Well, might as well give a few more tips since I've also been playing AC recently. For reference I'm playing on Thinker (2nd hardest difficulty) with thinker mod and stagnant research and I feel I can comfortably win most games with a bit of effort.
- Most important secret project is Weather Paradigm. Both for unlocking terraforming options early (this doesn't matter much for non-stagnant research since you'd get them fairly quickly anyway), and for the terraforming speed (which ends up mattering more for non-stagnant research because terraforming speed is the main limitation on getting bases profitable and strong and you have less total turns to do so in a faster game). Boreholes go on mineral/energy resources obviously and especially the minerals are a huge speedup for later SPs. Condensors are important since they bypass the starting 2-food cap anywhere you put them, and with pops taking 2 food each they are the only way to get a food surplus that will grow and make up for working more mineral/energy heavy tiles. I used to run a lot more forests but nowadays I'm finding even more terraformers and more time-intensive terraforming with only a few forests works better. Forests still give you easy minerals anywhere, just get the food from farm+condensors, which you want next to each other so the condensors boost each other. I generally run about 2 formers per base, sometimes 3, and upgrade to rover formers eventually.
- Every base comes with 2 units of free upkeep, which is equivalent to 2 minerals that the units would have used elsewhere. Of course you'll fairly quickly want a single unit for policing, but that's still 1 free mineral per turn ontop of what the base provides. Pods are only 30 minerals so colonies are going to pay off quickly and you should pretty much always ICS to some extent. My standard "ideal" layout is:
Code:
CFFFCFFFC
FBFBFBFBF
FFCFFFCFF
FBFBFBFBF
CFFFCFFFC
C = Colony, B = Borehole, F = Food (though early game you don't need all this food so some forests work). Crawl Food ASAP, work the boreholes and have everyone else be specialists. This gives every base 5 food tiles and 2 borehole tiles to work once the entire "grid" is laid out, which is a strong level of profitability (all those specialists and 2 boreholes) while not having too much eco damage that you're suffering aliens popping up every turn. Always keep in mind that specialists unlock at 5 pop, your goal is to get there and cover those 5 drones then all future pops are specialists that nicely ignore drone problems. Ideally you got Human Genome project or something so 1 talent will balance out 1 drone every time base grows. Of course don't be obsessively strict about base layout, establish bases further out to secure frontiers and minerals/food/energy resources before planting bases that have nothing around and will take 30 former turns to make good. Only the boreholes will disrupt your layout if you move them so plan around that.
- Sea bases are generally kind of shit since it's hard to get enough minerals with them. Sea squares are good though since you can get 3 food/3 energy quite easily. Just make one sea former early and have them do the outskirts of all your coastal bases. If you explore early and find a sea mineral tile absolutely put a base there early then farm/solar the rest, it'll be mega profitable. Remember that the increased cost of a foil colony pod is offset by getting a free recycling tanks at the sea bases. Eventually you only want energy and you either get that by mass seaborne energy collectors or raising the land to the highest elevation and doing mass collectors/Echelon mirrors. Crawl it all to your capital (or where you have the merchant exchange, and move your capital there).
- War is always kind of the easy way to win. The AI doesn't understand beelining to offensive military tech and also doesn't understand either mass upgrading units as soon as you get tech or going full war economy and having all of your 10-20 bases going all-in on conquering units. On top of this, being warlike is kind of a good thing diplomatically. AIs seem to get "angry" at you and try to pick fights and demand shit when you have a weak military while when you're strong and conquering someone that they probably don't like they'll all like you and try to cozy up with you. Trying to stay in a corner, mind your own business, and eco your way to victory is ironically the best way to get into wars. There is a threshold where all the AIs start hating you again because they are afraid of you being too strong and being about to win the game but for the most part this is too little too late, and if you make friends (by beating up on their enemies) before hand they tend to stick with you for a long time with a minimal amount of bribery. I don't *like* going 100% military and winning games that way because I like building and eco management, so I try to strike a balance, but just know that if you go like 10% military 90% eco you're setting yourself up for failure.
-If you want to abuse capturing mind worms for early warfare, try to use them immediately. Your chance to capture new mind worms is based on your planet rating and how many you already have, so the faster you use them up the sooner you'll get new ones. If you don't want to fight then use them to patrol the fungus.
