Dyson spheres or energy habitats?

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Carl_Bar

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May 22, 2016
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My thoughts. As someone who got seriously boxed in by an early unbidden waking up a nearby FE, (whilst another FE on the other side of the galaxy helped keep the rest of the AI boxed up), and bearing in mind the currently borked ethic attraction Dysons where a real saviour for me. I had enough planets and enough unhappy pops that i had to go heavy on the happiness boosters in habitats and as a result found that building habitats was actually making my research worse despite dedicating nothing but science. Because with all the happiness building i was only getting about 29 science. Sure if you build a super science race you could probably get it close to where you need to, but thats not an option for everyone. I'd have needed an aggregate 55% science production boost after negetive modifiers for happiness if i'd gone pure labs.

Which isn't to say habitats aren;t still good. But they're dependent on what your producing and several other factors. Also a Dyson including energy made whilst building breaks even compared to trading minerals after just 140 months. For me who spent like 250 years building up an economy to fight the FE's, (both where doomstacking hard with 600k FP to play with), a 15 year break even point wasn't even a drop in the bucket.

They're also great for sectors. Normally a sector will try to and has to build enough power gen to pay it's costs. give it a Dyson and it will never have to worry about hat again so you can tell it to specelise however you want and it will do it out the wazoo, and at building specialised worlds the AI is pretty good.


I agree though, the one at a time limit is a real issue, the kinds of situations you'll find yourself in where you need to use megastructures to finish the game tend to require truly staggering military build ups. And the one per limit tends to drag this out something horrific. The science nexus for example, if you could build as many as you could afford would be truly awesome, its nearly as much as a fully optimized habitat without any tech penalty, but god does it take forever to build up. Ringworlds i can get, but Sensor Array and Nexus really need to be as many as you can afford. Dysons i'm not sure on they'e quite [potent in allowing you to dedicate worlds and such like to other things, an approach i optimized around fairly well, though not fully min maxed.