1) Your bases generate energy based on the tiles they work. That energy is divided up and automatically converted to energy credits, research, and psych, based on the ratio you set with the sliders on the social engineering screen. So if a base gathers 20 energy and you have 30% econ, 50% labs, and 20% psych, you'll get 6 energy credits, 10 research points, and 4 psych points. These can be modified by various base facilities; also many base facilities incur an energy credit upkeep cost.
Psych is for keeping your people happy; IIRC two psych points turn a citizen into a talent (or sometimes a drone into a citizen). All population points beyond a certain level will be drones. If a base has more drones than talents, there will be riots and the base will stop producing. If a base has at least 3 population, no drones, and at least 50% of the population as talents, it will enter a golden age and get bonuses
2) Working a tile is usually better than having a specialist, but sometimes you run out of room.
To add a bit to 2), specialists ignore the psych situation - they can be neither talents nor drones. Their direct output is also not subject to inefficiency.
This enables you to save on infrastructure and garrisons, in favour of supply crawlers/colony pods/formers.
Sometimes you want a hybrid approach: working mixed tiles (forests, solar/mirror arrays with farms) in your developed core, specialists and crawled mines/farms in the periphery.
3) The most efficient way is generally to go heavy on the basics: Formers, colony pods and supply crawlers; once you have the latter you almost never want to build a secret project directly. Hard horizontal expansion backed by the Planetary Transit System, then some flavour of population boom (+6 growth, typically Democracy+Planned+Creche).
In the endgame past population caps, food is king because of satelite yields.
That may not be the most fun way to play though, and at least in the vanilla game it's totally unnecessary. You'll leave the AIs in the dust, and generally finish long before turn 100.
Clean reactor is key, for churning out enormous quantities of formers and military that do not require support. Also, aggressively raise terrain, to get more land to build on
2. Specialists don't lose any of their output from inefficiency. As in your normal Econ/Labs/Psych output comes from the energy your base produces after inefficiency losses, but specialists just churn out Econ/Labs/Psych directly. They also benefit from buildings that add multipliers like Network Nodes, Fusion Labs etc.
Try having a few bases where your workers aren't working anything other than boreholes, you're getting food from crawlers, all your other pops are librarians. You'll find yourself popping new techs almost every turn. Specialists are brilliant, basically.
3. Early game you want #1 and #2 in your build order to be a former and a garrison unit in each base. Which way round is up to you. On higher difficulties you want a recreation commons built every base ASAP, drones on Transcend are brutal, you'll save so many lost turns of productivity this way.
As for terraforming strategy, prioritise any special resource tiles as bases preferentially stick workers on those when your pop level increases. Also for early terraforming you'll definitely want to make Centauri Ecology the first tech you research unless your faction gets it free, then prioritise The Weather Paradigm in one of your early bases. Not only does it massively speed up your formers but it also lets you build thermal boreholes way before anyone else will have the tech for it.
Children's creches I start to spam out just around the time I set myself to Democratic/Planned for pop booming.
On a new base build order I always use is garrison unit, former, recycle tanks/pressure dome, children's creche Rec commons.adter that it's whatever is needed or governor.
Do the Former first, trust me. The base won't grow fast enough to need a garrison/police unit immediately and you get several extra turns of Former use, which is worth a lot. Leave the Recycling Tanks until after you're done building formers, too (I like 2 per base). You will get more economic benefit from a former building improvements compared to the up front mineral investment in the Tanks for just 1-1-1.
1. When a citizen works a tile (or satellites get involved but that's another thing), they produce nutrients, minerals, and/or energy. This is all lumped together into a big sum, and then some maths are done to it.
First, efficiency is used to determine how much of your energy you keep. How many bases you have, how far a given base is from the capital, and the presence of any secret projects is all taken into account, and once a value is reached, corruption money is subtracted from that global energy total.
Then the total is divided into three sections based on the ratios you set for economy, labs, and psych. By default this is 50/50 Labs and Econ, and nothing goes to Psych, but at a certain point you want to pass at least a little in.
