Slitherine

When picking a faction I need tooltips or compedium access to figure out what all the little bonuses they get actually do. The leaders are kinda...white.
What does power (the little lightning bolt) do?
How does growth work? Does increase food help or is food only for maintaining the people you've got?
When I found a city - how does one know which hexes it'll use ? At the start and any potential hexes added.
My instict is to right click for geography tooltip..when i do that my units move. At least for the new players can we get a lock on unit movement at the very start if no clickable tootips

Power applies to units. Generally, the more power a unit has, the better. However, there will eventually be all kinds of attack, defend, territory, air, naval, and other bonuses that make it less black and white about which unit is more powerful.

Food sustains your people. Extra food is stockpiled and does not speed up growth. The surplus/deficit of food is shared across your country. So if one base has a surplus of 10 and another has a deficit of 5, then each turn your food balance increases by 5. If your balance hits zero then your people starve. You can't speed up growth (except there is an operation that boosts it temporarily), you can only prevent things that slow it down.

The best way to learn how cities work is not to think of it as "which hexes will be used" rather "what territory a city claims" There is a big difference. Territory you have claimed has potential to be mined or harvested but it only happens if you assign workers to it in the left panel of the city control window. When you build a city it automatically claims the territory is sits in and all the territories touching it (7 total). The exception occurs if the territory is already claimed by someone else. Alien hives also "claim" territories that they are touching as well. This isn't shown on the map, but if you try to build a city 2 hexes away from a hive, you'll notice that you don't get any of the territories that are touching the hive. After the hive is gone, you can eventually claim those territories. Now, after you hit size 8, you can claim a new territory for each new city size if it is connected to your land and is unclaimed. You pick which one is next to be claimed by clicking on the little flag box (you have to be in the city control window for the flags boxes to appear).

You get 1 worker for each city size. If you put a worker on production, it contributes towards what's building in the queue and eats up more minerals. If you put him in mining, he will add minerals to you mineral bank. If you put him as a farmer, he'll add to the food bank. If you put him on research, he'll add towards your current research. Now, let's say you have 1 territory that has a potential of 4 minerals and one with 3 and another with 2. If you put a guy on mining, he'll automatically go to the tile with the greatest output. If you put 2 guys on mining, they'll go to the two highest and so on. What if that tile with 4 minerals also has 1 food? No, you don't get the food. You can't ask a miner to go pick fruit... it just doesn't work that way. If you want to get food from this city, you'll need to start putting workers on food and they'll assign themselves just like the miners. Can you get minerals AND food from the same tile? yes, but you'd need people as farmers and miners which is entirely possible and common. It sounds confusing, but it really isn't. All you have to do is remember: you assign workers to an occupation NOT a tile. Just move people around on that left panel based on your faction needs. Also, make sure that the hexes are in decent condition(terraform them to be better). When you terraform and look for new places to settle, look for concentrated resources. Let me explain. If you have 3 tiles with 2 minerals each (6 total), you can get 6 minerals. Sounds great, but you also need 3 workers assigned as miners. If you have 1 tile with 6 minerals in it, you can get all 6 minerals from 1 worker. This is much more efficient and allows you to allocate workers to other things like research.

Thanks for the info Jd. How far away from the city can you claim tiles ? Can a tile be worked by more than one worker? How does one build housing?

No problem.

You can claim 3 tiles away. Like hop-scotch. 1, 2, 3 away from your main tile. (Sorry if I over-explain things). It's also worth mentioning that if you get boxed in, you don't need to expand with each new city size. Actually, if you have a city that is dedicated to research, you don't need any good terraforming or many tiles at all. As long as your other cities make enough food for them. You can put a city in the middle of a barren desert and it can grow and be just as large as the other bases. That city just won't be able to contribute much food or minerals back to the other cities, only research and production. This is a nice feature... in my opinion.

Yes a tile can be worked by more than 1 worker. You can get food and minerals from the same tile if you have enough miners and farmers in the same city.

You can build city enhancements that boost the habitation. This will prevent people from emigrating away thus helping your city grow. But remember that the thing that drives migration among your cities is morale relative to your other cities. Morale is affected by a lot of things, habitation is one of them. Another thing that affects morale is pollution (in fact that's about the only thing pollution does, but if it stacks up it can really cause some problems- you don't want poor morale)

Pollution, habitation, and taxes affect morale.
Each city has its own morale.
Morale affects output of food, minerals, production, and research.
Relative Morale among your cities affects migration between them.

I've edited this thing like 10 times in the last few minutes. Sorry.

