too many ships... ugh

javaslinger · #1 February 27th, 2001, 08:57 AM

Well, I thought I was gonna kick some butt since I was doubling any other empire in ships... However, it seems my newer designs take some serious maintenance and now I'm in some severe mineral shortage..

Any advice?

Thanks,

Ken

Darwin · #2 February 27th, 2001, 09:29 AM

Scrap your most expensive ships, If you have any colony ships already built use them.

And if your in the US, Get some sleep.
Good night man I'm going to bed.

raynor · #3 February 27th, 2001, 03:26 PM

If you click on the 'Recycle' button when your ships are at a shipyard, you can 'Mothball' certain ships. Mothballed ships do not require you to pay maintenance, and the cost to un-mothball them is approximately the same as you would pay every turn for maintenance.

By the way, maintenance is 25% the cost of the ship. So, every four turns you pay the entire cost of the ship again.

One of the most important things you must do in this game is decide how you are going to spend your resources. It is a balance between spending resources to maintain your ships vs. spending resources to build new ships vs. building facilities, etc. A very good way to defend your empire without paying maintenance costs is to build units such as fighters, mines, satellites and weapon platforms. Units don't require maintenance...

Spyder · #4 February 27th, 2001, 03:29 PM

If you feel that those ships are too expensive to just scrap, you can mothball them and save the maintenance also.

Spyder, Chairman of the Arachnid Consortium

DirectorTsaarx · #5 February 27th, 2001, 04:45 PM

Of course, the obvious answer for the long term is to build more mineral miner facilities (and/or more advanced miner facilities); maybe some robotoid factories or mineral scanners or something to increase production.

You might also want to consider building some mineral storage facilities, once you get back to having a surplus. Then you can survive a few turns of losing minerals...

taterbill · #6 February 28th, 2001, 12:04 AM

Use trade. I sometimes find that I have radioactives and organics out the wazoo but no minerals. Obviously, I pull out all the stops to find good mineral planets and exploit them, but in the meantime, I can usually keep afloat by trading with my neighbors. If you are on good terms with a race, they will usually trade you 10,000 minerals for 3000 organics plus 3000 rad's every turn, give or take a thousand on either side of the equation. Plus it is good for interspecies relations also. When truly desperate, I have sold technologies for mega-minerals.