Gameplay tips & tricks

[douglas]

Alienboy said:
Firstly, and probably quite simply,... are we forgetting the actual costs of ship repair???...

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.

Alienboy said:
Another thing I have wondered about relates to the cost of an upgrade. As we all know you can only upgrade to 50% the original cost of that ship. If you are like me you may do several upgrades to get to the end result. eg,.. you start with a basic hull. Lets say you require four upgrades to get the ship you want. If you start with the first upgrade and accidently try to upgrade it to the fourth upgrade then you would receive a message telling you that you can not upgrade a ship more than 50% the original cost. That is well known,... but if you do not have enough resources to do that upgrade,... you will get the "you do not have enough resources to complete this upgrade" message before the "50% upgrade message" I believe the game considers the cost of an upgrade before the ability to upgrade. So,.. this may be another posible explaination for what you have discribed, and you would have no way of telling which upgrade you were trying for. Maybe this might also be useful in the new version. ie,.. if an upgrade order is not completed it would be great to know what you were trying to upgrade too, and if you were short of resources, how much and which resources would also be handy????

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.

[douglas]

Alienboy said:
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.

He mentioned scrap resources as a possible culprit a few posts later.

Alienboy said:
I have always wondered about ship repairs and I have been under the belief that all repairs do actually cost resources to complete. ...

I have played in a game where I regularly did an IMMENSE amount of repairing every turn (retroseries building for ordinary combat ships) and had a rather tight budget. If repairs cost resources, my calculations in that game would have been very far off and I would have run out of resources quickly. They weren't, and I didn't.

Alienboy said:
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 ...

The game may indeed check for resources before checking the 50% limit, but that is completely unrelated to CaptainAl's problem. He was getting out-of-resources messages after carefully calculating that he did have enough resources.

[Alienboy]

If you say so douglas, have a nice christmas.

[douglas]

Any space yard will do, and repair bays can help. Even a modded space yard with 0 repair rate allows repair bays in the same sector to repair emergency components.

[Slick]

I use that very "super fast" battleship design also for my Stellar Manipulation ships. You paid big bucks for them, you are paying big maintenance for them, you can't have them spending too much unproductive time moving around. It's good if you retro-series build and/or want to retrofit to a different configuration because the basic hull-engines-spaceyard-etc is the same.

With these designs, they usually operate solo so they have to be "minefield resistant". Keep them protected behind your lines, use armor instead of shields. So long as the spaceyard component survives, it will repair itself.

I also make a "super fast" rescue ship. Same basic idea with repair bays added also. I'll build these at strategic places and mothball them. In the rare occurrence that a fleet takes lots of damage and it will be several turns before the fleet's existing repair capability completes repairs (or the fleet's repair ships got killed), I'll activate these ships to assist.

[douglas]

Were any of the planets you had doing resource conversions on repeat orders? If so, that planet would have continued converting until you ran out of the source resource or it had executed the maximum number of orders.

Also, resource conversion happens before retrofitting, and retrofitting happens before income. Be careful that your current storage plus or minus whatever you convert is sufficient to pay for all retrofits.

[CaptainAL]

The fact that you have not encountered it tells me that it must be me. Jez, I thought I had added everything up very carefully each time, too. No, I did not have RCF planets on repeat orders. Weird, the times when it has happened nothing retrofitted at all - and I would think that if I were a little off on my numbers that at least some would retrofit. I know that if I were off those times it couldn't have been by that much. On my upcoming turns I will write down the numbers to be sure.

Thanks again Douglas.