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

[CW]

I'm currently in the process of assembling my resources to build a sphere world, just for the fun of it with no real practical purpose, since I'm so far ahead of the two remaining AIs anyway. This is a REALLY large scale project I'm undertaking, because I'm planning to build the super-planet in a blackhole system with 4 damaging warp points which happened to be in the middle of my empire.

So, the first step was to build a warp point opener and a warp point closer, then rebuild the 4 warp points (done). Next I'm building a blackhole destroyer, a star creator and a fleet of 21 construction ships (underway). The Last step will be to build the sphere world itself (to be done).

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