The Horatio/Strategy

The Horatio are Horatio, and intend to expand until all the galaxy is as gorgeous as they are.

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**Strategy**

### Early Game Weaknesses

The three major early game problems with Horatio are:

* 1) Horatio Prime is Mediterranean, and therefore will not greatly benefit from Xeno Industrial Infrastructure. which for most other factions is a major source of .
* 2) Horatio's early corvettes are awful as they only have four slots, and cost an extra 20% to build.
* 3) You're probably going to want to splice your Z'vali population and any other populations you find early on, which can take a toll on your development for the first 30 or so turns.

Here are some ways to handle these early game woes:

* In terms of , colonizing other planets in your home system will offset some of the loss from Prime being only hot. Hardship Ready, the  force law, allows for colonization of any planet type other than gas. Although this will still be slower than if you had started on Raia or Koyasil, colonizing two more planets, assuming they are not temperate or fertile, on your home system will make up the difference.
* Just defend. If you spawn next to an aggressive neighbor (at higher difficulties, nearly everyone is aggressive), then pick up defensive military buildings in the tech tree and build them. Horatio excels at producing , and can funnel it into system defense early. Try to avoid provoking other players until you can produce hunter class ships, which are very reasonable in strength.
* FOOD! See later section for the importance of  for Horatio, but just remember not to skip over those  buildings. Splicing early might seem like too much of a set back, but if you want to maintain that happiness in a dictatorship and get the ball rolling on your own population fast, best try to stay as monocultural as possible.

### Food

Food is what Horatio are all about, and as the game goes on, it turns into one of the most efficient uses of  in the game for any faction. Food is important early game anyway to get your population growing, and in late game when you can covert it to . Horatio get the added benefit that 5% of their  output is added to their . This isn't affected by using the biofuel industry conversion. So for a late game Horatio who can easily have systems that produce 2000  (far more than anyone else) they will also produce 2000 , and 100 , just in virtue of producing that . It is the colossal  production twinned with biofuel and their pop bonus that partly contributes to how strong they are late game, as that  can in turn be converted to either  or . You outscience the Sophons, outdust the Lumeris, and outproduce the United Empire at this point. Just remember to make as many  buildings on your systems as possible, first for growth, then for , then for .

### Splicing

The other thing Horatio is all about - gene splicing. In a nutshell, you kill non-Horatios in your empire to produce better Horatios. In effect this means that you will slow your growth down (but remember, you produce a hell of a lot of ) somewhat, but means you will eventually end up with the most  intensive population in the game, eclipsing The Vodyani and Riftborn. The best bit is that not only do your pops produce more, but you will probably have more of them than anyone else. The general rule I apply for splicing is: do it whenever you can. Leaving other faction populations in your empire for some population bonuses later will only have you wishing that those populations were just Horatios who have a much bigger  output. The only exceptions to splicing ASAP is when you want to wait for a better population type to splice (any population type with  or  is a priority). So you could splice the 4 Kalgeros now, or you could wait until your 3 Epistis turns to 4. In these cases, wait and splice the Epistis first, as they give you  (and ).

Make sure you use population boosters, and move population around when the numbers required for splicing get higher. Assuming you've reached the 300  threshold, a population grows twice as fast when spread across two systems than it does just sitting on one, so don't be afraid to move them about to get the splices quicker, especially if the space has just been freed up from a previous splice.

Due to your growth rate, and laws (next section) there is pretty much never any reason not splice everything you can. The non- splices are often more useful than they appear. The  can be used to vastly go over your expansion cap, and the  and ground damage splices will turn all your systems into heavy fortresses.

### Laws and Government

Keep  in your senate at least for the entire game. Horatio gets two special versions of the  laws. The first gives you 2%  per splice (second-to-last law), the second 2%  (final law). This doesn't sound like much until you also take into account you can switch to republic and double that to 4% each. With ten splices you are increasing your empire's  and  (the two most important resources) by 40%. With the first  law that gives 10%  bonus per anomaly, per planet, plus all the other bonuses mentioned earlier, this combination of laws, government, along with everything else means some of your systems produce absurd amounts of whatever you desire.

### Summary

Note that everything that makes Horatio strong requires build up. Splicing takes time both in acquiring the population types and growing them. You wont see those final laws until around turn 80. And those big techs that benefit you more than anyone else are all in the late game. So play safe and defensively, don't paint a target on your head, or try to expand too fast, and don't expect to be crushing opponents even in the mid game, like you would as the United Empire or Cravers. Eventually everything you have will be bigger and better.