Jumping in at the deep end

[douglas]

Jtownsend said:
EDIT: In purely combat terms, how important are battleships with their heavy mounts, and are there improvements on them? I'm asking becasue of the emphasis people have put on the CL's 10% bonus and someone having mentioned that the heavy mount on a carrier is large and vulnerable in combat - and in simulator battles my carrier wasn't much of a fleet-conquering hero.

Actually, the greatest benefit of battleships is the extra tonnage - 200 kt more than battlecruisers. The heavy mount is just a nice extra - unless you're going up against large heavily-crystalline-armored ships, in which case it's essential.

Once you get light cruisers, ship construction just isn't a very important tech for quite a while. The step up to cruisers is only an effective 80 kt with the extra CQ/LS requirement, and comes at the cost of the 10% defense bonus. Battlecruisers get you another 100 kt, which is nice but isn't as big of a deal as ECM, CS, and good weapons and the specialty armors. Battleships are the first really major improvement in combat power with a full 200 kt extra, but you need good stuff to put on them to really make good use of them, and better engines and solar sails are highly desirable to offset their lower number of engines.

Jtownsend said:
EDIT2: I know a methane breather who is likely to oblige - there's a lot of Oxys in this game - Do I need to remove the existing population of my domed worlds? This would be something of a project, I'd think.

For a planet to be undomed, all of the population on it must breathe its atmosphere. However, there is no requirement that you dispose of the previous inhabitants in a humanitarian manner (i.e. moving them to other planets), and just stationing a transport in orbit for one turn and repeatedly transferring population and jettisonning it out into space until only the breathers are left has no negative effect besides the actual loss of population. It doesn't even lower happiness on the planet you do it on. In stock, compared with the bonus from suddenly having 5 times as many facility spaces on the planet, the population loss is inconsequential unless the planet was very highly populated. So what if you lose a 2% production bonus for having 40M population? That's nothing compared to the 400% bonus the extra space gives you.