Important Understanding Resource Routing

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Re: Important Understanding Resource Routing

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Say you were trying to simulate a Federation-Klingon War. The distance from Earth to Qo'nos is 112 light years.

Let's presume that a 40x40 galaxy map is about equivalent in size as the Alpha and Beta quadrants...combined. BotE ships by turn 670+ are probably 20% as fast as Federation warships and so hoplessly slow that by the time you sent an armada, huge amounts of time would have passed whereas even in Star Trek Enterprise's time (the Jonathan Archer series), then their first mission on the very slow Warp 4 NX-01 not only could make the journey in one episode,but could be diverted and still make the journey (effectively making the total distance traveled about 224 light years).

This is why BotE ship speeds are too slow.
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Re: Important Understanding Resource Routing

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Now why are BotE ships so slow? Because you are playing on a random map and most young players are using pop rush tactics, as well as the AI, when that is entirely unrealistic.

So if BotE ships had realistic warp speed, this would likely exacerbate the unrealistic conflict caused by rush tactics.

BotE needs a campaign editor and thus a mapper and a modder could design an appropriate level of tech, infrastructure, ships, troops, and general economy for every major and minor race, and so fewer rush tactics would be utilized and although ships would be faster, the range issues would still stymie foolish rush tactics. Most early starships would have very short ranges and so that would hamper unrealistic early armada battles.

Likely minor race starting fleets would have to be reconfigured as they end up being absorbed as members andright from the first 50-100 turns, unbalance the game.
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Re: Important Understanding Resource Routing

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Medium and long range are a double edged sword in BotE.

Good
They prevent ridiculous early combat as the AI will use whatever tools are in the toolkit even if doing so wastes them. Usually the opponent is "out of range until turn 400+".

Bad
Warp capable starships have enormous range.

How to fix this?
A mapper and modder would prebuild outposts and starbases, BUT to establish borders for empires not to stupidly cause conflict as the BotE AI does within other major race's "spheres of influence. That is remarkably dumb.

Likely the modder would create some starbases, but then set very high requirements to create new ones.

Think about USA/Western Civilization (NATO) and then later EU versus the USSR Warsaw Pact(later Russsia)/China. What causes nuclear tension is an "outpost/starbase" situation within the other's sphere of influence. That is why very high tech and thus expense should occur to make outposts and starbases. They are very powerful and yet dirt cheap so of course the AI will misuse them.
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Re: Important Understanding Resource Routing

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What would be gained by the above being modded?

Very fast starships that can traverse the galaxy but solely able to do so initially by using prebuilt starbases. But then being severely limited until jumping through a lot of hoops to gain sufficient technology and spending boatloads of money to create new starbases...as is entirely realistic.

What still is wrong?
Starships didn't need starbases as they were not limited so severely by range.
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Re: Important Understanding Resource Routing

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With that in mind, a major race would research starbases and midway in a campaign, long after establishing an economically thriving empire, would then send scouts out and slowly create an entry way through waystation starbases to increase their range, and then send fleets.

And a vastly superior and accurate military simulation would happen.
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Re: Important Understanding Resource Routing

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BotE in the Android version is a touch based entry system and it wisely was programmed to click twice ie you select and confirm the order. Otherwise you can easily send ships to the wrong target and do incorrect resource routing.

On a huge 40x40 map, the player will zoom out so they can more easily do this selection process and the text is extremely difficult to read as the program was designed for standard desktops and laptops not tiny tablets.

And when you have ten criscrossing orange resource routes over a sector, and the text was already difficult to read, then you might fail to recognize that the sector is not only ignored regarding resource routing(s) but you also forgot to send adequate colony ships to fully populate it.

Never do resource routing before you need it but complete buildings based on available resources, as later enough might be locally mined, or by a few turns later, the terraforming colony ships are done, and now are available to actually colonize that sector. That will then start generating more local resources.

Your main limits in the game are critical shortages of deritium so you want to make more ships and can't. Honestly every scrapped colony ship is made of deritium, and so just creating a colony should deposit some in that sector, right?

The second limiting factor is there are inadequate trade routes and resource routes, and so if you set ones up before they are required, then maybe you lack five resource route slots you need NOW. That stinks and instead of a sector just making nothing, you have them make a valuable troop instead. Don't make too many extra mines or your upgrades will be cost prohibitive.

In my opinion, some systems that have a maximum of 55 billion, instead probably could reasonably house 75+ billion, and the way resource routing works is by sector population.

