Planet Capture? Is it worth it?

raynor · #1 January 27th, 2001, 07:11 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Tomgs:
The catch all planet type for the AI is mineral miner worlds thats why you see 1% worlds with a bunch of wasted miners on it. If the planet doesn't fit any critera or all the types it fits have been built in the system it makes the world a mining world.
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Thanks for the info. That explains some of the stuff I've seen.

Generally, when I play, I build research centers on worlds with < 75% on all numbers. But that is just at the beginning of the game while I'm trying to get my research points up to at least 100,000. Since, I'm pouring ALL excess mineral production into fighters, I don't need much storage.

In the middle of the game, I need more minerals for refits plus I've probably accumulated a good bit of research points. At that point, I build storage facilities on worthless worlds.

Finally, towards the end of the game, I start building intel centers to protect myself.

I haven't yet played a game where I was doing so badly that I intentionally built mineral miners on a world that wasn't pretty close to at least 100% on minerals. If the AI was expanding as quickly as it should be, I think it should be hard-wired to *NEVER* build a mineral/organic/radioactive facility when the number is below 75%. I consider any other behaviour to be a bug worthy of calling this game Ascendancy-like...

Tomgs · #2 January 27th, 2001, 08:16 PM

Well I build storage facilities in the early game so my strategies are different

. I hate to waste that early production. I build spaceyards on 99% of my planets build heavily and almost never run out of resources because of this.

But back to the question at hand. I think some changes in the text files improve this problem it may not get rid of it completely untill we can use numbers below 100 to set the planet types but for now you can limit the Mineral miner types to 101 minerals. Just remember to set a catch all type of planet at the bottom of each AI state. You will still see some miners in bad planets because the other types of planets like Military also build some miners if space allows.

UmberGryphon · #3 January 27th, 2001, 09:04 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Atrocities:
In fact, when I set my ship stratigies to CAPTURE PLANET if carring troops, all my ships will do is go to the planet, hover and use up their turns and DO NOTHING....

Funny, I don't have that problem. It sounds like your transports are getting a "Don't Get Hurt" strategy from somewhere, and it's higher priority than their "Capture Planet" strategy--that would make them move to the planet, but would keep them just out of weapon platform range. If you're using ships labeled "Pop. Transport" as troop transports, consider putting them in a fleet whose strategy is "Capture Planet"--this worked the few times I've done it. Ships labeled "Troop Transport" default to the right thing.

With my huge troop transports, their repair facility 3s and their eight emergency propulsion 5s, I sometimes succeed in taking entire systems in 5 minutes. And yes, sometimes those planets have stupid facilities on them, but I can always scrap them... and that's a small resource advantage over glassing and recolonizing, right? And I don't have to build a colonizer (another resource advantage), and send it to the planet (a time advantage)....