Gameplay tips & tricks

[Alienboy]

CaptainAL said:
The ship upgrading has been a source of frustration for me. I think it may be a bug - I am sure that others here must have encountered it. Here's what happens:

I give the upgrade orders. [when this happens there's usually pretty many ships and a large amount of resources involved, with maybe a stellar manipulation upgrade or two] I add up all the resources needed and check my STORAGE amounts to make sure I have enough. Sure enough, I have plenty because I have been good at building many storage facilities. Now I also convert some resources, because I have so many extra organics and radioactives but am light on the minerals. I am careful NOT to convert more organics and radioactives then are available for the upgrades. Great, good to go... next turn I'll be ready to move...

NEXT TURN: Sh--! Not one ship upgraded. "Not Enough Resources" message for every one. But there are all the resources - still in storage.

Anyone have this happen (or am I just really burned out and not calculating everything right -- nine or ten times now)? Sometimes it happens, sometimes it does not. Anyone know how to avoid it? It has screwed me up so badly that now I never convert and upgrade in the same turn, unless I really don't need the upgrades that badly.

douglas said:

Repairs do not cost any resources at all. Damaged components still cost maintenance, but there is no extra cost for repair beyond just getting the damaged ship and a repair bay or space yard in the same place.

If the problem were the 50% limit, the log message would say so.

The problem seems to have been figured out already. Unless I am mistaken, he was depending on resources from scrapped facilities for at least some of the upgrades, and there is a bug that makes those resources disappear in simultaneous mode turn processing.

Hi Douglas,
Sorry dude, the quote from CaptainAL that I was refering to in my last post is quoted above and does not mention anything about scraping facilities at all. I was not refering to the bug you mentioned.

I have always wondered about ship repairs and I have been under the belief that all repairs do actually cost resources to complete. I based this on my observations but of course I may have not taken something into account and therefore may be mistaken. If your ships are damaged during a battle surely it costs something to fix them? Thanks for your comments, I will have to pay more attention to see if my original thoughts are correct.

With regards to the 50% thing. A little while ago I designed a ship that took three upgrades to complete. I must have made a slight error in my calculations because I was unable to do the last upgrade, due to it costing over 50% more that the second upgrade. However I did not find this out at the first time I tried to do that upgrade because I was too low on resources and in the next turn I got the"you do not have enough resources" message. I then tried it the following turn. My resources were fine but this time I got the "50% more than cost" message. Thats what I was refering to.,... thats is,.. unless somehow again I have overlooked something??? I'm sure I remembered it correctly though??