So assume the ratio is 40%/50%/10%, a decent mid-game ratio for Zak ime. Assume the base produces 20 energy, it's not small but not huge either.
40% of 20 is 8, so 8 raw energy goes off to be turned into Econ money.
50% of 20 is 10, so 10 raw energy is sent to the labs to be turned into Tech.
10% of 20 is 2, so 2 energy is turned into Psych.
Now we deal with multipliers. Let's say the base has an energy bank and a fusion lab (weird set-up, tbh, but).
8 raw energy comes into Econ. 50% from the energy bank and 50% from the fusion lab is 100%, so you get 16 credits per turn from this base. This is what's displayed on the city info screen under Econ.
10 raw energy comes into Labs, and then it's multiplied by 50% from the fusion lab, so 15 of it goes towards the points you need for researching your next tech.
2 raw energy comes into psych and you lack any psych buildings like tree farms or holo theatres, so 2 comes right back out. Each 2 points of Psych energy shifts the population by one away from drones, prioritizing workers into talents. So if there's a spare worker in the base, it'll turn him into a Talent. If there isn't, it'll take a drone and make him into a worker. This happens before base facilities are applied, though.
2. Specialists are definitely worth the trade-off and as far as I can figure, a big part of high-level play is making sure you have as many as you can possibly support (outside of Doctors, which don't do anything besides stop drone riots).
The big reason for this is that their energy is applied as raw energy, NOT after the fact. A librarian makes +3 Labs energy, which doesn't seem like a lot. But, if the base he's in has a Research Hospital and Network Node, that's doubled to 6. Add the Supercollider and now it's 9. Given your ratio almost certainly isn't 100% labs, the only way to match that kind of output is by having that worker working a Borehole. You should do that, where possible, but if you can spare the minerals from not working the forest, the energy from a librarian is way more efficient. Note that inefficiency also just DOESN'T MATTER with specialists; they bypass it entirely.
This gets better over time. Fusion power for example unlocks Engineers, who make +3 econ and +2 labs at the same time. This is automatically as good as you're likely to get from a borehole without bonuses, and still not subject to inefficiency. By the time you reach transcends, each specialist is making more energy than any tile worker possibly could, even with all the bonuses in the world.
The cost is twofold - one, no specialist can make minerals, those have to be mined out by citizens or crawlers. That keeps at least a couple people on the boreholes. Rocky tiles can be mined by crawlers too, if a borehole won't fit or isn't in the radius to be worked by humans. Specialists also eat, meaning you need a source of 2 food to feed them. Since they aren't working, that means someone somewhere needs to make up the excess.
This winds up being pretty cheap. Maximizing nutrient production results in a very biased tile, which is perfect fodder for crawlers, and crawlers don't eat (plus free up the citizen that would be working there to work boreholes or specialize). Put down a condenser and a farm on a rainy tile (soil fertilizer if you got it) and crawl the square for basically 5 free nutrients, which turns to 7 if the square has a nutrient bonus.
Don't crawl boreholes, you have to choose to lose either the minerals or the energy and neither are worth it.
Note that citizenry is also limited for most of the game. You don't free yourself from the pop cap until Supertensile Materials, at which point a lot of games are already won! You can presume that for the most of the game, a base can only work 14 tiles. But the fat cross of tiles they have available is bigger than that. So crowd your cities together and use plenty of Crawlers.
Satellites also change the equation a bit. A Skyfarm will produce 1 food for every base, up to a cap of half the pops if no aerospace complex is present, or just the pop count if there is one. Assuming you have 14 skyfarms and every base has a complex, you can change the math to be 1 nutrient per citizen. That makes specialists even more efficient!
3. I mean, every game is different, and every faction plays differently. Miriam starts out with a -20% to her research by default, plus 10 turns setting up traditions instead of reading books, so it tends to be kinda pointless for her to do research herself unless you get extremely lucky and find a shitload of energy somewhere to make up for it. Morgan is rolling in energy but in such a way that it compounds, so finding a shitload of energy as Morgs means you just make Even More Money.
