Ring Worlds
 

1.Can anyone tell me exactly how to build a ring world?

2.Is it worth the Expense?

Re: Ring Worlds
 

You need to use Space Yard ships to create enough Starbases in the same sector as a star to hold the 100k of plating, the 100k of cabling, and the Ringworld generation component. When all of them (11 separate bases) are completed, you can use the Stellar Manipulation icon which'll appear when you select the base with the Ringworld generator on it.

As for the expense, it depends quite a bit on the nature of your game. The smaller the map, the more likely you'll need the room enough for it to be worth the cost.

Of course, they're cool on any size map. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon6.gif

Re: Ring Worlds
 

Forget ring worlds. Go for sphere worlds! (Dyson spheres, that is) If you're going to go for something like this, you might as well go for the best! A sphere world has 200 facility slots, 64 billion population limit, and 150% for minerals, organics and radioactives.

Is it worth it? No. Let's face it. By the time you can build something like this, you don't need it. If you'd devoted the resources needed to war machinery then you could probably have cleared the map. The Last time I built a sphere world I devoted 11 ship space yards to the project for roughly 5 years (50 turns). That doesn't even count the time it took me to build 11 ship space yards and fly them out to where I wanted to build (actually, I created a star in a system that had gone nova, sort of as a memorial to the dead population there -- this is VERY inefficient and I don't recommend it).

Re: Ring Worlds
 

I should provide a caveat. Is a ring or sphere world worth it from a purely strategic point of view? No. Absolutely not.

However, they are VERY cool.

Re: Ring Worlds
 

I have to disagree. Even a single Sphereworld and the resources it can generate can easily turn the tide of a close battle. Played against a friend and both of us where pretty even with a nice stalemate... with a battle zone of about 3 systems anywhere our borders touched... I won because I did divert some resources and built a sphereworld... since we were both so close in all of our production and research areas this made all the difference.

Like all things it depends on the situation... Against humans maybe worth it maybe not... against the computer, probably never barring a drastic increase in AI difficulty through some future patch.