Step 14b - Galaxy Structures

There are a number of structures you can build in the Galaxy. You main objective is to rebuild the destroyed Galaxy, after the Great War, and for that task you will need many resources.

The first structure you can build in the Galaxy is the space station. It is used to protect a system and give support to the fleets in the system, as well as protect a mining facility. In order to build one, you need the appropriate technology. It is wise to build a station after you managed to get some of the evasive modules, like cloaking / emergency warps. Always remember that the Galaxy is a very nasty place roaming with enemy commanders that will want nothing more then to destroy your structures and loot you mining facility.

After you build the space station, access the structure commands by clicking on the structure image in the Galaxy system view.

The Space Station interface:
  You will notice it is split into three parts:
Building Details: The information about the state of the station, the attack power, hitpoints, fighters and missiles in the hanger, etc.The stats can be modified by modules that have to be researched via the Science Interface in the mothership.

Building Maintenance: Provided you have the fighter / missiles technology, you will be able to produce them here. The better your tech level is, the better the fighters / missiles you can produce. They are automatically upgraded once you get a higher tech level on them.
The station also has a fleet support bonus, that can be distributed. For example, if you expect an attack and your fleets have high hitpoints and you want to keep them flying as much as possible, you can distribute the whole fleet bonus to hitpoints, make the distribution 100%. The bonus distribution depends on your fleets guarding the system, if they don't have any defence systems on them, then you should focus on attack / hitpoints.

Building Maintenance: From the Science Interface, you are able to aquire new technology to build modules for your station. Each module has a bonus, some have higher bonuses then others. You can have multiple modules on a structure, usually depending on your tech level in that domain.

After you have a system defence space station and preferably some fleets assigned to the system in order to protect it, you can take care of the production and mining of the asteroids in the system. You can build a mining facility structure. The mining facility is able to mine every hour resources from ALL the belts in the system. A very important thing to know about choosing the right system to mine / defend is choose a system that has as many asteroid belts as possible, this will increase your mining profits. Also look as the asteroid values and their types. The higher their values and types, the more your mining facility will have work to do. Asteroids do not replenish, but if you lose or destroy another mining facility, the cargoholds are spilled into space, creating more asteroid belts.

The minign facility can do more then mining, it can convert asteroids resources into credits by setting up value markets, and has a special ability of converting one resource to another via a misterious process known as replication, converting a resource into energy and then the energy back into another type or resource. The mining facility can be upgraded with many modules from the research area, that can boot it's mingin output and productions. You can control the production by distributing in the maintenance area, for example you could set the production to 50% mining and 50% credits, and you could mine and convert into credits in the same cycle. The mining facility cycles every hour, and mining is calculated, then credits conversion, then replication, so you could do all three in the same cycle. To maximize credit conversion you may want to have amounts for each of the asteroid type in the mining facility, you can transfer them from your mothership into the mining facility, then set it to credits conversion.

The Mining Facility interface:
  You will notice it is split into six parts:
Building Details: The information about the resources contained in the mining post. Depending on what the facility focuses on, you will have to supply it with the minerals needed or get them out and into your mothership and build something else with them.
The most important thing for a mining facility is the production capatity. You can divide the production into several tasks, however you would want to focus on specialized mining facilities in order to maximize your profits. Every production cycle has 60 minutes, at 01 minute server time each hour.

Mining Production: If you set your mining facility production on mining, you will notice your mining production increased. Now what you would want to focus on is to find a system with 3 or more resource asteroids, and preferably of the richest, gold + diamond is a very nice combination. The mining facility working at 100% with a 100 base production will mine 100 units of ore each production cycle from every asteroid in the system .

Credits Production: You may also choose to convert your resources by trading them for credits. Credits production will take a fixed amount of each mineral and trade it for credits. To maximize credits production, you should supply your mining facility with each resource to be able to get the most credits out of trading raw resources. You can do that by transfering resources from your mothership holds to your mining facility.

