Played through a game and won by technological ascension, but now have some questions for min/maxing:
I realized about 1/2 way through food is now global. Does that mean having 1-2 dedicated farm planets is best? Also, anyone know the "break-point" at which enhancing buildings should be build over new population?
As far as population goes, I know that it = raw production, then times modifiers is everything else. The thing is though, even on "specialized" income planets, I never made that many credits.
Tourism, how does this work?
My military for most of the game was ranked #5, and I noticed that my research was #1, and my fleets were SIGNIFICANTLY more powerful than my enemies. Is this ranking actually based on number of ships instead of type?
In previous galactic civ games, spies would give me snippits of info like "x is planning to attack y", I didn't see any of that even at ultra. Did I miss something? Also, the U.N. outlawed tech trading early, and I never got the tech stealing event from spying.
Malevolent ideology has a trait that makes their planets and starbases immune to culture flip. Doesn't that essentially break a whole style of gameplay?
The starbases themselves were excessively weak, laughably so. Anyway, without stationing a whole fleet onto them, to fix this?
Now, specifically about citizens:
The promotions on some seem like a no-brainer, and on others seem ridiculously weak. As an example, why would you ever NOT promote a general to supreme general, or an administrator to a minister? Sure, the administrator dies, but you keep the administration points, and it's not like their a resource accrued over time, so what is the point of not doing it?
On the flip side, sacrifice a farmer for a 10% food boost? He natively provides 30%, and since food is global, that's way, way better than an empire-wide buff.
I also realized about 3/4ths through that citizens affects stack: As far as that goes, do % bonuses stack multiplicatively or additively?
Lastly, about the tech tree, from what I recall reading several techs are now tied to traits, rather than races. I started several games as each of the races to look at the tree, and I didn't see much difference (exception was drengion, who's slave mechanic drove a huge difference). Is there a list of these techs, or any notable ones I should be looking for?
Thanks in advance guys, I know a lot of questions but definitely will help me improve as a scale from normal difficulty onward.