Ring and Sphereworlds

[Nyx]

Well, I build ringworlds as the ultimate defense against people detonating my stars. I don't give a darn about their production or population, but it's incredibly difficult to survive the reqired one round of combat against the volume of fighters and weapon platforms I can stick on a ringworld. In my games I bump into the 2000 unit in space limit a lot because I over deploy mines. And I do play against humans so stellar bombs get used. Stick satelites in orbit of the star and he just waits for the 30 turns to end, then kills the system. But with a ringworld, he's toast and my stars are safe.

I'm about to test an old strategy I used to use when my friends and I would play for points in Finite resource games: Blow up all non-huge worlds and rebuild them as huge. I'm wondering if this resets the resource limit on the world. While I'm at it, I'll test to see what the resources of ring and sphere worlds are in finite games. I'll have the data for you on Monday if no one else does it sooner (I don't have a connection over the weekend).

Also, if you're playing for points, and not just to win, sphere's are worth building.

[Kagetora]

I would be very interested in knowing about the resources. I bet in finite resource games there is a limit set for the system at the beginning of the game based on how much each planet starts with. Otherwise you could just keep blowing up planets to get more resources. If so this could make a big difference in a game in which the system the ringworld was built in had no planets of it's own before. There is a stellar manipulation shield that could be placed in a system and would stop people from blowing up your sun. This would be much cheaper than a ringworld. Of course they could still destroy the planet and thus the shield too. You could build more than one tho and they wouldn't know exactly which planet it was on in a multiplanet system. You would also have alot of response time do to their search and wasted efforts on the sun.

[Kagetora]

I am not sure how a ringworld could be a very effective defense considering the time it takes to build it. It certainly couldn't be built on the front line of a war. I would use cloak or suicide ships to keep checking your systems for ringworld construction then wait till right before it was done and waste all those bases with no defenses on them and or all the shipyard ships or take out the ringworld before you could put defenses up on it. Also perhaps capturing the world myself after you spent all the resources building it. I am also not sure how the points are calculated exactly but I doubt the sphereworld would be worth more points than the number of ships you could build with the same amount of resources. Unless of course you had the ship limit to worry about. But if you had 2000 ships I doubt you would worry about it too much.<G>

[AJC]

Ring worlds are awesome monsters and have enormous growth potential - once you get a decent population going , the population explodes and they grow at an amazing rate. All resources available are 150% and conditions are optimal. In one game my opponent built 3 of them. They were expensive to build but once he had one up and running- he could easily afford to build the others.

[Joda]

Speaking of ringworlds has anyone built a RW in 8-9 turns (not counting the construction time for the 11 space yard ships) without custom techs? I have , and here is how I did it:

1) Create a starbase design with one Master Computer component and say 3 colonization modules, lets call it SB1.

2) Start building 11 of those around a star, @ emergancy rate (200%). It will cost you 3 x 4000pts/turn and be completed in about 4 turns IIRC.

...4 turns later...

3) Create a new starbase design that is as close to 50% more expensive than the SB1 design, lets call it SB2. Now create another SB design that's 50% more expensive than SB2... continue to do this until you have SB? that costs 2/3 of a "Ringworld SB", lets call it SB10.

4) In the same turn; pick one of your SB1:s and uppgrade it to a SB2, then uppgrade it to a SB3 and so on, all the way upp to SB10. Uppgrade SB10 to a "Ringworld SB".
Do the same procedure with the remaning 10 SB1:s, but stop at the SB? that cost 2/3 of a "Hyper - Density SB"/"Planetary Gravity SB". Then uppgrade 5 of those to "Hyper - Density SB":s and 5 to "Planetary Gravity SB":s.

5) Click next turn.

...1 turn later...

6) All the components that you need to create a ringworld are in place! Create the RW!

IIRC, it takes another turn for the RW to appear, or am I mistaken? Who cares.

Theoretically you could construct a ringworld in X + 1 (or X + 2) turns, where X is the number of turns it takes to build the SB1:s. So in the example above it would take 5 to 6 turns.
In my case it took 8 or 9 turns because I had not build up my organics and radioactives industry enough, so I had to wait a few extra turns to uppgrade all of my SBs. Needless to say this procedure uses up A-L-O-T of resources, but I never said it would be cheap, just faster.

[Kagetora]

Yeah they are awesome all right but right before you get the ringworld tech you get the tech to change all the planets into your atmosphere which if you have any decent number of planets going would give you so much population that it wouldn't freaking matter anymore. Not to mention the increase in resources. I never said the ringworlds weren't good I just said they were impractical for a serious war and are really only good for show. They just show up too late in the game and cost far too much research and resources to be worth it.

[Kagetora]

How much anybody would care how many turns it took you can also be a formula. X+Y-1 Where X is how totally useless and impractical what you did was. Which in this case is near optimum. Where Y is the amount of over enthusiasm you showed for this useless and meaningless effort which was also extreme. Minus 1 is the amount your intelligence is below the sum in order for you to actually think it mattered enough to post it.