Quick update

Wow, over a week without a post - how time flies. Anyone would think I was getting distracted with New Year....

Things are still moving. I've finally figured out how to use github, which means that I've downloaded a half handful of repositories to my PC, which is now running constantly doing exciting things like building Excavators and sending them out, as well as searching for glyphs for Halls of Vrbansk. I've managed to upgrade my Crashed Ship Site to level 5, and am working on level 6.

The current projects are:
- University upgrade
- Spy upgrade
- More excavators

After a few days of dithering, I've moved the University to my new Capitol planet. I've got it up to level 18, which is the highest I've managed, and am in the middle of upgrading the planet's storage so I can get level 19 (and which will mean I can make a start on a Genetics Lab.) I could speed this up quite a lot, I suspect, with Essentia and importing massive amounts of resources, but I don't want to spend that much time sat in front of a PC. At the moment, waste, water, and ore are all have one store of 19, and food will be done shortly. Energy will take a little longer (four days or so) so I do foresee an expenditure of Essentia shortly.

I noticed that one of my planets has at least one spy on it - it's showing up on the Defense Ministry page - so I'm spending a little time upgrading the spy related buildings to 15 or so, which is the point where they start to cost a serious amount of resources. I don't know if there are more spies out there, but it'll be nice to see - I note that the one I can see hasn't done anything for a couple of days, so hopefully the defensive spies are high enough level to stop him. Besides, where else am I going to find grist for a Genetics Lab?

I also realised that since I'm searching constantly for glyphs, it makes sense to upgrade the Archeology Ministries to up the odds. And if I can do that, then why not take them to level 15 - again, at the point where it starts to cost massive amounts of maintenance - and start putting out more Excavators? It's not like the resource cost for them will matter that much, and if it'll help me find extra Glyphs and Plans, why not?

Hmmm. Maybe less of a quick upgrade than I thought!

Diabolitin

So far, I've had two systems probed by the Diabolitin; one of them from two different sites. I know that, because that one has two batches of eighteen ships incoming, while the other just had the one.

I'm not quite sure what happened, but the first attack evaporated - I assume it was made up of Placebos, though there were no messages about it. That's one of the things I find the most frustrating, I think; when there's no information provided when something happens. You'll see the same thing when a spy ship lands - you'll see it incoming, but no message when it lands.

So I have 36 ships incoming to one world. I'm trying to upgrade the world they're coming towards before they get here, in case this lot actually do something, but there's really not much I can do. If the Diabolitin are as high level as advertised, there's not really much I can do to defend myself - all I've done is shift most of my high level spies onto the world, and am hoping I can capture any that arrive, for future experiments in the Genetics Lab I hope to be building in the next few days.

In the meantime, I'm working on upgrading my new capitol - I'll be getting my first level 16 resource producing building in the next day, which is very exciting. I've opted to upgrade the Recylcing facilities, which will give me a recycling rate of around 100,000 per hour. Which is very nice. I'm also working on upgrading the University on that world, to take over as the main University. I'm thinking I might be spending more Essentia to get it finished faster....

Darn it

A few days of intensive work on getting a second University up to 17, and I'm wondering if I did the right thing....

The plan was quite simple; I've got one world designated as a waste world - it's got the highest capacity for waste storage of any of my worlds, together with three of each of the waste recyclers. At its peak, it was recycling over 40k per hour.

The idea was that dropping the University on the same planet would mean that I'd have the capacity to support it - there's nothing especially draining there, so most of the resource production can go straight into supporting the university.

The practice, though.... With a good chunk of the recyclers at level 15 and most of the rest not too far behind, they're producing a lot less than I'd expect. I might be able to get a couple of extra levels of University, but I can foresee myself running out of resources a lot sooner than I'd like.

Darn.

So I'm now looking at migrating it again to the world I'm now building my Capitol on. That way, I'll be able to build up the resource production facilities past 15, which will help no end in supporting the University. And I can then remove the spare university on Wasteworld, and return it to its original purpose of storing and recycling Waste.

Time to start burning Essentia again.

A brief update

I seem to have ground to a halt with progress. I've spent a couple of days shifting resources from all my more established colonies to the site of my new University. It's currently level 16, though I may need to ship in (yet more) resources to upgrade storage before I can start on upgrading to 17; which will involve another whole batch of imports before I can start there.

I suspect I should spend a few cycles in getting the local production facilities up to speed - they're averaging around 10k each, and it's not quite at the stage yet where I can't upgrade the University because I can't support the additional costs.

I think my next step might be to pump out a few of the exciting new cargo carriers to replace my existing Cargo Ships - I've got a level 16 Trade Ministry, which means that the Galleon is doable; that should give me about triple the cargo capacity; which in turns means that I can upgrade both the University and the Shipyard world quicker.

Go me.

Moving University site

So I've decided I'm going to move the University from Homeworld - I've already had to make a few tricky decisions about what to demolish on Homeworld to give me room to expand properly there, and as things stand, a high-level university is taking up quite a large chunk of resources which I can probably use better elsewhere.

I can probably shift the ship-building facilities elsewhere, too; at the moment, the only reason I've not done it yet is that Homeworld has a high level Archeology Ministry, which means I can build Excavators there. I'll take care of that once I've built up the Archeology Ministry on my ship building world.

So after a couple of hours of work, I've built the new University up to level 13. Just a couple more levels to go before I can make the move. It's going to get a little tricky, though - I need to up the amount of storage available before I've got the capacity to make the upgrades. I suspect I might start using Essentia to help out with the build times; but I'm going to be importing a vast amount of resources over the next few days, I think.

Memo to self: when pushing resources, do try to remember where you're sending the stuff too, hmm?

Spies and the Saben

Well, I've given up on getting anything out of the Saben through spies. Sixteen of my spies, all trained to a decent level, and not one of them managed an actual result - most of them succeeded in getting themselves knocked unconscious, and two have gotten themselves captured.

So I can't see any point in keeping the rest there - I've had half a dozen attempts, and the best result I've managed is that my spies didn't get knocked out. So a couple of ships are on their way to ship out the first half; I'm going to send more ships as and when and hopefully pull the rest out. Getting the two captured spies out will have to wait til they've been released from jail.

Or I could just move the schedule forward, and send in as much waste as I can get together. I've got a couple of million units on my homeworld, and am shipping Scows there slowly; and my waste re-processing world is has around three million units, and they'll be getting the next batch of Scows once I've built the Spaceport up enough to the point where I can have more than a two ships waiting.

So the next step involves sending around a million units of waste in their direction, and see what the Saben do next. The one downside is that I'll be sending the Scows from two different planets, with a preceding wave of Scanners from a third, which means I'll need to work the timings out carefully beforehand. Stupid maths.

More Saben!

So my spying offensive against the Saben has been slightly less impressive than I'd've liked. Specifically, I have 16 spies on the local planet, and have given them all the Gather Empire Intelligence mission, the easiest one.

Results have been, shall we say, unimpressive?

None of them actually managed to succeed. That's quite definitely not good. I'm assuming that this somewhat disturbing lack of success is due to a large amount of trained Saben spies on the planet. Which by itself is quite impressive, considering that the colony's not been there for a week yet; methinks that the building rules are different for Saben.

So I could try and send a few more spies - I've got the ships, and the spies are already there - but that might just prove to be even more disheartening. I should probably update my spying buildings, too, because that'll never hurt. Though there are so many things I'd like to be building right now - I think my longest build queue is four days right now.

Additionally, I've just discovered a second Saben colony, to the north of the one I already knew about. Now, where did I leave those two million units of waste?