Couple design questions

[Zilkin]

1. Is there any difference between frigate, destroyer, cruise, escort, capital ship other than their icon? I mean atm eg. I can design all to have max size of 400. At least the carrier already has max size of 600.

2. What does structure need to have to be able to function as a refueling point? Eg. what do I need to put on my monitoring station to be able refuel my ships there.

3. How many fuel cells do you usually place on ships? Ie. what do you think is good operational range.

[rgibbs]

I'm a newbie.

1) There doesnt seem to be any difference except the missions the AI give to them (when set to auto).

This is speculation and not proven though.

2) Ships refuel from cargo space on stations. Whether it's limited to certain "roles" i dunno!

3) It's all relative. Early game I dont need my ships/scouts to leave the system so they get 200 max.

Later on, every ship gets more and more fuel to give them better range.

[Pilcrow]

2) Everything can be used as a refuel point as long it has fuel in its storage bays (not sure about fuel cells) and docking bays. This means that they will refuel at a gas station if ordered to. In fact I just designed a military ad hoc tanker which works differently that a Resupply ship. I have designed an escort, with a token weapon, 2 gas extractors, huge storage bays, and 8 docks. Once built, I can order it to mine from a caslon planet and bring it near to my thirsty fleets for immediate refuelling, without having to search for a caslon cloud, deploy a resupply ship and bring the fleet to it. It works, but I have to see how useful is it.

3) It depends on the galaxy's size, and technology. I tend to give 6 sectors for a civilian ship and the double or triple for a military ship (depending on role), because the fuel has to feed the weapons.

[fenrislokison]

1) as rgibbs said

2) well i tried sometimes to make refueling stations in deep space, but it doesn't really work since the station isn't filled with fuel (to my knowledge, there is no way to tell cargo ships to fill that or that station with caslon or hydrogen)
What really works are gas mining stations and they need to be equipped with a lot of docking bays to be able to refuel a lot of ships at the same time.
What works even better is deployed resupply ships on gas planets or nebula, but be careful to choose planets or nebula with only calson or hydrogen since there is no way to empty the cargo bays.

3) long story short: between 4 and 10 fuels cells, whatever the tech, depending on how far i think i have to go

[Zilkin]

Thanks for the great replies. I got 2 new questions!

1. How many construction ships should I have midgame?

2. How do I know I have enough research stations?

[eyegore]

Don't go crazy on research stations. I put my game on "suggest" as far as ship building and as far as constructors go this seems to be okay. To avoid the spam messages of "Out of resources" you do not want too many constructors expanding too fast. Although it is abstracted by what you see also keep in mind those spaceports also build cilvilian ships.....so, if you got lots of constructors going...each time it builds a mining base or research base a large ship order is going to hit your starport. If at the same time you start building your military ships that will quickly deplete your resource storage and your start getting that "out of resource" spam. So keep in mind each time you build something or colonize your putting pressure on your starport in cilivian ship orders. So it is well good to go slow, even slower than the A.I. will suggest building.

[fenrislokison]

For constructions ships, i usually go with one if i'm prewarp, then up to 4 once i have hyperdrive or even just warp bubble and finally 10 by mid game to the end.
I also always control them manually and use the expander to send them off to build mining stations. This way, i avoid the problem of having a mining station 10 sectors away from my nearest border.
Using the expander, i try to be sure to have at least 3 sources of strategic resources per starport and as many of luxury resources when possible.

For research stations, i generally only build 3, located on science bonus planets or stars (one station per bonus, weapon, energy and high tech)
At first, i make them simple, just labs, solar panels and the necessary rest, no defense at all, then when i'm stronger, i design them as big as possible with a lot of weapons and defenses.

Big armed stations have 2 advantages: they obviously stand a chance against pirates or enemy empires attacks, but i think they are also more difficult to destroy by enemy spies (i'm not sure about this, but once upon a time, i used to build small research stations that were regulary blown up by sabotage, then i switch to big stations and it didn't happened anymore).

I put my scientists on research stations only when they're big, else, i keep them at my initial starport.

when i have enough research stations, i stop putting labs on starports to avoid either far too great research capacity or having to deal with a special starport design on my homeworld.

[Castinar]

For deep space refueling stations, try varying the role of the structure. I don't think a monitoring station would get regular fueling runs by freighters...but maybe a Starbase role? You can still put your LR scanners on it (assuming that is what you're using a monitoring station for). (Just getting to that point in my twitch playthrough...so certainly something I'll have to experiment with!)