Once again this is going to be a rarely used technique. If used in the proper way it will allow you to set up some nice traps for your enemies fleet or at least pull them out of position. The key is to get your enemy to pursue you with the mistaken impression that they can catch you and then at the critical moment allow your ships to reach their full speed potential and leave the enemy behind. An enemy will allow themselves to be pulled out of position if they feel there will be an adequate payoff. There are two basic ways to falsify your speed, the first method uses an admiral while the second is a variation of fleet-splitting. I will cover them both here since the fleet-splitting section has enough content already.
This simply involves setting up a series of way points in a straight line. The trick is to make sure the distance between the way points is consistent. The weakness of this method is that you will not have a route so your ship will not leave a trail and a route scan will show no destination. Of course this could be very confusing to your opponent so may be an advantage. Most likely it will be a disadvantage since the point is to give the impression to your opponent that you are running away as fast as possible and not leaving a trail or having a route is not likely to give that impression. The best you can hope for is to give the impression of overconfidence or inattention. So why use this method at all? Because it can be done on the fly and requires nothing extra which brings us to the other method.
As you have probably already figured out this involves putting a slower ship in your fleet. Since the fleet moves at the speed of it slowest ship this will make your whole fleet move at that speed. At the appropriate time split the slow ship out of your fleet and take off. What happens to the slow ship is not very important but most likely it will be fine since the enemy fleet will almost always follow your fleet and not the ship you split off. Review my section of fleet-splitting to get the mechanics of how this works. In almost every way the ship method is a better than the admiral method. The big downfall is you have to have the slow ship in position for this to work which means planning ahead. I will tell you from experience plans are very easy to conceive and really hard to execute in-game. Still, including some slow ships in your main fleet or seeding them near your opponents planet is probably not a bad idea.
Ever think to yourself, “My food-storage box is full and some of my food production is being wasted!”? Well you are not the first, this has been covered multiple times in the forums and the solution is called “Controlled Starving”. I did not coin the term, I believe it was jackjack who originally called it that. I also doubt I was the first one to come up with it but I was the first one to break it down publicly(or at least I think I was). It is really not that difficult so lets get to it.
After I started writing this I saw that the governor examples does cover this briefly here. So you can see the basic method there but your reading this guide to be better right? So lets move on to the:
Does it really bug you that all your farmers turn to workers for just one turn and then turn back? Would you like it better if the swing in production was not so great? Do you have to turn the doorknob three times before you enter a room? Then keep reading because other than the doorknob thing I have the same problem. Just do the following:
What this does it makes it where only one farmer is converted to a worker at a time. The upside is your production will overall be the same as the other method but it will be more consistent. You may notice that in the basic example the threshold is 20% while here I put it at 25%. It does not really matter but if you really want to push the limits maybe you will be interested in:
Of course you can get away with even less surplus in the food box if you really feel like it. How little? Generally 3% is enough. I am going to go into a long explanation on how this is the case. To do this I have to make a series of assumptions. If you fall outside of these assumptions perhaps you should do your own figuring. To figure how much we can get away with we need to consider a quite a few factors. These are:
Planetary Maximum Population- Planets can range anywhere from 15 to well I’m not sure what the maximum is. Somewhere in the 50’s I think. Lets say 60 even though I think the largest I have seen is 56. The max doesn’t really matter because the smaller your population the smaller the food box so if we are testing extremes small is the way to go. 15 population it is. So what size does this make our food box? 2120
Food Production per Farmer- This will be a combination of the base food output per farmer, the number of farms on the planet, and the corruption(or loyalty bonus) on the planet. More food output will be the extreme we want to push here so we are going to set up a base output of 50 and 4 farms. I can already hear you, “4 Farms! Thats not very extreme”. My response is, on a 15 population world it is extreme. You may put more farms on larger worlds but you will also have increases in the size of the food box that will more than make up for it. You also may want to examine the wisdom of putting 8 or more farms on a planet that is not for the express purpose of creating military but that is a whole other argument. We will also ignore corruption. It will almost certainly have the effect of reducing your production so ignoring it should do no harm. So what is the final per farmer output? 100
Amount of Surplus- Since we have the other two factors this is pretty easy to figure. you will need 2 farmers to sustain population. Your population will consume 150 food(notwithstanding any civilization traits or doctrines) This will leave a per turn surplus of 50 food.
So now that we have all of that what do we do with it. Well, when the rule processes one of the farmers will become a worker(or something else) and you will lose 100 food production per turn. This means you will have a shortage of 50 food. So you have to make sure the rule never processes without more than 50 surplus in the food box. Since your food box size is 2120 that means that every percentage will be 21.2 food. That means your answer is 3%(21.2 * 3 = 63.6 = 64 food). Things will have to be pretty extreme for this not to be adequate.
Depending on how you play you may run into the situation where you want a queue to infinitely repeat itself. The game mechanics do not really support repeating a queue. Just repeating a queue is pretty simple and I will cover that in the first section. The second section will be a little more complex and will deal with shipbuilding. Most times people want a repeating queue its for ships. There is already an infinity command when adding items to your production queue so clearly if your wanting a repeating queue you want your governor to be a little smarter. I will show you how to make this happen.
The problem with getting a queue to repeat is pretty elemental. It is generally undesirable for a queue to auto-repeat itself. I guess we could beg for changes to be made to the governor so we can have a repeat option but have you looked at the governor lately? Isn’t it complicated enough already? It got that complicated from players asking for just one more feature. So wipe the snot from your nose and lets make it happen, the tools are right in front of you. First make the queue you want to repeat(I am calling mine ‘demo’), then make a queue with nothing in it(I am calling mine ‘wealth’). Then make a governor, here is what you want your governor to say:
I will let you fill in the rest of the rules on the governor. The way it works is when it first runs it assigns the wealth queue first then immediately overwrites it with the demo queue. The next time it runs neither rule processes since you are building something, namely whatever is in the demo queue. When the demo queue finishes you are back to producing nothing so the rules process. The wealth queue overwrites the demo queue then the next rule overwrites the wealth queue with the demo queue. The governor will not overwrite a queue with itself which is why you need the wealth queue. Thats it for basic repeating queues, now lets talk about shipbuilding.
Now we can really get into how to make repeating queue work for you. There are two big advantages to using a repeating queue instead of the infinity command.
You can have more than one ship design infinitely repeated. Lets say you want to build two bombers and a fighter, repeating queues would allow you to do that.
You can have the governor be more reactive. Not enough troops? do something else. Not enough money? Do something else. Not enough resources? Do something else.
When you get right down to it there are so many different little tricks you can do I should probably do a whole new section on it but I don’t feel like formatting it so lets get started.
It is not uncommon in the early game to need some ships built but not really have the proper infrastructure built. What I mean is you may have a planet that you can build ships on but you don’t have a planet to feed it troops nor the ships to transport these troops to your shipbuilding planet. With a repeating queue and an inventive governor you can have the planet supply itself until the infrastructure is built around it. For myself this situation occurs the most often with building colony ships.
