I just posted my Beginner's Guide to Colonies for Age of Wonders: Planetfall on youtube:
In the video I tackle these 4 question that new players may have about colonies:
1) What sectors should I send my colonizer too?
2) What sectors should I annex?
3) What jobs should I assign my pops too?
4) What should I build?
My written answers to the questions can be here:
1)
- As you look around, you may be tempted to try to send your colonizer to the sectors with the most resource icons on it, which actually provides no benefit to the colony in the current build of the game.
- Some icons are more important than others. In this game, it is far more important to look at the large locations icons, which represent landmarks, visiting sites, resource nodes and hazards than the resource icons when trying to pick a location to colonize. I recommend colonizing as close to as many diamond shaped icons as you can while avoiding the triangle shaped ones, until you have the tech to remove hazards.
- Colonies produce a lot more resources in the late game if their sectors share the same climate, and terrain, but sectors can be transferred between colonies in one turn, which means it is very easy to match those feature up as soon as that starts to be useful.
- With that being said, I do like colonizing around the river feature, as it produces +10 food income as soon as Environmental Conditioning is researched. (good for early colony growth, at only 280 research)
- I tend to build my first few colonies within 2 sectors of my HQ, so that they are easily defendable w/o an escort. After the 4th or 5th colony I feel more comfortable sending out colonizers with escorts as wasting a colonizer is a massive setback.
- each colony is limited to 5 sectors, and you can’t annex more than 2 sectors from the center of a colony, which means your colonies can afford to be close to each other.
- a few locations provide exploitation bonuses, which you should colonize nearby, but not on top of
- colonize on sectors with locations that do not have exploitation bonuses, like the cosmite spatial rift, or the celestian artifact. Some sites are better than others. Most sites >> teleport station (+5 energy)
2)
- The first thing I like to look for when annexing a sector is landmarks
- If you can get one inside your space, you can get a prebuilt exploitation sector, which provides a large passive income.
- After I check for landmarks, I check for some of the better sites, like the cosmite spatial rift, or the celestian artifact
- And if I can’t find any locations I would like to annex, then I tend to try to annex sectors to colonies that have the same terrains and climates as the colony, so that they can specialize in a terrain and a climate. Specialization upgrades the exploitation level in sectors will the relevant features, which provides fairly minor bonuses, especially when considering that specialization has to be researched and then built inside of each individual colony. Arguably, not even worth investing the research and production into.
- NPC Dwellings count as Level 5 sector exploitations. So setting up a nearby colony and either conquering or integrating them is a much straightforward way of getting a level 5 sector exploitation
3)
- Each colony gets 4 free jobs, and then every other job is either provided by a landmark, or an exploited sector
- The best way to assign each pop is to try to reduce the estimated time to complete a task, whether that is to grow a population, build a building, or research.
- Keep in mind that growing your population quickly in the early game can be worth it, as not only can more pops can produce more resources, they can annex and exploit more sectors.
- Production can be rushed on one task per turn at a rate of 2 energy per unit of production (so it can be worth leaving a bit of production if you need a worker to grow the colony a turn quicker)
4)
- what you build depends a lot of your approach, and is quite debatable.
- some say you should go for the early food, but a lot of sites provide a lot of food, so I like to focus on production
- after that I tend to build units so that I can clear out sites with less risk of a unit dying, while also getting a lot of units a bit of easy experience.
In the video I tackle these 4 question that new players may have about colonies:
1) What sectors should I send my colonizer too?
2) What sectors should I annex?
3) What jobs should I assign my pops too?
4) What should I build?
My written answers to the questions can be here:
1)
- As you look around, you may be tempted to try to send your colonizer to the sectors with the most resource icons on it, which actually provides no benefit to the colony in the current build of the game.
- Some icons are more important than others. In this game, it is far more important to look at the large locations icons, which represent landmarks, visiting sites, resource nodes and hazards than the resource icons when trying to pick a location to colonize. I recommend colonizing as close to as many diamond shaped icons as you can while avoiding the triangle shaped ones, until you have the tech to remove hazards.
- Colonies produce a lot more resources in the late game if their sectors share the same climate, and terrain, but sectors can be transferred between colonies in one turn, which means it is very easy to match those feature up as soon as that starts to be useful.
- With that being said, I do like colonizing around the river feature, as it produces +10 food income as soon as Environmental Conditioning is researched. (good for early colony growth, at only 280 research)
- I tend to build my first few colonies within 2 sectors of my HQ, so that they are easily defendable w/o an escort. After the 4th or 5th colony I feel more comfortable sending out colonizers with escorts as wasting a colonizer is a massive setback.
- each colony is limited to 5 sectors, and you can’t annex more than 2 sectors from the center of a colony, which means your colonies can afford to be close to each other.
- a few locations provide exploitation bonuses, which you should colonize nearby, but not on top of
- colonize on sectors with locations that do not have exploitation bonuses, like the cosmite spatial rift, or the celestian artifact. Some sites are better than others. Most sites >> teleport station (+5 energy)
2)
- The first thing I like to look for when annexing a sector is landmarks
- If you can get one inside your space, you can get a prebuilt exploitation sector, which provides a large passive income.
- After I check for landmarks, I check for some of the better sites, like the cosmite spatial rift, or the celestian artifact
- And if I can’t find any locations I would like to annex, then I tend to try to annex sectors to colonies that have the same terrains and climates as the colony, so that they can specialize in a terrain and a climate. Specialization upgrades the exploitation level in sectors will the relevant features, which provides fairly minor bonuses, especially when considering that specialization has to be researched and then built inside of each individual colony. Arguably, not even worth investing the research and production into.
- NPC Dwellings count as Level 5 sector exploitations. So setting up a nearby colony and either conquering or integrating them is a much straightforward way of getting a level 5 sector exploitation
3)
- Each colony gets 4 free jobs, and then every other job is either provided by a landmark, or an exploited sector
- The best way to assign each pop is to try to reduce the estimated time to complete a task, whether that is to grow a population, build a building, or research.
- Keep in mind that growing your population quickly in the early game can be worth it, as not only can more pops can produce more resources, they can annex and exploit more sectors.
- Production can be rushed on one task per turn at a rate of 2 energy per unit of production (so it can be worth leaving a bit of production if you need a worker to grow the colony a turn quicker)
4)
- what you build depends a lot of your approach, and is quite debatable.
- some say you should go for the early food, but a lot of sites provide a lot of food, so I like to focus on production
- after that I tend to build units so that I can clear out sites with less risk of a unit dying, while also getting a lot of units a bit of easy experience.
