Ring Worlds

[shampine]

Forget ring worlds. Go for sphere worlds! (Dyson spheres, that is) If you're going to go for something like this, you might as well go for the best! A sphere world has 200 facility slots, 64 billion population limit, and 150% for minerals, organics and radioactives.

Is it worth it? No. Let's face it. By the time you can build something like this, you don't need it. If you'd devoted the resources needed to war machinery then you could probably have cleared the map. The Last time I built a sphere world I devoted 11 ship space yards to the project for roughly 5 years (50 turns). That doesn't even count the time it took me to build 11 ship space yards and fly them out to where I wanted to build (actually, I created a star in a system that had gone nova, sort of as a memorial to the dead population there -- this is VERY inefficient and I don't recommend it).

[shampine]

I should provide a caveat. Is a ring or sphere world worth it from a purely strategic point of view? No. Absolutely not.

However, they are VERY cool.

[Cyrien]

I have to disagree. Even a single Sphereworld and the resources it can generate can easily turn the tide of a close battle. Played against a friend and both of us where pretty even with a nice stalemate... with a battle zone of about 3 systems anywhere our borders touched... I won because I did divert some resources and built a sphereworld... since we were both so close in all of our production and research areas this made all the difference.

Like all things it depends on the situation... Against humans maybe worth it maybe not... against the computer, probably never barring a drastic increase in AI difficulty through some future patch.