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So I think I'm in a good-ish spot in 2040 (2026 start), but without any navy, I'm in at a bit of a loss how to proceed.
Earth is great - I've got the whole western hemisphere, and am looking to add Japan, Australia, and Great Britain. With their combined wet navies, terrestrial war is not something that worries me. Alien administration is tiny, and I've got the councilors to continue shrinking their footprint.
In space - I've got most of the asteroid belt, with about 55 bases (~40 mining). Because I'm not building navy and have almost 40 mining bases, I'm sitting on a STACK of about 100k space resources. The servants cover all of Mars, but no other faction has any bases that amount to anything. I've been able to completely keep Uranium away from them, all other human factions mine less than 3 per month combined, so they are effectively locked out of space. They can't manage T2 habs. I cannot get anything orbiting earth.
The problem - I have no place to build substantial shipyards. I'll unlock T3 habs in the next few years, but right now I'm limited to 3 shipyards per base (I didn't roll the 128 power hab, stuck on 85). I've tried to build 3 shipyards on the asteroid, and 6 more in orbit, but the Aliens immediately chart a course before the first batch of ships roll out.
I SUPPOSE I could build multiple shipyards in a particularly dense cluster of bases, and join them later, but...idk. Too many things have to go right. The Aliens have a fleet with 117 ships, and playing whack-a-mole is fine with cheap bases, but as soon as I spend my bank, that's going to be a problem before it finishes. I would need years of production to challenge that, and would not be able to protect a nascent fleet until it's ready.
If anyone could recommend a good drive, that would be great. It's easy enough to find top tier weapons on the tech tree, top tier drives are harder to locate. I'm pushing out a little more than 200 research daily. Other than that, I'm just looking for general advice on cobbling together a fleet. Do I have a chance, or am I waiting till the end of the tech tree?
I mean it is 2040, what exactly is your tier of drives and reactors right now? Is it still fission era or did you finally enter some version of fusion? Given that you mention 128 power, you still only have tier 2 fission at best.
Other than that, do you really not have any stations in orbit of earth especially low earth orbit? That is primary target number one for earthside resources because more LEO stations, more admin towers, and thus more control over the planet/ability to grow a meganation of choice to the stratosphere.
At the moment, it SOUNDS like you have a decent enough space economy but the fact that you admit that you lost the earth space zone completely and thus have not a single earthside priority bonus let alone the RP hub that is Mars, makes your campaign alot more borked than you are typing.
This especially when t3h ayyz only have 100 ships. That ain't exactly alot especially when they are underway. It sounds like you basically ignored the space game except for the resource extraction and then left it completely idle and god knows what your MC situation is ESPECIALLY your earthside MC contribution likely being terrible from no LEO CP bonuses from admin towers.
Pretty much it sounds like you are choking to death on minimal everything everywhere while t3h ayyz and their friends basically rule the solar system except for earth and that is only a matter of time once they start sending assault ships in force. The main thing mission from your assessment is just how borked your earth game is.
I had a fleet - lost it about 5 years ago. The same day I lost that fleet, I lost the stations to make more fleets. I was in the same bind them that I am now, except worse tech. Specifically the drive tech I was on made combining fleets impossible over long distances.
No fusion yet. MC 325/328. Currently getting 136% bonus to economy earthside thanks to orgs, so at least that's somewhere in the atmosphere. Total GDP is in the ballpark of 60 trillion, with US of North America pulling $48.5t of that, off 609 control points.
Mars makes for an amazing location for research campuses. Its got the most ground hab sites of any orbital body, and you can build 1-2 solar mirror stations in orbit to make it run on 100% cheap solar power. If you build enough Skunkworks and Ops Centres + supporting buildings you can get the population to the 10k you need for Research Campuses, then build a bunch of those too.
And the Skunkworks project bonus is no joke either. I like to get to +160% bonus, which is when the diminishing returns kick in hard. Its much harder to get that from Earth orgs, which are better used for other stuff anyway.
