Welcome to the game.
Bromstarzan wrote:So, rule of thumb: don't use premades? Maybe that's were I got a little confused
Not at all. Most premades are good in a bunch of situations. Also, just tweaking some of them will give you what you need, until you learn how to roll your own from scratch.
Some small tips which weren't clear for me my first times around:
- The upgrades to Industrial Centers are just techs you research. You don't have to build/produce anything extra so they kick in and double, quadruple, etc the boni.
- Both production and research queues have a cost *and* time requirement. So, you can see something as, say, costing 100 PP (or RP) & 4 turns. That means it will always take at least 4 turns to be produced (or researched), no matter if you already have the 100 points to begin with - it will take only 25 points per turn from your pool. If you have less than 25 points available in a turn, it will still progress, taking as much points as you have available. Small caveat: if you spend, in this same hypothetical production/research, 3 turns putting 1 point in it, you will not be able to pour 97 points on it on the 4th turn - the 25/turn limit will still be in place.
- Supply lines are calculate primarily by counting starlanes jump from the colony they come from. The meter is not visible by default, you have to expand a section in the planets panel to be able to see it. That said, they are always counted individually for each colony and they don't accumulate, so you will probably want to boost supply (eg. by building space elevators, or colonizing tiny/small planets), for colonies in the fringes of your empire. It does no good for you, and most of the time will be a waste of resources, to try to boost supply in planets/colonies in the core of your empire.
- The Objects view is your best friend. It has a bunch of filter options which are actually quite handy. It's awkward to deal with, but I think it's already amazing as it is, lacking only some capacity to "remember"/save its filters. The width of its columns may be adjusted by editing a special section of settings.xml (which is located in FreeOrion's directory of you home/AppData folder).
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