Power should be called something else with a different icon...its too suggestive of an electrical grid limitation.

Hmm so specializing tiles makes a lot more sense then balancing their output. Makes forest kinda weak.

I noticed the tech tree changes from game to game..are there any unique techs for each factions that I should be aim towards?

Yes, specializing make much more sense, but forests help a lot with pollution. I find it easiest to just get the city enhancements that treat the pollution though.

Aiming for certain techs is smart, but how you do it really just depends on the situation. I've done it a bit different each time I've played. I like being able to skip techs that I don't need in order to stay ahead in research.

Q:does stacking units let them attack together ? does it give a bonus ? what does efficiency mean in the battle report?

Q:So everyone gets the same randomized tech tree or are there a few faction specific techs like better bibles for the fanatics or calculators for the economy people? Getting fertilizer +/- a few turns earlier or later this game then another isnt really that exciting an implementation.

Q: Why cant a put a flame thrower on my jeep? The workshop seems really limited to me..if I'm only going to have like 2 choices (bio vs mech, cheap vs $$) why make me design it?

Q: any way to improve the water hexes ?

Doesn't. Only for a few special devices (there's one that gives healing to all units in the stack, I think). How much of the power the unit has in battle. For example, the default trooper has +25% against biological units and -25% against mechanical and power 2. So its power is 2.5 against biological and 1.5 against mechanical, with corresponding efficiencies.

As far as I know the tech tree is the same for everyone. I haven't noticed anything special.

I tend to edit units to suit them to jobs, exchanging devices or weapons.

Nothing for water.

You can give a stack of units orders to attack but they don't attack together, they attack individually. One might ask, "what's the purpose of attacking with a stack if I can just tell them to attack individually?" The advantage of selecting a group and attacking with one single attack command is that the odds before attacking will be calculated considering all the units. So you might lose a few, but you'll have an idea of whether or not you'll be able to win. Also, they will attack in the optimal order. The odds calculator will consider all the different bonuses (defense, city, fort, air, naval, rank) and will attack in the best order for you. "Best order" is arguable because if you want to ensure that your only air unit doesn't get hurt, then you would logically wait to attack with it... whereas the group attack might use it first if it's the most powerful and has the best odds of defeating the best enemy unit in the opposing stack. In this case, select all the units and then ctrl+click the aircraft to deselect it before attacking.

I don't know exactly what efficiency is referring to. I think is has to do with the "estimated casualties" which is also displayed. Good question.

They all have the same tech tree... for now. You never know what is planned in post-release patches (which we know are in the works... but we haven't heard anything about tech tree overhaul).

If they scrapped the workshop and automatically designed the units, there would be a lot of spam in the production window. Also, quite a few options open up later on; especially devices.

The water hex question has been asked many times. So far there's nothing.

I had a phone call while writing this and came back to find that dalves beat me to it! He always has good answers. Sorry for the repeats.

jdmillard wrote:I don't know exactly what efficiency is referring to. I think is has to do with the "estimated casualties" which is also displayed. Good question.

Definitely not that. I have seen estimates of troops against galeths. 0% chance of winning, but higher than 100% efficiency. Other similar situations too.

dalves wrote:

jdmillard wrote:I don't know exactly what efficiency is referring to. I think is has to do with the "estimated casualties" which is also displayed. Good question.

Definitely not that. I have seen estimates of troops against galeths. 0% chance of winning, but higher than 100% efficiency. Other similar situations too.

Maybe it has to do with damage inflicted vs damage sustained. If you have a plain, untrained colonial trooper with flamethrower against a galeth you will have 100% chance of death, but you will inflict more damage than you sustain thus giving you a high efficiency? Maybe?

I have just started a map and got three situations:

Troopers vs. XenoDrones (victory chance - 79%, estimated casualties - 86% vs. 100%):
2.0 with 75% bonus vs. 2.0 with 50% bonus: 117% efficiency.

Troopers vs. Galeth (victory chance - 0%, estimated casualties - 100% vs. 44%):
2.0 with 75% bonus vs. 8.0 with no bonus: 175% efficiency.

Troopers vs. Scite (victory chance - 100%, estimated casualties - 50% vs. 100%):
2.0 with 50% bonus vs. 2.0 with -25% bonus: 200% efficiency.

I well past my sleeping hour to make much sense of this, but damage comparison makes sense.

Sidenote: terrain can give a bonus, but be cautious. The estimates show the value of the terrain the unit is right now, not the terrain the unit will be when fighting.