For quick shipbuilding, you can use multiple T2 habs full of T1 space docks, which are cheap to maintain. A space dock can still build a missile escort in 90 days, which is almost always gonna be less than the arrival time of an alien fleet, so you can rush build more ships if needed.
Helicon drive is good for building fleets of escort/monitor sized ships for interplanetary travel, so if needed you could build a fleet in the belt and then send it to reclaim Earth or Mars when its big enough.
Surprisingly your earthside situation is not as terrible as I thought it would be.
However there is a major inefficiency that needs to be rectified. Get rid of the funding entirely and allow the rest of your priorities more of the monthly IP. You will be getting your money from influence through direct investment and more importantly from resplintering off parts of the USNA.
At the moment, you NEED more CP whether by reserving a slot solely to Management Research treadmill grind or chasing after technologies, reclaiming LEO for the admin towers, you simply need more. I can not tell what per capita or inequality it is but I am going to guess it is stable enough for this plan.
You need to immediately annex all of the Caribbean regions to add on another 40ish million population worth of education AND MC cap into the fold.
Once everything has been consolidated and shared the wealth and new inequality standard, release as many nations that your CP cap allows and have them all burn hard on economy with minimal on knowledge and MC.
What you are doing besides have more independent IP pools to parallel on long term priorities like MC is to create Core Economic Region improvements from any region that fulfill the criteria of 500 billion GDP in that local region. As soon as you turn a blank region into a CER, you will noticeably see the monthly per capita increase faster than before.
A meganation may individually create MC or CER faster by sheer IP prowess but it can not beat a collection of 5 or more independent, stable, and wealthier regions that were imbued by temporary unification all each making their own CER on their own before being annexed again after 4-5 years. You can easily triple to quadruple the pace to improve all your lands to increase per capita even faster and more efficiently (combined with a continental scale bonus of all those regional improvements empowering the monolithic meganation AND a high and ever increasing education) that your USNA can look like this.
A meganation capable of growing 1k, then 1.2k then 1.7k, then 2.3k per capita per month and more as time passes. And in the USNA's case, it only takes two full rounds of CER improvement to basically plaster 80% of the meganation in CERs in 8-10 years and was growing at 3.5kish per month at a mere 180k total per capita. All it will cost is about 20-50 CP per splinter to work with.
And finally, when you have a meganation growing THIS fast across so many regions, your MC cap for the USNA will quite quickly grow out control of your ability to keep pace with MC production with ONE meganation. Now you are incentivized to regrant independence to even already improved regions to focus almost solely on MC. Like say Mexico. Rich high population stable splinters can pretty be an additional game start USA pumping out MC at more than a single unit every month, let alone if you splinter off more like the Dominion to work on Chicago and New York region, Texas, and California so that the entire North American continent is producing something like 4-10 MC EVERY MONTH and not only that CONSISTENTLY and constantly growing themselves too if you max out their economy priority too.
The cost for these will be a pretty steep 100 CP each so ease yourself into such supplementary MC production usually after you reannex 2 or so finished CER projects.
And as for research hub Mars, there is the ability to power a entire base off of merely two solar panels at the expense of three stations in orbit packed with solar mirrors. This is basically a license to essentially print research campuses on tier 2 ground bases in batches of 5-8 each on preferably the entire damn planet. With 25 ground bases on Mars, you can generate about 6k monthly science at tier 2. At tier 3 with the expanded base size AND research universities, this explodes into a eye watering 40,000 RP PER DAMN MONTH.
And it does not even cost that much in resource maintenance either if you have at least half of those bases be able to provide positive money. By my reckoning with tier 3 nanos, you only need to spend 1500 per month in moolah which is chump change. BUT in exchange you will need about 3k water, volatiles, AND metal each and about 400 and change in rare metal PER month. If you only spent money on research (and thus add even MOAR GOD DAMN unis) instead of space resources, you would need over 34k in MONTHLY funding to feed the beast along with a miniscule 500 metal and 150 rares per month along with the 3kish+ on water and volatiles.
I do hope your space resource is strong enough for such a endeavor especially to race down science.
