quote:
Originally posted by Nyx:
I find that WP with several PD weapons and missiles can stalemate or win against any ship that tries to duck in and out of weapon range. Especially if you have missiles with a range of 10 or more as no direct fire weapons can fire from that range.
With regard to transporting them via colony ships, the smallest WP is 200kt in size so colony ships can't move those puppies until late in the game. The transports you normally load with population can. However, even the smallest world can build a cheap WP in one turn, so there's no real reason to transport them around.
A more advanced question is how do they effect damage distribution? For example, a planet has a facility, 10M people, and a WP. It gets his with a missile for 100 points of damage. Do the people die, the facility takes 100 damage, and the WP takes 100? Does it get eveny distributed? Does it hit first WP, then Facil, then population? Or, as I think, does it get randomized like components on a ship?
ALL CARGO on a planet must be destroyed before facilities and population is damaged. This is the only way the game could work. Think about it. You can build "Cargo Facilities" to increase your storage capacity. What if one of these got destroyed before all the cargo was gone? You could have more cargo than your planet has capacity for, which makes no sense.
So, not just WPs, but troops, sats, or even mines, act as "armor" for your planet. The only exception is "Smart Bombs" which hit the targeted facility type immediately (Resupply Depot or Space Port -- Dang, I want a SPACE YARD smart bomb!)...
I have considered, but not yet tried, building WPs crammed full of the highest value armor (or best shield generators) I can come up with just to protect the planet and the other WPs that are shooting back at the attackers. The problem is that cargo seems to be damaged "randomly" just as components in a ship are, so there's no special order to build them in and put the "dummy" WPs in line for damage first.
I find that taking the TIME to build WPs on new colonies, even small ones, can be very costly. If you are expanding quickly you want to have a resupply depot in each new system as quickly as possible. So, I prefer to send WPs by transport. I wish the AI was smart enough to send them that way, too. it would make new AI colonies much less predictably easy targets.