Share some wisdom with the new guy

[Critias]

Greetings fellow forum dwellers,
Your base are belong to...no wait thats from something else.
Ahem. I'm a newest and most humble (and peaceful, of course) member to join the galactic community, and I seek your guidance.

As a ruler of a budding space empire, I've been disappointed by the lack of any in depth information regarding this game. It seems that very few people actually know some of the finer intricacies involved in being an Imperator, and fewer still are willing to share them.

But perhaps some of you are more informed and open minded than the others? We shall see.


1. Where is the colony development level displayed? The Galactopedia info seems outdated in this aspect.. Is it the same or different from culture level? I have found forum posts where it both confirms and denies this assumption, so I have no idea what is going on there. Yet it is essential number for all of your empire income.
2. Does a colony get development bonuses from multiple wonders (it doesnt seem to work for me so far)? Or is it the same as with research bases (assuming I'm correct with this) and only the highest bonus is ever applied, so if for example I have wonders with +30% and +50%, I'd get +50% only?
4. Actually, am I correct in that only the best research base provides a bonus, and I can use all the rest as target practice to stop the lazy bastards from sucking up free government funds? What about resorts? Just blow them all up anyway?
3. Do other development boosting sources stack on top of that still - the small 5% racial bonus from goods, the ruins bonus (and what about ruins with wonders on top of them?), the ultra-rare resources bonus? What about multiple ultra-rare resources - up to a maximum of 3x90%? Because if the latter works, the multiple wonders should work as well. What about planet with max normal development, racial bonus, ruins, multiple wonders and multiple ultra-rare spices - basically, can I get the game breaking envy inspiring economy obliterating development level of 300+% with 90+% tax level on max pop world, all the while still keeping the drones happy at +15?
4. If only one wonder is effective, what is the best to have on the homeworld?
I believe that due to how income works in this game - basically 90-95% of your cash comes from taxes, and 95% of that comes from your homeworld - until you conquer and begin ruthlessly exploit the other poor aliens around you that is - the most effective wonder would be Holographic Network with its +100% local happiness, as you could then allow your population to escape reality in something like Space Sword Art Online 16 while you quietly take away all their material goods and basically suck them dry...and then some more on top of that.
On the other hand, I seem to be able to do that even without that wonder, just place 2-3 colony governors on homeworld and I can achieve 85% tax rate and still maintain +15 happiness...infact that alone is even enough to tap into and actually drain the civilian savings a little if I wanted to go that way. Seems unbalanced to be honest.
So with that in mind the other wonder I like to use is the Bakura Orbital Shipyards or something like that. Since I do all my building on my homeworld it seems most effective this way (I scrapped all other spaceports, they are useless. All resources flow to one place and i can pump out ships endlessly with custom number of construction lines on the starbase)
Does anyone have other suggestions? The rest of the Wonders seem to have empire-wide or inconsequential bonuses so could be safely built on other worlds to exploit the development bonus the most.
5. Speaking of buildings, what determines the building's , well, building speed? Doesnt show it anywhere as far as I know... does it depend on development level or on population or on tech of the colony?
6. Construction speed in general doesnt make sense to me. I see that there are things on my ships/station called construction yards...that have build speed attached to them. And it can be increased via some tech, fine. But why cant I use MULTIPLE construction lines to build the same thing twice as fast, only two different things? Just why? I have the resources, why can i build two of the same ships simultaneously but not one ship twice as fast with two construction lines? Is this by design?
I have a custom starbase with 18 lines, want to build a large ship, 1 line begins works at 400something speed, other 11 are idle. Tried to build custom construction ships with 2 or more construction yards to build bases faster - nope, I'll use only one slow set of factories thank you go away. Same with repair - takes forever to restore the derelicts. I even tried to get multiple construction ships to work on the same thing, but nooo.
It just seems weird that you can massively expand the parallel construction capacity but not linear. Just why the hell not, what is the point? If its some sort of artificial limitation on expansion then I will just build the 15-20 constructors (using formerly neutral planets) anyway and do the same thing...just through the ass than the logical way.
7. What is a Weapons/Energy/High Tech Factory, what does it do, what does the 30k number on them mean and how do they work in conjunction with the relatively straightforward construction yards? I havent messed with these components yet and normally just throw one of each on a construction ship/base, but I have no clue what they do. And it cant be that the factory capacity divided by number of construction yards on ship/base determined actual max construction speed, it would require far too many construction yards to exhaust that cap (make the construction speed lower than the max stated on the yards themselves).
8. Expansion in general. Is this working as intended?
