Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: BigWolf

Personally, I've created a "population support" base, which is the same as a port, just minus labs, plants and space yards
So it contains recreation, medical, a couple of cargos and landing bays, basic defensive abilities

I then build them at any colony that won't have a space port, which saves me alot of money since they are 1/4 of the price of a small port, but still having the same bonuses to the population

As for space ports, 1 large per system, and 1 small on any other colony in a system of enough importance to require extra construction slots

quote:

ORIGINAL: Interesting

The solution is to make a specialized research base, a specialized base for each colony for those "recreational and medical attention" bonuses.  But my question is, what are the minimum necessary ammounts for other components?

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About defenses.
Do you guys prefer lasers or anti-ship torpedos? How many shields and weapons? Does adding countermeasures to bases is worth it?

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ORIGINAL: BigWolf

Ok, lets see

Pop Support...
1x Command Centre
1x Recreation Centre
1x Medical Bay
2x Cargo Bays
2x Docking Bays (Though, one might be more than enough)
2x Fuel Cells
Weapons and defences comes to pref. I personally have no weapons, and 2 armour and shield

Then add as many reactors, life support and hab modules as needed to cover the above (usually 1 or 2 of each)


Concerning Plants, you MUST have at least one of each type at each port
Weapon Plants - Weapons and Armour
Energy Plants - Shields, Engines, Reactor and Energy Collectors
Industrial - Mining Extractors, Storage and other Plants/Space Yards (ie. too build Constructors)
High Tech - Sensors, Labs, Habitation and Computers

So you'll find you need all of them, the only exception if you're building a ship without weapons or armour... but tbh armour is a must, so you can't really skip on that either

Concerning Space Ports, strip all research labs, and try to only have 2 of each plant for each space yard on the port, you may even be able to drop the number of hab and life support units as well
I personally alter the number of yards for the large port down too 6 as well, with 3 of each plant, I find after the initial rush, you aren't mass building lots of ships anyway, so save yourself some maintenance costs, at the same time, you can still leave your original port up on homeworld so you can still take advantage of it's research and extra slots

As for research, all I do is create a facility with basic defences and weapons, then 5 of each lab, I worked out I'm getting 20 Labs for around 50%-80% cost of the 16 labs with the 4 original designs

Just to show, starting a new game, 4 designs, around 1560 each, so going at a cost of 390 per lab with infrastructure included
Maintenance is around 885, going at 221 per lab
Base size is 231

Now, combining it all, with adding 2 extra weapons and 2 extra reactors and 1 more fuel cell, plus needed extras supports and an extra lab each (so now of 5 each), it's at a size of 597, so still buildable to game starting tech
The cost for this one facility?  2212 Credits
The hitter is the maintenance, as it has doubled in comparion (1739)... but now the per labs
Bare in mind, there are now 20 labs on this one station, so...
The construction cost - 110 credits per lab, a saving of 280 credits per lab
The maintenance cost - 86 credits per lab, a saving of 135 per lab

The advantages? it's cheaper, you're getting more research, uses less resources in construction, and it packs double of the original designs punch with more spare Energy

The disadvantage? it's one target instead of four... but I can live with that

quote:

ORIGINAL: BigWolf

I will say that they could be better, but they work for me
Of course, you can easily refine them to suit your own needs, eg. in a more hostile universe, you'd want to put on more weapons and defences