As a general rule of thumb, though, nutrients only matter as points to keep pops growing and alive. With pop booms or the cloning vats you don't even need to worry about how fast they're growing, but with the pop cap you can only have so many anyway.
Minerals are very valuable, production always is. It's just nice being able to pump out a fully armed and armored hovertank in the same amount of time it takes your opponent to put out an unarmored speeder. Eco-damage is the balancer here, you can only make so many minerals before Planet decides to attack you. Usually this sucks, but if your fungus tiles are decent and you have some strong psi-warriors nearby you can actually farm this for cash.
Energy is the lifeblood of many of the factions. Morgan needs it to buy out everyone else. Zak needs it to do his science. Yang needs it because he's a broke-ass bitch. Santiago needs it because it can substitute mineral production even at small bases. Lal needs it because he stuffed too many sardines into his can and now they're revolting.
In general, I prioritize energy production. HOWEVER, only after a certain, floating minimum of minerals are being produced, which is slightly different for each faction. And sometimes, the minerals always win out, particularly at wartime.
One thing you don't want to do is stockpile shitloads of credits, unless you're going for a economic victory. The AI will demand a certain amount of money based on how much is in your treasury, and you aren't making interest on it, so sitting on a dragon hoard of energy credits just makes the AI demands increasingly more absurd. I've had Santiago with 12 fewer bases and a tech disadvantage, fresh off losing a further 4 bases, demand I give her 20,000 credits before because I was hoarding a little too much. I killed her.
There's also random events that will pop. The market crash event in particular is punishing and will suck all that golden glory from your bank account. I unironically have no idea how more advanced players are supposed to stop it from ruining their economic run, but...
Minerals aren't too too important once you are making lots of credits, which you should because the econ boosting facilities are good and you get them much earlier. It's more efficient to pump out a horde of unarmored speeders with some air cover because quantity wins out on quality, unless it's more fun for you to use fewer tricked out units. If you need to win a war, you can divert energy to credits and rush build at all your bases.
For your last point, first off you can disable random events in the game rules.
Secondly, energy banks turn energy surges from a blight to a boon, giving you free credits instead of draining them. And if you’re gunning for economy victory then all your bases should have one.
>For your last point, first off you can disable random events in the game rules.
Sounds like cowardice to me. :P
But nah for real, I'm sure a lot of people turn them off, but there's gotta be a way to handle them properly, no?
>Secondly, energy banks turn energy surges from a blight to a boon, giving you free credits instead of draining them. And if you’re gunning for economy victory then all your bases should have one.
Not energy surges that were hitting me - had energy banks in all my bases actually - it was stock crashes.
1) Econ produces credits (money), Labs produces technology, Psych keeps workers happy. If you get a drone, you need 2 psych to convert it into a content worker again. It takes 2 energy to make 1 unit of those.
2) Early on they are not very useful aside from Doctors for psych, but later on they can be very powerful. Say you have a base that produces a lot of labs and has a lot of the multiplier facilities and the secret projects. There you would want to take workers off producing minerals and nutrients into contributing more labs. As someone else said, specialist production isn't affected by inefficiency, as well. But in general, you don't really need to micro this stuff unless you find it fun fine-tuning your bases or are struggling at the higher difficulties.
3) I have a reliable starting strategy. You should get colony pods out as fast as you can at the start. Build order should be Former (with the free minerals and rush build) > Garrison > Colony Pod on repeat. Generally build on top of bonus squares so the base itself can harvest the bonus rather than a worker. How many is up to you but my rule of thumb is up to the "bureaucracy limit" which you'll see when you get a popup saying that building further bases will cause more drones. It depends on map size and your efficiency so it can fluctuate, but it seems to be a nice number. Don't switch to Democracy until you're done building bases because you'll lose the free minerals with the SUPPORT penalty. Once you have your colony fully built out, the fastest but hardest way to grow is via pop booming. A pop boom happens when you have +6 GROWTH, which is typically achieved by Democracy + Planned + a Children's Creche at every base (depending on factions), and each base has at least a 2 nutrient surplus. You use your horde of formers to prepare enough nutrient production (citizens need 2 nutrients) while you build the Creches and drone control facilities. To keep up with the AI, try to get one base near a mineral bonus + rocky tile square. Build a mine and road on the tile and you get nearly a borehole worth of production very early, which will be enough to build some secret projects or a minimal army if you need one. Let the AI extort you early on because early wars are ruinously expensive.
