Official: Centralis boreholes?

[Cedayon]

Agreed on the energy park thing, there's one thing that puzzles me though:

Originally posted by Archaic
Boreholes crawled contribute to Eco-damage too afterall

Even if they're outside city radii and crawled for energy and not minerals? That would kill the idea pretty quick... but I remember playing a game some time ago (SMAC, not X) where I had some 40-50 boreholes on a large plain (terraformed up from the seabed) all outside my radii (perhaps even outside my territory) crawled for energy sent to my capital. I was getting 1-2 techs a turn, but I don't recall seeing terribly many fungal blooms or worm assaults or the usual effects of massive eco-damage that one would expect from 40-50 boreholes, however.

Was this changed in a patch, or am I just remembering wrong?

[GeneralTacticus]

Unfortunatly not. However, if I remember correctly, they still make 5 energy each or some such. It's been a while since I've bothered to make an energy park in a game. However, the following pattern will generate more energy than any other....

I just ran a test using the Scenario Editor on the map that we're using (not the same game, though), and it seems to won't be very efficient to turn the central area into an energy park - the maximum it will produce per turn is 5 energy, which is less than a single borehole will produce, so it would probably be more efficient to just drill a single boreholes, crawl it, and leave the other two tiles as forest to help contain the ecodamage.

[GeneralTacticus]

Even if they're outside city radii and crawled for energy and not minerals? That would kill the idea pretty quick... but I remember playing a game some time ago (SMAC, not X) where I had some 40-50 boreholes on a large plain (terraformed up from the seabed) all outside my radii (perhaps even outside my territory) crawled for energy sent to my capital. I was getting 1-2 techs a turn, but I don't recall seeing terribly many fungal blooms or worm assaults or the usual effects of massive eco-damage that one would expect from 40-50 boreholes, however.

Was this changed in a patch, or am I just remembering wrong?

Did the capital or nearby bases have Hybrid Forests?

[Cedayon]

The capital (and pretty much all my bases) had essentially everything that current tech permitted, including TFs/HFs and copious amounts of SC's. The borehole field was many, many squares away, though, and probably outside my territory (ie not within 20 squares of any of my bases or whatever the area is). What determines which base gets hit with the eco-damage for a borehole (and thus could alleviate that damage with HFs) if the borehole isn't in the city radii?

[Archaic]

Originally posted by Cedayon
Agreed on the energy park thing, there's one thing that puzzles me though:
Even if they're outside city radii and crawled for energy and not minerals? That would kill the idea pretty quick... but I remember playing a game some time ago (SMAC, not X) where I had some 40-50 boreholes on a large plain (terraformed up from the seabed) all outside my radii (perhaps even outside my territory) crawled for energy sent to my capital. I was getting 1-2 techs a turn, but I don't recall seeing terribly many fungal blooms or worm assaults or the usual effects of massive eco-damage that one would expect from 40-50 boreholes, however.

Was this changed in a patch, or am I just remembering wrong?

Hmmmm....perhaps I'm remembering wrong. I remember having massive eco-damage, but then, I'd crawled mainly minerals, not energy. It was a 1 city challenge I'd done for some reason. I remember counting over 100 Boreholes by the end.

[GeneralTacticus]

The capital (and pretty much all my bases) had essentially everything that current tech permitted, including TFs/HFs and copious amounts of SC's. The borehole field was many, many squares away, though, and probably outside my territory (ie not within 20 squares of any of my bases or whatever the area is). What determines which base gets hit with the eco-damage for a borehole (and thus could alleviate that damage with HFs) if the borehole isn't in the city radii?

No idea. Meybe it doesn't get hit at all, but in any case, if all your bases had Hybrid Forests, the issue it irrelevant - HFs negate the ED effects of terraforming.

[Cedayon]

From Archaic:
I remember having massive eco-damage, but then, I'd crawled mainly minerals, not energy.

Yea, you'd get massive ED if you had massive surface mineral production (anyway around that other than large numbers of orbital mining stations and large population?)... I've played a few games where my industry got to the point that I was fighting off 40-50+ unit swarms of locusts per turn (sometimes multiple groups of them), ouch. So I adopted the strategy of crawling enough energy that I could research really fast and have enough cash to buy whatever my more moderate industry couldn't produce fast enough.

Anyway, I'm done hijacking the thread

[GeneralTacticus]

Hardly a threadjack - it was on a related topic, and your suggestion is probably a good one.

[Main_Brain]

As I always say: you cant have enough Boreholes

[MrWhereItsAt]

Cedayon - if this is indeed true, that boreholes crawled for energy beyond a certain distance (or perhaps at ANY distance) create no ED, then we must look into this seriously - it could be a way of bulking up the energy without even FM, thus keeping groups on both sides of the FM fence happy. After all, the only bonus to FM is energy, and if we could get masses without resorting to the negative police and planet ratings, then we COULD stay in Planned or Green with fewer objections from the likes of me.

IMO this idea needs to be investigated further.

[GeneralTacticus]

While it's a nive idea, it would need vast numbers of boreholes to reach the levels that FM would give us, which would mean a huge investment in former-time - not to mention the fact that the STEP lobby would probably go on the warpath on RP grounds.

[Archaic]

Finished checking. The Boreholes won't create Eco Damage directly unless they're in a base radius. Of course, as already stated, it's not a viable solution to the problem. Inefficiency would kill most of that production even before we get into the STEP RP reasons and the former time.

[GeneralTacticus]

Well, inefficiency wouldn't be a factor if we directed it all to our HQ, but that would force it spend vast amounts of time producing crawlers, or mean that we'd have to move al the crawlers to there and rehome them first.

[MrWhereItsAt]

Or we up our Efficiency as much as possible with Green, Children's Creches (IIRC) etc.

Even if we never get as far as building enough to reach FM proportions, whilst there is this much oppositiion to FM, we may as well go for what we can. And just imagine what it would be like if in the future we had BOTH boreholes and FM...

[Archaic]

As already stated, better to go for the Mirrors and Solars than Boreholes for energy parks.

Unless.....does anyone know if Mirrors boost energy production of Boreholes?

Still though......we're getting along the lines of creating a Super Science City with that there. The production to create such a thing though.....we won't be able to manage it at this rate.