Atmosphere conversion?

[Zereth]

Slick said:
Don't forget to address their natural trend to unhappiness, though. Troops or one of the happiness facilities is a good way to do that.

I favor the "Ships in orbit" method of happiness control. Build a few defense and cosntruction bases around the planet and (at least in the stock happiness types) they'll be Jubilant in no time, and the bases contribute to your construciton or defense rather than consuming cargo or facility space. (Of course, I _Also_ design all my races with max maintence reduction, so this may not be as useful to a race who pays more maintence.)

A handful of troops is useful on those captured enemy planets that don't come with spaceyards, though.

[Fyron]

Troops require 0 maintenance. You can load 120 or so police troops on every planet for guaranteed jubilance in all but the most dire of situations. I'd still go with 0 maintenance troops in favor of low maintenance ships, myself. If you arm them, your planets become marginally more difficult to capture and you have a ready pool of troops in emergencies as added bonuses.

[Emperor's Child]

Why 120? If memory serves, you only need 10 troops to eliminate the turn to turn natural decrease that non-native population will see. In my games I make sure I build 15+ to ensure a small upswing and over time it will be enough. Only for colonies that get isolated by enemy colonies (and their associated ship traffic in system) will I bump the number higher to 30 or so, and that seems to be sufficient.

And don’t forget the trick of building “security troops.” This is a small troop with only a cockpit, but nothing else. This is the cheapest (and fastest) way to keep those folks happy since you can build them almost twice as fast as regular troops, but they won’t do anything if you are invaded.

[Fyron]

This post assumes the default Peaceful happiness type. Neutral is absolutely worthless and police troops have the same benefits with Bloodthirsty.

Note that the "police troops" I use are exactly your "security troops." They are always small, and weapons are optional. Some people like to arm them to get a ready source of troops to handle rebellion events and such, as well as extra defense against invasions. Not that they help much against a large transport filled with shielded large troops, of course.

You can get a max change of 20% (aka 200) up or down per turn. 100 troops is sufficient for getting this 200 (at 2 per troop). The 20 is just for a bit of redundancy. The purpose of police troops is not to make the people happy when all goes well. They are there to keep the people jubilant through the worst of situations. It is disturbingly easy for an unprotected empire to go from jubilance to riots in a short while if a war takes a turn for the worst. The troops can prevent this from happening and provide you with the possibility for recovery.

With 120 troops, you can suffer up to 240 happiness points worth of losses per turn and not have any decrease in happiness. This equates to 240 ships or almost 5 planets in a single turn. You could lose 2 planets and 140 ships and suffer no ill affects to happiness throughout the empire. In most games, I find it highly unusual to be able to lose more than this in a single turn. If you do, you have probably already lost and are just being mopped up by the enemy. But even if you lose more than this in one turn, chances are you won't lose just as much in the next turn, so having enough troops to get 240 percent increase in happiness will bring you right back up to jubilance, with an added window of still being able to lose 1 planet or 40 ships and not matter.

Granted, against the AI, this isn't always necessary, as the AI is not too challenging. It mostly applies to multiplayer games.

No amount of ships can achieve these same riot protection results. Having 20 ships stationed over every planet or 67 in every system (to get 200 happiness increase per turn) is generally a very bad idea, as your offensive forces will be few and far between (or even nonexistent).

[Starhawk]

Well I generally find that "other breathers" method very ineffective as it takes a LOT of resources and time to build transports enough to move other breathers to every world that your own pop can't breath on.
I prefer leaving populations where they are and waiting until I have a large stable resource and research base then doing mass atmosphere conversion "blocks" in order to get my populations up.

As far as security troops I usually arm mine, I don't expect them to do much good against the enemy but I expect them to be able to crush rebellions without me needing to call in my "regular" troops, To keep my security forces available I organize them at HQ bases that are designed strictly to hold Security troops for deployment to various trouble spots around my Empire.
Especially since i Modded devnull to include base mounted space yards that produce at the equivalent of an 8 billion population world I usually build my troops at these bases and load rally battle fleets around them so that the battlefleet can pick up it's troops before leaving for the front.
For my "security forces" I do pretty much the same thing, I mobilize a fleet of small fast transports with a few warships to provide escort, then load up my security troops before having my security fleets head to the trouble spots.

