Military Colonizers

[Gil Hamilton]

I'm about 10 turns into a game I joined well into its 40th year..... I'm adjacent to empires 2 to 4 times as large as me and am boxed in as far as being able to colonize except for through a black hole system which severely damages ships. I've designed a cruiser with colony modules of both types of colonies I'm able to produce, along with some armor. I'm reasonably sure I'll be able to make it to the other side with something usable.

This tactic has me thinking... If one were to design a military ship with a colonizer and a repair bay, would the ship still be "destroyed" upon colonizing or would you be able to just lay a string of colonies 'till you ran out of supplies?

Edit- Also, If you create a planet in a system of nothing but asteroids-no stars-, what are the effects as far as resupply (Solar) is concerned; and what is the ratio of asteroids used to create a planet? Is the calculation based on the size of the asteroid field/fields and/or minerals present? Or is the whole thing random? Is there a component for creating stars?

[ July 04, 2002, 12:05: Message edited by: Gil Hamilton ]

[Baron Munchausen]

Yes, there must be a star in the system before 'create planet' will work. Dunno why. I wish there was an 'asteroid collector' component to create asteroid fields, and then that you could create a planet in any system regadless of the presence of a star. You could corral some asteroids and build a planet in the midst of a nebula. The perfect secret base! But by the time you had the tech to do it, I guess everyone else would have the tech to detect it.

[dogscoff]

1- Once a colony component is used, the ship is gone, no matter what components it has on board. This can't be modded, either.

2- resupply (solar) takes no notice of the number of planets in the system, it only counts stars, so no stars= no resupply. If you were to have a planet with a resupply depot in a starless system, that would still generate supplies fine. I'm not sure that's possible though. (except maybe on a manually editted map) See answer 4.

3- Planets are created from asteroids at a rate of one asteroid field per planet. Most of the time this means one planet per sector, but it is possible to have more than one asteroid field in a sector. In other words, those systems you see with a ring of asteroids around the star- they produce a ring of planets. The planet will have the same size and min/org/rad values as the asteroid field had.

4- I don't think you can create a planet in a system which doesn't have a star. Not 100% sure about this, though.

5- Yes, you can create new stars (and destroy old ones=-). Keep researching stellar manipulation to get the component. Note that there is a limit of one "artificial" star per system. Ringworlds and sphereworlds don't count as stars for most purposes though, so I suppose you could create a star, convert it to a ringworld, create another
star next to it, convert it...
Maybe. Has anyone ever tried this?

[Captain Kwok]

No, once you lay the colony the ship is "consumed" regardless of what components you have on it.

[dogscoff]

Capt. Kwok: Nyer nyer, beat you

Dogscoff: Noobracer champion

[Suicide Junkie]

A ring/sphereworld counts as half a star, and gets the worst of both.

You get no solar supply generation, and can't build another star.

It IS possible to mod a component that will blow up a constructed world, which will turn it into asteroids. You can then build another star, and form the asteroids into a planet, and/or repeat the process to make an entire solar system.

[dogscoff]

Yeah, I'd like the stellar manipulation in the game, both natural (ie random events) and artificial (ie stellar manip components) to follow more of a "life cycle" pattern.

For example:

Star > black hole > nebula > star or something like that, so you can go full cirle ad infinutum. It would take some working out though, to work in all the possible variations.

[Gil Hamilton]

This "Stellar Manipulation" is expeeeeeeeeesive!