Planetary management

From Galactic Fleets Wiki

Tutorial: “Planetary management”

You have set up your sector; built your “main four” OP’s, and are wondering- now what? Now comes planetary management. Your main objective is to maintain a positive cash flow. This is accomplished by keeping population growth a top priority. In two and three planet systems, this can be as simple as keeping your planets supplied with a steady flow of food and water. In a four planet system, it is a little tougher, but still doable. Your “support” planet should always be your “main” planet, as it has the largest resident population, thus will have the largest potential growth. This will keep your “secondary” planets food and water needs manageable.

The “Planets” tab is your friend, learn to use it daily to check your status, and progress. The default view is the “info” view; this view shows planet name, location, and available turns. The second view is the one we will deal with in depth here, the “population” view. This view shows the current total civilians, workers, and troops at each of your planets, these numbers are fairly self explanatory. The last few figures are what we will deal with here. The food, water, and growth numbers; the food and water results are your total available resources at each planet. The growth is the key to your success. The growth is how much new population will be produced at that planet per hour if the available food and water are sufficient to support the growth. There are a few important things to remember while managing your population growth.

• Multiplying your growth by 24, 48 etc. will indicate how many food and water are needed to sustain that growth for 1, 2 etc. days. Note that this will change slightly every few hours, as your population grows. Use this figure to plan your resource movements between planets.
• The greater the resident civilian population on a planet, the higher the growth. The greater the planets approval, the higher the growth.
• If either available resource reaches 0 and there is still positive available resource of the other type, your population WILL use the excess with NO growth.

If you have set up your system to have a “support” planet (see Becoming self sufficient), dedicate as many turns as you can stand to generating food and water. If you keep your populations on your secondary planets low, they will be much easier to support. Over your first few days, transport about 20,000 food and water to each of your secondary planets. This should be roughly enough resources to sustain them for several days without a re-supply. Then concentrate on stockpiling as much as possible on your main planet. You need not spend ALL of your main planets turns on food and water, but I suggest at least half of each days turns be dedicated to food and water production. Once you have at least 100,000 of each stockpiled, you can concentrate on other resources if you like.

Once you are confident you have enough food and water to support a steady growth for several days, you can begin concentrating on additional planetary resources. Each planet type generates a higher or lower percentage of each resource type. For example, Desert planets produce greater amounts of silicon and spice than glacial planets. Likewise pelagic planets produce fair amounts of polymer. To obtain stock levels desired without excessive turn usage, you may need to transport workers to your other planets for optimal turns to resource ratios.

Polymer should be your second priority for worker production. Polymer is needed to build and upgrade out posts, (OP’s), to manufacture ships, and in manufacturing Armory products. Large amounts of polymer will eventually be needed. Of lesser demand is Helium II and Silicon. Silicon is used in the manufacture of electronics, and fair amounts should be stockpiled for ready use. Helium is used in ship building, and low stock levels should be sufficient for now. Lastly is spice. Spice is an important resource for production of medicines, and liquor.

Once you have built your Bio-factory, you will need to procure spice in order to produce any Bio-goods. A fair amount of medicines should be produced and kept on hand at all planets at all times. Disease will ravage your planets periodically, and is extremely detrimental to both your population, and your approval ratings. I suggest stocking 1000 medicines at all secondary planets, and at least 4000 at your main planet. This should keep you in a fair stock for several days. Monitor your stock levels as your populations grow, as disease will strike greater numbers of civilians on more heavily populated planets, thus requiring greater numbers of medicine to cure. After a supply of medicine is on hand, you can produce liquor if you like. Liquor can be given to planetary populations to increase approval, which is important early on to increase population growth, and as your cash flow will be limited at first- making lowering taxes to increase approval costly.