Step 14b - Sea Structures

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

The first structure you can build in the Sea is the island fortress. It is used to protect an island and give support to the fleets in the island, as well as protect a mining facility. In order to build one, you need the appropriate technology. It is wise to build a fort after you managed to get some of the evading modules, like fog / escape tunnels. Always remember that the Sea is a very nasty place roaming with enemy captains that will want nothing more then to destroy your structures and loot you mining facility.

After you build the island fortress, access the structure commands by clicking on the structure image in the Sea island view.

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

Building Maintenance: Provided you have the fighter / bombs technology, you will be able to produce them here. The better your tech level is, the better the fighters / bombs you can produce. They are automatically upgraded once you get a higher tech level on them.
The fort 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 island, if they don't have any defence upgrades 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 fort. 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 an island defence island fortress and preferably some fleets assigned to the island in order to protect it, you can take care of the production and mining of the resources in the island. You can build a mining facility structure. The mining facility is able to mine every hour resources from ALL the island. A very important thing to know about choosing the right island to mine / defend is choose a island that has as many resources as possible, this will increase your mining profits. Also look as the resource values and their types. The higher their values and types, the more your mining facility will have work to do. Resources do not replenish, but if you lose or destroy another mining facility, the cargoholds are spilled into space, creating more resources.

The minign facility can do more then mining, it can convert resources resources into credits by setting up value markets, and has a special ability of converting one resource to another via material exchange. The mining facility can be upgraded with many modules from the research area, that can boost it's mining 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 exchange, so you could do all three in the same cycle. To maximize credit conversion you may want to have amounts for each of the resource type in the mining facility, you can transfer them from your commandship 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 commandship 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 an island with 3 or more resource resources, 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 resource in the island .

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 commandship holds to your mining facility.

Exchange Production: The facility trades one resource for another if you need another resource type or if resources are scarce in your island, you can use the mining facility even when all island resources have been depleted.

Building Maintenance: You can add / transfer resources to / from the mining facility to cover production, you can set exchange input / output and distribute production to several tasks at once.
For example, you can mine 20 units of ore, convert some to credits and excchange 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 Scoping: You will need the Fog Sight technology in order to scan an enemy structure. The enemy Fo 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 fog 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 fog 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 fort capabilities, especially the number of fighters / bombs it has on board.

When you attack a structure or Island Fleets and the fort is present in that island, the island fortress will enter combat. It will grant the fleets in orbit the bonuses selected in the fort maintenance area.

fort combat: the fort has weapons, bombs and fighters. The fort will fire all available arsenal in the begining of the battle. Depending on how many fleets you attack with, the fort will use it's attack on other fleets too. For example, if you attack with 2 fleets of 10 bil HP each, the fort 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 fort has bombs, it will fire them. It will use bombs depending on how much damage the bombs did, so if it has 50 bil bombs with 3 attack each bomb, if the bombs did 30 bil damage, then the fort used 10 bil bombs. The attacked fleets can not retaliate.

Fighters: Last fort 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 bombs more powerfull.

Escape Tunnels, looting, spilled minerals into sea. After the fort attacks the fleets, normal Sea 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 fort. If the Sea fleets have 10 or more fleets, it is possible the fort would not be attacked, but a second attack will get to it.

When the fort structural integrity is failing, it will try to escape via the escape tunnel. Provided it has a module installed for this purpose, it will use it now. The tunnel collapses after use and is destroyed in the process. If it doesn't have the special module, the fortwill be destroyed.

Forts / structures in the Sea can be redeployed via the island 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 captain fleets.

After the fort 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 commandship.
70% of the minerals in the cargohold will be spilled into the island area, producing more resources.

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 fort and place Island Fleets of your own then try to attack it, the fleets you placed in island patrol will trun against you and aid the enemy. It has something to do with the sovereign of the island, the fort will capture them and trun them on you. It is also possible for an alliance to set up fleets in the island patrol. Those fleets will be defended by the fort and will enter combat if the fort is attacked.

Click here to proceed to learn abour researching new technology.