Newbie Strategy Guide

[Taqwus]

More on scouts:

Scouts definitely could use solar collectors to greatly extend their range, and thus utility; in addition, solar sails will be helpful in making them go faster and faster. Both of these two useful techs are found in the Stellar Harnessing tech area, which is available upon researching Astrophysics I.

Other components worthy of being on a scout include a long-range scanner and a non-combat sensor, and cloaking.

By non-combat sensor, I mean *not* the Combat Sensor that's available via Sensors I-III. Instead, there are five types of sensing:

Active ECM. Most objects have Level 1 Active ECM by default. Tachyon Sensors, found rather expensively via the Sensors tech area, provide three more levels.

Passive ECM. Again, Level 1 by default for most objects. Hyper-Optics give this, and are found in the Advanced Military Science tech area.

Gravitic. This is not present by default, and is granted only by Gravitic Sensors in the Gravitic Technology tech area.

Temporal. Temporal sensors are restricted to Temporal Technology, and therefore to that particular racial trait.

Psychic: Psychic sensors are just as restricted as Temporal, only to the Psychic racial trait.

A scout ship with a Level 3 sensor device of any type will generally be able to detect everything in a system. Against a human opponent in a huge galaxy, if all players tend to delay and build up for a while before war it is very possible that large war fleets could be skulking about cloaked...

And one application of having numerous scouts is that of an intelligence spotter. Namely, anti-ship and anti-colony intelligence operations can be directed at specific targets *if* you can see them. For instance, if you station a spotter in a 'no man's land' system -- perhaps one with only an asteroid belt, say, so nobody has a colony base for resupply -- you can use Crew Insurrection to snare passing ships. Not only is this a fast way of gaining new technology, since these ships can be returned to a shipyard and analyzed, but it can cripple a small attack fleet by turning its best ships against their brethren.


------------------
-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[taterbill]

A question regarding scouts and damage:

I just had a thought while I'm here at work pretending to be working. Those dang unstable wormholes can sure put a crimp in any scouting expedition. If you say, built a cruiser-level scout with its own repair bay, would it be able to repair itself? (Assuming the repair bay did not get damaged, of course.)

Bottom line question: Can ships with repair bays repair themselves?

Bill

[Nitram Draw]

Yes, ships can repair themselves if they have or are with a ship that has a repair bay.

[raynor]

quote:

---

Originally posted by taterbill:
A question regarding scouts and damage:

I just had a thought while I'm here at work pretending to be working. Those dang unstable wormholes can sure put a crimp in any scouting expedition. If you say, built a cruiser-level scout with its own repair bay, would it be able to repair itself? (Assuming the repair bay did not get damaged, of course.)

Bottom line question: Can ships with repair bays repair themselves?

Bill

---

You bet!

It is pretty common to see folks building stellar manipulation(SM) ships with repair components. After you use the SM component, it is 'destroyed'. But if you have a repair component on the ship, the SM component is repaired by the beginning of the next turn.

[taterbill]

Ah, tricky!

What a great board this is. Considerate responses, no flames, great participation... Quite different from most of the game Boards I've seen.

Bill

[DirectorTsaarx]

BTW - there's a bug with the stellar manipulation components. They're supposed to use 4000 (!) supply each time they're used; they don't actually use any supply. Yet.

Which means that, if they really did use supplies as stated, you'd have to find a resupply depot (or have a ship with LOTS of supply on it) for each use of the component, no matter how fast you could repair it. Not to mention you have to have 4000 points of supplies to use the component the first time...

[Nitram Draw]

Makes the Quantum Reactor extremely valuable (to valuable in my opinion)