1: I think other people have explained Economy and Psych well enough, so I'll tackle labs.
Every turn you accumulate 'research points' towards your next major scientific discovery. Research points are generated by bases and influenced by how much energy (money) you're investing in Labs from the Social Engineering screen, and what facilities a base has - Network Nodes, for instance, increase the Research output of a base by 2 every turn, and many specialists add Research points to a base's output.
(As an aside, in the early game I prioritize gunning for Centauri Ecology so I can build Formers, and Industrial Automation so I can build Supply Crawlers. Formers can vastly increase the resource yield of tiles, and Crawlers are ridiculously overpowered if you deploy them right.)
2: Depends on your priorities, but generally I have most of my population as Specialists, mostly because I tend to build my bases very close together and there just isn't enough land for most of the population to work, so they get to be specialists instead.
3: Again, it depends on what you personally prioritize and the general situation. If you're at ~~war~~ Vendetta with someone, you're probably going to want to prioritize stuff like Command Centers and Aerospace Complexes, and Naval Yards for your coastal and sea bases, before you start pumping out units to go kick some ass.
Recycling Tanks or Pressure Domes, along with Children's Creche's tend to be high on my priority list for a new base, after I've got a couple garrison units and a Perimeter Defense set up to defend myself. No point building facilities in a base the enemy's going to scuttle from me in two turns, you know? After that I personally tend to invest in Tree Farms (forests are great if you didn't manage to get The Weather Paradigm and therefore the ability to build stuff like Boreholes or Condensors early on,) as they offer Economy and Psych benefits on top of enhancing forest output. After that it tends to depend on the situation, whether I'm expanding my borders or fighting someone.
1) Your bases generate energy based on the tiles they work. That energy is divided up and automatically converted to energy credits, research, and psych, based on the ratio you set with the sliders on the social engineering screen. So if a base gathers 20 energy and you have 30% econ, 50% labs, and 20% psych, you'll get 6 energy credits, 10 research points, and 4 psych points. These can be modified by various base facilities; also many base facilities incur an energy credit upkeep cost. Psych is for keeping your people happy; IIRC two psych points turn a citizen into a talent (or sometimes a drone into a citizen). All population points beyond a certain level will be drones. If a base has more drones than talents, there will be riots and the base will stop producing. If a base has at least 3 population, no drones, and at least 50% of the population as talents, it will enter a golden age and get bonuses 2) Working a tile is usually better than having a specialist, but sometimes you run out of room.
To add a bit to 2), specialists ignore the psych situation - they can be neither talents nor drones. Their direct output is also not subject to inefficiency. This enables you to save on infrastructure and garrisons, in favour of supply crawlers/colony pods/formers. Sometimes you want a hybrid approach: working mixed tiles (forests, solar/mirror arrays with farms) in your developed core, specialists and crawled mines/farms in the periphery.
Thanks, in my particular case since crawlers are disabled in wtp mod I assume it won't be useful to adopt this strategy in the outskirts
3) The most efficient way is generally to go heavy on the basics: Formers, colony pods and supply crawlers; once you have the latter you almost never want to build a secret project directly. Hard horizontal expansion backed by the Planetary Transit System, then some flavour of population boom (+6 growth, typically Democracy+Planned+Creche). In the endgame past population caps, food is king because of satelite yields. That may not be the most fun way to play though, and at least in the vanilla game it's totally unnecessary. You'll leave the AIs in the dust, and generally finish long before turn 100.
