Leveling up your homeworld?

[Proteus]

Are there any good reasons to level your homeworld up to higher levels (like 3-5) instead of waiting for the discovery of a planet with a scalable resource (like FTL Crystals or Quartz) and using your resources to level this planet up instead?

[KaidenOZ]

other then turning it into a cashcow? not really. with its starting resorces its quiet easy to level up and higherlevel planets have a better income. so i do it just for the extra cash it produces easily.

[Proteus]

Hm ... I can understand this for levels up to level 2 ... but from level 3 upwards a planet needs so many resources that IMHO it should be carefully planned which planets you want to level up to this level or higher.

Even more so Level 5, which needs so many other planets for support that, unless you are playing really huge universes with 300 planets upwards, you may only be able to afford 1-2 of them.

So I guess, if the only reason for leveling up your homeworld to level 3+ is just about earning money a little bit earlier, I interpret this as "no good reason for me to level up your homeworld".
(a good reason for me personally would be, for example, that there are any special attributes of the homeworld which I don´t know of (that increase by leveling up) that make the homeworld at level 3-5 be as good (or even better) as a level 3-5 world with a scalable resource).

[Jambie Lionheart]

Personally I level up my homeworld early ingame as quickly as possible in general that is. But sometimes if I get titanium (or another building resource) as a starting resource (in my starter system) I'll sometimes level up that one instead. (because it works well in that I can divert the most resources to that one world with the least effort, AND it saves me the cost of creating an extra water planet. Unless I want to level up both planets. *shrugs* Down side is that you have to switch all of your production to the other planet.

Actually there is one reason I can think of to keep your homeplanet as your main. I dunnno if anyone else has noticed but I tend to find the homeworld handles foriegn pressure better than any other. I never need any metropolii for my home world to sustain it's pressure.

[Jorn Stones]

As the Mono, I always aim to make my homeworld a primary production center, usually using the unbotanium on either a scalable resource, or on a local asteroid field resource. But this doesnt work for the other races.
There is also the budget option that gives you labor.. on your homeworld.

[Proteus]

Originally posted by CtMurphy:

...

Actually there is one reason I can think of to keep your homeplanet as your main. I dunnno if anyone else has noticed but I tend to find the homeworld handles foriegn pressure better than any other. I never need any metropolii for my home world to sustain it's pressure.

Interesting ... your posting just made me compare the size of the homeworld in my current game with that of other wolrds .. and you are right ... the homeworld is larger than any other world in my empire (at least aong those I looked at ... with the homeworld having 18*11 tiles whereas my biggest other planet just has 17*10.
(of course this doesn´t take into acount that other planets may have the chance to increase their number of workable tiles by making moons usable (which the homeworld generally doesn´t seem to possess)