Why are Anti-Starship Arachnid fab's so common?

[Dragon]

I'm just wondering if there is a specific reason why anti-starship fab's are far more common then other types of fabricators...  There are four in my current 60 planet game....  I wouldn't mind so much if each one you captured increased the ship cap, but as it is, I don't see why there should be more then one of each fab in a game....

[rubikscube]

they're so useless that they must spam you with them so you will facepalm and eventually ragequit


real reason is ship cap is low so that's why you need them, and compared to other fabricators, they are "rather useless" compared to BOMBER STARSHIP and such

[Frozen Critical]

Anti-starship Arachnids are only minor effective against Starships , it's Horrible against everything else , so its pretty useless , and i am quite suprised that Galaxies generated always contain more then two Arachnid Fabricators

my only prediction and guess is that the AI War Devs are doing something that ain't going the right way

[x4000]

Are you playing with TZR on?  If so, the arachnids should not be very common.  With TZR not on, there are only two or three types of non-core fabs around in general, so they tend to be very common in those games.  The "core" fabricators, and the "Experimental" fabricators are two different seed groups, and so hence why that occurs in the base game, where there are not all the new experimental ships.

[Dragon]

I'm playing with TZR, and ship type is complex....

[x4000]

It's probably just map seeding, then.  Most games I play don't have them that frequently, but this is an unconstrained random selection, so that would mean that in some edge cases you might see 100% or 0% of something, rather than 20% of everything or whatever it would work out to for even percentages.  That's the same sort of randomization that can let you start surrounded by all the Mark IV planets on the map, for instance, though that's rare too.

Most games try to constrain the randoms so that there's a fairly predictable distribution, but that winds up making the game seeds... predictable.  If you're seeing this routinely in every game that would be a question mark for sure, but I haven't heard from other folks about that, and I've not seen that in my own play, so I imagine it's just an unlucky seed. 

[triggerman602]

Also why are fabs frequently clumped together on a few planets and not spread out? I see it quite often where there can be 3 or 4 fabs on one planet.

[x4000]

I believe that is also a matter of just statistical clumping, honestly.  Though part of it may be that they are set to be at least 3 planets away from you, which -- depending on the map -- might be limited to just a few planets.  If you're playing grid or similar, that might make it so that there are a lot fewer ideal planets for that.  On snake you'd see almost no clumping, probably.

[Dragon]

Well, if the next game I play has a bunch of anti-starship fabs also, I'll let you know.  I guess it is likely to be just random.