[Pax]

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
Two questions about natural merchants:
1) Do people actually use natural merchants that often in the regular game? IE: Will this simply help balance its use?

Yep, all the time.

2) Is it really that advantageous? The scale of all building is altered by the same factor; IE even though the spaceport takes longer, the resource facilities take longer (about 7 turns), too.

Put it this way -- I take Natural Merchants, you don't; we have the exact same culture, and Construction rate, etc. we each build one colony in a new system.

Your colony will have it's first resource center built and functioning ... sending resources to the capital ... in 37 turns.

In that time, I will have FIVE resource facilities -- with 2 entire turns to spare.

[b]I imagine you would place all the extra population immigrating to the new system on the spaceport planet first, so your spaceport will see a higher build rate, and by the time your other colonies actually need the spaceport, it should be almost done.[/QB]

Or you build OTHER stuff faster. Research labs, maybe, tog et better tech -- meaning better pop transports ... meaning better immigration rates ... meaning better empire-wide construction rates.

Plus, all those OTHER colonies, which leapt right to building resource facilities, contribute THEIR utput to the empire right away too. Take the above example -- we each plant FIVE colonies. Assume you immigrate to teh SP first, and I psread it out. Assume that means you get 7 turns per colony world per resourcer, and ~20 turns for the SP. By the time you have the SP done, with 2 resourcers per off-colony ... assuming I immigrate evenly, and get 5 turns per resourcer per world, in those 20 turns, each of my four worlds has 4 facilities.

20 facilities producing for me, and some of them have BEEN producing (5 for 15 turns, 5 more for 10, and 5 more for 5), to your 8 facilities, which JUST came Online.

Trust me; the longer ALL build times are, the better not having a SP becomes. Especially with 30-turn SPs.

In P&N ... NM is worth 1500 to 2000, IMO.