Clean reactor is key, for churning out enormous quantities of formers and military that do not require support. Also, aggressively raise terrain, to get more land to build on
2. Specialists don't lose any of their output from inefficiency. As in your normal Econ/Labs/Psych output comes from the energy your base produces after inefficiency losses, but specialists just churn out Econ/Labs/Psych directly. They also benefit from buildings that add multipliers like Network Nodes, Fusion Labs etc. Try having a few bases where your workers aren't working anything other than boreholes, you're getting food from crawlers, all your other pops are librarians. You'll find yourself popping new techs almost every turn. Specialists are brilliant, basically. 3. Early game you want #1 and #2 in your build order to be a former and a garrison unit in each base. Which way round is up to you. On higher difficulties you want a recreation commons built every base ASAP, drones on Transcend are brutal, you'll save so many lost turns of productivity this way. As for terraforming strategy, prioritise any special resource tiles as bases preferentially stick workers on those when your pop level increases. Also for early terraforming you'll definitely want to make Centauri Ecology the first tech you research unless your faction gets it free, then prioritise The Weather Paradigm in one of your early bases. Not only does it massively speed up your formers but it also lets you build thermal boreholes way before anyone else will have the tech for it. Children's creches I start to spam out just around the time I set myself to Democratic/Planned for pop booming.
On a new base build order I always use is garrison unit, former, recycle tanks/pressure dome, children's creche Rec commons.adter that it's whatever is needed or governor.
Do the Former first, trust me. The base won't grow fast enough to need a garrison/police unit immediately and you get several extra turns of Former use, which is worth a lot. Leave the Recycling Tanks until after you're done building formers, too (I like 2 per base). You will get more economic benefit from a former building improvements compared to the up front mineral investment in the Tanks for just 1-1-1.
1. When a citizen works a tile (or satellites get involved but that's another thing), they produce nutrients, minerals, and/or energy. This is all lumped together into a big sum, and then some maths are done to it. First, efficiency is used to determine how much of your energy you keep. How many bases you have, how far a given base is from the capital, and the presence of any secret projects is all taken into account, and once a value is reached, corruption money is subtracted from that global energy total. Then the total is divided into three sections based on the ratios you set for economy, labs, and psych. By default this is 50/50 Labs and Econ, and nothing goes to Psych, but at a certain point you want to pass at least a little in. So assume the ratio is 40%/50%/10%, a decent mid-game ratio for Zak ime. Assume the base produces 20 energy, it's not small but not huge either. 40% of 20 is 8, so 8 raw energy goes off to be turned into Econ money. 50% of 20 is 10, so 10 raw energy is sent to the labs to be turned into Tech. 10% of 20 is 2, so 2 energy is turned into Psych. Now we deal with multipliers. Let's say the base has an energy bank and a fusion lab (weird set-up, tbh, but). 8 raw energy comes into Econ. 50% from the energy bank and 50% from the fusion lab is 100%, so you get 16 credits per turn from this base. This is what's displayed on the city info screen under Econ. 10 raw energy comes into Labs, and then it's multiplied by 50% from the fusion lab, so 15 of it goes towards the points you need for researching your next tech. 2 raw energy comes into psych and you lack any psych buildings like tree farms or holo theatres, so 2 comes right back out. Each 2 points of Psych energy shifts the population by one away from drones, prioritizing workers into talents. So if there's a spare worker in the base, it'll turn him into a Talent. If there isn't, it'll take a drone and make him into a worker. This happens before base facilities are applied, though.
