Resource Stockpile Display

[corfe83]

When I have negative income and basically no metal or crystal in stock, I would expect my metal and crystal to get down to zero, or very close to it. Instead, they often hover around ~200 or ~280. I would expect my metal and crystal to show as "zero" if my stockpiles are indeed empty. Perhaps not that important to fix, but it's a bug I assume?

I'm curious to know where the number it hovers around is coming from, so I can know for sure when my stockpiles are really empty (and hurting my build progress), vs. when they're simply close to empty.

Yes, I often spend more than I have, and probably more than half the game, my metal and crystal stockpiles are both below 1,000 

[x4000]

It's definitely not a bug, but rather it's a reflection of the varying complex rates of inflows and outflows resulting in "at the time of the display update, here's what you had" slight overages.  It may also be related to the manufactory rules, but any rate this is just a small buffer that hangs around based on ships not being able to do the construction that they would be able to, or the manufactories not being allowed to run conversions when there is that little of the source resource type, etc. 

We could spend hours and hours chasing this down, but I don't know to what end that would be.  If you're spending that much of the game with your economy stockpiles that low, that's... probably something you want to address.

[corfe83]

Fair enough. The real problem with my low stockpiles is that I've never gotten past the first few hours of the game and lived, mostly due to lax defense measures. I'm beefing them up for this game and hope to survive to a wealthy, well-defended multi-planet empire this time!

[x4000]

I gotcha.

[carlosjuero]

I, as some who have read my posts and seen my screens/save games can attest, am a very defensive "Turtle" player so I figured I might lend you a little help. The key about defense is to start early, but also be careful to monitor your income & threat levels. Be careful scouting before having a defensive layer prepared, and definitely hold off on an offensive fleet until you can take the backlash.

Start out by unlocking a cheaper (resource wise) turret like the Laser Turret [long range, good attack, pretty solid for defense in general] and possibly Grav Turrets. Then place your turrets so that you can cover as much space as possible with as few turrets as possible. In other words, if you have 2 wormholes that are close enough to be in the range of your offensive turrets - place them in a ball between those wormholes. Remember, placing them right on the wormhole actually degrades their usefullness as units are temporarily invincible when exiting the wormhole. The only turrets I place right up on wormholes are tractor beams [Psst - X... if the AI ever learned that it would certainly make attacking systems a bit more difficult ].

Keep in mind different ranges your turrets have [Z key is your friend ], and place tiers that can support each other while maintaining effective and economic control of ingress points. Don't use only one type of turret, but mix it up (as different ships have different weaknesses). I also suggest globs of Spider & Sniper turrets placed near your command station - the Spiders will disable the enemy ships, the snipers will slowly chew them up and spit them out (It is called the "NOM NOM NOM" strategy )

Fair enough. The real problem with my low stockpiles is that I've never gotten past the first few hours of the game and lived, mostly due to lax defense measures. I'm beefing them up for this game and hope to survive to a wealthy, well-defended multi-planet empire this time!

[corfe83]

Thanks Carlos. I start early but I think my problem is I don't continue building defenses, and I often go on the offense way too early (before I can handle the backlash). I do check their ranges, try to build covering multiple wormholes (or multiple resource extractors) and I always build a variety of types (I often unlock laser turrets and missile turrets since they're cheap, long-range and seem effective).

One of the problems that keeps biting me is when I get in turret-laying mode, I want to just drop a hundred turrets or so, but that breaks my economy.

Actually, it would be cool if there were a way such that when laying down 10 turrets, the game would build them sequentially (it would pause 9 of them until the 1st had finished building, then it would unpause the 2nd, etc.) so the turrets don't all build at the same time. If I lay down 2 groups of 10 (20 total), only 1 from each group would be building at a given time. So if I lay down 10 groups of 10 turrets, 10 would build at a time. Of course, this should be optional, perhaps via control node or special keyboard or context menu shortcut.

I wonder if this is something one of the devs at Arcen might consider adding.

[x4000]

Generally there absolutely no reason to add turrets all at once, and doing sequential turret adding would be pretty hard to code in an effective way. I tend to take my first planet from the ai in about 5-10 minutes of playing, and then pretty regularly from there. It's all about which planets you take, and what sort of ships or turrets you leave behind. There's no reason to spend hours turtling, but you need something to defend on your home planet. I've written some strategy articles that you might find o use, and hopefully after 4.0 I can do some more videos. But except in the case of rebuilding massively-destroyed turrets I wouldn't see a general need for sequential building of them...

[corfe83]

I guess I just need to learn to build turrets more frequently (and in smaller groups) is all.

[Diazo]

Ya, that's something I've started doing also.

With the new spread out home system, I build a smaller turret ball on each of the 3 starting locations and each warp point, then each extractor that isn't covered by that gets 5 basic turrets.

It's amazing how even just those few basic turrets turn a few stragglers from a several minute long chore to chase down with mobile military to something that just dies. (Especially anything cloaked.)

D.