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[Zeebie]

I have 1.2 million folks on Mars and 1 million on Luna, but neither are demanding or producing any trade goods (other than infrastructure).  There are civilian shipping lines but none of them have built any freighters. Is there something I need to do to get trade going?

[Paul]

You need larger populations to actually have trade goods. A few million is just setting up and only demand infrastructure. I don't remember the cutoff where you start getting trade goods, but I think it's like 100 mil or more. Just infrastructure and population is enough to start civilian trading though.

You can subsidize them to make them build more - but generally all you need to do is have a demand and they'll start with at least one ship. It may take them a bit to launch the ships. It seems random on whether your shipping lines produce colony ships, but once you have lines with both colony ships and freighters things get moving pretty quickly trade-wise. They deliver people, those people demand more infrastructure which needs to be delivered, and so on.

[forsaken1111]

I believe you'll start seeing trade goods around 3 million, and by 10 million all of them will be shown. Production won't be high enough to be meaningful until you get larger populations though.

[Cthulhu]

Getting back into it and feeling good, now that I've got two monitors I can actually play!

I'm wondering though, I remember that Mass Drivers transporting materials to a body with no mass driver of its own basically ends up bombarding the planet.  When I last played this had no real military applications.  Has that changed?  I still have a hard-on for relativistic impactors.  I want to plant them on all the asteroids in my system and drop the hammer of the gods on anybody who pisses me off.

Also as far as weaponry goes I haven't been able to do much experimentation with the various weapon types.  Maybe I got the wrong impression from the AARs I read but it seems like combat is heavily centered around large ships with large batteries of nuclear missiles, with other weapon types mainly serving as point defense for all the missiles.  How true would you guys say that is on a large scale?  I'm still kicking ideas around for other kinds of things.  Laser fighters seem cool but considering all the point defense I feel like they'd probably serve better at intercepting incoming missiles.

[forsaken1111]

I'm wondering though, I remember that Mass Drivers transporting materials to a body with no mass driver of its own basically ends up bombarding the planet.  When I last played this had no real military applications.  Has that changed?  I still have a hard-on for relativistic impactors.  I want to plant them on all the asteroids in my system and drop the hammer of the gods on anybody who pisses me off.

Unfortunately you can't do this on purpose. You can't select a planet as a destination for a mass driver unless it has a receiving mass driver. I suppose you could in theory make a colony on an alien world, deliver a mass driver, target it with some mineral packets and then remove the receiving mass driver once the packets are in-flight.

[Zeebie]

Does anyone know what's up with the Pentarch forums? I tried to register over a week ago and haven't heard anything from them.

[MarcAFK]

Eric was active there less than a week ago, try resending the application.

[Flying Dice]

Getting back into it and feeling good, now that I've got two monitors I can actually play!

I'm wondering though, I remember that Mass Drivers transporting materials to a body with no mass driver of its own basically ends up bombarding the planet.  When I last played this had no real military applications.  Has that changed?  I still have a hard-on for relativistic impactors.  I want to plant them on all the asteroids in my system and drop the hammer of the gods on anybody who pisses me off.

Also as far as weaponry goes I haven't been able to do much experimentation with the various weapon types.  Maybe I got the wrong impression from the AARs I read but it seems like combat is heavily centered around large ships with large batteries of nuclear missiles, with other weapon types mainly serving as point defense for all the missiles.  How true would you guys say that is on a large scale?  I'm still kicking ideas around for other kinds of things.  Laser fighters seem cool but considering all the point defense I feel like they'd probably serve better at intercepting incoming missiles.

Broadly speaking, missiles are far and away the dominant weapon. This is mainly down to limitations on energy weapon range; since all K/EWs have to complete their firing cycle in a single 5-second tick, they have severely restricted ranges, and it takes a lot of teching even to break 1 million km, whereas mediocre low-tech missiles typically have ranges measured in the tens of millions of kms and good high tech ones can hit from more than 1 billion km away while still having decent evasion and warhead strength.

In particular, the advantage falls on the side of large single volleys because of how PD works. One salvo of 40 missiles every two minutes will typically do much more damage than one salvo of 10 every fifteen seconds unless the tech disparity between the sides is so great that virtually all/none of the missiles will hit in any case.

That said, if you can get E/KW-armed ships into slugging range they're effective enough, it's just the long run down the throat of missile barrages that makes it difficult. Typically E/KW platforms fall into two categories: light, fast, cheap ships like fighters, FACs, &c. that you can churn out by the score, and heavily armored+shielded lumps of metal with good PD that can soak up fire and keep going.

Basically you can make an E/KW-heavy fleet work, but your battles will be much messier and you'll spend a lot more repairing and replacing ships.

Does anyone know what's up with the Pentarch forums? I tried to register over a week ago and haven't heard anything from them.

IIRC mine took a while to go through. If it never does, resent the application. If that doesn't work try emailing Steve and asking him. Ofc. this thread alone is at least the equal of the total content of the official forums, and you don't need an account to download new versions or read AARs... 

[Cthulhu]

That's okay, I figure real space shit would be similar if we're leaving out high-end kinetic weapons.

I'm thinking about making an egyptian themed empire.  It seems perfect, Egyptians were known for conquering places, building huge things, and talking a lot of shit.  That's basically all the requirements for an interstellar empire.

[MarcAFK]

Nah, this thread is 20% the size of the aurora forums, and oddly enough gets half as many new posts as day as the Aurora forums. Also it lacks the fiction :p

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, the fics is the big thing. A lot of the other content over there is old update question and bug report threads, too-which is helpful if you're searching for fixes, heh.

[Cthulhu]

I've already got lots of silly ideas for Egyptian space empire.  People who have played before, how viable do you think it would be (keeping in mind I'm not going for practicality here as much as radness) to make a superdreadnought that's literally nothing but a vehicle for extinction-level ordnance?  No armor, no point defense, no stealth, slow as shit, minimal storage capacity (colliers and tankers to carry its fuel supply and ammo?).  Nothing but bigass missile launchers that are likewise designed for nothing but close range destruction with minimal armor, range, and maneuverability.

Use the real fleet to break down an enemy's defenses and once they're helpless Menthu the bull of heaven jumps into the system and makes sure their homeworld will never support multicellular life again.  Then for flavor troops land on the surface and erect a stela to commemorate the conquest.  Surely not the most efficient way to do things but I'm not playing space egyptians to be practical.

[Sheb]

Well, what do you mean by "viable" if youre not into practicality? Im not sure how you would justify making it so huge though: a bunch os size 100 launchers arent THAT big. Id suggest using commercial engines and a ton of troop bay so you can drop a bunch of assault divisions to exterminate the last remnants of your conquests.

[Cthulhu]

I mean is it gonna work at all?  I haven't really gotten a good handle on how much space things take up, I'm not sure how everything would fit or if it'd end up so huge it just wouldn't function.  I don't care if it's an efficient use of my resources or not as long as it actually works.

But if large missile launchers aren't as big as I'm expecting that's even better. 

[Metalax]

It's certainly possible, though it will likely take you a while to get a naval shipyard big enough to actually build it. Leave a shipyard on continual capacity expansion, and you may want to invest in the shipyard build rate techs as they are what determines how fast capacity is increased.

If it is just going to be used as a world glasser, you can design your missiles for it as bombs with no space required for engine, fuel or agility.