Ring and Sphereworlds

[Kagetora]

I built one of each today but I basically postponed winning for a long time until I could finish them just to try them out. They are awesome structures but it seems to me highly unlikely that a game would go on so far that building either would actually be a good idea in a game or even less so would be a big help in winning a game that close. There major advantages of size and population aren't as important by the time you can actaully build them and the research cost and material cost is just too much for them to really be useful in a close game or a game against humans.

[Atrocities]

I am on my 400th + turn, and I have only managed to conqure only about a 1/5th of the galaxy. I am in third place behind two AI players, and they are pounding the crap out of my colony worlds. So, I would venture to say that in my game, it is entirely likely that I will have the time to build them. And I think I shall starting in a few turns. I need to beef up my fleet, but can not do that without resources. Resources are where the SW and RW's excel.

[Kagetora]

Yeah but the ringworld costs 500K of each resource and the sphere twice that much not counting the cost of the shipyard ships or the cost of the facilites. Not to mention all the population you will have to skim off to populate them. It would take alot of production just to recover the cost and you get no bonus for production over 10B pop. So really the sphereworlds are not at all worth building over a ringworld at half the cost.

[DirectorTsaarx]

You can alter this in "Settings.txt". Currently there are 12 breakpoints where you get increased production. The 12th is set to 200,000,000,000 (yes, 200B!) in the 1.19 Version. In the interest of making ring and sphereworlds useful, I've changed that Last breakpoint to 20B (well, technically, it starts after 19.999B, but that's the same thing really...).

I just re-checked - ringworlds allow 32B pop, and sphereworlds allow 64B. So maybe you'd want to increase the number of breakpoints and add a few more (up to, say, 60B).

Reagardless, these are the relevant lines from "Settings.txt":

Number Of Population Modifiers := 12
Pop Modifier 1 Population Amount := 99
Pop Modifier 1 Production Modifier Percent := 100
Pop Modifier 1 SY Rate Modifier Percent := 100
<snip>
Pop Modifier 11 Population Amount := 9999
Pop Modifier 11 Production Modifier Percent := 190
Pop Modifier 11 SY Rate Modifier Percent := 190
Pop Modifier 12 Population Amount := 19999
Pop Modifier 12 Production Modifier Percent := 200
Pop Modifier 12 SY Rate Modifier Percent := 200

Hope this helps make your sphereworlds worth the effort...

[This message has been edited by DirectorTsaarx (edited 29 December 2000).]

[Kagetora]

Thanks for the info very interesting. However even with your change since both the ringworlds and sphereworlds can hold over 20B I still see no reason to ever build a sphereworld. There are more facilities allowed but since you can only build one a turn and rings have 100 thus well over 100 turns to fill it up I doubt you would ever get the extra production back that a sphereworld costs. Even setting another breakpoint over 32B wouldn't help much if the bonus was only 10 percent over a ringworld.

[Kagetora]

Not to mention that for the cost of a sphere you could nearly build 2 ringworlds and get the 200 percent production bonus twice instead of once. Another point however it would seem to me that in a large multiplayer game you would probably need to play with finite resources to make the game of managable length. How does finite resources effect the ring and sphereworlds?

[Nyx]

Well, I build ringworlds as the ultimate defense against people detonating my stars. I don't give a darn about their production or population, but it's incredibly difficult to survive the reqired one round of combat against the volume of fighters and weapon platforms I can stick on a ringworld. In my games I bump into the 2000 unit in space limit a lot because I over deploy mines. And I do play against humans so stellar bombs get used. Stick satelites in orbit of the star and he just waits for the 30 turns to end, then kills the system. But with a ringworld, he's toast and my stars are safe.

I'm about to test an old strategy I used to use when my friends and I would play for points in Finite resource games: Blow up all non-huge worlds and rebuild them as huge. I'm wondering if this resets the resource limit on the world. While I'm at it, I'll test to see what the resources of ring and sphere worlds are in finite games. I'll have the data for you on Monday if no one else does it sooner (I don't have a connection over the weekend).

Also, if you're playing for points, and not just to win, sphere's are worth building.

[Kagetora]

I would be very interested in knowing about the resources. I bet in finite resource games there is a limit set for the system at the beginning of the game based on how much each planet starts with. Otherwise you could just keep blowing up planets to get more resources. If so this could make a big difference in a game in which the system the ringworld was built in had no planets of it's own before. There is a stellar manipulation shield that could be placed in a system and would stop people from blowing up your sun. This would be much cheaper than a ringworld. Of course they could still destroy the planet and thus the shield too. You could build more than one tho and they wouldn't know exactly which planet it was on in a multiplanet system. You would also have alot of response time do to their search and wasted efforts on the sun.

[Kagetora]

I am not sure how a ringworld could be a very effective defense considering the time it takes to build it. It certainly couldn't be built on the front line of a war. I would use cloak or suicide ships to keep checking your systems for ringworld construction then wait till right before it was done and waste all those bases with no defenses on them and or all the shipyard ships or take out the ringworld before you could put defenses up on it. Also perhaps capturing the world myself after you spent all the resources building it. I am also not sure how the points are calculated exactly but I doubt the sphereworld would be worth more points than the number of ships you could build with the same amount of resources. Unless of course you had the ship limit to worry about. But if you had 2000 ships I doubt you would worry about it too much.<G>

[AJC]

Ring worlds are awesome monsters and have enormous growth potential - once you get a decent population going , the population explodes and they grow at an amazing rate. All resources available are 150% and conditions are optimal. In one game my opponent built 3 of them. They were expensive to build but once he had one up and running- he could easily afford to build the others.