warp point abuse?

[Puke]

I dont know if this is abuse or the reality of warfare at high technology, but check out some things about manipulating warp points:

1 - any given system can have no more than 10 warp points. this means that you can have a fully contained and impenatrable empire by simply meshing all of your systems together, and unless somone can magically get inside of your network of systems, they wont be able to destroy a warp point in order to build one of their own bridging in. you can then open a single warp point out in a controlled fashion to conquer another system, and subsequently close off that system by destroying its other warp points and opening up private ones into your mesh.

2 - makes it very hard to defend warp points when some one can just close it from the other side. defend your side, and the enemy can just close their side of the warp point. go through and build defenses on the hostile side of a warp point, they can just build another warp tunnel into your system and close the friendly side of the gate.

I can understand the 10 warp point limit, maybe the fabric of the space time continuum cant bear any more stress from all the whacky tachyons or something (or maybe its just hard to program all that pathing), but is there a file where you can change that number?

also, is there a way to disable reasearch into warp technology without disabling the rest of the stellar manipulation tree? (i know, i can edit the tech files - but I do like the option of being able to build warp points and tear them down, its one of the best points of the game IMO).

or if anyone else has any thoughts or workarrounds..

[Instar]

1:
Well, its true that you could do that, but thats time consuming! Really though, that would work. But its very hard to do.

[Puke]

not really, an unarmed frigate with a first level warp point generator and a repair bay (or other repair ship) is pretty cheap. you could build 5-10 of them without much stress if you had as many systems, and secure a system every turn or two.

[Seawolf]

Remember that you can't have any other ships but your own in a sector to open or close Warp points.

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Seawolf on the prowl

[Taqwus]

*frowns*

Hmmm. I can see why there'd be a fixed limit (fixed array size, say, plus you don't want the system graph to have a hundred thousand edges...). You'd need a minimum of... 10 systems w/n 500LY (at max tech), since each can have a warp point to itself plus each of the others. And you'd need to create 100 warp points that way. If you think your opponents would try this, you can always use a sparser galaxy...

It's probably more practical to simply close off warp points, and create new ones stacked in the same square. The nice thing about this is that they can be defended w/ a single minefield, base and set of satellites; plus, since warping takes 1 MP, you can warp-warp-warp through a chain of always same-square warp points and perhaps traverse your empire in one turn. Bad news is, of course, if your defenses go down your attacker can traverse your empire in one turn.

I'm also tempted to look at warp-point booby-traps (e.g. create warp point in center of system you don't care about. Then create a black hole. Does the warp point remain, and if so, is black-hole damage on arrival or end-of-turn? Likewise, one with too much time on his hands could try to lure ships into systems with a black hole, then close all exits. Pity we can't create one-way warp points. ;-))

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night