Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth
"* "Research tech that gives Affinity (IMHO Superiority is best but the others are good too), build cheap military units, upgrade them, crush your foes.
- Wide is much better than tall. Internal trade routes can generate such a stupid amount of food and production for your cities that your actual location doesn't matter too much. Since there's no luxury resources, you can plop cities more or less wherever you feel like it. Hell if there's no actual resources somewhere, there are techs in the lower right quadrant of the tech web that let you build satellites that create natural resources out of thin air on tiles that don't have them already.
- The AI and notifications are also pretty bad. There's a depressingly high chance that you can start your 'win the game' machine/building/whatever for a traditional science victory and literally nobody will give a shit. The flipside to this is that the AI won't get off its ass to stop another AI from turning their win device on, so you have to keep an eye on the AIs too.
- You can go somewhat tall, though the power of traderoutes does mean it is a bit of a self-imposed handicap to do so. If you want mega-cities, you have to pay a lot of attention to food, because health from buildings is local health, and the game stupidly doesn't tell you this. That means a city can only ever contribute <population> health, even if you have much more in it from buildings, so you want to pump them up fast to avoid being permanently unhealthy. The rest is wasted. Health from virtues is global, so look towards picking up one of those (there is one for large armies in might, one on prosperity of course and one at the bottom of the industry tree if memory serves.)
- When founding new cities, I generally look for strategic resources, especially the 3 affinity ones. Securing a big deposit of those, or 2-3 smaller ones, is usually a good enough reason to drop a city. Titanium, oil and geothermal is less important, though you will want at least a few nodes of Titanium for end game satellites and units pretty much regardless of your path. Oil is mostly for orbital things, and geothermal grants you some extra energy, though you'll have to also search for the buildings that need it to make the most use of it. The AI likes to buy strategic resources, so sell them stuff you aren't using.
- For tech I tend to wait until I know which of the three affinities I am going for, and then rush a few levels of that to get better units. I've not played on the harder difficulties yet, but apart from that, it seems to work well enough to do that, and then just pick whatever you happen to need at the time, be that more production, energy or health etc.
- All the victories, except Domination, involves building a big expensive thing and waiting around for a lot of turns. Sometimes you can speed it up a bit, but you will have to wait a bit. The easy solution at that point is to just blob your army and pull it back to your core, leaving a token defense force in outlying cities. The AI isn't savvy enough to make deep strikes, and at that point the only way to really lose is if they got a headstart on you and started waiting earlier.
- The health counter at the top represents actual health you have in your empire. If you look at the city screens, you also see a health counter in each of those. All those get added together for the top counter, but if say you build a Clinic and a Pharmalab in a city (for a total of +3-ish health), but the city is only 1 pop, then you only get +1 health to your total counter until the city grows, but you still get the unhealthiness of having an extra city. The sweet spot is to have as much health in a city as it has pop, either from buildings or terrain improvements like Biowells. Note that Biowells only contribute health if the tile is being worked.