Ringworlds and such

[Dragonlord]

Hi all,

New question: what are ringworlds and when/why would you bother to develop them?
Is there a difference between a ringworld and a sphereworld?

In the few solo games I've played, even making it is hard on myself as I can against the AI, I usually dominate over half the galaxy before I ever get to this stage. And it gets boring then, so I stop playing.
I never even played up to the point where you get Wave Motion Guns and such, but I have opened a wormhole once, just to see what it'd be like
My PBW games usually end even sooner than my solo games

So I hoped someone here could tell me, that way I don;t have to open an old save game and go through the boring motions just to build a ringworld.

Does it provide any bonuses? Huge production capacity? Is it a huge mine? Or more like a monument to yourself?

[Phoenix-D]

Ringworlds and sphereworlds are essentially really friggin HUGE planets.

Ringworld is something like 10 times the Huge planet size, spheres 20 times..

Phoenix-D

[BeeDee10]

They cost a fortune and take forever to build (five years IIRC), but once you've got one built you can turn it into an impregnable fortress. For a Ringworld:

Max Cargo Spaces := 64000

That's space for 2560 heavy fighters, or 106 heavy weapon platforms, not even considering that if you were really insane you could stick up to 100 cargo facility IIIs there for an additional 300,000 cargo spaces (12,000 heavy fighters! You probably _can_ have that many there, since the unit limit only applies to what's in space not what's in storage). It'd take a while to build all those cargo facilities of course, but you can use the base space yards you used to construct the thing in the first place to supply the units.

If you built a sphereworld instead, double all the numbers above; 29,120 heavy fighters or 713 heavy weapons platforms for a sphereworld packed to the gills with cargo facilities. Ringworlds and sphereworlds are inherently immune to planet-destroying and sun-destroying weapons too, BTW. No need to waste resources on gravitational shield facilities for them.

And then, once you've spent hundreds of turns building the mother of all fortresses, you can lose it to a puppet political party thanks to the 1.41 CI bug.

[BeeDee10]

Eee! Corporal BeeDee! Now _I_ get to terrorize the pitiful PFCs all over the forum!

[Phoenix-D]

"There is nothing more dangerous than a Lieutenant with a map and compass.."

Phoenix-D

[tesco samoa]

here is a 6 player map with each starting point a sphere world. Just go in and edit each sphere to match atmoshpere and planet type. Makes for a great pbem game or a really hard game against tdm mod pack ai's. I wish I could make the game so that you only have 30 turns before the sphere worlds go nova. That would make for an intersting turn. Nothing like starting with 70 billion people 300000 minerals and 126000 research points.

[Taqwus]

You could consider a RW/SW to be mostly a prestige object... although, in the Peacemaker-type game (that I set aside for awhile when I found out about the JA2DL user-created campaign; killed Deidranna (well, several of them... strange mod) again) with a hefty resource surplus I'd started to construct sphereworlds around stars that were listed as unstable, as a preventative measure. I seem to recall that once you get the "star is about to explode" warning, you don't have enough time to build an SW without refit-chains, and you may not be able to build an RW unless you have sufficient spaceyard ships already assembled somewhere and ready to go... and it would have been *cough* irritating to lose a core system to a preventable incident. SWs/RWs prevent such stellar catastrophes (including artificially-induced ones), and are also immune to planet destroyers.

One note is that they start breathable / optimal, and with 150%/150%/150% values. Thus, they're great for monoliths (if you *need* the resources at that point...). The additional population capacity also means that, eventually, you can get some higher production modifiers than you can with a "mere" breathable-huge. It'll still take you basically forever to fill the world with monoliths, unless you're Temporal in which case it'll take you a fraction less.

[Edited when colonDL turned into, well, L...]
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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[This message has been edited by Taqwus (edited 24 July 2001).]

[capnq]

quote:

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here is a 6 player map with each starting point a sphere world. Just go in and edit each sphere to match atmoshpere and planet type

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You don't have to do any editing; SE IV automatically sets the atmosphere of the start world to match the race, and you want the planet type to be Sphereworld. It doesn't matter what your race's planet type is; I have a solo game where my Icy/CO2 race's homeworld is a Gas Giant.

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Cap'n Q

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

[tesco samoa]

when I load the map and change my atmosphere to one that is not the sphere world's atmosphere the sphere world changes to a huge planet. This has happened every time. (1.35 and 1.41 )

[Puke]

quote:

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Originally posted by CW:
1-do you mean this is going to take 5 years plus the construction time for the components?
2-I also gathered that all the starbases containing the components must be built in the same square where the sun is, is that true?
3-Strategically speaking I really don't see a point to build this monster, it is more like a monument than anything else.

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no, yes, and yes. someone worked out a cost/benefit analysis a while back and figured out that you can actually make a profit off of ringworlds in a fairly short space of time. I guess organic races would have a good time with replicant centers on one of these, but temporal races would do better in the short run with temporal spaceyards.

someone mentioned that constructions are immune to planet destroyers, i do not think this is so. I thought that they counted as a huge planet and as such could be destroyed by the highest level of planet destroyer. can anyone confirm?

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"...the green, sticky spawn of the stars"
(with apologies to H.P.L.)