Postby silverkitty23 » Sat Oct 28, 2017 8:09 am
Sadly, while factories, farms, markets, and labs all have 4 levels of improvement via technology, mines only have 2. The tech to upgrade your mines is "Industrial Automation" - which also enables the "mining" production for planets which doubles the metal output on the planet each turn. Two general pieces of advice:
First, any planet that
a) can't get to population 14 or so (where it can run several factories or several labs) that isn't mineral poor, and
b) any planet that is mineral rich or has precious minerals
should probably be a "mining" planet with like 1 farm and nothing else but mines.
Secondly, the AI seems to count raw number of ships rather than weighting them by size when it determines fleet strength - so you can scare off an aggressive AI by having a jillion destroyers or light cruisers - so you don't need a huge metal output (and especially not a huge metal stockpile) to get a fleet big enough to keep the neighbors from constantly declaring war on you.