Questions from a Newbie |
I haven't played any SE game before, no GalCiv or Stars either; only MOO, MOO2 and sadly I've even bought MOO3 the day it was released. I played the Demo a few times now and I have a few questions:
- What are Ministers?
- How do I conquer planets?
- How do I board ships?
- Is there some way to auto-colonize or to at least make Colonizing less of an effort?
- Can I spy for Tech? (I know it's not worth it in the Demo because the other empires are... no real competition)
- When could I expect to be able to buy it?
Thank you for your patience and kind sharing of knowledge.
Some Answers...
1. Essentially AI players that perform a certain function.
2. You need to land troops on a planet via a troop transport, ground combat proceeds and if you win then you get the planet.
3. From the Ship Capture tech area you get boarding parties, during combat ships with boarding parties can capture other ships with no shields remaining.
4. I don't think it's difficult, but if you'd like you can use the Planets Report screen to select planets to send available colonizers to - if you have any available. For example then, you can select planets high in a certain resource and then click "send colonizer" and it will send the closest available colonizer. So all you need to do is build colonizers and not have to worry about giving them direct orders.
5. You can steal tech via intel.
6. Oct-16 is the release date...
7. Not at this time...
8. Population and happiness affects both production and construction
9. Conditions I guess refer to the general state of the planet - it effects reproduction rate.
10. You can mine asteroids with remote mining components or you can turn them into planets with stellar manipulation technology.
11. Storms can also be damaging or affect shields or sensors etc.
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Thank you!
Thank you very much for your informative answers 
I'm looking forward to this game's release - the first one I'll buy after I burned my fingers with MOO3.
1) Ministers are computer AI
1) Ministers are computer AI routines that run portions of your empire for you. Particularly useful for later stages of large games.
2) Research the technologies to build troops, build a bunch, load 'em in a transport, attach the enemy colony.
3) Need to research ship capture and then build ships with the boarding party components.
4) You can send colony ships from the planet screen, but you want to select the right planets. Colonizing is key to the game and something you want to micromanage for many turns.
5) I don't know about spying for tech in SEV. I have the same question.
6) Sometime between Oct 5th and Oct 17th, we think.
7) As far as I know only through racial trait selection.
Population does have a noticeable effect on productivity and the amount of militia troops you have if invaded is supposed to be proportional to population.
9) Conditions impact reproduction rate. I don't know if they affect happiness.
10) Mine them for resources
11) Impact of storms in SEV is unclear. There were impacts in SEIV.
Thank you to you, too!
Thank you to you, too, tmcc
Now if you'll excuse me, there's an SEV demo icon winking at me from the desktop...
Yay! More questions!
Excuse the double post, but I have even more questions:
Thank you yet again!