roids vs mines

[Makhil]

from some posts, it seems not clear if we should stick to a hundred roids and develop the mines or get loads of roids and use the mines to balance the production of resources.

- roids can be stolen, they become more and more expensive to initiate so it is better to steal them early (and attacking increase the score) they count for little in the overall score.
- mines can't be stolen but can be destroyed, if you lose a mine your score drops more than by losing the equivalent roids, building a mine costs no resource only time and produces 4 times more res. than a roid).

There's apparently a limit to the number of roids you can exploit and there's a limit to the number of mines you can build ?


As attacking brings more score than roid stealing, and destroying buildings lower the opponents score faster than stealing his roids will the way we fight change drastically (destroying enemy structures becoming the standard attack) ?

[Wandows]

Originally posted by Makhil
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- mines can't be stolen but can be destroyed, if you lose a mine your score drops more than by losing the equivalent roids, building a mine costs no resource only time and produces 4 times more res. than a roid).

The cost of building a structure is 1000 * number of existing constructions of each resource type.

So the first building of any kind is for free, but building more will increase the cost of the next :-)

[zenopus]

Let's disregard other structures, pretend there's just mines.
And let's ignore that you can lose mines and gain or lose roids in combat.
We'll do mines in threes and roids in groups of 4/4/4 for simplicity.

The first 4/4/4 roids cost 1000+1250+1500+1750 = 5500 of each resource and output 1k of each resource per tick.
Each subsequent set of 4/4/4 roids costs 4k more of each resource.

The first 1/1/1 mines cost 0+1000+2000 = 3000 of each resource and output 1k of each resource per tick.
Each subsequent set of 3 mines costs 9k more of each resource.


The 10th set of 4/4/4 roids (bringing you from 108 to 120 roids) costs 41.5k of each resource.
The 5th set of 3 mines (bringing you from 12 to 15 mines) costs 39k of each resource.


If your total income exceeds 200k per tick Finance Centres give better return on investment than mines.

[Tactitus]

There's another factor to consider as well. Your roid count[*] is free information to the universe; your mine count isn't. If most of your income is derived from mines, you probably won't show up as a very good target to those looking at your galaxy or using a conventional target search program. Obviously, they scan to see how many constructions you have, but that's neither free nor automatic (like roid count).



*Plus there's no uninitiated roids anymore, so they're all good.

[Gayle29uk]

My personal theory for the start of the game is all races should init all roids as fast as possible (up to about 150 by the end of protection) but Terran/Cath/Zik should use mines to balance the disparity in their resource income. Building all mines of one type will quickly allow the required roid type to be inited in greater numbers and the required status quo reached with a minimum of resource trading.

[Andy_r]

Originally posted by Tactitus
There's another factor to consider as well. Your roid count[*] is free information to the universe; your mine count isn't. If most of your income is derived from mines, you probably won't show up as a very good target to those looking at your galaxy or using a conventional target search program.

...and even if you know you have lots of mines, they can't steal them, only destroy them. The other factor to consider is the Heavy Cargo Transfers limit, which makes you choose between having lots of productive roids or working on the rest of the tech tree.

The desire to build mines should be offset by the likelyhood of their destruction (constructions are the new pds!) and the usefulness of other construtions, currently a pair of unknown factors, even to us beta testers.

Keeping a low roidscount and playing 'sim planet' is certainly possible, but if you can manage it, you will only obtain Value, not Score.

[Browolf]

Originally posted by Gayle29uk
My personal theory for the start of the game is all races should init all roids as fast as possible (up to about 150 by the end of protection) but Terran/Cath/Zik should use mines to balance the disparity in their resource income. Building all mines of one type will quickly allow the required roid type to be inited in greater numbers and the required status quo reached with a minimum of resource trading.

I agree completely and is proven.
By the end of protection the majority of the universe will have 150+ roids so you'll hardly be a sticking out target.

[MAdnRisKy]

you can "build" roids and other constructions at the same time, this is not the case with mines.

if you're playing a race like Terran which need cr pretty fast, or if you wish to deflect covert op (unlucky if you're big, everyone and sundry is going to take pot shots at you all day long :/) or have realised how useless scan planets are and want intel against any possible incomming (pointless but that's another issue) which means amps :/ , then freeing up your construction page for something other than mines is a good thing.

and that nice comparision between cost of roids and cost of mines is as you pointed out, missing the other constructions, which are quite nessesary.

Quite how essential that point is going to be I'm unsure, especially at the start, since constructions are nothing like what they used to be, but it's a point I've not seen mentioned before so I thought I'd bring it up.