In the same manner as general construction, the super low construction speed of colony ships on planets is silly. I can usually grab 4-6 neutral planets, with zero permanent impact on my reputation (again, weird/bug? bboy points should last longer or penalties be more severe, or what the point) by the time I manage to finally produce the first colony ship. And the ai doesnt do that (grab neutrals quickly) and just sits on its ass, so I end up with a massive advantage anyway. Which brings me to the point that neutral planets are ridiculously underdefended. No spaceport, no combat ships, not even ground troops most of the time. You need what, build some cheap barebones space hauler with just enough lifesupport in cargo that wont kill your troops you jam in there, load 2-3x regiments (conveniently already present on your homeworld) and then simply dont forget to send them out as your fleet of 30-40 explorers hunts for galactic goodies in its quest to steal as much unprotected stuff as it can and discovers the invasion targets largely as a byproduct.
Neutral planets SHOULD have their own fleet and base, SHOULD have crapload of troops, and SHOULD be treated by player as trade partners supplying rare goods (and actually be usefull doing it) or as forward resupply bases, instead of "oh look, thar be free colony planet / slave breeding pens" - depending on whom you are playing.
9. Does a construction ship use resources to repair derelicts? Do you get resources back if you modify a design and in doing so uninstall a bunch of modules from it? Basically, If I have a expensive large station that I completely redesign from the initial nerd base with 400k labs each to a death star with 20k shield, do i get the resources from the labs back? And if I modify a hugely expencive design in a small way (change reactor to diff fuel, or add couple extra modules only without toughing the rest) do I only pay for what I add or part of the total cost of the station regardless? Are frequent upgrades useful if your infrastructure can support them, or should I upgrade less to save on resources (mostly cash).
10. Resources. I find that I have too much of them. Maybe thats because I put 10x mining mods and lots of cargo storage on all my mining and planetary bases, or maybe because I have 15+ constructors doing it all day every day, or because I only have one spaceport so it doesnt all get spread out all over the place and logistics are all centralized and easy. But I dont see the point of building additional mining bases - all they do is is sit there and suck up maintenance costs. The resources themselves, or mining/hauling them, doesnt seem to make me money.
SO. It doesnt make sense to simply hoard non essential resources? Except maybe fuel, never can have enough of that especially if your new colonies and thus fuel using civilian ships are popping up in droves. Can anyone comment on this?
It seems that cash is the most precious resource because it's expansion is actually finite (depends on your limited population and not on how fast you can pump out new stations) and because huge amounts of it are used on maintenance and research boosts.
11. Ship design.
Do modules with %% bonuses stack - the commerce center (what does that even do by the way? simple resource hauling is free, right?), the med lab, the recreation center (is the rec center useful for anything other than planet morale bonus?) the ECM, the target thing, jump scanners? Others? Fleet boosting modules?
There is no point of putting solar panels on ships, right? Bases only?
There is no point of putting any weapons or more than one shield on civ ships and bases because of maintenance costs. They cant fight off 1-3 pirates anyway, and the additional saved maintenance is better invested into more mobile military ships. Thats my approach anyway. Even with pirates, its simply cheaper to buy them off (what they ask is practically zero, bug?) temporarily while you send nearest patrol fleet for some intensive local diplomacy session to renegotiate future contracts. Agree/disagree/other approaches?
What does armor do, what is the reactive parameter, can I tank with armor instead of shields only?
What is the standard 'good' combat speed? is there no such thing since it changes with tech, ship tactics and weapon fitting?
Is it worth it to make custom freighters with more cargo space? In my case, have mining stations with huge cargos that are often falf or more full, so those freighters picking up stuff from stations are always full. Meanwhile, 3/4 other freighters just seem to haul something like 15-20 luxury goods. Wonderful...
12. Integrating other races into your glorious empire as valued citizens (enslaving).
I noticed that I sometimes manage to get a partial racial bonus from a neutral planet full of filthy aliens after I'm done training my troops on the locals.
For example, as Human I somehow got a small ship cost reduction from smacking around some Haarkonish colonies.
Then, encouraged by that, I did it some more for a couple of other neutral colonies and then some unfortunately placed neighboring races with different bonuses that I did not posses, and got a big fu, nothing.
And then the Haarkonish bonus rose from 4% to 7% without me doing anything.
Just WTF is going on there?
Does the bonus depend on the population of the race in question (doesnt make sense because other races should still apply their bonuses, even if small)?
Does it depend on race assimilation/integration (how many of their colonies you have)? I did spread the original aliens around a bit to take advantage of the increased growth below 500m. You in effect get double initial pop growth from breeding them that way.
How can I get other race bonuses to apply (I have seen allien empires with bonuses from 2+ foreign races, so it cant be just the first race you 'incorporate').
If my empire contains other races, can I get access to that race's tech tree, if not then why not, and how do I got about doing that (mods, anyone?). it seems that the only way to get all techs and wonders I need to have 12 or 13 races in game beside me, keep them alive, and then either steal or bribe their leaders for the racial tech. But why do all that if you can just brutally enslave them as usual? it would give a bit more meaning to the neutrals as you would actively select which races to go for to get certain interesting techs, inmho.


