N00b Question

from Sins Forums
Hi, this is my first post here.  I bought the game the other day and have been playing around with it.  Right now I'm playing Advent against a TEC AI and doing OK.  However, there's an asteroid belt close to the center of the map, making it the chokepoint to fight over.  It can't be colonized, of course, but it does have one asteroid with my opponents metal extractor on it (and I need that metal!).  When I try to attack it I see the message "Invulnerable" followed by "Can be captured".  My question is, captured by what??  I have the Progenitor there chock full of anti-matter with colonize enabled but it wont do anything to it at all.  It doesn't have any allegiance so I don't think culture would affect it but who knows?  Has anyone else ever come across this and what's the answer -- please?

Thanks in advance.  I've enjoyed the reading I've done here so far.
strategy
1,822 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
You have to use a colony frigate. Colony frigates have two abilities: one to colonize planets, the other to capture neutral extractors. Unfortunately, the colonize ability of the Progenitor won't work on neutral extractors. It has to be a colony frigate.

Neutral extractors are nice because they aren't effected by allegiance and they also tend to have higher base resource extraction rates as compared to planetary extractors. Plus they also give you vision of the gravity well they're located in. You can see when enemy ships pass by them so they kind of serve as a makeshift early warning system.

On another note, if you ever play Vasari their colony frigate cannot capture neutral extractors. Their scout ship performs that function.
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
Ha ha, never mind.

I see the Progenitor doesn't have the 'Crew Extract' ability so all I had to do was build a Missionary and the problem was solved.

But thanks anyway. :)
Star Control: Origins
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
The Advent and TEC colony ships both colonize worlds and establish/capture extractors. This is a little different for the Vasari, where their scout ship, NOT their colony ship, captures extractors. To add another wrinkle to that, I'm not sure if the Vasari can establish extractors in uninhabitable areas, but I'm not sure.

Hope this helps.

EDIT: Wow, everybody replied fairly close to everybody else.