[Exploit] upgrading ships

Two cheesy exploits regarding ship upgrades.

1) Upgrading a constructor (that has used 4 out of its 5 construction points) to another constructor will give it the original 5 construction points for like 40 credits. Total cheese.

2) Upgrading a cheap constructor to a colony ship gives you free population to put on the next colony. You are effectively buying population for like 40 credits. (Amplified by having Benevelonce III giving you free additional 2 population when colonizing a planet, and heaven forbid you have the race trait giving you your first building free on said colony.) I build a cheap constructor, on first turn move it its max moves towards my target planet and then upgrade it so that next turn I have a colony ship heading to the planet with no drain on my building planet. Total cheese.

5,014 views 6 replies
Reply #1 Top

Dear God, could you not have waited til Marigoldran hit turn 40 before posting this? Now he's gonna have 200 planets by then ><

Reply #2 Top

LOL I discovered this while doing my own testing on the limits of expansion ie trying to break the game.

Maybe I should take up day trading and chess?  B)

Reply #3 Top

Known issue, been reported before.  That being said it's still broken =\

Reply #4 Top

#2 isn't an exploit as Brad has said he uses it.  #1, however, is pretty cool.  You can bet I'll be doing that until the cost gets situated. 

Reply #5 Top

Quoting MottiKhan, reply 4

#2 isn't an exploit as Brad has said he uses it.  #1, however, is pretty cool.  You can bet I'll be doing that until the cost gets situated. 
End of MottiKhan's quote

 

I think Brad's OK with converting constructors to colonizers; I don't think he'll be OK with getting big chunks of free population from doing so though.

Reply #6 Top

I likewise see no issue with converting constructors to colony ships, because as the devs have said in Live Streaming, you still have to use up your population to put on the empty transports. But this way you don't. You get free 0.1 population with an empty colony ship and still get to colonize/claim the planet as yours. You have free 2.1 population with the Benevelence III trait.

Keep in mind that colonizing a planet with 0.1 population (a completely empty colony ship) still gives you +0.1 population growth per turn on that planet and all the benefits of a new Colony Capital ie 5 manufacturing.