FreeOrion

OK first off - hello there! i'm a previous lurker who has decided to offer whatever observations/efforts i can. i'm a mac user, noob to FO and MOO in general, but a low level moderate at the civ series and SMAC. musician, sound designer, computer savvy but not a programmer.

after getting the updated zip files from a poster here (the sourceforge DL is corrupt, or was 2 weeks ago), i finally installed the mac version successfully and everything is basically OK as far as gameplay technically goes. - no crashes - occasional stutters from high CPU revving but it hasn't totally hung or crashed once. good looking game - kudo's to the programming/design team!

i did get the production queue bug where i couldn't build colony ships and eventually resorted to saving/restarting FO, and that seemed to work.

now my problem is more gameplay and basic strategy oriented. in order to expand the empire i need to build colony ships. so i research the medium hull design, fine and finally get it in the queue, and let a few turns go by, and i see my minerals going down quite a lot per turn. eventually i run out and the queue grinds to a halt by around turn 25.

since things are pretty primitive as to buildings at this point (palace, shipyard, orbital shipyard) and i can only build a few ships, what can i do to get more minerals without actually building anything? is it a matter of establishing supply lines? since expansion is the name of the game, building colony ships would be very very important it would seem (although i suppose you could attack the enemy and take their production centers).

anyway, any help or tips appreciated,

scott

Minerals are a consumable resource. They are eaten up when you put your Production Points to use. For every PP you need one Mineral. For example, if you want to build something that needs 10PPs every turn and it will take 5 turns in total you'll spend 50 Minerals on it. You don't need to to have 50 Minerals when you start to build this, but you would need to gain 10 every turn(the green number) for it to complete in 5 turns. I hope this made sense. You can check out the quick play guide, which should cover this.

Btw, why don't you play 0.3.13?

I just recently started freeorion too, and yeah it seems a quick re-load fixes the ability of not being able to start ship production. Also, to help you with your colony ships early on, I have noticed that you dont actually need to unlock medium ship hulls. On all the games ive done I can make colony ships from turn 1 if wanted. *shrug*

Anyway, to boost your production, keep in mind that you gotta give your resources time to grow. I always start off with about 10 or 12 turns of primary mixed resources on both my starting worlds, that gives a noticable bump to a few resources. By turn 15 or so, I can see which planets will give decent minerals or construction, and so then i turn the secondaries to those and i can have a thrid colony ship by turn 38 to 45, sometimes a little longer. It also seems random what worlds will be 'mineral dead'. Seems like about 1 out of 4 games my starting systems have almost no minerals of anykind. I just call mulligan and start over on those attempts. Hope this helped =)

I believe that for v0.3.13 I modifed the relevant techs and parts and buildings so that your home system starts with an orbital drydock, which is required to build medium hulls, which a colony ship is. Building another drydock, perhaps at another planet, should require the medium hulls tech.

Ah yes, I tested that and that's correct.