Moon or Mars

[Seraph]

Is it better to start a few habs on the moon, or to skip the moon and save your boost exclusively for Mars? You waste so much boost on getting both a moon base and earth orbital hab with a space dock for space construction. Moon mining sites are terrible compared to mars. Has anyone done the math to see which will get you more resources/good mining sites in the long run?

[Mistfox]

Skip moon AND Earth habs.

[ulzgoroth]

Why would you even want an Earth orbital construction hab at that point?

Moon is potentially good, but iffy if it will be a maintenance boost sink.

[Asherogar]

Yeah, Moon is almost 100% skip. Rush for Advanced Chemical Rocketry and Solid Core Fission Systems (Nuclear Freighters) to get massive discounts on boost and bonuses to boost production (if you start in nations with no or little boost). Grab site on Mars with balanced resources (priority on Basic Metals) and send hab + mine + fission pile here. For a long time you don't need boost anymore, so grab a few other good sites, but build them up only when you have enough raw resources (building time would be 90 or 60 days).

This is the solid option that works always, regardless of any rng.

Also you don't need any Earth habs or docks to build in space. You need Construction Module, but it needed only for habs themselves and works only in the panetary system it's built i.e. if you build one on Mars, you can build habs with raw materials on Mars, it's orbit and it's moons.

You're building habs around Earth only when you set up your space economy, so they don't put a massive boost tax on you and only when you unlocked tier 2 space habs (tier 1 is prone to capture by enemy councilors)

[utilityguy]

You want all your Earth habitats to be INSIDE LOW EARTH ORBITS that have the [INTERFACE] designation, as that is what allows your Scientific labs and nanofactories to give you bonuses in Economy, Military, etecetera (Up to 30%).

Moon only has two Mining zone that's worth the trouble, the first one being the mining zone that is self-sufficient, and thus allows you to launch a mars colony from space--without the need of boost. The other being the mining lot that gives you the highest return of Fission on the moon, as it's one of the best fission mines in the solar system available to you for... well, the next hundred hours or so lol.

Mars, eh... It's decent for what you get. A great shame that you still need boost if you get Mars up to 50,000 population, as the Tourism habitats still require it for non-earth and moon locations. Which stinks, a lot, as the boost requirement is the only thing keeping the tourism habitats from being better than nano-factories, when it comes to money generation.

[Bahrman74]

To my mind it really depends on what's on thew moon. If there's decent water and or volitiles to go with some metals I'll grab them, otherwise I save up for Mars then Mercury.

[Fairin the Drakitty]

*me sitting here wondering*

"Both, the answer is both, screw letting the AI factions having nice things"

in my first game to completion the AI stole all of the moon first leaving me with no option but to take mars, which i took the best places on mars.

and within a week the entire planet filled with their garbage. took me months to clean up.

[Grognerd]

It depends on the Moon sites that get generated, really.

[Badger BrownCoat]

I'm not debating any of the responses-
and there's a near identical thread I just tagged to this one-
but if i may add:
i think of them as "stepping stones" useful-
thus - like boost- not near as important once you're "up there"- and the importance of boost totally changes.
that's my 2 cents, minus inflation; factored by bein' dumb as box of moon rocks.

Originally posted by eqit/PS:

but DO NOT bring that glowing green moon rock home. "spoiler"

plays the song in background.

[BanDHMO]

I've seen several threads like this, and what's rarely mentioned that I wish I knew as a new player is that ONLY PRODUCING SOME SPACE RESOURCES IS USELESS. You need all of them to build in space, otherwise you are still doing everything from Earth, as there's no such thing as partially paying with space resources. If you have a lot of Water, but no Metal, you can't do a project that needs both.

So with that in mind, I'd only for the Moon now if I could have a couple of bases that produce all the resources between the two of them. Otherwise, just wait for Mars, it should be easier to find such spots there.

The only arguable exception I can see is, there might be a really good Fissiles site on the Moon, which you might want to grab for the future, but don't develop anything on it for now. The cost of a single Hub to the Moon isn't that great in the grand scheme of things and probably won't make or break your Mars efforts anymore than RNG already will.

[fortydayweekend]

Another point that rarely gets mentioned is that you don't have to win any races, a single ship with marines can take any of the good sites only a little bit later on. It might not be the best strategy but you definitely don't have to panic (or restart!) if you miss that 15 fissiles site

[Badger BrownCoat]

I'm too busy in an Epic Meme Battle Public Relations campaign vs the Academy to really respond/ read well;
but i wanted to +1 both of those above this post;
and again bemoan people make new threads that getlost rather than use Proper Forum Etiquette of posting on extant threads.
I will only beat THAT particular skeleton of a horse to say, it DOES make it harder for the improvement of the game is every useful advice / suggestion is lost in a wall of threads.
glad I don't moderate or have to collate player feedback; I'd be annoyed.
but what do I know, surely never did any of that stuff.
Y'all keep those alien feet off my lawn <O

[AgaresOaks]

Originally posted by Asherogar:

Yeah, Moon is almost 100% skip. Rush for Advanced Chemical Rocketry and Solid Core Fission Systems (Nuclear Freighters) to get massive discounts on boost and bonuses to boost production (if you start in nations with no or little boost). Grab site on Mars with balanced resources (priority on Basic Metals) and send hab + mine + fission pile here. For a long time you don't need boost anymore, so grab a few other good sites, but build them up only when you have enough raw resources (building time would be 90 or 60 days).

This is the solid option that works always, regardless of any rng.

This is pretty RNG, you're basically completely committed to 2-3 sites on Mars to start because you need ALL the resources on one site to develop stuff on Mars (technically speaking, you could do without fissiles and get it on your second site, but it's finicky and even more prone to bad things happening) and if you lose the mine or your power to an event before things get started, you need to wait for like a year and a half to send that module up again.

Generally, the optimal thing to do is to research Mission to Mars first, send the probe there, then while it's on the way get space mining and Mission to the Moon and get a mining outpost on Luna first. The idea is to get enough metals to use that to build a couple mines on Mars.

If you can get a small excess of water OR volatiles (don't need both) to get to the point where you can get enough for a mine, it's REALLY cheap boost-wise to get a mine to Mars (like 9 boost with nuclear freighters and interplanetary rockets) and if you can't it's only twice as much. The plus is you can usually get fissiles on the moon as well, so you technically don't need to get that when selecting sites on Mars. After sending up a couple mines (for some redundancy) you can just send up outpost cores and grab the primo sites (and even the bad ones eventually to sell to other factions) with the idea to build them out later after the mines have arrived on Mars.

Exodus might have a different opening it wants to do on account of having so much boost from its org. (silly things like boosting up and boost maintaining platforms with xeno labs to rush the org and then going from there)

[ulzgoroth]

Originally posted by fortydayweekend:

Another point that rarely gets mentioned is that you don't have to win any races, a single ship with marines can take any of the good sites only a little bit later on. It might not be the best strategy but you definitely don't have to panic (or restart!) if you miss that 15 fissiles site

I see no downside of that strategy.

Well, okay, restrain youself about armed robbery against factions you're trying to be non-hostile with. But eventually that stops being an option anyway.

[DarkestOnion]

Skip Moon. Skip Mars. Get Mercury and get Ceres. The AI/RNG will mess with everything you put in Earth orbit. It will ignore everything beyond the Earth-Luna system until the end game typically

[Damedius]

So if the moon has fissiles I would at least hold the spot. You also want water at least so you aren't paying so much for boost in my opinion.