Ring and Sphereworlds

[Kagetora]

I built one of each today but I basically postponed winning for a long time until I could finish them just to try them out. They are awesome structures but it seems to me highly unlikely that a game would go on so far that building either would actually be a good idea in a game or even less so would be a big help in winning a game that close. There major advantages of size and population aren't as important by the time you can actaully build them and the research cost and material cost is just too much for them to really be useful in a close game or a game against humans.

[Atrocities]

I am on my 400th + turn, and I have only managed to conqure only about a 1/5th of the galaxy. I am in third place behind two AI players, and they are pounding the crap out of my colony worlds. So, I would venture to say that in my game, it is entirely likely that I will have the time to build them. And I think I shall starting in a few turns. I need to beef up my fleet, but can not do that without resources. Resources are where the SW and RW's excel.

[Kagetora]

Yeah but the ringworld costs 500K of each resource and the sphere twice that much not counting the cost of the shipyard ships or the cost of the facilites. Not to mention all the population you will have to skim off to populate them. It would take alot of production just to recover the cost and you get no bonus for production over 10B pop. So really the sphereworlds are not at all worth building over a ringworld at half the cost.

[DirectorTsaarx]

You can alter this in "Settings.txt". Currently there are 12 breakpoints where you get increased production. The 12th is set to 200,000,000,000 (yes, 200B!) in the 1.19 Version. In the interest of making ring and sphereworlds useful, I've changed that Last breakpoint to 20B (well, technically, it starts after 19.999B, but that's the same thing really...).

I just re-checked - ringworlds allow 32B pop, and sphereworlds allow 64B. So maybe you'd want to increase the number of breakpoints and add a few more (up to, say, 60B).

Reagardless, these are the relevant lines from "Settings.txt":

Number Of Population Modifiers := 12
Pop Modifier 1 Population Amount := 99
Pop Modifier 1 Production Modifier Percent := 100
Pop Modifier 1 SY Rate Modifier Percent := 100
<snip>
Pop Modifier 11 Population Amount := 9999
Pop Modifier 11 Production Modifier Percent := 190
Pop Modifier 11 SY Rate Modifier Percent := 190
Pop Modifier 12 Population Amount := 19999
Pop Modifier 12 Production Modifier Percent := 200
Pop Modifier 12 SY Rate Modifier Percent := 200

Hope this helps make your sphereworlds worth the effort...

[This message has been edited by DirectorTsaarx (edited 29 December 2000).]

[Kagetora]

Thanks for the info very interesting. However even with your change since both the ringworlds and sphereworlds can hold over 20B I still see no reason to ever build a sphereworld. There are more facilities allowed but since you can only build one a turn and rings have 100 thus well over 100 turns to fill it up I doubt you would ever get the extra production back that a sphereworld costs. Even setting another breakpoint over 32B wouldn't help much if the bonus was only 10 percent over a ringworld.

[Kagetora]

Not to mention that for the cost of a sphere you could nearly build 2 ringworlds and get the 200 percent production bonus twice instead of once. Another point however it would seem to me that in a large multiplayer game you would probably need to play with finite resources to make the game of managable length. How does finite resources effect the ring and sphereworlds?