I can keep going, but that would be most pointless because I want to first see if anyone even can or better yet is interested in answering/commenting on the questions I already posted.

Lets find out, shall we.

[Darkspire]

Welcome to the forums Critias.

That is some first post, I have not the hours in the day to answer it so I will answer a few and some other folk will no doubt jump in and answer a few as a well and in a week or so you might have it answered [:D]

1. F2 Colonies screen and clicking on one of your planets / colonies is where you can see the development level. the idea is to get each colony with at least 10 luxury items to increase it which in turn increases the populations happiness.

2. I was under the impression only the largest was applied, so yes, 30 and 50 is 50.

3. This is getting into under the hood formulas, there are folk on here much better than me at those sorts of answers (I'm blonde)

4. Depends on how you play, I tend to put them all on the homeworld, they build faster, There are a few at the start of a game that help like the accelerated construction and the open trade network that I like to get ASAP, others will say different, depends on how you play.

5. No idea, things like that are shrouded in mystery and many discussions.

Your questions get deeper going down so I will leave anymore answers as I do not have all the light bulbs needed to respond, there are much brighter folks on here.

Enjoy the game.

Darkspire

[CyclopsSlayer]

5. Building speed for Bases and Buildings SEEMS to be connected to the worlds raw population. Order a Base on a 12 Billion pop world and they will build ~4 systems at a time. The Same base on a new 30M colony builds only 1 at a time and seems to have a longer cycle time.

6/7. Consider it as Docking Slips, each building one ship at a time. Meanwhile the Factories produce the raw components used by the Yard doing the construction. There is likely a behind the scenes abstraction as there seems no disparity in the needs of High-Tech, Weapon, Energy components, just that a yard needs sufficient supply of components to build all. If I recall correctly it was like 6 Yards could be supplied with 1 of each factory (need reference).

9. Yes Construction Ships do use resources, either carried internally in there cargo, or I have seen them serviced on site by Freighters when doing something like a World Destroyer or Debris Field repair. Ships seem to only cost resources, never refund them.

