harpy eagle wrote:But they do provide a discount to ship production costs, right?
That is correct: they halve the wrench cost of all ships but leave metal cost intact. Effect does not stack so it only makes sense to build one per planet
Hence they are both crazy usefull for production heavy worlds (to justify the intial investment in metal) and dangerious to metal income as ships built there will consume double the amount of metal per turn as before
Hence it would make sense to build them if:
1. Planet is among top 20% highest production worlds (if it has 5 planets it should build one for the planet with the highest priduction capacity - more would not be feasable to operate metal wise)
2. Metal reserves ensure succesfull building of the Shipyard(s) (so that they dont cripple production during the time they are built)
harpy eagle wrote:Speaking of which, the AI is pretty bad at defending it's key planets sometimes. It will send it's fleets off to guard some unimportant planet even though there are hostile ships just a few turns away. I've seen the AI lose their homeworlds this way, despite having a fleet large enough to fend off any invasions - I should probably keep a save the next time.
Yes, there is a lot to be said regarding ship movement on the strategic map - tried to sum it up for you somewhere.
Was thinking that you initial approach to the tactical AI might be portable here but instead of assigning priority to potential targets based on damage potential/risk, it would be assigned to systems where an individual ship or fleet should move to based on system value. e.g.: enemy with highest metal income is primary target, but defending own top metal producing planets might outweight it if closer and under direct threat