[PvK]

Originally posted by PsychoTechFreak:

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Originally posted by PvK:
What are you thinking about Starliner Modules?

Compared with a stack of cargo I components the overall costs are slightly higher, as far as I recall from here. The organics are more expensive, the minerals go down a bit, but overall you have to pay more. Plus, the medium transports with sl modules get a malus in defense. Because of the over-proportional higher costs, I rarely use the higher cargo II+III also, but that's another story.

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If I recall correctly, Starliner Modules, and high-tech Cargo Bays are both intentionally more expensive than their counterparts, because they represent attempts to do what some players asked for - the ability to use high technology to stuff as much cargo into a design as possible. The Starliner Modules help for mass exodus in minimum time (reduces build costs by distributing resource types used) and in some cases for more cost-effective population transports (both by spending orgs, and by increasing capacity per ship, which divides down the other non-cargo costs of the ship). The high-tech cargo bays are good when you want a more capacious transport of other types. Cargo Bay I remains the cheapest component for simply transporting some units, when your design has enough space that you don't feel like maximizing capacity with expensive tech.

There's a similar situation with armor - you have to decide whether you want to max out structure or save some resources to buy something else as well.

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Originally posted by PvK:
I don't think the "Upgrade All Facilities" button will do that - will it?

I am not quite sure what your question is about. With the upgrade all Facilities button all of the Facilities in progress (which could be many years/centuries in Proportions) upgrade to the highest facilities available. I often use this (maybe I am kind of cheating by doing this?) and start building nature shrine II and in parallel I research shrines III and then I press upgrade all facilities so this entry changes to nature shrine III. But on the other hand this procedure also creates a mess in almost everyone of the space port, cities, resupply and similar facilities.

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That's what I was asking... sigh. I didn't realize it would change facilities in progress. Unfortunately, this adds another tradeoff where players who want to spend time fighting the interface can get better performance. I guess it has the trade-off that you often won't want to upgrade everything, so often it will do more damage than it gains.

One reason it would be hard to make all upgrades always desirable (if I wanted to) is that there is a big difference in Proportions between construction rates of small colonies versus developed worlds. A high-tech homeworld can upgrade Research Center I to Research Megaplex III in 0.4 turns, on average. But a new colony would take much longer, and will get much better results in terms of time and in terms of cost and in terms of output, by building a bunch of Research Center I's.

Another reason is that I added trade-offs of investment - expensive long-term performance versus cheap short-term performance. In the middle of a war, it often makes more sense to build weapons and fast/cheap facilities rather than expensive terraforming and infrastructure development.

PvK