If you're playing a long game, then yes, fully tech and build up your economy. Economic structures and technologies will pay huge dividends in the long term. If you don't plan on fleshing out your economy, then I would recommend being extremely aggressive and taking your opponents out early; if it gets to the lategame and your opponents have a fully developed economy while you have none, then you're probably going to lose.
From my experience, the Cred-to-Metal-or-Crystal rate on the black market tends to stay between 400 and 500, while the materials-to-creds rate hovers between 200 and 300, so I'll say 100 materials is roughly equal to 350 creds. With this in mind, and playing as TEC, researching Orbital Commerce and then building one Trade Port costs approximately 2662 credits
If you're playing Advent, spam Illuminator Vessels combined with the Halcyon's Amplify Energy Aura.
*accidental double post*
Topic. When you have extra logistics slots on planets, particularly desert planets, is it better to fill them up with trade ports or culture structures (assuming the planet is reasonably close to the enemy, so that culture from it will actually reach their planets)? Trade ports increase your own income, but culture decreases the enemy's, and also provides combat benefits. This is affected to some extent by race; TEC trade ports are tier 2 and culture is tier 3, enc
[quote]WJC, what about the income penalty caused by the increased fleet size? Seems like that would be more of a factor than the one time research cost of the increased fleet size?[/quote] Well, you're going to do both (basic hull and fleet capacity upgrades) pretty much ASAP, and fleet capacity can be researched at the same time as one of the other two. So if you choose to spend money on hull first in the interest of postponing that income penalty, you only set
I don't have the 1.1 patch, so I'm not sure about all that. I will say that I see little point in upgrading Autocannons until you have something besides just your capship using them.
For TEC....... Assuming you filled up your initial fleet capacity with a Kol Battleship and 10 Cobalts, just for the sake of example. Researching 2 levels of Advanced Metallurgy gets you +1.5 Armor for everything and costs 900 Creds/75 Metal; according to the Combat Mechanics topic, 1 Armor roughly equals +5% base hull strength, so you're getting roughly +225 hull points to your Kol and +45 hull points to your 10 Cobalts, for a total of +675 hull points across your who
How do you guys say these things stack up? It looks to me like the Kol and the Marza are the best, with the Dunov being the worst; the Sova and Akkan atleast have somewhat useful abilties in the form of Embargo and Colonize. Also, what are the best abilities to put on them?
Is there anywhere that one can find data about exactly what the abilities do, i.e., exactly how many hull points the Hoshiko's Repair Bots restores and how quickly, vs exactly how much the Demo Bots slow down enemy fire?
How do you manage these things' abilities? For Hoshikos, is it better to keep Repair Bots or Demo Bots on, or both, and same for Cielos and their two abilities. On that note, do people here think that Cielos are even worth using?