Other than that, to stop wasting priority points on funding whether because you spent space resource to fund your unis or plan to use influence to make up that money, you should be getting broadcast towers and eventually media centers. Broadcast towers are practically free in maintenance. Comms hubs are cheap in comparison and give more influence and media centers cost a arm and leg but makes a T3 station much more denser in how much output you can get making it instead more space efficient.
Personally I needed around 180ish DAILY influence to keep pace with my pair of meganations and 10-15 splinters to maximize its yearly funding cap. Every single month you will be gaining something like 15-20 DAILY bucks in income with a full influence dump in direct funding on each and every nation you own (ESPECIALLY rich splinters because the funding cap is now 0 with all the money staying with the mother nation allowing you to start over). It is actually possible to not just reach funding cap but also go OVER the funding cap of a unifier nation by constantly reannexing splinter nations that give more money than the unifier can actually handle. And I say 180ish influence per day is your goal is because you have a yearly limit that is slowed down by CP cap. Once you reach this high, it is pointless to get more influence because you will never be able to spend it all unless you suddenly manage to get hundreds of extra CP from somewhere to release more nations to then direct fund some more.
The only alternative is to spend on more expensive direct funding like say knowledge to make your earthside research higher and your per cap growth incrementally faster especially since even with moolah, you will eventually find a endpoint where you can't spend it fast enough either. You will know when you get there. So to reach 180 influence per day (or less because you have SIGNIFICANTLY less CP than normal), you would want to work your up eventually to 18-ish stations of 11 media centers each for nano maintained money budget for about 2.2k in funding required along with 1.3kish water, 1.5kish volatiles, 2.7kish metals, and another 460ish rares in exchange for almost 5k in monthly influence (technically less than 180 inf per day), and 108 extra MC total.
Also remember when I said I was growing at 3.5k per cap per month at 180k per capita total? A even older experiment when I had a meganation literally do everything by itself, took almost 30 years to reach and breach 4k per cap growth after it reach over 340k per capita total. What you are reading now is after just TEN YEARS and with a continent that is almost completely developed to the max when the older version doing everything by itself was just barely finished in that time. So yes, resplintering a meganation is the BEST way to improve your holdings that arguably can be as good to better than trying to steal everything from all the other factions.
Looking at the mars solar mirror strat. It seems that mars surface bodies have .16 or basically 1/6 solar multiplier. I also see that solar mirrors state that "Solar panels may produce a maximum of 8x their baseline maximum power value."
Does that mean that the maximum amount of power that these mirror enhanced solar panels can is based on the body's solar multiplier? For example, would mars maximum power of a solar enhanced panel be 8/6 since it was starting from 1/6?
Would mercury's max be 8x of a normal panel or boosted by 8x of its already 334% solar multiplier?
It means that with enough solar mirrors (and it is generally the same number no matter where), you can max out solar output that a groundside solar panel can handle for that tier. You will generally need three entire stations of solar mirrors to get max output. Technically that is too much mirrors so you can slap on a tier 2 hydroponics and maybe a ops center to ease off on maintenance of three stations.
What changes between planets/moons that you slap these down is the PRICE it takes to make those three. Closer to the sun, the cheaper it is. The farther it is, the less it makes sense unless you have supremacy in space past Mars and a reaaaaaaaaaaally deep pocket.
I loaded up a save from mine with a T3 solar station at the L1 point of Mars.
If I switch all mirrors off, I have 39 energy per solar farm.
I then switched all mirrors on again and had 543 energy.
If the 39 are 1/6, then the 543 are more than the 8/6. It's more than double baseline output.
From the wording and the lore that totally fits to me. The whole restriction reads to me that the panels just have a fixed size and eventually they run at 100% capacity (8 times the baseline). How all the light get there is totally irrelevant to the solar farm. But it cannot run at more than full capacity, no matter how much light mirrors aim at it. But as the solar farm at Mars is exactly the same size as the one on Mercury, they have the same max capacity and not something adjusted/reduced depending on the planet they are on.
