Is there a benefit to captive human settlements?

[mindloss]

Yeah, I read on the tooltip that they give you 25 or 45 M/C or whatever, but that's obviously just a trifle. And if you do capture a planet with one, it'll cause the AI to hit that planet harder, and if you lose the settlement you go up, what was it, 80 AIP?

I've been avoiding planets with these like the plague. Are they just an option to make things more colorful/difficult, or did I miss something?

[x4000]

Yes, it's mostly to make it harder.

[Coppermantis]

Yup, From the Wiki:

We felt like this would more accurately represent freeing a captive population in this sort of military situation -- suddenly having civilians in the middle of the war zone is rarely a good thing, despite the fact that freeing captives is the morally upright thing to do (although, conversely you could make the argument that they are relatively safe under enemy control for now, and if you win the war they will all be freed).
From a gameplay standpoint, the main function of these settlements is to make capturing a specific planet less desirable. This is a special unit for Homeworlder AI types, but they also show up at random on some planets in other games. Sometimes you have no choice but to capture one of these settlements, or maybe you want to free them on moral grounds, but otherwise (strategically-speaking) it's a good idea to avoid them. The purpose of them, therefore, is to create challenging decision points for the players on planets which would otherwise just be rotely captured.

I still stubbornly capture them, just because I can. Putting a Warp Jammer Command Station on the planet would negate the 3X wave multiplier, wouldn't it?

[Hearteater]

If you take a far off human settlement and can decently defend it, it does create a pocket of alerted systems to siphon off reinforcements.  That assumes the settlement is not near anything important.  Note that they can produce their own special ships so it isn't impossible to defend.

[mindloss]

Wait, did I hear that right? When the text says "AI will attack this planet harder" for stuff, it means waves will be 3x normal size? I always wondered about that...

[Gudamor]

Hearteater:

Captive human settlements and rebelling human colonies are different things.

Rebelling human colonies are a Minor Faction plot that must be enabled. These are the ones that produce ships.

Captive human settlements are a random structure and can be more commonly generated by the Entrenched Homeworlder AI type. These are the ones that produce metal+crystal.

They both carry a heft AIP penalty upon their death.

[Commiesalami]

Making Waves larger for having certain objects on a planet (like human settlements and Human Ion Cannons) was taken out quite awhile ago.  The description for settlement just hasn't been updated methinks.

[Hearteater]

Thanks for clearing that up Gudamor.  Never played against an Entrenched Homeworlder.  I think I just assumed it had that minor faction turned on for it.

[Ozymandiaz]

Making Waves larger for having certain objects on a planet (like human settlements and Human Ion Cannons) was taken out quite awhile ago.  The description for settlement just hasn't been updated methinks.

Still got memories of a 100k ship wave I had once...

That did not end well for me, or my CPU

[x4000]

The biggest wave I ever saw was 16 million ships.  I was using about 30 golems via cheats to test something, and the AI sent a wave to the planet with all the golems.  Thanks to carriers they did all spawn, but the game hung for about 3 minutes before they got in there.  A threat of 16 million didn't even fit in the bar properly, and of course the game itself ran at a crawl after that.  It was still 8,000 carriers, heh.

[mindloss]

Wow. Hey, a credit to you guys that the game didn't just crash, eh?

[x4000]

Originally the save that someone else sent me did.  But we rejiggered things until it didn't.

[dotjd]

Should've put the carriers in carriers!

[x4000]

It's just carriers all the way down!

[Hearteater]

I think if I killed a carrier, and 16 carrier spilled out, I'd probably start crying.