Help with Allocations

[Vytae]

After reading Vel's strat guide there i found i had a few questions.

One being the economics/psych/labs allocations in your SE window, now i usually dont tinker with these at all but in Vel's guide it mentioned getting a tech every round,best ive ever managed was 1tech every 2yr and that was mid to late game.

Now this may seem pretty basic and newb to you guys but ive always assumed you start losing labs/energy if you uneven them by more than 10% but if you have high enough efficeny you dont? (and therefore can put it all into labs? for a tech-a-turn? when your eff is high enough?)

And my second being,whenever i probe a city for research next time i try it there's a "new safetey interlock" do you guys just bull through it when you try to keep it covert or is there a way around it? (other than probing another city)

Please enlighten me !

[cbn]

Simply put, the higher your efficiency rating, the less you lose to unequal allocations. I believe that +4 is a paradigm economy which eliminates these losses. But at lower efficiency rates than that it may be worthwhile to accept some efficiency losses to get a key tech. I am mainly thinking about restrictions lifting tech here. The energy boost from gaining this tech a turn or two earlier will usually more than make up for a small "loss" while researching it

The tech a turn rate is possible . In fact I have achieved multiple techs a turn late in a SP game. Allocations may be important
but I found to achieve those rates you would likely be using a lot of crawlers and specialists. You can have a single super science city that has all the lab enhancing facilities as well as the SuperCollider and the TOE. Then start crawling energy to the place and watch the multiplicative effects. Run Demo/Green and place Labs at 100% making as many specialists as possible and then WOW! Warning- this can get wasteful if you want to exceed one tech per turn. All labs beyond those needed to make a discovery are lost in the base that contributes the final research points to that discovery. Thats why some players advocate two or more super science cities.

Probe teams-- well thats an entirely situational thing. I think the game tried to make it so it was not TOO easy to probe rape a base multiple times. If other bases are close I will probe at them instead. If this one base is the only one easy to access well I would try it there again accepting that my chances of success are reduced. It also depends on what they have. I won't risk a probe against the higher odds unless I have a good reason like a tech I want to get.

[Sikander]

If you get efficiency up to +4 or greater (paradigm eff.) you can set your allocations to whatever you like, without losing anything.

I'm afraid that you will have to probe another base to avoid the security interlocks. This seems to be in place to limit somewhat how many techs you can steal.

[Solver]

As for the tech per two years, it's not bad for the starters. All you need to do this is PARADIGM economy, which is easy if you're Deirdre or Aki-Zeta, and some good crawlers out there.

[Avenoct]

Just to add my favorite comment:

'The world size affects'... . how many labs ya need per tech. Smaller is faster.

Additionally, commerce income, not to mention tech-trading can be quite a boost.

When I was just starting to play at transcend level (recently in the scheme of things) I asked a lot of questions on the forum, especially about submissive factions. The AI has trememdous advantages at the higher two levels, so let it do the research for you if at all possible! Granted, turning a wily transcend AI into a submissive faction is not at all easy, especially on the larger maps, but if you manage it:

1. Keep your submissive happy: feed it tech, bases, units, anything. This way it will always give you a newly discovered tech.

2. Build up your submissive if and when possible. Just think..if that research hospital would give you 18 more labs/turn, what would it give the AI (relatively)?

3. Coordinate what techs you study with your submissive vassal if possible, and recognize that the techs it is least likely to give you are the special projects techs. It'll still give them too you if it's a happy faction, but one should prepare for the dreaded "Get back to me just a soon as I've built the Planetary Datalinks".

4. Possibly allow/influence the submissive to grow larger than yourself. If it is possible to distract the other AI's away from attacking you, there are many benefits. See some of Blake's posts about being #2 on the power graph.

5. If you are playing with pods, try to save those Ancient Artifacts for later in the game, ala when you are at tech parity with all the AI's and are ready to make a sprint for the finish.

-Smack

[Kassiopeia]

I had this wonderful SP one pretty day. I had, as Yang, subjugated both Zak and Lal. After warring with them, I gave them most of their old bases if possible, and Hive's effic and econ being what they are, I gave my best energy.producing bases to Zak. The results were fantastic; my three-faction-coalition researched a new tech in about ten turns, but three different techs at a time, and this was somewhere in early 23rd Mission century. Getting rid of Miriam had never been as fun as that! Those Synthmetal Sentinels bravely standing up against Plasma Shard choppers and Quantum Rovers.