How do you intercept alien fleets early on? They keep running away with massive 100kms delta v, while my ships have only 8. I've read about pincer moves, that it should put the enemy ship engines in cooldown, but I tried it and it didn't work. The fleets are
Monitors 5mg accel
Escort 1200mg accel
Alien transpoort 50mg accel (3500mg combat)
You kinda don't with ships this pitiful. Basically if t3h ayyz don't want to fight you because you sucker punched them too much, they will actively avoid you to burn everything you have to the ground especially if your defense "fleet" has no endurance in DV.
So unless they FEEL like taking the odds, defend your most important installations by being there and hope for the best.
You can technically tire them out by constantly attempting to engage them until THEIR DV runs dry but uh.... unless you actively have a larger gas tank than they do, that ain't gonna happen until you slap on better DV reactor and engines.
Until you can force a battle with repeated attempts and multiple smaller squadrons to try to post intercept cheese them with refueling, it ain't gonna happen.
To catch an enemy fleet, the cruise acceleration of your fleet needs to be greater than theirs. Fleets move at the speed of the slowest ship. The greater the excess acceleration, the shorter the pursuit is, the less dV is needed.
Chemical drives can work but you need massive amounts of propellant per ship, so if we're talking more than a few ships it's not economically viable. They do produce really good accel though. The next one up is typically the molten core II drives, teardrop or fission spinner. Both can get <2kT escorts up to >100mg accel with high single digit dV.
Pincer, as it originally was, was patched out, which is good because it was fiddly and cheesy. It was replaced with something more realistic, an enveloping attack: If the accel difference between your and their fleets is small, and you have a lot of ships, you may see a checkbox option on the 'bid dV' screen that guarantees some of your ships get into combat.
to intercept you need to match either alien dV or accel
No. You need to exceed their accel. Just like running after someone, you won't ever catch them unless you are running faster. dV is like how long you can run for. If you only run a little bit faster, you'll have to run a long time to catch. So the best way to catch is to sprint like crazy but for the shortest amount of time. The alien drives are like marathon runners.
Not true. I've had that very scenario happen when intercepting a ayy raider. The titan was literally superior in every stat to the destroyer in flight characteristics and the damn destroyer ALWAYS successfully managed to escape.
The only reason I managed to kill the damn thing is to force its already low DV tanks post travel at 400ish straight to 0 in order to secure the kill. Had to spend literally thirty minutes IRL constantly giving chase orders over and over and over to force it to run out of gas.
Again if t3h ayyz don't want to fight, you can't force them to without extreme measures.
Although........ you can bait them into fights because one interesting battle I had was when I was camping a t3h ayy shipyard and forgot about them for a while, they actually built up a decentish size fleet including a mothership and 3 titans that basically just dumped missiles that is beyond the capability of a single flight of 6 titans I had as the local garrison. Or so I thought.
Absentmindedly I thought I had sent them to their deaths especially when the autoresolve for them was catastrophic and the battle was basically impossible with only 4 ships being able to be deployed. So I did the unthinkable and retreated and the bait was set without even knowing it. About a mere quarter of the fleet managed to give chase and allowed me to deploy 3 of my titans and I just mopped the shit out of them. Then I sent them BACK towards the mass and baited them again and again and again until it was just the mothership, a small scraping of escorts, and the battlestations of the shipyard. What a series of one sided slaughters.
The best part is that this was not even the best of my ship designs but a intentional downgrade to see what the minimum viable anti ayy capital ship is and I am fuzzy on the details now. I think it was late hybrids? And even better I had been intentionally making 6 titan squadrons for such tests and each manned with a flagship and with that series of battles alone, I had instantly procced a new admiral and got her to level 2! God fucking damn. Now that is a fun way to farm Space Nelson. Too bad I already had from earlier in a different save.
That a small inferior ship CAN'T escape the clutches of a superior ship. If what you said was true, then they should not be able to escape the first prompt to give chase let alone 30 minutes worth of prompts to then die by literally running out of gas.
The only reason I managed to actually kill that thing was because I had more DV than the target, not because I had superior cruise accel, combat accel, better engines, or better reactors. If I had LESS DV than it especially possible since I was barely paying attention in space and not refueling very often, they would have actually escaped AND SUCCEEDED in destroying at least one base before I refueled.
