Master of Orion/Increasing your production

As touched on previously, planetary production is the name of the game in Master of Orion.

Planetary production controls everything you do every single turn.

If enemy forces are heading to your planets, it is planetary production that will determine if you can get sufficient defenses to the planet in time.

You want to have some ships that you can move to planets under attack before the ships start coming? Planetary production controls that too.

You want to research better technologies than the enemy so you can thoroughly devastate their fleets? Production controls that too.

There is no area of the game that planetary production does not either control or enable.

As mentioned previously, the two components to production are that from the manual labor of the population and that of the output from controlled factories.

The population's manual labor capabilities start at 0.5 BC per turn with level 1 Planetology technology and increase to a maximum of 2 BCs per turn with level 50 Planetology technology.

The special ability of the Klackon race is that its population can produce double the normal amount of manual labor. This means the Klackon colonists produce between 1 BC per turn (lvl 1 Planetology) and 4 BC per turn (level 50 Planetology).

The controlled factory portion begins at 2 controllable factories per person. Technologies in the research field of Computers which are called Improved Robotics Controls III, IV, V, VI, and VII increase the number of factories that can be controlled by each unit of population to the value of its Roman Numeral respectively. Factories always produce 1 BC of production per turn.

The special ability of the Meklar race is that they can always control 2 additional factories per unit of population.

The goal, then is to have the maximum planetary population possible and to build the maximum possible number of factories to enable each planet to produce the absolute most production possible.

The only reason not to act in this way and not to max production as quickly as absolutely possible is if your survival is in question. Even then, the goal is to build the absolute minimum defenses necessary to ward off the threat to survival and then to resume increasing your production again at the greatest possible rate.

If you do not have a production advantage on your opponents it is highly unlikely you will have a technological advantage on your opponents and it is further unlikely that you will have a superior space fleet compared to your opponents.

This is not as completely simple as it sounds.

It is a good strategy to begin the game by trying to acquire every possible planet and then to go into defense mode as you try to build them up as quickly as possible and to erect sufficient defenses as quickly as possible. This may even be the best strategy. If you are playing on the impossible difficulty setting and you are using one of the races in the weakest half it may be the only option you have if you want to attempt to win.

It is very difficult to make a strategy work that is substantially different from this on any difficulty level. If you try to build one planet up to operational capacity at a time and to erect defenses before you begin on the next planet you will almost undoubtedly end up with too few worlds to compete with the computer AI regardless what difficulty setting you choose. During the first expansion phase, particularly in larger galaxies, relatively few planets get attacked and several undefended planets grow faster than one defended planet.

The question is more about exactly how far you try to reach.

You may get 5 planets and have to decide if you should strain to get number 6 and 7 or to instead use those resources to get a head start on defending the 5 you already have. Or you may have 7 and have to decide if you want to try to stretch to make it 9. (Naturally the numbers depend on galaxy size - in a Huge galaxy, 9 planets is woefully inadequate. In a Large galaxy with just one or two opponents, 9 planets is still leaving you on the back foot.)

There comes a point where you want to reduce or halt your colonization effort and concentrate more on developing and defending what you have. You don't want to lose a lot of planets to an opponent who has fewer, better developed planets, and has taken time to construct and gather its fleets for attack. (Depending on difficulty the AI may be more prone to nip off one or two planets than to sweep through your empire.)

When is this point? This depends on the size of your galaxy, the nearness of the enemy players along your borders, and the relative tech level and population of you and your opponents. Sending a colony ship to a habitable planet right near the planets of an enemy player who is as big and tough as you are, means that there's a high risk you'll lose that colony to invasion (If you've got a big economy the colony ship may be worth risking anyway.) But if they're only a small population and you have one or more ground combat techs you have good odds of holding it.

If there's unoccupied space, there's little question - send a ship! How much effort do you put into ship building? Some of it ... perhaps your home planet builds ships and your first 2-4 daughter colonies, once developed, do research, until you run low on planets worth colonizing. In a larger galaxy, you may well find the home planet can't build ships fast enough, and one or two of your better (preferably Richer) daughter colonies that is nearer the frontier will also build ships.

If you are sending a colony ship to a hostile planet, and the indications are that they don't have that colonization tech yet, your odds of holding the planet are much higher; and particularly where more hostile and rich planets are involved, it is likely to be worth the risk. So it is common to have a fresh wave of expansion after researching the tech required for Inferno, Toxic or Radiated planets - building several ships on several planets over a relatively short number of turns.

On lower difficulties or when good luck stymies your opponents expansion, it is quite possible to out-colonize the opposition to the point where you can just vote yourself a victory; it is possible to win without firing a shot. (Technology still plays a very major part in this kind of victory.)

Also, production is only as good as the things you can do with it. Production, itself, is nothing more than a means to an end. You cannot win the game only by having high levels of production. Production is only worthwhile inasmuch as it can be used to drive research breakthroughs and to construct winning fleets.

You cannot construct a winning fleet if your technology is obsoleted by the opponent's technology. No matter how many ships you make if you can't even dent their ships that have superior shields your entire fleet is worthless. The only thing to do with worthless ships is scrap them and to apply the money you get to gaining something of value.

This is the reason that production drives research which drives combat victories.

Adequate defenses are required to ensure you reach the end game, galactic conquest, but the real key is to cut it as close as you possibly can. You want to have the absolute minimum defenses to ensure survival every step of the way until you are capable of building a winning fleet, then you want to convert massive production to building that winning fleet, and then you want to devote most of your energies to using your fleet to do the winning.

Every BC you spend early in the game beyond what is absolutely necessary for survival is a BC that is not only not working toward the goals of giving you a research edge and building a winning fleet, but it is directly working against you. If you build more than enough ships, you are stuck with paying their maintenance cost as long as you keep them around. If you build too many missile bases, they will sit there sucking maintenance out of you every single turn for an irrelevant purpose.

Without further ado, on to research.