You'd be suprised how quickly a squadron of superdreadnoughts escorting a fleet of 1,000 security troops can change the public oppinion in your favor

[Slick]

Starhawk said:
Well I generally find that "other breathers" method very ineffective as it takes a LOT of resources and time to build transports enough to move other breathers to every world that your own pop can't breath on.
I prefer leaving populations where they are and waiting until I have a large stable resource and research base then doing mass atmosphere conversion "blocks" in order to get my populations up.

Interesting. An Atmosphere Converter costs 15000 M, 15000 O, 15000 R. Assuming no construction bonuses, that takes 8 months to build and 2 years to convert the atmosphere on the planet; total = 2.8 years for an ACIII. If you build a spaceyard first, that takes 5 turns and costs 10000 M before you start building the AC. Although a SY III will save you 3 months build time on the AC, it costed you 5 months to build and another 10K minerals. Total time = 3.0 years with a SYIII and an ACIII. This also costs you 1 facility slot on each planet using this method during the conversion. Note: due to a bug in the game, when you scrap your AC, you don't get the resources back. That's just for 1 planet.

For the cost in resources and time that it costs for doing this on 1 planet, several small transports can be built and deployed. Also, planets can be undomed sooner, thus allowing facility construction to begin sooner. If 1M population is placed on a planet, the next turn there will be 2M - that's a 1000% (per year) reproduction rate for the first turn!!!. This method can be used to quickly multiply alien population. When not ferrying population, these transports can be used to move other things around or simply mothballed until needed again. The downside is that you probably want to get all versions of other-breathers and you probably don't want to be at war with everyone else while you are trying to boost your economy. However, even if you only get 1 species of other-breathers, by quickly undoming your roughly 10-20% of your planets, you can quickly gain an economic edge. The economic edge translates directly into being able to build & maintain more ships. In general, he who has the most ships first, wins. It appears to me that the "resources & time" argument benefits other-breathers over atmosphere conversion.

Research: It also requires researching Planetary Engineering then Planet Utilization to at least level 7 - this is costly. These research points are basically spent on purely defensive techs; i.e. you will still need some offensive tech research to win. This may not be a bad thing in itself, however consider that the research spent on planet capture, ship capture, intel, etc., of other-breathers is both offensive and defensive. This means that, if you can capture enemy ships or planets, you are both strengthening your empire and weakening the enemy.

This is just my view on the economics of each method.

[Slick]

While we are on the subject of AC, this was posted in the "Update the FAQ" thread. It kinda surprised me. Can anyone confirm this?:

FunnyMan said:
Correction to 1.3.3 ...with no atmosphere. Gas giants always have an atmosphere (i.e. not None), but an Atmosphere Converter can solidify them into a Rock/None planet.

I enjoy playing as Rock/None I can definitely say that an Atmospheric Converter will change a Gas/Any planet into a Rock/None one.
-FM

[douglas]

I can confirm that it is wrong. Test game, finished atmosphere converter on gas giant inhabited by none breathers on turn 2401.2. On 2404.2, ten turns after the atmosphere conversion should have taken place if it were possible, the planet was still gas/methane.

[Alneyan]

500 turns after having built that Atmosphere Converter, the planet was still a gas planet. The only way to change its type would be to destroy the planet and recreate it.

Slick, the standard delay to build an Atmosphere Converter will likely be 5 turns, and not 8: Emergency Building does wonder in such situations. All slots will likely be filled already, or you will build facilities taking a single turn to build, so Emergency Building will not really hurt you (unless you have a spaceyard there and want to build ships while the conversion goes on). Otherwise, I fully agree with your analysis.

[Slick]

Agreed. In order to do an analysis, you need to hold some things constant. I didn't want to throw in Hardy Industrialists, enhanced construction aptitude, pop bonuses, etc.; they all would affect the numbers to a small extent. Actually, 5 turns or 8 turns becomes pretty insignificant on the large scale anyways.