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OOops! That will teach me not to check the order before I write it down!
With regards to your question about efficiency, I would ask: more efficient than what? If we were funding the reserve then Mentar is definitely the world to do it because it is twice as efficient for a rich world blah blah blah. However with Mentar providing more than 25% of our total research right now there is no way to get more than that. Even if Mentar funded the reserve in full and then that reserve were plowed back into another world every turn we still wouldn't get more than a 1:1 return. An Artifact world, on the other hand...
Anyway, once we have more worlds able to fund research then Mentar's production will absolutely be more efficiently spent on production than on research, but for now with RPs as our most important concern there isn't much else we can do.
So in general: yes Mentar is by far our best world for feeding the reserve or building ships, but it is also our most efficient Research station simply by being the biggest world we have.
I hope that helps explain how I approach thinking about this.
May 7th, 2017, 09:50
(This post was last modified: May 7th, 2017, 10:11 by RFS-81.)
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(May 7th, 2017, 08:36)DaveV Wrote: As far as the game: I always cringe when I have to spend production in a 1:1 field when there's the potential for 3:1 or 2:1 (e.g. research spending on the newly Rich Mentar, or building ships on a Poor planet). Is this just my penny-pinching nature, do I misunderstand the mechanics, or are we wasting money by putting most of Mentar's resources into an unenhanced category?
That depends. If we need ships, we should definitely build as many of them on Mentar as possible. If we don't need ships, then we shouldn't build them just because Mentar has an advantage in that area. That'd be like buying something you don't really need/want when it's on discount because you feel like you're losing out if you don't take advantage of it. (Of course, I've been guilty of that both in games and in real life...)
EDIT: Ninja'd.
EDIT2: Seeing all those screenshots of the Darloks...I've never finished a game with them. But now I want to, because I want to know if the Darlok emperor wears a cowl under his cowl in the ending. (NO SPOILERS!)
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What about missile bases? The AIs like to attack Rich worlds, missile bases never obsolete, and their maintenance is not too high. I'm sure I rely too much on missile bases in my own games, so I'm genuinely asking to be talked out of them rather than trying to be difficult.
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There is no reason to be talked out of building bases. The question is: how many bases do we need and how quickly can we get them? Our worlds are big and production-rich (Mentar in particular) so building them ahead of time is somewhat less important. The main problem we have right now is that the number of bases we need now is inflated by lack of good shields and powerful missiles.
Now that we have our economy humming along it would probably be worth starting to build ten or twenty bases at our front line worlds. Being at peace makes that less critical but being preemptive is always a good idea. We also lack improved scanners so while we will get advanced warning from a broken NAP when an attack is coming we won't know exactly where, so a broader defensive front would be warranted.
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Great turns and report, Ianus - even though I disagree with you about Mentar and Firma here!
On research spending at Rich Mentar: It's fine when we have a special research need - e.g. when seeding new tech or running out of other ways to get the full rate of return on earlier tech investments. It also makes sense in other special circumstances, e.g. when all of our non-poor worlds are maxed, it can't do much more prebuilding without risk of finishing a ship, and we new tech ASAP even while getting less out of the x3 research bonus for using "already finished labs" instead of "creatingnew ones" - tech that we'll need for the real fleet into which we're planning to turn that prebuild and lots of new production when it's ready. Here though, again apart from the beginning and end of tech cycles, I have to disagree with Ianus. Argus and Paranar are/were great worlds still struggling to get their factories up to IRC3. In these circumstances, I'd mostly be building reserves at Mentar to feed into those two colonies.
Firma would be all-out on research though. With our current technology, any factories it builds won't repay the investment for (an average of) 40 turns! The payback on research is much, much better than that. Look at it this way: If you put Firma's factory spending into research, and put the exact same amount of Mentar's research into Reserves, you end up with the same amount of research done, but twice as many extra factories on Argus and/or Paranar as you could get on Firma by building factories there while leaving Mentar on research. (Note that's just a thought exercise; I'd pour all of Mentar's resources into reserves for Argus and Paranar while they need it for new factories and the tech spending isn't urgent, not just enough for Firma to make up the research difference.)
On missile bases: Some really, really good MoO players like Sirian (when he still played) and Maniac Marshall love putting up lots of missile bases everywhere. I generally prefer to put defensive funds into a minimum number of missile bases that I think will work or be needed and prebuild ships for flexibility. There's a limit to how much value you can get out of either of these though, and a big reason I like the prebuild system is that they're not limited to ultimately becoming defensive builds - except in the sense of "the best defense." One advantage of bases though is that the AI recognizes their efficacy and is less inclined to attack a planet at all when it sees a lot of bases there. (Doesn't help as much when we have a Firma in the empire though unless they lack the range to reach it.)