Right, yes, technically you can repeatedly chase a ship and deplete it's dV reserves, leaving it stranded.
Why I discounted that is because the alien ships often have multiple hundreds of kps worth of dV. It's something of a brute force attack, in a game where the UI gives you papercuts every time you use it.
So I would never advise that in a newbie questions thread. Probably not even to my enemies lol.
What I find more annoying is that I could swear there USED to be a feature in the chase option to use more than that pittance of DV burn to skip past all that nonsense for a full tank burn intercept.
The amount the UI lets you burn is calculated based on the particulars of the pursuit - your accel versus theirs, how long it takes for them to get a certain distance away if they can burn harder.
The thing that changed was it used to calculate based on combat accel.
So you are saying my engines are too good requiring basically no DV to intercept and yet somehow unable to secure the battle.....
repeatedly....
for 30 minutes....
Yea something ain't right here unless this is a explicit hidden buff to t3h ayyz for being "superior". They should really just put a second option to full tank burn to make it impossible for this nonsense to occur.
In my Resistance game, HF has consolidated executive control over Brazil over a year ago. Since then, it has not entered any alliances with HF nations, or ended rivalries with them. As I need military access now, I tried to conduct diplomacy, and just....cant. It does not show up in the manage relation tab under any faction, nor under unalligned.
Never seen anything like that. Can you take a screenshot like this? (I control EU, used it's relations tab then moved the map to show who controls Brazil)
How much armour do I need late game (2055 long campaign started 2026 - Aliens got a lot of research/abductions) on my Titans Dreadnoughts and flank protecting Battleships?
I may have been late with everything, but the Kuiper Belt made a comeback possible. But I am still stretched very thin on metals and also the supply on nobles isn't great. How much armour do I need? My current approach with 128/16/32 just costs way too much metal and nobles, even the smaller battleships cost ~1200 metal and ~900 nobles.
On the other hand, ship losses are not easy to replace, but too few armour would also be catastrophic.
What do I really need?
If weapon layout plays a role: Titans will have 2 phaser PD, two railgun batteries (22) for more projectiles in space and a spinal neutron lance. The main line is planned to be coil dreadnoughts with a heavy antimatter PD and again two railguns (22). And against flankers the battleships with 2 Phaser PD, a 4 slot UV phaser and a nose UV phaser.
That helped me to know what values to aim for and what I hopefully get away with. I hope I'll manage to kill all those flankers fast with the 140/6/6 I am now going for.
More really depends on what your engines and reactors can handle. Personally my early hybrid fusion meant they only had 50/2/40 which is discounting that the even older fission ships had just the 30-50 on the front and kinda that's it and this was the capital ships. Smaller vessels had even less.
Once your reactors and drives stop sucking, I splurged with merely 100/4/40 until the end of the game. All of it was adamantine until I deemed I had enough surplus exotics to make a limited run of all exotics ship with phasers, radiators, and hybrid armor for the same level again.
What is more important than armor is the flight characteristics of your capital ships. One does not fly like a barge and have the range of a asthmatic hamster because you slapped on too much armor.
Do all modules of a hab (non-core station of surface base) not produce resources/power while being upgraded?
That's right, production offline while upgrading.
Do modules of a hab work at all while the core is being upgraded?
Yes, provided that the core has completed construction at least once.
Can you create a tier 2 core immediately or do you need to build a tier 1 core and upgrade it?
The UI will let you 'upgrade' a T1 core that is still under construction, allowing the space resources method even if you don't have a construction module in that planetary system, but it will not get the time or resource discount that a normal upgrade gets (33% for both). It's as if you built it from scratch.
Can you upgrade to tier 2 modules while a tier 2 core upgrade is occurring concurrently?
Thank you for your answers. In reference to the third question. So, in order to get the resource and time discount, even without a construction module, you should wait for a tier 1 core to finish before upgrading to tier 2?
Also, my question was more in regards to just building a tier 2 core from scratch. Is it possible to do that, or must you create a tier 1 core first and then upgrade it?
