quote:
Originally posted by Kimball:
I am just wondering what everyone's opinions are about racial tech levels. Is there one racial tech filed that is better? Religious looks because of the system wide combat advantages, but organic looks good because of the armor and population advantages. Then there is Chyrstalline Tech...you get the idea. Any opinions and comments are welcome.
I am a huge fan of organic technology. Hele's why:
Medlab, organic armor, and replicant center. +10 to +40M population per planet per TURN ends up having a huge effect. Self healing armor can make even a wimpy transport fairly damage resistant.
But, even more than that, there are Fighters.
Fighter's are god's gift to an organic race. Fighters have no maintinence cost, so you can crank out tons of them and not have to worry about paying the bills, placing swarms of dozens to hundreds at every warp point into your space. They have insane innate bonuses, to boot.
More importantly, Organic races have the ultimate fighter weapon: Small Electric Discharge, which at Lvl 3, is a space 3, range 3, damage 20! weapon. You can fit 2 on a small fighter and still have room for 7 engines. So, at L1 fighter tech, L3 organic weapons and small weapons, you can be cranking out tons of little gnats, each of which has about half the damage potential of a comparable escort or frigate, but you can make 7 or more per turn per shipyard.
You can fit 2 on a large fighter and still have room for 9 engines, shields, cluter bomb (gotta cleanse those planets quickly), and ECM. Or just fit 4 and engines. Even better, it only costs organic, so the build time from the weapons is effectively zero, the build time is just the rest of the fighter chassis.
Also, fighter production parallelizes extreemly well, just early on build A spaceyard, have it build more spaceyards, etc. Once your production starts to be more than your income, start mothballing them and save them until you need to produce a good swarm.
Whenever excess income is coming in, build more fighters. Transport them to your frontline planets and launch them in large Groups from the surface, to cover warp points.
And, it just seems fitting that an organic race should rely on "The Swarm!"