Fungus Resources

[King_Kristian]

Who cares about fungus?
I am a good true natured Morganite and I build boreholes and condensers and echelon mirrors, I get more resources from that than I ever could from fungus.
Besides with my terraforming I have removed most of the fungus on the planet in my current game.

[Shai-Hulud]

What I'd be interested to find out is whether "conventional" terraforming is, in the end, superior to forest in any case. I was thinking about the focus most people put into fast colonization and expansion. Immediately after planetfall, even few turns can make a big difference. Now if you can achieve more resources and faster using farms, boreholes etc. than forests it just might be worth the trouble.

If you forest everything, or most of the land, and aim for tree enchanging facilities you have to wait for relatively long time before you can really start to grow and harvest energy. But if you optimize the environment early on using conventional techniques you get more overall benefit than Tree Farmed foresters because the restrictions are lifted sooner than Forest facilities become available. Perhaps those few years or even decades are well worth it even though after Tree Farm and Hybrid forest you might be able to get better overall benefit.

The latter approach is of course necessary if you're heading for specialist society.

[MariOne]

That's why I always smirked(?) reading all those ForestFirst approaches praised as the bible.
Those are evidently limited and short-sighted, as are all the totalizing strategical approaches.

You CANNOT keep top-speed early development without forest
but
You CANNOT keep top-speed early development using forest only.

You must use forest because it's the fastest and cheapest way to get early minerals, up until you discover EcoEng.
Only rocky tiles can give you 4 minerals (for 10 formerturns), all other tiles give you at best the same forest does, and without the added nutrient and energy.
Even if you have MinSpecials, as well only rocky tiles are worth mining.

BUT.
in the very first turns, EVEN IF you're not planning to generate a pod asap, your priority should be to bring every base to size 2, and only for that moment you should care to have a forest ready.
Of course you should blend 2-or-3-Nuts tile with forest tiles to be worked in a base, in the early days.

Things ONLY change when you get crawlers, which I admit can be rather early in the game, but only to some extent.
Let's say that conventional terraforming has to guarantee enough support fo forests, till Tree Farms appear. But at that time you might be already oriented towards other approaches.

"...the focus most people put into fast colonization and expansion. Immediately after planetfall, even few turns can make a big difference. Now if you can achieve more resources and faster using farms, boreholes etc. "
IMHO, the word "borehole" does NOT fit in your sentence.
When you are in the phase you describe, BHs giving only 0.2.2 are a big waste of terraforming resources and of workers placement. Besides only the WP owner can drill them, and they'd only be worth on a MinSpecial.
When later you have EcoEng, the game is already in a bit more mature phase, where the first level of your fast expansion should already have been achieved.

in Summary: you must ensure that you have and can support/handle enough workers to exploit forests, before committing on them.
But beofore EcoEng a forest is anyway waaaaaay superior to a borehole.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

MariOne,

Good points. TO summarize I agree with:

1) Most important aspect is achieving 2 or 3 nut to allow base growth to size 2 ASAP

2) Forests are the most economical t-forming time wise way to achieve min increases especially up until eco engineering. Even after eco-engineering crawlered mined/roaded rockies is a better investment t-form time wise then boreholes

The questions then becomes at what point in the game do advanced t-forming options become attractive. My thoughts on this are:

Shear qunatity of formers required causes it to normally occur somewhere after clean reactors. Once you have a sizable former workforce of 40+ I normally consider the following approaches and ususally in a dual pronged approach

1) continued expansion. A normal approach means a land raise at a coast, a deposit of a condensor farm and two boreholes. Place a Colony Pod/base (Assuming Planetary Transit SP is yours) and you've got an instanly productive base (13 mins minimally) and whats more it is perfectly balanced at size 3. What's more if your expansion has gotten you to the point of Drone issues, crawlers can accompany you colony pod to still allow the nuts and mins. A normal new base set up should be happening about every 2-3 turns and so the appropriate number of formers need to be dedicated to the task.

2) reclaim the interior. Formers now are dedicated to the task of forest reclamation in favor of condensor farms to allow specialization of more advanced bases. In the above case I look to these bases as sattelite production centers but not necessarily the energy producers. These I reserve for the interior bases that are complete with facility enhancements.

By going withthe two prong approach I am able to co-develop the interior and proceed with expansion. Only 2-3 bases are required to continue the expansion paradigm and in most cases the exterior bases feed the expasnion through the use of crawlers via a variant of the Pod Booming PTS gambit. The biggest issue is developing the largish number of formers in order to pull off both rather large t-forming efforts and IMHO this occurs after discovery of clean reactors.

But that simply describes my preferred play style. It probably isn't the best or the worst paradigm to follow. Simply mine.

Og

[Sikander]

Yea, Clean technology is when I quit foresting everything and start putting down condensors and then boreholes. Usually I have my HQ and the bases next to it crank out crawlers (for SPs) while everyone else cranks out clean formers. They come a little less than one per turn per base usually, so about four per turn with my initial 9 bases until there are no more SP to build, and then 7 per turn or so after that. I need a lot of formers, and usually have no more than two per base before clean tech.

I've become quite used to doing a forest only Demo / FM / Wealth GA popboom once my TFs get in, pushing the empire up to 7-9 population while maintaining my technology rate. Then I build Hab facilities, switch to planned and start on hospitals. Once those are done I usually switch back to crawlers and formers. I usually stay in planned here, because by this time most of my energy production is coming from specialists, and most of the rest from boreholes, so running +2 econ yields very little energy gain, and adds other troubles. In fact I usually run planned right up until I build the CV, when I switch to Green. This keeps all those new bases booming, and the industry bonus is worth more than the efficiency loss.

I still put forest everywhere at the beginning, because by the time I get every square around a base filled with forest, I have discovered recycling tanks. Then every base can sustain a population of 3, and is ready to boom with tree farms. In a slower tech game (tech stag, blind research, or playing a faction with research problems) I don't have the luxury of recycling tanks, crawlers or tree farms so soon, and look for moist or wet squares (hopefully rolling) which can be profitably farmed and solared to get me growing the old fashioned way.

[Shai-Hulud]

So, you do use forests extensively before more advanced terraforming options become available? You must terraform like there is no tomorrow once you get clean reactors? I also take a different approach when playing say...Believers which really don't work that well with all-forest strategy.

Ogie:
I use a very similar strategy myself, when expanding my influence peacefully. I used to have problems to maintain a core of economy under aggressive colonization but now I focus on both and it seems to work very well. The good thing about having a lot of bases is that when technology starts to brake boundaries your faction grows almost exponentially.

[Sikander]

Having 4 or more times as many formers per base and the Weather Paradigm really helps, and it does take some time, but by ganging up the formers in groups of 4 to 8 you can really get a base done pretty quickly. Each base has 5 condensor / farms (about 11 former turns each), and 2 boreholes (16 each), so if the base has 5 formers it only takes 20 years or so. I put roads and forest down before I get clean, so that the clean formers usually don't have to waste a turn moving, and a lot of the fungus is grown over with forests.

[MariOne]

Originally posted by Shai-Hulud
...Believers which really don't work that well with all-forest strategy.

I saw the great Bingmann give a show of the contrary in a pbem.
He also explicitly explained me (I was the CMN) why the all-forest approach was the only decent/viable one for the Believers, in his opinion.
He scared the others so much that he could play builder but also build up a dissuasive punch force enough to enforce a non-armament-clause on all other players while they watched him transcend....