Ok, share with me folks...

[asylumdown]

I've found most montis (at least the ones I've grown) to be practically bullet proof. Even when most of my expensive acros were dying, my montiporas doubled or tripled in size.

I've also found that the faster the growth rate of the acropora, the faster they are damaged by unfavorable swings in parameters. My slowest growers have all survived my year of tank hell relatively unscathed.

As others have said, stable alk is absolutely critical. How you do that doesn't matter, but if you dose by hand you would need to have the diligence and attention of a robot to keep up with it with even one or two good sized colonies in the tank. A few days of neglect can cause damage that takes from a few months to a year to fully recover from. A doser or calcium reactor is critical IMO.

As a general rule - the more expensive the specimen, the faster it will die if something bad happens. Probably the main reason there's still a difference between "designer" acros and the more common things everyone has.

Finally - I think you're better off going straight to the things you know you want than filling your tank with "learner" pieces. Montipora capricornis is a great testing coral, but it can become as weedy and annoying as the ugliest of mushrooms, and it's next to impossible to remove. At the least, don't put tiny frags of it everywhere in your tank because you can't bear to throw the pieces you accidentally break off out. Be ruthless.

[asylumdown]

There's not really many "stay away from..." Sps corals. If you have conditions that an acropora valida or lokani will grow in, you can grow just about any of them.

A great way to test how good your tank is for them is to buy a frag from a tank where the colours are stable and awesome, and see what it does in your tank over 3 months. If it bleaches out, you might have too much light (but it might just need to adjust), if it browns out and loses all its pop, you might have too little light or a nutrient issue. It can take up to 6 months for a coral to figure out what it's going to look like in your tank and really take off, especially if it's fresh off the plane from one of the big aquaculture facilities in the Pacific. I had some Walt Smith pieces that barely grew and shifted colours every two months for a year before they decided what they were and started growing fast.