Advent Refinery?

Now, I just started this game really. I certainly don't presume to know a whole lot about the intracacies of balance in play here.

But while I was playing the game and reading through this: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p7xc_snd9Cc-6o2UwvPEWUg&gid=6

I noticed that advent does not have a refinery, at first I thought "Well Advent probably get some other building that the other races don't." But according to the above link, that's not true. While playing I noticed that resources, metal and crystal, are at a huge premium and they are, quite often, the limiting factor on research, expansion, and fleet production.

So, I'm wondering, why do the Advent NOT have refineries? And what DO they have to balance this out?

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Refineries. You get them from Trade Ports. There's a research... Have you even played Advent yet? It should be fairly obvious they have one. Regardless, refineries are worthless right now; trade ports are far better than refineries. That, though, will probably be addressed soon.

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In regards to your question, and not to dump on refineries, which are indeed too slow for anything besides huge multistar games, the Advent get a tech for their tradeport that allows it to convert its output from credits to resources. I haven't tried it though.

Revisiting refineries a bit, they're decent next to volcanic or ice worlds with several phase lanes that lead to points with resource satelites. Depending on the allegiance of the area, you can up to 1.8 resources a second from a trio of refineries. Sadly this sets you back 4,500 credits and 1,000's of resources, plus the one time cost of researching the technology. So you need them running for twenty minutes or so to get a profit(much slower than the awesome tradeports, which fuel your economy when your expansion stalemates against an opponent's holdings).

If I were to give input for the next patch, I'd cut refinery cost by 33% or so. While resources are 'more valuable' than credits, refinery output is so low that it just isn't worth it most of the time. In comparison playing the Black Market with the credit flow from tradeports gets you all the resources you could want.

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Tridus

Join Date 03/2008

+110

As was mentioned, you can tell an Advent Tradeport to "stop trading and become a refinery".

I tried it once, and I found that the lost credit income didn't make up for the gained resource income, simply because you can use those credits on the black market to buy whatever resource you need, or on Pirates to harass an AI, or on capital ship level upgrades.

What you can do if you really want a refinery anyway is build two Tradeports, and put one of them into refinery mode. In that set up its not much different from the TEC/Vasari method (in fact I think a Tradeport is cheaper to build then a Refinery).

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Yeah, tradeports are like half the cost of refineries. In exchange the Advent have to research both their tradeport and the conversion ability, though why you wouldn't research tradeports is beyond me...

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Well, the other races have to research the refinery by itself anyway and personally, I think it's advantageous for the Advent to have one flexible building rather than having to choose between two.

Although, as was said above, until the coming market fixes take effect, refineries in general are a total waste regardless of faction.

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