10. 3 or 4 Mining modules are sufficient to reach the extraction cap. Racial mods apply up to the cap. 10 Modules are excessive, and as best as I know mostly unused.

11. While extra Damage Control, ECM/ECCM have no direct added effect, they do provide backup in case a module is damaged. If your only DC systems is disabled or destroyed it cannot very well repair itself. Energy extractors on apply when a unit is stationary/orbiting, so would serve little purpose on an always moving ship, but on patrol fleets that spend time parked or drifting would be very useful saving fuel usage.


Armor - http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/fb.asp?m=3346102

[Mad Igor]

WHOO i haven't seen a wall of text this big since...NEVER !
tl;dr [8|]
systemize it and MAYBE it will be less painful to read

[Fenrisfil]

4) For me (like Darkspire) the trade guild and orbital yard are very useful on the homeworld and I get them ASAP. After that it depends on the game situation. Obviously my homeworld is the safest place for a wonder and almost always the fastest place to construct one, so if I think I may be in a race or that alternate locations have a risk of invasion then I will build the rest at home. If I happen to have a second large colony (usually a lost colony that has popped up, which from a pre-warp start can sometimes be as large as my home colony) I will build at least one wonder there. Mostly though they end up on my homeworld. I think I had a game once where I built every wonder (other than the limited win condition based ones) and only two ended up away from home.

6/7) I'm with CyclopsSlayer on that one. I think the reason bases have a 1-1 ratio on plants/yards compared to the help file (and constructors) suggesting it should be 3-1 is because a yard will only use one plant at a time (whichever is relevant to the current component), so each yard needs access to a each of the plant types but only uses one at a time. A constructor can only do one thing at a time so there is no point having extra yards (I did used to think it sped up repairs but I think that was a trick of the mind and the fact I was probably running the game at a faster speed). On bases it probably makes construction speed a little erratic as they can only construct at full speed in all bays if exactly one third of the ships are making components of each type. It may perhaps speed things up if you had some extra plants.

9) An interesting thing I noted with constructors was that they can happily move on to repair all the normal ships in a debris field without heading off to refill it's cargo hold, but if you tell it to repair a world destroyer it always makes a trip to a nearby station first. They do get restocked by freighters now and then so I guess there is either a level of required resources where it is no longer happy to be freighter supplied or perhaps it is just down to what resources are located where at the time it receives the order. I don't think repair needs as much cargo and possibly doesn't even need the plants but I've never tested that hypothesis.


11) Those things do not stack. There is no extra bonus in having multiple commerce centres, med bays or recreation centres even via multiple bases around one planet, so if your only using defensive bases where you already have a main space port there is a good chance your duplicating medical bays for no reason (I suppose is someone blew up your main base it would provide a back up but most likely the defensive base would be blown up first anyway). The Recreation centre is required for resort bases, though I'm not sure if it actually does anything for them (other than allow them to exist). Other than that I don't think it does anything outside of a colony.

For Energy Collectors it depends how much time a ship will spend standing around. If you like to house fleets to protect a planet/base they will be sitting around until something happens and so they will be wasting fuel unless they have collectors. If however you prefer to just let your ships be automated outside of a fleet then they will be constantly moving and so energy collectors will be wasted (chances are though you will have at least one fleet and it will spend some time doing nothing). Explorers, until the later game where you may have them hang around and spy on your enemies should be constantly moving and so don't need collectors. Freighters should also be constantly moving and if they are not, well the civilians can cough up for the fuel as punishment for wasting their Empires time. Mining ships and constructors will spend a lot of time stationary and so can benefit from Energy Collectors. My general system is not to put collectors on explorers or freighters and to put them on everything else. I actually don't have any normal military ships outside of a fleet these days so they all get Energy Collectors.

