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Thread: Colony or Outpost?

  1. #11
    The smaller ships can be and are used at early game to take over outposts. The reason I'm not doing it right now, is because of a redundant bug that screws with the combat. As soon as they fix it, I will go after outposts Muahahahahehe

  2. #12
    Jet, you just stated your problem in one game was lack of RO, a d you're not a Trader. So in order to get my RO, you have to basically max out your Advanced Materials Tech or Trade with a Trader. That's the whole point of this game. As a Warlord you shouldn't be able to sustain an enormous fleet without the help of other people. It's the whole, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Offer your protection to a nearby trader and start running trading routes with them. I'm not sure if they can transfer RO over to you, but if they can, you set up a payment plan with them. Then, you build your fleet and eventually destroy everyone, even the few you were protecting.

  3. #13
    The thing is, even if you max out Advanced Materials Collection, that gives you +20% to RO collection. Planets that I colonize with a stated RO generation rate of +40u actually generate +1u once I put a colony there (I'd be curious what the logic is behind this as well). Unless I'm misunderstanding how those techs work, 20% of +1u brings me to a whopping +1.2u! That hardly seems like a worthwhile investment of days of research time.

    I really hope I'm misunderstanding how these techs work, because obviously that is ridiculous.

  4. #14
    My understanding is that the +40u the planet shows is its Max potential, but without the Advanced Materials Collection, you can't even collect it. What'd I'd venture to guess (and I could very well be wrong) is that percentage you get from every step up in the tech tree is a percentage of the Max Potential, not what you're getting right now. If I did my math right, 3% of 40 is 1.2, so they probably just round to the nearest whole number. As a trader you can get 90% of its max potential, I believe if you max the AMC. That makes more sense to me, and I hope that's how it works. So if you can get a max bonus of 20% than you are looking at a max of 8u RO per hour on the planet you referenced. Still not great, but definitely better than 1.2. In the end, you'll still have to rely on Traders to stockpile enough RO for a sizable fleet of Super Capitals. And I don't think there is anything wrong with that. Otherwise the Warlord would be extremely Over Powered.

  5. #15
    I think CH7's explanation is right. WL is constrained by poor RO production. Lee would know best, he designed the scheme.

  6. #16
    I'd definitely like Lee's input here.

  7. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by JetJaguar2000 View Post
    The idea of using smaller ships for "general conflict and defense" doesn't add up. What kind of conflict can you even hope to get involved in with these smaller ships? You're obviously not going to be attacking planets with them, since they have absolutely no chance to defeat one, and they contribute nothing to the defense of a planet that can hold off 20 dreadnoughts on its own. So again, what is their role? From what I can tell, you have a tiny window of opportunity to use them if you catch someone in the act of deploying an outpost or colony ship, but once that colony is established, forget about it.
    Sure, smaller ships may not be useful for attacking colonies, but you have more than a "tiny window of opportunity" when it comes to outposts. Outposts don't generate population, so their defense doesn't change over time. The only time it changes is if you set up orbital defenses (minefields etc). Otherwise, outposts are easily captured with a small fleet of small ships. If someone has 5 colonies and 20 outposts, and you go capture their 20 outposts with small ships, they're not gonna be getting much income to do a lot about it while you work on building your bigger ships to kill their colonies.

    That said, I'm not sure "dread rushing" is actually possible either. This brings up something that has been bothering me too: on the server I have been micromanaging the most, between my 4 colonies and 10 outposts I have maybe 500 RO. This is not enough to build anything big, even if I did research up to capital ships. I am stuck building lesser ships that are useless.

    Meanwhile, in my other game, I have barely done anything beyond setting up one colony and a couple of outposts, and I have something like 7k RO. Granted, I am a Trader in this game, and I have a jovian planet next to my home sector, but is that really enough of a difference to justify over an order of magnitude difference in RO production? I feel like the first game is already lost for me, since I don't have the RO production to sustain the higher end techs (despite colonizing every RO generating world I've found, only to have them generate +1 or +2 with the colony inplace, WTF?). As a result I've hitched my wagon to the non-RO ships, which I now realize are worthless.
    Being a trader makes a HUGE difference in RO production. My trader game I've made a lot of 500 RO cargo ships, while my non-trader game is probably around the same place as yours for RO.

  8. #18
    Sure, smaller ships may not be useful for attacking colonies, but you have more than a "tiny window of opportunity" when it comes to outposts. Outposts don't generate population, so their defense doesn't change over time. The only time it changes is if you set up orbital defenses (minefields etc). Otherwise, outposts are easily captured with a small fleet of small ships. If someone has 5 colonies and 20 outposts, and you go capture their 20 outposts with small ships, they're not gonna be getting much income to do a lot about it while you work on building your bigger ships to kill their colonies.
    I would agree with this if cruisers could not be auto-converted to beam defenses. Since no one really knew about this hidden feature, there was a fairly large window in which a lot of back and forth with little ships happened.

    Now I know I can rush cruisers, capture a bunch of outposts and insta-protect them all in less than two days. Mammetum is going to be a whole different ball game.

  9. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by catswift View Post
    Now I know I can rush cruisers, capture a bunch of outposts and insta-protect them all in less than two days. Mammetum is going to be a whole different ball game.
    One of the bigger problems identified during beta was that mining outposts were easily captured, since they could not build ships/orbitals locally with no population. The cruiser/battleship conversion was put in specifically to address this situation.

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