There are too many such game limiting functions like that.
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Re: Important Understanding Resource Routing

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Playing in the manner I suggested resulted in making 5.1 million selling a miniscule percentage of my total stored ore and crystals. Durantium exceeded 3000 per 100 units. Believe me, this is far more profit than trying to create one tiny trade route. Trade routes are worthless. I'm making 67000 per turn just on tax income and the Omega are not using any Super Taxes projects.

My galactic empire is practically a utopia that has never declared war, placates every irritated minor alien race, and my enemies then end up offering me treaties including alliances. This is the way to play. Although I can make the finest military since I've researched everything, my military spending is an absurdly low figure based upon how many sectors I directly control. My people want for nothing. They even have no energy shortage. Even alien race who joined has their minor race projects competed.

You can play as any major alien race in this manner. With a tiny amount of modding (less than a week making small alterations), the game would be so much better, and you could play with 5 major alien races and 95 % minor alien races. And I bet new reviewers would rave about it on Google Play as the best Android 4X strategy game.

If a few small java changes were enacted, the game would be outstanding.

And then if starship captains gained actual attributes by choices routinely made per turn, then BotE would seemingly be a roleplaying game. If anyone ever played Medieval 2 Total War, then that had characters and if they were in the army or in a settlement, and if a building was completed, they gained characteristics. This very small idea meant some characters were fantastic. Those characters who win battles gain specialized experience by manuevers, and thus they get better and better. That would emulate tacticians and strategists so battles are not just raw number crunching, but certain commanders in the flagship would excel.

To simplfy that you could even just have flagships gaining the abilities and so not have to follow characters. Flagships have declared names and so that flagship could transfer between fleets. Think about it.

It may be an older game that was ported to Android tablets, but the ideas are sound.
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Re: Important Understanding Resource Routing

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When you make millions, and particularly in the late game, then each new colonized sector will automatically have 4 mines of whatever resources are present in the sector when you send multiple colony ships. Heck, I have very few M class planets and so have lesser sectors than the minor alien races. And still I'm making millions.

This means you can upgrade everything, and though expensive at Level 5+, that then makes the value of every ore and crystals extremely high with stable predictable profits. You send streams of colony ships. from the initial populated sectors to populate the new colonies. You reconfigure the resource routes over and over to level up the upgrades faster. It works everytime.

If I wanted to, I could wage war, but the galaxy is so huge, it's unnecessary. That is very likely. Galaxies have enormous amounts of planets.

And then you focus on late game superbattles where the minor race aliens have powerful fleets. That is more fun that bullying minor alien races with less tech and no growth potential.
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Re: Important Understanding Resource Routing

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If we had multiplayer working, and I could configure each major race in the galaxy, and set all their boundaries and infrastructure, and similarly do the same as I have the Omega, then create a save game that either multiplayers or single players could then load, well grand battles could take place without players spending a month doing all the mundane work. The game would be awesome with fullscale battles.

Sabotage is so easy to fix merely by reconfiguring the tech requirements to something much higher across all six areas like Level 18. Then suddenly everyone would want to play BotE as no more ridiculous sabotage would happen until long range starships could truely travel all across the galaxy.

If a modder merely emulated choices from existing mods to create higher tech levels and ships and units, then BotE would totally rock as a wargame. There is no need to reinvent the wheel.
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Re: Important Understanding Resource Routing

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I could even do minimaps (10x10 galaxies) that reflect galactic borderlands between two advanced major alien races as a scenario. That would never happen randomly, but if I had multiplayer as above, and could do the presets for both sides, that would create wonderful scenarios that would take place at turn 800+ with a full high number of mixed ships and units. You would have real battles and organized invasions.

The players would spend time deploying existing units and ships into organized fleets and start waging war in ten turns, not hundreds and hundreds of turns. You could play a full scenario in a weekend. Doesn't that sound more fun?
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Re: Important Understanding Resource Routing

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So after turn 640+, then you can start generating millions and millions in staggered sales, and that is used to rush production of infrastructure.

And judiciously terraforming with 3 or so colony ships then allows you to do multiple colonizations in a sector. And late in the game, the program assigns 4 mines of every resource it recognizes when you colonize at that late point. I reckon it's a balancing feature that especially helps the AI sector colonies.

This strategy works well.

But here is a trick you can also do. You will have massive amounts of ore and crystal and yet the initial problem is these new colonies lack a storage of titanium. So right off to bat, you have to assign a resource route, but these populated established sectors often only have 2 or 3 trade routes or resource routes. You will run out of slots and you really ought to use the same ones and reassign them as otherwise you end up surpressing local sector mining as a glut exists.

