How fast should I build MC early game?

[Gingerbread Conductor]

Playing Initiative, I grabbed Kazakhstan for the early boost, Canada which did a space program, and the US. I've kept the US growing steadily and have just won the race to Mars. Then I check the faction comparisons. I have 12 MC. Lots of others have 30+. How? Should I have been having the US slam points into MC? So far, I've used all my MC while the computer is waiting on boost.

More generally, do I want to have an MC lead? Or will a solid economy / science get me more advantages in the long run?

[TheDeadlyShoe]

you want to hard prioritize boost until you get a mars mine started. Only then should you start considering boosting MC. Although, some nations dont provide much boost, and unused MC does have a slightly beneficial money/research effect.

[gimmethegepgun]

The reason others have much more MC than you is that small nations, particularly the ones in the EU since they don't need to complete Space Program, are much more efficient at making MC than large nations are, because each CP of a nation costs as much CP cap as the IP output of the nation, so nations with more CPs cost more for the same amount of IPs.

[Ericus1]

Just as a point of reference, in my current game Turkey costs 60 CP and has 14 IP to spend, whereas my EU costs 240 CP and has 35 IP to spend. Do the math and you see that Turkey is about .25 IP/CP and EU is about .14/CP. So for fixed assets like MC you can see how 4 Turkey-sized countries could build more MC than 1 EU sized countries for the same CP cost.

[Gingerbread Conductor]

Thanks. I may do the scramble for Europe next game.

[LorDC]

Originally posted by Gingerbread Conductor:

More generally, do I want to have an MC lead? Or will a solid economy / science get me more advantages in the long run?

In general, MC is the only valuable thing Earth has. Science is useful but it is more efficient to pump MC and build science in space. Boost and armies have their uses but there is enough of both present at the start of the game to not have to build anymore.

[no one]

You want to end up having and MC lead eventually. As other people have pointed out, you should prioritise boost in the early game to get your space economy going. I do a similar strategy as you do, I grab the USA and then Kazakhstan and pump boost until I have a decent income. Then I start moving into the EU or other nations and start building MC.

In my latest run, I switched the USA to build MC on half of the CP's since like 2025, and in 2045 I ended up having like 70 MC just from there.

I was also behind on MC compared to the AI in the beginning, but that' really easy to make up. Just look for countries where the AI has already built up MC and crackdown + purge them out of there.

[DaedalusSA]

My opinion is grabbing the big nations in the EU first is a better idea than to go for the USA ASAP, you'll start to combine the EU and while that's happening you're also building tons of MC, I'd suggest getting France, Germany, Italy and the UK as well as Kazakhstan while doing your best to get as much CP as possible and only after that go after the US, i find that the AI is really bad at getting into it so as long as you combine the biggest bits of the EU early you'll be able to grab it as well, especially once you get the Transnational Coordination tech for that 40 CP as well as grabbing your fifth agent.

If you do this you'll be swimming in MC as long as you get some max Admin people to Advise to speed it up as well.

Then it's up to you if you want to grab all the tiny nations or try to save up for one of the other meganations like China before the AI takes it.

[[BFs]Karaya 1]

Ive recently jumped back into the game, and in my first game i was always so far ahead of everyone in colonizing, but now the AI just absolutely giga spams everything and everything thats worth anything is immediately claimed and build on now. I guess ill have to build ships with marines this time to get a good mining setup... I was really surprised.

I went for Russia and Kazakhstan plus arabian peninsula to start since i wanted to build a giga caliphate again. My mistake :D .

[Pawleus]

Originally posted by Gingerbread Conductor:

More generally, do I want to have an MC lead? Or will a solid economy / science get me more advantages in the long run?

Solid economy/science on Earth will get you more advantages in the short run. In the longer run MC is much better but ultimately both science and MC on Earth are only needed to kickstart your space industries because they can very fast eclipse anything you can have on Earth.

Originally posted by LorDC:

In general, MC is the only valuable thing Earth has. Science is useful but it is more efficient to pump MC and build science in space. Boost and armies have their uses but there is enough of both present at the start of the game to not have to build anymore.

This is only true when you limit yourself to stay small in space. You can win the game much, much sooner when you don't limit yourself in this way because you can develop then so fast that you can't keep up with pumping MC on Earth even if you do nothing else there. Without limiting yourself it's much more efficient to have space as the main source of both MC and science and when you are solidly established there focus again Earth on Boost alone as it's the only source of it and you definitely won't have enough of it at the start of the game to maintain your large space industries.

[DaedalusSA]

Earth science is very good because of how low cost it is compared to actually building stations, it's cost effective to boost that as much as you can if possible.

That said, eventually you'll reach the very expensive techs that Earth science alone won't be able to research quickly enough which leads to making a lot of the various Labs and Skunkworks/Foundries to boost it to acceptable levels again.

MC *can* be gotten from the very expensive Operations/Command Centers but those are so power-hungry you have to put them near the Sun for massive solar power boosts otherwise they take up too much space just to power them that getting more MC built during the early game from your nations are just more useful and cheaper to get.