EDIT: I used to beef up the escorts (making them at least Frigate level, maybe even Destroyer level) and leave them to AI non-fleet control, so they wouldn't need collectors. However, I have found lone ships to be of little use unless they are big and powerful enough to take out small fleets by themselves, so I gave up this practice. 100% Fleets is the way to go I think.

I've found that ultimately weapons on civ ships are pointless because it just causes other Empires to get angry with you when they enter one of their systems ("That single Maxtos blaster on that puny ship is a THREAT TO EVERYTHING WE HOLD DEAR!"). The best protection for civ ships is a fast jump hyperdrive. As for the bases, opinions vary. If they have enough to deal with lone pirate ships or enemy escort that is enough for me, they are never going to take down a pirate fleet and remain economical. Plus if the resource being mined is really important you can always put a fleet or def base down with it.

Calculations for armour is around somewhere on this forum and I don't recall the details but what I can tell you is that you can't tank with it. For a start you would have to set your ship to "never flee" or else the first time the ship received armour damage it would run off to be repaired. If you had a repair component early (which would require a dedicated push or taking a race that gets the unique repair bot), perhaps you could get away with it but it would probably be too resource hungry to make work. Ultimately Armour is just a back up, it protects you against railguns and provides something less important to soak up component damage (so the more armour you have, the less likely you'll end up with a damaged hyper drive).

As for freighters, I can't remember who tested/recommend this but I have been running for a while with 4/8/12 cargo bays on sml/med/lrg Freighters as per their recommendation and it seems to work well. That is slightly more than normal.

12) I'm not totally sure, but it does seem to be based on population size. I don't really like this feature so much as it seems to make extermination twice as pointless as before (reduce your population and throw away bonuses? No thanks, genocide looked so much more fun on the packet).

[Modest]

I love to help others, so I will gladly help You understand everything, what I can

1. What Darkspire said + development and culture are the same thing. 50% of total culture comes from population level (at 500M You get max culture/development bonus from population) and rest 50% comes from controling and supplying colony with 10 luxury resources (that is 5% in culture/development per luxury). So planet with big population and acces to 10 luxury resources will have (with time) 100% culture/development.

2. I can only comfirm that Darkspire is 100% right on that.

3. Research is bit more complicated. As for bonuses - Yes, only biggest bonus matters so no need to have other space stations JUST for the sake of obtaining smaller bonuses. BUT! But You still may want to provide labs for research - one station is usually not eoungh. You know what? Just read that and You will know how research works, and when exacly it is good to build what kind of research stations. tm.asp?m=2988238&mpage=1&key=?

4. Ok... Development bonuses... So, normally You get 50% form population size, and 50% from 10 luxury resources. Than You get additional (potential) +5% (Gizureans +10%) racial resource bonus. So it is now 105% (110% for Gizureans). Afther that You get Your biggest Wonder bonus - and AFAIK it means natural wonder (like ruins) and build wonder. And lastly we get development bonus from having rare luxury resource - only once. So no +90%. 30% is max You can get, even if You have 3 of them. It is still good to control all of them, as You can sell them, and it helps to spread it acros all empire.

12. Bonuses from having minority of other spiecies in You empire is scaling with it's population. I think that when having 2B inhabitatns will give full bonus (so if Hakonish have -30% from ship maitandance, You will get it when 2B of them will be living in Your empire). And You will not get bonuses if numbers of other races are to few in Your empire. In addition, if You want to get precise info You need to look at Your empire policy screen, not in diplomacy screen.

[Icemania]

ORIGINAL: Critias
As a ruler of a budding space empire, I've been disappointed by the lack of any in depth information regarding this game. It seems that very few people actually know some of the finer intricacies involved in being an Imperator, and fewer still are willing to share them.

...

I can keep going, but that would be most pointless because I want to first see if anyone even can or better yet is interested in answering/commenting on the questions I already posted.

Lets find out, shall we.

With regards to the need for more information on mechanics from the developer, I completely agree. But for a small community I think the responses you have already say it all.