Other than building mines, of course. I assume there are things you can build or research?

I just ran into an AI fleet of TWENTY ONE SHIPS. So I'm thinking I need to step up my ship-building big time and I can't do that with the less than one thousand metal I have now.

Any suggestions?

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.

The Metal shortage seems to be a conscious limitation on empires so it is not possible to spam ships with high production that easily

Especially if you want to step up production of defensive star-bases, you really need a large supply of Metal

That is why there are no additional research for mines beyond tier 2: You need to decide what you need more of long-term on your planets: Markets of Mines (labs, factories and Farms are more easily decided upon given the planets attributes)

Due to this mechanic Metal is a way more important resource then money, so you really need to think about how you are going to go about spending it form beginning to end

Thanks, this is very helpful.

So if 'industrial automation' is the first tier for mine upgrades, what's the second?

There are two techs that help in Metal production:
1. Industrial Automation upgrade Tier I Mines to Tier II (There are no other Tiers, and starting Tier is: I)
2. I couldn't find it on the Research tree right now sorry:) There is a tech that enables the project increasing existing Metal production though

One of the techs gives you the mine metal queue filler. Functions like the increase population or research science items. So you dedicate a planet to mining, start with one factory and maybe one farm. Fill the remaining slots with mines and then once its completely built. Set it on the mine metal queue filler and forget about it.

You should aim for having many metal mining planets. Some amount of dedicated science research planets. And a small number of ship building planets with lots of manufacturing.

Industrial Automation gives you the tier 2 mine and the Mining production activity.

Am I correct in my understanding that adorable little Tarib also produce metal? Or is that a secret? (Or am I wrong?)

akkamaddi wrote:Am I correct in my understanding that adorable little Tarib also produce metal? Or is that a secret? (Or am I wrong?)

They don't, but they probably should.

I just bought 500 metal from the Phidi. We're in an alliance now so I'm thinking I'll be able to do that again.

Arioch wrote:

akkamaddi wrote:Am I correct in my understanding that adorable little Tarib also produce metal? Or is that a secret? (Or am I wrong?)

They don't, but they probably should.

I ask because of this, from RACES.lua, but it looks like you are correct:
They are the only race with "metal_production". I tried changing it to 100, which if it worked as I expected I would be swimming in metal, but I did not see a significant change in production. (Unless 1 is the only valid value?)