Master of Orion/Interplanetary reserve

The interplanetary reserve is an important resource to manage and must be managed alongside everything else.

There are two ways to build the reserve, either through siphoning off a percentage of resources from each planet in the empire or by building factories on planets that already have the maximum number of factories.

In the first case, you can choose how much you want to gain per turn in the reserve. Every click will display how much you will gain at that percentage.

If you choose a planet and set it to build factories after it is already full you can't see how much you will gain per turn, it will just show up in the reserve. You can calculate it by watching the reserve for two turns and doing some subtracting, but that is the best you can do.

The important thing to keep in mind is that all money that goes from a planet into the reserve is cut in half. To gain 1000 in the reserve you have to take 2000 from somewhere else.

That is the price you pay for being able to soup up the output on planets you choose by double.

The best way to spend these resources are to (1) pour them into your newest planets to get them operational as quickly as possible by doubling their output every turn till the money is spent, or (2) to pour them into planets that can produce or research very quickly.

Artifacts worlds, Orion, and Ultra Rich planets are the worlds you want to target with the money for #2.

Note, if you pour it into a Rich world, you will double your production, you lose half putting the resources into the reserve, though, so you just break even like this, you don't actually gain anything this way. It is only really useful to do this if you want to localize your ship construction at the rich worlds for some reason.

Ultra rich, on the other hand, always comes out ahead. With ultra rich worlds you can tell the ultra rich world to pour everything into the reserve and then spend the whole reserve on beefing up the ultra rich planet's production. You get a net gain into the reserve this way every turn with no losses. This is an annoying way to get ahead, but it works.

Artifacts worlds and the orion, though, should always be pumped as much as they can be if you are trying to use research to get ahead, which is most of the time. The only reason not to keep these producing at double is if you really can't be bothered to actually go through the motions and do it. It makes gameplay more annoying, but its a very efficient way to get ahead.

That being said, the major reason to play Master of Orion 1 rather than 2 or 3 is because you like simplicity and because you don't want the life to be sucked out of you by the gameplay. Orion 2 and certainly Orion 3 have a lot of the fun taken out of them by the added complexity. If you like complexity, you are probably playing those games anyway.

With Orion 1, you are playing a very simple and easy to manage game where the tactics and research takes a front seat and the micromanaging takes more of a back seat in terms of gameplay.

The added micromanaging isn't that bad, but its still often the case that its skipped anyway. The advantage is there, but usually it is only 1% or 2% in terms of your entire empire's production and research. If you want to do it, do it and if not then don't.

Note, any overspending on factories goes straight to the reserves. If you put everything into factory construction and it happens that the last turn only needs 1 factory constructed when you are putting enough resources into production to make 100 factories, the resources for those extra 99 factories will go straight to reserves. It won't tell you it is doing this, it will just do it.

If you see MAX listed during factory construction and you don't want the extra resources cut in half and put into the reserves, then take down the factory slider till it is just high enough to say MAX and put the rest in research or missile defense or something else. This will keep you from losing half of those production points.