's strength but it's not used in the combat system, and doesn't take into account certain factors. Realize that simply having huge numbers of ships in a fight makes it harder to hit your more valuable ships enough times to kill them.
This means it is worthwhile to co-ordinate your fleets to arrive at an attack site on the same tick for maximum effectiveness (and minimal losses)

I haven't done as much investigation into the combat system as I would like. I'd love to know, for example, how much "fodder" makes a fleet with 1 V3 'Bot a favorite over a fleet of just 2 V3 'Bots with no fodder. These things are probably worth at least thinking about.

[Zurvan]

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Ult is ALWAYS the bottleneck. Early in the game Pop is a problem too. But notice that Ult is consumed while Pop is renewable. This means that as the game goes later and you have a higher Pop/Ult ratio, you need to be building items that have a high complexity/cost ratio. This is what pushes the drive into the building the high complexity capital ships and their upgrades (I'm building the Megabot v4 upgrades in the current game because 4000 complexity for only 100 or so ult is a great ratio - I can keep my pop all working)

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This depends what kinds of units you like to build. I build a lot of cap ships and a lot of unit upgrades, which are high cpx, low cost. I had tons of ult laying around until just recently.

[flsc]

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I will start the next game with the name POG2 and the password pogpog

Just jump in.

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I just tried to join, but it doesn't show up in the lobby. If I click on your profile I can see it but I get an error message "You aren't in this game, and it isn't viewable by spectators."

[Zurvan]

fnord - on the game admin page, there's an option for whether the game is hidden or not.

You may need to invite people, as well (not certain of this)