Horrible Doom

[Suicide Junkie]

I was just reading the game forum, and saw a few things to add:

Construction rates have been changed - no longer can you build at 2/3 the rate of a homeworld on your dinky little outPosts! You'll need to ferry population to your colonies if you want to increase their construction rate into four digits! In addition, spaceyards and resupply depots cost more, so you can't afford to build them everywhere you want to.

In addition, the resource production rates are highest for backwater colonies with moderate populations.
Too few people, and you don't have enough workers to get the work done.
Too many people, and the planet gets paved over
The peak production happens close to 500M people and reaches up to 225%. Beyond that, the production bonus slowly declines, until it reaches 100% at about 2 billion people.

Spaceyards start at 10% of normal rate. For every 25M people you add, you get +1% rate. That means a regular little facility like a mineral miner takes 8 months on a brand-new colony unless you ship more people in.
When you have 100M people, that's 14%
When you have 1,000M people, that's 50%
When you have 64,000M people on a sphereworld, thats 2570% (!)

You'll immediately need to gather lots of radioactives, as they are much more important in P&N than in regular SE4 - for one thing, engines use a LOT of them! Supplies are also in short supply, at least if you use matter-based attacks such as depleted uranium cannons or missiles - a single Heavy Bombardment Missile shot can cost 300 supplies! (that's a 3 with two zeros!)

You start with Legacy Infrastructure, so you shouldn't have to worry about the rads right away. When colonizing, do keep rads in mind, because they will be important.

There are no resupply depots in this mod, so the only way to get more supplies is to use solar panels, or build new ships
I highly reccommend building a base with "solar reactors" and lots of supply storage tanks. If you have the base and a ship in the same fleet, they will share supplies.
The ship will get filled up and can then go on its merry way, while the base refills using the solar panel.
Binary and Trinary systems will be especially useful as resupply areas.

Note that bases have limited supplies! You will need to send resupply ships, or have solar panels on them. You can also lay siege to them

Watch out for the Pirates' Civilian ships though - they're completely undetectable, no matter what level scanners you have, and they pay only 20% of normal maintenance! Fortunately for a Normal player, they only come in sizes up to 250 kT, but unfortunately that's big enough for a Pirate to put one of his specialized 100kT mini spaceyards on!

Cloaking is also heavily modified in this game:
Small shipsizes defeat gravitic sensors.
Master computers (Military) defeat Psychic sensors.
Stealth armor defeats passive sensors
Scattering armor defeats active sensors.
Tachyon diffUsers defeat temporal sensors.

Cloaking devices are available, but the top level sensors defeat the top level cloaking device, and they do not provide any gravitic cloaking.

Frigates can be made completely undetectable, just like the pirate civilian ships, but most of their mass will be devoted to the various cloaking devices, and you will have almost nothing left for payload.

PS:
Some basic designs you will probably need:
- Solar Power Plant
Base with 1 solar reactor, plus as many supply storage components as will fit.
Used as a resupply depot by fleeting with ships.

- Scoutship
Escort with about 10 ion engines, and supply tanks in the remaining space.
This will go about 10 speed, so you can really explore quickly. Use cheap mounts to save cash, since it dosen't stand a chance in combat anyways.

- Heavy Warship
Enough engines for about 5 speed, the rest divided up amongst weapons and shields/armor. This will be your heavy hitter. As tech improves, you can afford to get more speed.
Use premium mounted armor to boost hitpoints. Armored engines are also a good idea.

- Interceptor Warship
Enough engines for about 7 or 8 speed, the rest divided up amongst weapons and shields/armor. This will be your fast-response ship. Use in fleets, since they will be weaker than the heavy hitters missiles are probably a good idea, so you can stay away from the heavy hitter's guns. As tech improves, you can afford to get more speed or more guns. Use premium mounted armor to boost hitpoints. Armored engines are also a good idea.

- Minesweeper
Basic components, and as low a speed as is practical. You don't want to spend lots of rads on a ship that will die rapidly.
Load up on armor, and look for the best Cost per hitpoint ratio. Standard Armor III is probably your best bet, unmounted.

[Fyron]

The highest production bonus actually occurs at 661-764 population (221% bonus).

[Ed Kolis]

I did notice the lack of resupply depots when the game actually started... Surprised me, I almost thought the "solar reactors" were supposed to be Nomad tech but turns out they're essential!

Too bad you can't actually transfer supplies between ships like in Stars!...

And too bad you can't set the population production bonuses to depend on the planet size... sure, 8000M might be "all paved over" for a regular planet, but what about a SPHEREWORLD

[Suicide Junkie]

It has come to my attention that there is a missing portrait for an image in the mod.

comp_286.bmp


It is one of the original SE4 images, and so I never checked to see if it had a portrait; and it turns out it dosen't!

So you can blame one of the SE4 artwork guys for this one

Just download the above file, and add it to your images\components folder.

[ May 24, 2003, 07:20: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[dumbluck]

See that PBW game thread.

[mottlee]

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
It has come to my attention that there is a missing portrait for an image in the mod.

comp_286.bmp


It is one of the original SE4 images, and so I never checked to see if it had a portrait; and it turns out it dosen't!

So you can blame one of the SE4 artwork guys for this one

Just download the above file, and add it to your images\components folder.

ME! ME! I'm the one in the Blue!!!

[Ed Kolis]

So, what's up? Where's Zero been all this time?

[dumbluck]

I wish I knew.

Did you see my post in the game forum?

[ June 22, 2003, 23:35: Message edited by: dumbluck ]

[dumbluck]

Players: please check the game forum to see if we can get this game moving...

[Suicide Junkie]

P&N PBW r8.zip
A roman numeral typo in the name of training facilities, and a couple of bits in the organic seeker weapons targetting options.