Gameplay tips & tricks

[Wolfman77]

Multiplication is the best method I've found. if you select 10 ships that cost 5kT of minerals each, you need 50kT to compleate the upgrade. If I'm not mistaken, all ship need to be from the same class. After selecting them and clicking "retrofit" it should list the costs of each shipto the right of the class name. It would be nice, though, if it totaled them up for you.

[Alienboy]

Wolfman77 said:
Multiplication is the best method I've found. if you select 10 ships that cost 5kT of minerals each, you need 50kT to compleate the upgrade. If I'm not mistaken, all ship need to be from the same class. After selecting them and clicking "retrofit" it should list the costs of each shipto the right of the class name. It would be nice, though, if it totaled them up for you.

Yeah, I agree,.. a total is necessary. I have just upgraded 70 odd ships, mostly different classes. I have tried to calculate things but I am missing something somewhere. I think that you only have the resources you have left from your last turn to work with. You might have 500000 minerals coming in on your current turn but I think that it is not accounted for with your current upgrades?? not sure really.

You also have to account for any resources you gift to other races.

[Wolfman77]

Yes you can only use resources you have in storage. None from production mining or trade are counted. I don't gift too much, but then I only play the AI, most of the time I've already ticked them off enough that I can't change their mood much. When your empire really starts to grow retrofit costs can kill you if you havent kept up on storage. Several mods have added storage to the production facilities. This helps alot, but I've found tiny planets full of starage facilities to be useful as well, since you cant get as good production and build bonuses from them.

[douglas]

The bug is that resources from scrapped facilities, despite showing up immediately when you're playing the turn, vanish without a trace in turn processing.

Resources from scrapped ships come in when the ship is scrapped, which happens when it executes its orders for the turn. When that happens relative to any retrofit orders depends on the speeds of the ships involved and on their ship ID's. Resources from a ship with speed 5 will never be available on the same turn to retrofit a ship with speed 6. If they both move on the same day (eg, same speed or speed 10-13), it depends on ship ID, which I most recently explained in this thread

Note that bases and ships with no engines "move" on day 0, so resources from scrapped bases will always be available to spend on retrofitting mobile ships, while scrapping mobile ships can never pay for retrofitting bases.

Also, there actually is one way to get resources from scrapped facilities in simultaneous play - abandon the planet and answer the prompt about scrapping the facilities with "yes". When the abandon/scrap order is executed (on day 0), you will get the correct amount of resources for scrapping every facility on the colony. Of course, this does completely destroy the colony, so you probably don't want to do it very often.