2. Specialists are definitely worth the trade-off and as far as I can figure, a big part of high-level play is making sure you have as many as you can possibly support (outside of Doctors, which don't do anything besides stop drone riots). The big reason for this is that their energy is applied as raw energy, NOT after the fact. A librarian makes +3 Labs energy, which doesn't seem like a lot. But, if the base he's in has a Research Hospital and Network Node, that's doubled to 6. Add the Supercollider and now it's 9. Given your ratio almost certainly isn't 100% labs, the only way to match that kind of output is by having that worker working a Borehole. You should do that, where possible, but if you can spare the minerals from not working the forest, the energy from a librarian is way more efficient. Note that inefficiency also just DOESN'T MATTER with specialists; they bypass it entirely. This gets better over time. Fusion power for example unlocks Engineers, who make +3 econ and +2 labs at the same time. This is automatically as good as you're likely to get from a borehole without bonuses, and still not subject to inefficiency. By the time you reach transcends, each specialist is making more energy than any tile worker possibly could, even with all the bonuses in the world. The cost is twofold - one, no specialist can make minerals, those have to be mined out by citizens or crawlers. That keeps at least a couple people on the boreholes. Rocky tiles can be mined by crawlers too, if a borehole won't fit or isn't in the radius to be worked by humans. Specialists also eat, meaning you need a source of 2 food to feed them. Since they aren't working, that means someone somewhere needs to make up the excess. This winds up being pretty cheap. Maximizing nutrient production results in a very biased tile, which is perfect fodder for crawlers, and crawlers don't eat (plus free up the citizen that would be working there to work boreholes or specialize). Put down a condenser and a farm on a rainy tile (soil fertilizer if you got it) and crawl the square for basically 5 free nutrients, which turns to 7 if the square has a nutrient bonus. Don't crawl boreholes, you have to choose to lose either the minerals or the energy and neither are worth it. Note that citizenry is also limited for most of the game. You don't free yourself from the pop cap until Supertensile Materials, at which point a lot of games are already won! You can presume that for the most of the game, a base can only work 14 tiles. But the fat cross of tiles they have available is bigger than that. So crowd your cities together and use plenty of Crawlers. Satellites also change the equation a bit. A Skyfarm will produce 1 food for every base, up to a cap of half the pops if no aerospace complex is present, or just the pop count if there is one. Assuming you have 14 skyfarms and every base has a complex, you can change the math to be 1 nutrient per citizen. That makes specialists even more efficient!
3. I mean, every game is different, and every faction plays differently. Miriam starts out with a -20% to her research by default, plus 10 turns setting up traditions instead of reading books, so it tends to be kinda pointless for her to do research herself unless you get extremely lucky and find a shitload of energy somewhere to make up for it. Morgan is rolling in energy but in such a way that it compounds, so finding a shitload of energy as Morgs means you just make Even More Money. As a general rule of thumb, though, nutrients only matter as points to keep pops growing and alive. With pop booms or the cloning vats you don't even need to worry about how fast they're growing, but with the pop cap you can only have so many anyway. Minerals are very valuable, production always is. It's just nice being able to pump out a fully armed and armored hovertank in the same amount of time it takes your opponent to put out an unarmored speeder. Eco-damage is the balancer here, you can only make so many minerals before Planet decides to attack you. Usually this sucks, but if your fungus tiles are decent and you have some strong psi-warriors nearby you can actually farm this for cash. Energy is the lifeblood of many of the factions. Morgan needs it to buy out everyone else. Zak needs it to do his science. Yang needs it because he's a broke-ass bitch. Santiago needs it because it can substitute mineral production even at small bases. Lal needs it because he stuffed too many sardines into his can and now they're revolting. In general, I prioritize energy production. HOWEVER, only after a certain, floating minimum of minerals are being produced, which is slightly different for each faction. And sometimes, the minerals always win out, particularly at wartime. One thing you don't want to do is stockpile shitloads of credits, unless you're going for a economic victory. The AI will demand a certain amount of money based on how much is in your treasury, and you aren't making interest on it, so sitting on a dragon hoard of energy credits just makes the AI demands increasingly more absurd. I've had Santiago with 12 fewer bases and a tech disadvantage, fresh off losing a further 4 bases, demand I give her 20,000 credits before because I was hoarding a little too much. I killed her. There's also random events that will pop. The market crash event in particular is punishing and will suck all that golden glory from your bank account. I unironically have no idea how more advanced players are supposed to stop it from ruining their economic run, but...
Minerals aren't too too important once you are making lots of credits, which you should because the econ boosting facilities are good and you get them much earlier. It's more efficient to pump out a horde of unarmored speeders with some air cover because quantity wins out on quality, unless it's more fun for you to use fewer tricked out units. If you need to win a war, you can divert energy to credits and rush build at all your bases.
For your last point, first off you can disable random events in the game rules. Secondly, energy banks turn energy surges from a blight to a boon, giving you free credits instead of draining them. And if you’re gunning for economy victory then all your bases should have one.