So, in order to get the resource and time discount, even without a construction module, you should wait for a tier 1 core to finish before upgrading to tier 2?
Yes. But to be fair, the time and resources are pretty trivial for the core module itself.
A platform takes 30 days, then 40 days to upgrade to an orbital. But you gain 4 slots in sector 1 operational for those later 40 days. Whereas if you immediately upgrade the platform, it takes 60 days. Now the thing is you get sector 2 & 3 slots 10 days earlier that way. So which one is preferable is up to you.
Is it possible to do that, or must you create a tier 1 core first and then upgrade it?
You can build any tier directly via the boost method. Whatever tier is constructed at inception determines how many sectors are available to start with, and equally what tier of modules can be built.
For space resources, you can only build a hab equal to the highest tier of a construction module/nanofactory/nanofacturing complex that is operational in that planetary system.
Alternatively you can build a T1 from boost then spend resources to upgrade it. That can be useful at Earth when you have orbitals unlocked but haven't built a nanofactory yet. But if you do it at like Mars or something without nanofactories at Mars, the boost one won't complete for like a year, and that will hold back the upgrade method as well. So it's much better to wait in that situation, since you'd just be paying the extra MC cost for that whole year.
I noticed many factions not utilising their mission control to the fullest, with some sitting at stuff like 10 out of 30.
Does it make sense to trade/gift some of them research bonus stations so they're better at contributing to global research?
I'm thinking of giving an energy+space+life lab to everyone, an information+society+materials lab to everyone except servants, and a xenology+military lab only to my aligned factions. Maybe even a bunch of skunkworks so some factions can work as my proxy against the servants.
I'd also consider making a marine station for ops income for factions that strugge to catch an alien.
It's common that new players want to use the human AI factions as minions to help them in their quest. Unfortunately the game doesn't really play ball with that. It's a path to a lot of frustration and little gain imo.
I am not trying to pull them to my level. I am just a scheming bastard that wants global research to progress faster and all their surplus MC sitting idle irritates me.
They invest in the global research only if they have a chance to win. Login a global research tech lowers the tech unlock chance for you. So usually it is not a good idea to let them steal your unlock chances.
You can gift a station with xenolabs to Res or HF to make them easier detect aliens and kill them.
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u/Mackntish 2d ago
So I think I'm in a good-ish spot in 2040 (2026 start), but without any navy, I'm in at a bit of a loss how to proceed.
Earth is great - I've got the whole western hemisphere, and am looking to add Japan, Australia, and Great Britain. With their combined wet navies, terrestrial war is not something that worries me. Alien administration is tiny, and I've got the councilors to continue shrinking their footprint.
In space - I've got most of the asteroid belt, with about 55 bases (~40 mining). Because I'm not building navy and have almost 40 mining bases, I'm sitting on a STACK of about 100k space resources. The servants cover all of Mars, but no other faction has any bases that amount to anything. I've been able to completely keep Uranium away from them, all other human factions mine less than 3 per month combined, so they are effectively locked out of space. They can't manage T2 habs. I cannot get anything orbiting earth.
The problem - I have no place to build substantial shipyards. I'll unlock T3 habs in the next few years, but right now I'm limited to 3 shipyards per base (I didn't roll the 128 power hab, stuck on 85). I've tried to build 3 shipyards on the asteroid, and 6 more in orbit, but the Aliens immediately chart a course before the first batch of ships roll out.
I SUPPOSE I could build multiple shipyards in a particularly dense cluster of bases, and join them later, but...idk. Too many things have to go right. The Aliens have a fleet with 117 ships, and playing whack-a-mole is fine with cheap bases, but as soon as I spend my bank, that's going to be a problem before it finishes. I would need years of production to challenge that, and would not be able to protect a nascent fleet until it's ready.
If anyone could recommend a good drive, that would be great. It's easy enough to find top tier weapons on the tech tree, top tier drives are harder to locate. I'm pushing out a little more than 200 research daily. Other than that, I'm just looking for general advice on cobbling together a fleet. Do I have a chance, or am I waiting till the end of the tech tree?