Replication Production: This is a very special technique discovered only a few years ago by a brilliant commander. It involves the conversion of matter into energy and energy to matter . It is actually possible in the process to create additional matter by regulating the energy convertor. For example, from 100 units of matter you can convert 1000 units of energy. Now using a very specialized equipement, some commanders are able to reduce the input matter necesary for producing 1000 units of energy or maximize the output matter collected with lower energy consuption. So instead of optaining 100 units of matter, you would get 105 units from the same 1000 units of energy, or use 950 units of energy to get 100 units of matter. Done serveral times, this can actually create matter and energy on a regular basis, if the matter is scarce in your system, making the mining facility a good structure even when all system resources have been depleted.

Building Maintenance: You can add / transfer resources to / from the mining facility to cover production, you can set replication input / output and distribute production to several tasks at once.
For example, you can mine 20 units of ore, convert some to credits and replicate the rest to something else in the same production cycle.

Building Maintenance: From the Science Interface, you are able to aquire new technology to build modules for your structure. Each module has a bonus, some have higher bonuses then others. You can have multiple modules on a structure, usually depending on your tech level in that domain.

Structures Scanning: You will need the Subspace Scanner technology in order to scan an enemy structure. The enemy cloaking technology is taken into account in determining your chances for each databit you will receive. The basic chance if you have scanner tech level 1 and the enemy has 0 cloaking tech is 10%. For every new tech level in scanning you get a +5% to the chance of getting each info, while for every enemy cloaking tech you get a -5%. The lowest you could get is 1%, while the highest would be 50%. Scanning is very important before an attack to determine the enemy station capabilities, especially the number of fighters / missiles it has on board.

When you attack a structure or system fleets and the station is present in that system, the space station will enter combat. It will grant the fleets in orbit the bonuses selected in the station maintenance area.

Station combat: the station has weapons, missiles and fighters. The station will fire all available arsenal in the begining of the battle. Depending on how many fleets you attack with, the station will use it's attack on other fleets too. For example, if you attack with 2 fleets of 10 bil HP each, the station will attack the fleets until it exhausts it's attack, in this case if it has a 15 bil attack, it will go for first fleet and do 10 bil damage, then second fleet for the remaining attack. The attacked fleets can not retaliate.

After weapons, if the station has missiles, it will fire them. It will use missiles depending on how much damage the missiles did, so if it has 50 bil missiles with 3 attack each missile, if the missiles did 30 bil damage, then the station used 10 bil missiles. The attacked fleets can not retaliate.

Fighters: Last station resort, they attack for their tech damage, do their damage, but the attacked fleets can retaliate and destroy some of them.

Note: Increasing the tech level will make the fighters and missiles more powerfull.

Emergency warps, looting, spilled minerals into space. After the station attacks the fleets, normal galaxy fleet combat commences. The attacking fleets go for the defender fleets. When there are no more defender fleets, the attacking fleets will go for the station. If the galaxy fleets have 10 or more fleets, it is possible the station would not be attacked, but a second attack will get to it.

When the station structural integrity is failing, it will try to escape via the emergency warp bubble. Provided it has a module installed for this purpose, it will activate it now. The module is destroyed in the process. If it doesn't have the special module, it will be destroyed.

Stations / structures in warp bubble can be redeployed via the system building room, they show up under Undeployed structures. You can deploy them just like building them, however they have all the modules / resources on them. Of course normal building conditions apply, no reavers, or other commander fleets.

After the station is out of the way, the attacking fleets will proceed to loot the mining facility, if there is one. They will capture 10% of the minerals in the cargo holds, and an engineer specialist will transfer 100% of the credits in the facility to the attacking mothership.
70% of the minerals in the cargohold will be spilled into the system space, producing more asteroids.

Note: The way the combat is setup to be more realistic, it is is possible to attack your own structures / fleets. Also, if you find an undefended station and place system fleets of your own then try to attack it, the fleets you placed in system patrol will trun against you and aid the enemy. It has something to do with the sovereign of the system, the station will capture them and trun them on you. It is also possible for an alliance to set up fleets in the system patrol. Those fleets will be defended by the station and will enter combat if the station is attacked.

Click here to proceed to learn abour researching new technology.