Newbie building sphere/ringworld question

[Taqwus]

The impatient, profligate types among us can also use the refit trick to build the bases in just a couple o' turns... it'll cost you an arm and several legs, but you can do it. ISTR that it came up when Dracus was discussing how he built vast numbers of 'em for the TwinGalaxies tourney.

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[Oggy ben Doggy]

quote:

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Originally posted by Taqwus:
The impatient, profligate types among us can also use the refit trick to build the bases in just a couple o' turns... it'll cost you an arm and several legs, but you can do it. ISTR that it came up when Dracus was discussing how he built vast numbers of 'em for the TwinGalaxies tourney.

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How's that work? Make a bunch of bases and retrofit them to be ringworld component bases?

I thought that if there was to high of a cost differnec, you couldn't retrofit one ship into another?

[Taqwus]

There are two details you need to know about refits...

a) The cost limit is based on the cost of the current design, not the original.

b) You don't need to repair a component before you can refit it.

This means that if you have a series of designs of the same hull type where each iteration increases the cost of each resource by no more than 50% (by default; moddable), you can do perform ALL the refits from the start to the end in one turn (as long as you can afford them).

IOW, you can build a cheap starbase in X turns; refit it to a sphereworld base in 1 turn; and then repair it in another turn. You end up paying for it all up front, which could be nasty; I don't know how the cost compares with the maintenance required for the normal multi-year way, which would in any event vary with race.

I've never bothered to work out the design chain, but it can and has been done before. I sometimes refit-chain 600kt+ warships, bringing up older designs (especially captured AI ships) to expensive, new designs, and that rarely takes more than one or two intermediate designs.


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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[Q]

The refit trick is a little bit on the cheating side, wouldn't you agree?

[Taqwus]

When used to construct expensive things very quickly, it does seem quite munchkin. OTOH, it might not be that bad, ethically, if it's FAR more expensive, but I've not crunched the numbers...

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[serpwidgets]

quote:

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you can build a cheap starbase in X turns; refit it to a sphereworld base in 1 turn; and then repair it in another turn.

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Not in a simultaneous game. You can only refit/mothball/unmothball ONE ship per turn at any given location, and that stuff takes place when the turn is run by the host, you can't do it "realtime" during your turn. IOW if you have 3 shipyard bases at your homeworld, you can STILL only mothball ONE ship per turn at that location.

Simultaneous really bites for that, among several other things, like launching fighters/satellites, transferring cargo...

[Erhardt]

Another question on this thread: how can I get construction ships to combine their efforts to build something? 5 years for on ship to build the ringworld frob is not great when I can have a const. ship each for 2k cables and plating.