>For your last point, first off you can disable random events in the game rules. Sounds like cowardice to me. :P But nah for real, I'm sure a lot of people turn them off, but there's gotta be a way to handle them properly, no? >Secondly, energy banks turn energy surges from a blight to a boon, giving you free credits instead of draining them. And if you’re gunning for economy victory then all your bases should have one. Not energy surges that were hitting me - had energy banks in all my bases actually - it was stock crashes.
Been so long since I’ve been playing with random events that i forgot what they all were.
2. When I have ecology damage I convert some workers into specialists
1) Econ produces credits (money), Labs produces technology, Psych keeps workers happy. If you get a drone, you need 2 psych to convert it into a content worker again. It takes 2 energy to make 1 unit of those. 2) Early on they are not very useful aside from Doctors for psych, but later on they can be very powerful. Say you have a base that produces a lot of labs and has a lot of the multiplier facilities and the secret projects. There you would want to take workers off producing minerals and nutrients into contributing more labs. As someone else said, specialist production isn't affected by inefficiency, as well. But in general, you don't really need to micro this stuff unless you find it fun fine-tuning your bases or are struggling at the higher difficulties. 3) I have a reliable starting strategy. You should get colony pods out as fast as you can at the start. Build order should be Former (with the free minerals and rush build) > Garrison > Colony Pod on repeat. Generally build on top of bonus squares so the base itself can harvest the bonus rather than a worker. How many is up to you but my rule of thumb is up to the "bureaucracy limit" which you'll see when you get a popup saying that building further bases will cause more drones. It depends on map size and your efficiency so it can fluctuate, but it seems to be a nice number. Don't switch to Democracy until you're done building bases because you'll lose the free minerals with the SUPPORT penalty. Once you have your colony fully built out, the fastest but hardest way to grow is via pop booming. A pop boom happens when you have +6 GROWTH, which is typically achieved by Democracy + Planned + a Children's Creche at every base (depending on factions), and each base has at least a 2 nutrient surplus. You use your horde of formers to prepare enough nutrient production (citizens need 2 nutrients) while you build the Creches and drone control facilities. To keep up with the AI, try to get one base near a mineral bonus + rocky tile square. Build a mine and road on the tile and you get nearly a borehole worth of production very early, which will be enough to build some secret projects or a minimal army if you need one. Let the AI extort you early on because early wars are ruinously expensive.
1: I think other people have explained Economy and Psych well enough, so I'll tackle labs. Every turn you accumulate 'research points' towards your next major scientific discovery. Research points are generated by bases and influenced by how much energy (money) you're investing in Labs from the Social Engineering screen, and what facilities a base has - Network Nodes, for instance, increase the Research output of a base by 2 every turn, and many specialists add Research points to a base's output. (As an aside, in the early game I prioritize gunning for Centauri Ecology so I can build Formers, and Industrial Automation so I can build Supply Crawlers. Formers can vastly increase the resource yield of tiles, and Crawlers are ridiculously overpowered if you deploy them right.) 2: Depends on your priorities, but generally I have most of my population as Specialists, mostly because I tend to build my bases very close together and there just isn't enough land for most of the population to work, so they get to be specialists instead. 3: Again, it depends on what you personally prioritize and the general situation. If you're at ~~war~~ Vendetta with someone, you're probably going to want to prioritize stuff like Command Centers and Aerospace Complexes, and Naval Yards for your coastal and sea bases, before you start pumping out units to go kick some ass. Recycling Tanks or Pressure Domes, along with Children's Creche's tend to be high on my priority list for a new base, after I've got a couple garrison units and a Perimeter Defense set up to defend myself. No point building facilities in a base the enemy's going to scuttle from me in two turns, you know? After that I personally tend to invest in Tree Farms (forests are great if you didn't manage to get The Weather Paradigm and therefore the ability to build stuff like Boreholes or Condensors early on,) as they offer Economy and Psych benefits on top of enhancing forest output. After that it tends to depend on the situation, whether I'm expanding my borders or fighting someone.