Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares/Freight training: Difference between revisions

*Moving food between colonies. 1 Freighter can carry 1 unit of food. Food transfers are instantaneous, but the operating cost is 0.5 BC per Freighter per turn in which food is transfered.

*Moving people between colonies. You need 5 Freighters to move 1 "person" (each "person" icon represents 1M colonists). Unlike food transfers, population transfers take a non-zero time that depends on your level of drive technology.  

Suppose for example you decide to transfer 2 "people" between systems and the transfer takes 3 turns (often the minimum time in the early game). During the 3 turns the population of a no-farming colony may grow and, if all your freighters are tied up in the population transfer, the starving colony's population will not grow. If several no-farming colonies grow in the same turn, the shortage may be enough to kill some colonists. Even worse, you can't control which colonies suffer the worst, the game software decides that. Too bad if starvation hits a Housing colony that you're relying on to pump up your population.

The main screen has a panel at the bottom right that tells you how may Freighters you have altogether and how many are available for new tasks.

Pay attention, you Lithovores, or you'll get a nasty shock when you go conquering! You too, Unifications and Aquatics, other races usually don't have your farming skills! Creatives had better listen up too, non-Creative empires usually don't have the morale techs you take for granted.

Usually the first colonies you invade are on the edge of an enemy empire, so they're the least developed; and most of your enemies will not be Lithovores, so captured colonists will need to be fed.

*The population will initially be angry (unless you mind-controlled them) and so unproductive that they don't feed themselves even if you move them all into farming. Newly-invaded colonies have no Barracks (destroyed in the ground battle), so if your Government is Feudal or Dictatorship there's an additional loss of morale that reduces farmers' productivity even more. And in any case you will usually want  at least some of the conquered colonists to build things, especially Automated Factory (if not present already), Marine Barracks and (if you researched it) Alien Control Center to get them working productively as fast as possible.

Make sure you have at least 20 spare Freighters before invading (more if you are moving population between your existing colonies), and maintain that saftey margin by building additional Freighters as you invade more enemy colonies.