I have several questions about the functions of some of the facilities and stuff, because they don't seem to be explained too well in the docs. Thanks in advance for any answers.
1- Resource convertor. I haven't seen any way to tell it what/when to convert, so I'm assuming it's automatic. Does this convert, for example, Organics and Rads to Minerals only when you run out of minerals? Or will it convert excess (more than you can store) to other types that you can store? Also, it says "one effective per system." Would you ever need more than one of these in your empire? If so, why?
2- Atmosphere convertor. I've seen mention of this but haven't found it yet. I assume it's way up the "Planet Utilization" tree. Anyway, my race is Hydrogen, but I also have a ton of CO2 breathers, about 60% of my population, and they're out of room... Is it possible to convert to whatever type of atmosphere you want, or will they only convert to your empire's "native" type?
3- Condition Improvement plant. I have yet to see a use for these. My population grows so fast it's usually maxed out within a year or two and I tend to take a 10% racial happy bonus, so I can't see what good a 2% "improvement" would do over a period of 2 years. Is there a place/time in the game where these are really useful?
4- Repair. Is it just my imagination, or is repairing stuff free? I've been sitting a warp point opener on my home system and making a nice spider web of warp points to all my systems and it doesn't seem to cost anything every turn when it's repaired. Not that this is good or bad, but I just wanted to figure out if I should be calculating that into the costs of everything I'm doing every turn.