after fixing the yor factory upgrade loop bug, I've been playing them more and more with each game learning new things. I've found a few ways that YOR can expand to really take advantage of their differences. Truth be told, "they are awesome!" & tons of fun. Here are the main strategies I've found that work well
- The obvious... Play them similar to other races with a slow start, upgrade the power matrix & go on a roller coaster of exponential exploration, population growth, new planet claiming with colony ships from multiple colonies loaded with a couple mil like meatbag style colonization.
- This has some serious penalties because your research is hit so badly & your military manufacturing is so busy everywhere that the diplomacy penalty is likely to get you attacked fast!
- The improved obvious... send a couple mil out on each colony ship from a couple worlds & plant a factory or two on planetfall each time. repeat until population is hurting & make some more yor while those new colonies develop
- It works better & you can hope to keep up better than the previous method.
- Understand that the yor are not fragile bags of meat & use that!
- return that initial 2.5 mil yor colonists floating in space to iconia, eject the colony ship with a mere .5 mil on it. use the scout & colony ship to start manually scouting stars while the survey module is set to harvest anomalies.
- Build about 50/50 manufacturing & research yor on iconia while your starbase is building a construtor & ships scouting. Plant the colony ship somewhere decent if you haven't already
- Build a starbase at the edge of your range if you haven't found any decent planets (note: almost any planet is decent!)
- Hopefully iconia is mostly built up by now & you can set the governing slider back to normal while building more yor up to whatever your cap is Go back & a couple lines, & make sure you have the small hull & maybe a miniaturization tech or two.
- design yourself a self constructing colony module on a small hull with a life support or two.
- Crank out 3-4 (you probably don't have tourism income yet & will need to be careful not to go broke by spreading too fast.
- Send out those ships with ~.5 mil yor each & land them almost anywhere
- set the slider to 100% manufacturing & build yor on that planet... Ignore it until you have around 8-10mil yor
- Morale seems to do nothing in 0.61, but after 8-10 mil on almost any planet the morale starts to drop a bit the further you go
- Do the normal stuff with iconia, your ships, research, etc
- repeat as fast as you can crank out colony probes from iconia
- Once your new colonies grow to 8-10ish mil yor, remove the growth & build the planets ~60/40 research/manufacturing
- dot your planets with economic starbases & research up tourism if you haven't already
- Don't forget to research weapons and crank out something pointy from time to time between colonization probes or the ai will look at your -2 diplomacy & splat you
There is such a wonderful degree of up close micromanagement all over that meatbags simply cannot keep up. . In a huge galaxy with StarSpread2, common stars/planets abundant habitable, & all races represented with one ally each (irridium was my(yor's) team ally at the start. By about turn 100-120ish I had dozens of worlds either built or building, about 150 credits/turn income, around 130mil population, on and on. Without using starbases to spread, my borders well pretty much 1-2 star systems from every other race's
I'm sure that some tweaks will be needed once the ai is unshackled & galaxies scale up, but they are amazing