So what you can do is when you sell down ore to reap 5 million plus in credits, then I generally stop selling at 500 and then by the time I run out of credits, the value has jumped way up to about 2000-3000 credits per 100 units.

Instead, keep selling it down to 300. Now it's cheap,but go to a new colony and then enter the main trade screen on the left (not the bottom as that is for trade and resource routing). In the MAIN trade screen, there is a way to buy ore or crystals and that next turn will then show up in that new sector. You sell your pricey ore and crystals, but as the value drops where it's cheap, you transfer deposits for next turn...wherever they are needed as the program is strange and limits resource routes. You shouldn't have to do that as you have your own ore/crystals and ought to be able to assign a reaource route but on a huge map,you have hundreds of sectors.

Be careful not sell the ore too low as very low price drops slow down the rate of the rise invalue and you could depress your own stored ore. If you sell too low, just buy more and deposit them where needed as everytime ore/crystals are bought and sold, it affects the price as it's following the laws of supply and demand in macroeconomics.

Really this is a minor bug fix as every sector should have 3 even at low population and 6 at 40 billion +. BotE's sectors need way more resource routes. A sector is not like a planet. Imagine how much mined ore is boughtand sold on the Earth every month. It's a huge tonage amount
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Re: Important Understanding Resource Routing

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The main issue with colonizing three ships in a sector at a time is you have to rush food production straight away or you induce famine as all those people that just arrived and there is about 950 units of food for billions of new arrivals.

So my first rushed construction is food...always. I carefully watch that colonization on non-M class planets still allows space docks as some unusual planet classes when terraformed do not place spacedocks as allowable. In a worse case scenario, no ships can be made because no space dock was every recognized as possible on that colonized terraformed plant. This can happen when there are multiple O class (ocean) planets.

You have to have space docks as you want to be able to send colonists eventually from every planet. It would be very irritating if that sector had high deritium and no spacedock, right?

The same is true when deritium exists in a sector, but the software did not recognize that deritium is present. That most often happens when you fail to send multiple colony ships, but just sector migration occurs, and then no deritium refining is possible. That is very annoying but rare.
Zuletzt geändert von UesugiKenshin am Mittwoch 10. Juni 2020, 23:31, insgesamt 1-mal geändert.
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Re: Important Understanding Resource Routing

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Because of all that, when I see spacedocks are available, I rush them, so I can relax because that problem (bug) is not going to occur.

Similarly when scouting sectors and when ships terraform, I prioritize planet terraforming where deritium exists as the 2nd terraforming, but the primary terraforming is the planet with the most resource types.

Since I most often play with the most minor alien races, many of my first colonies are icy P class planets. It finally works out, but if you were to look at planet composition when I first start terraforming, that sector ain't so great but is a very mixed bag of crummy planets that are cold, barren, lack moisture, etc. Or they are O class but space docks and mining are major issues. O class often only have deuterium. You need at least titanium and deuterium to get a viable sector going.

I think that given Japan found a massive rare earth metals deposit in the Ocean, that maybe O class planets should be more favorable for mining.
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Re: Important Understanding Resource Routing

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I'm testing if it's ultimately worth it to lessen making resource routes and instead since I have a massive amount of ore and crystals, then selling off several million so the price gets down to 200-300. Then in the next turn since ore is cheap, then buying it in sectors that need it.

This seems crazy but with hundreds of sector colonies and trying to create resource routes effectively and then canceling them when not needed, the majority of my time is doing that and it's extremely irritating.

Yeah, it's wasteful, but especially when trying to create advanced saved game to help players who don't want to spend 600 hours just setting up the game, a slightly lower profit may be worth it when millions are being made.

It's not millions per turn. You make 5 million and rush infrastructure and then at advanced levels the upgrades can be very expensive. I only rush those that take more than 10 turns. 95% of the time, I don't buy infrastructure that serves no purpose. For beta testing, I bought some unneeded buildings.

So this creates a large balance that lasts maybe 10-11 turns, then rinse repeat. I have so much ore and crystals what I sell is maybe 2% of storage.

If I wasn't rushing production, but slowly doing upgrades, then it would take longer to colonize but my treasury would be at 150 million by now.
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Re: Important Understanding Resource Routing

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Profits are taking a hit by buying cheap resources for newer colonies, but it inflates the value of resources faster. It is way way faster than creating resource routes. You buy the resources just ahead of new projects (when nothing else can be added to the building queue and it happens on the next turn). But you pay for it when you order those cheap resources. Or you can just buy them when as cheap as possible on the subsequent turn after cashing out a big chunk.
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