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Home » Stars! 2.6/7 » The Academy » Ramscoops, which one to use?
Re: Ramscoops, which one to use? Mon, 03 March 2003 12:57 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
Stalwart is currently offline Stalwart

 
Chief Petty Officer

Messages: 74
Registered: November 2002
Location: Varies

Greetings all,

The question arizes about which to choose from: IS10 or ramscoops that take a LONG time to get. Now before getting into detail about this one must look at the pro's and cons of each. Since I have already covered most of these points I will just briefly (to the best of my ability Laughing ) summarize what these are:

NRSE: Short term Engines with High Mass and High Cost. Provides a nice early boost to Warp 10. Good for IT as they have stargates, may be good with WM as their ships are already heavy and the Dreadnaught is by far NOT gatable... and the early boost helps there as well.

IFE: Fuel mizer acts as a decent engine that I have seen last till the 2450's on a lot of ships. Able to go warp 9 with little fuel and can do so for long periods of time. Radiating Hydro Rams are nice on early DD's (warp 6 for free), they are relatively cheap and light weight. Other engines are obtained after longer periods of time, though those engines you do get are Light Wieght, have a "free" speed, and make it possible to gate even Battleships. Compared to NRSE Engines, they are also extremely cheap. Again, this is a Long Term LRT.
One last thing people don't notice is the fact that your engines use up less fuel, even with standard engines...

Niether NRSE/IFE (Basic Engines, and yes, NOBODY has mentioned this yet): You still get Ramscoops, but you don't get the better fuel usage, nor do you get the fancy Ramscoops (2 engines). Anybody ever think of this? Think about it, a race such as SD/IS/or HE can easily get away with this for a number of reasons. SD Gets that nice Mini Mine Layer hull, which with a Fuel Pod, can get to a LONG distance. IS get the Mini-Fuel Xport, also a nice booster. HE, from year one, have the Settlers Delight. If you use anything larger than the mini colonizer with cargo pod needs to consider this again, or either research more into prop. Other than that, you don't gain points nor do you loose points, though you still have ramscoops and decent engines.

As you can see IFE has a LOT of advantages, but in order to achive these advantages you have to be in a game that you believe will be able to last long enough to let you use them. Now if you are playing a race that you think will be spending a lot of time in midspace, either laying minefields or having a lot of ships on the offensive, having ramscoops will really help out there. Races such as SD can REALLY benefit from having IFE as you can go speeds of warp 10 without using up much fuel, while your enemy is chasing those same fleets going warp 10 through the minefields you are laying...

Now thinking about the cost of Propulsion Research. In Stars the primary fields you need to keep your economy going is Weapons and Construction. Propulsion and Energy are Secondary to this. Electronics and Bio being in last. This order of course changes per PRT (For example Energy and Prop are Primary for an AR, Con and Weapons Secondary... Bio Primary for CA... so on and so on). That in mind consider the aplications being used. If you are planing a SD having propulsion norm would work out nice, but in order to keep your economy effective towards the engame it may be wise to have it set to expensive, increase your cost of Factories (not going below cost 9) and instead put the points back into Fac Efficiency or Hab. Reason for this is if you are going for the endgame you are going to want a larger number of production worlds to PUSH your tech to where you want it, fast than the -f and HY can after they have reached their limits or when they can't expand any more. In that event having Prop Expensive can be effective if you can push your economy to it's limits.

So let us look at the possibilities: Medium Dense with so many players. With that in mind you are going to want a pretty decent economy to get to where you want towards the end game correct? Well if you are going to play SD (Bit risky) and you think you are good with your MM, or if you plan to hide your PRT till you can EXPLODE with all your mines (in more than one way Twisted Evil ) then this race might
...




"Attaining one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of excellence. Subjugating the enemy's army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence."- Sun Tzu

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