May 7th, 2017, 13:49
(This post was last modified: May 7th, 2017, 13:56 by shallow_thought.)
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Really appreciating the discussion - thanks guys.
I had to look up the details of the way that IRC changed costs - the answer was, of course, in old thread featuring Ianus and RefSteel (the actual question was about "refit", but there was a complete explanation embedded in there, which is what I needed). I love the way that Googling for answers always leads me to either Sirian's page or back to RB.
I'd never really considered not building factories on poor/UP worlds. I'm not going to argue with RefSteel's figures until my understanding is good enough to replicate them, but I wonder if it actually makes sense to build them only when they're cheap (you've researched a good IT and have not yet reached the next IRC). It depends on the value of having a local production capability I guess, as well as judging the benefit of immediate research against future production. It's certainly nice to have the capacity to get some sort of missile defense in place at a world bordering the Bulrathi.
Wandering a bit off topic - Maybe there's space for a variant game as Klackons where you're not allowed to build (or capture?) factories anywhere. How low a difficulty level would you need? It might be slightly more sensible to say you cant build any before a certain IRC level (IV?, V?).
A noob question not directly related to this game (I'm practicing): When shuttling pop around (particularly from the homeworld to the first colony), do you immediately adjust the slider to avoid waste or do you just let it correct itself over the next couple of turns (whcih it seems to do). If you do change it, does it reset itself back to minimal afterwards or do you need to micro it back down again (experiment suggests the latter)? Sirian's page suggests that you should dial it up but doesn't go into details.
Also, I'm worried that RefSteel's posting pattern implies that he never actually sleeps.
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
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Ha! Ref I agree with you 100% that putting Mentar on reserve spending and transferring those reserves to our still developing worlds is the One Right Choice™ here. I was so focused on tech that it didn't even occur to me to do that. Go figure!
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shallow_thought: the only time you should fiddle with the Eco slider when sending pop (ignoring the issue of spending to regrow pop) is when the cost of sending transports drops assigned Eco spending from Clean to Waste. If you don't know, population transports have a cost (1BC per pop? I can't remember) which is withdrawn from the source planet's economy when transports are sent. I don't think that they cost per turn while in flight but I'm not positive. Generally this only applies in the early game when production is limited, but sending lots of transports can do it too.
It occurs to me to say that you should also check spending on all of your worlds after signing a big trade deal, as that "tax" is applied to all your worlds and can drop some or all worlds from Clean to Waste too.
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(May 7th, 2017, 13:49)shallow_thought Wrote: I had to look up the details of the way that IRC changed costs - the answer was, of course, in old thread featuring Ianus and RefSteel (the actual question was about "refit", but there was a complete explanation embedded in there, which is what I needed). I love the way that Googling for answers always leads me to either Sirian's page or back to RB.
Could you post a link, please? The manual says that every level of Robotic Controls increases factory cost by 50%, and for refitting, you simply have to pay the difference between the previous and current cost. Is it actually more complicated than that? I could imagine some weird edge cases when you discover better Robotic Controls while you're refitting, but I never had that happen.
(May 7th, 2017, 13:49)shallow_thought Wrote: I'd never really considered not building factories on poor/UP worlds. I'm not going to argue with RefSteel's figures until my understanding is good enough to replicate them, but I wonder if it actually makes sense to build them only when they're cheap (you've researched a good IT and have not yet reached the next IRC). It depends on the value of having a local production capability I guess, as well as judging the benefit of immediate research against future production. It's certainly nice to have the capacity to get some sort of missile defense in place at a world bordering the Bulrathi.
The math isn't hard: If we're low tech, a factory costs ~10 bc, but on a poor world, we actually have to spend ~20 bc to build it. When it's done, it produces ~0.5 bc per turn, after pollution clean-up. Thus, it takes the factory approximately 40 turns to pay for itself. On a normal planet, this would be only 20 turns. That said, I didn't really think about this before, and just built up factories on poor worlds. On UP, I usually said "screw it" at some point and switched them over to tech. Not really sure about delaying factories on normal planets, though. Getting good IT would take much longer than 20 turns.
May 7th, 2017, 16:16
(This post was last modified: May 7th, 2017, 17:39 by RefSteel.)
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(May 7th, 2017, 13:49)shallow_thought Wrote: Wandering a bit off topic - Maybe there's space for a variant game as Klackons where you're not allowed to build (or capture?) factories anywhere. How low a difficulty level would you need? It might be slightly more sensible to say you cant build any before a certain IRC level (IV?, V?).
May I recommend a look at Imperium 15? And as a matter of shameless self-promotion, my report of my own playthrough....
Quote:Also, I'm worried that RefSteel's posting pattern implies that he never actually sleeps.
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