Section 12:
Weapons Design is pretty self-explanitory. Still, all of this section is really for advanced players only. You can get by without it, but it will help you gain an edge if you are one of the top players and are going up against another one of the top players.
To design a weapon, click the Weapon Design link on the right. It will show you your existing designs. Each person can have 5 designs, and you don’t really add designs, you just edit the ones that are already there. Click on the name of one to edit it.
You are now at a screen prompting you to name your weapon. Pick something original, and don’t use the same name for different designs, it might be important later. Hit continue.
You now need to select what weapon “hull” or “category” you want. This will decide how many and of what kind your weapons slots are. The 4 that are available to everybody are Laser, EMP, Projectile, and Minelayer. The best way to learn about each one is to just try each one out. Anyways pick one and move on.
You are now at a page that has Slot 1: and a drop down menu, then slot 2, etc. Pick something for each slot, or leave them empty. You won’t have to pay for empty slots when you build the weapon. If you see something like this: Beta Laser(45/10) that means you are adding a Beta Laser to the weapon which has 45 shield and 10 armor damage. For minelayers there is only 1 number in the parenthesis which is how many mines it has available each maint to lay. Once you pick out your selections for each slot, hit continue.
This is a confirmation screen. On the top is all of the different pods you picked for the slots, and how much it is costing you to put each pod on your weapon. Notice that each successive pod is a little more than the one above it. So 2 weapons with 2 Alpha Laser pods will cost less than 1 weapon with 4 Alpha Laser pods. This gives some small advantage to not filling all of the weapons slots, especially for minelayers. If everything looks right, hit Confirm Changes. You can now return to the weapon design page and see your new weapon design. Take note of what is in the “Cost” and “Colonists” columns, that is important.
The Weapons
Queue
The Weapons Queue is similar to the ship queue and is not too hard to understand either. Remember that you need a planet to do any of this stuff though.
To get to the Weapons Queue, click on the link at the top of the planet screen. This will be a list of everything you have in your weapons queue. If you didn’t add anything, this is probably blank. Click “Add to Queue” to add something.
You will now see something that looks rather familier if you were in Weapons Design already. It’s your 5 weapon designs, their stats, and a box next to each one. Type how many of the weapon you want to add to the queue, and click on the “Add to Queue” button. You will get a report on how many you added.
Go back to the queue(click on the link on the top) to confirm that the weapon was added to the queue. If it’s there, then it’s time to set up your planet for actually creating those weapons. Read on.
Setting Up
Your Planet
As with most planet stuff, you need to fill more than 1 condition to have stuff happen. With weapons there are 3 conditions: Weapons Factories, colonists assigned to Weapons Factories, and cash on the planet. Read on to find out how you should meet these 3 conditions properly.
First off you will need Weapons Factories. 1 Weapons Factory can build 1 weapon each maint run. Weapons Factories are built like all other buildings, read the Planets section of the help if you don’t know how.
Now, to satisfy the cost and colonists requirements you will need to look at the stats for the weapon you designed. Go to Weapons Design. Take note of the number in the Cost and in the Colonist columns.
Take the amount in the cost column, and multiply it by the number of weapons of that type you want to build. Add that much in cash to the planet. So if you are building 5 weapons and the cost for each weapon is 110000 you would put 550000 cash on the planet.
Now take the amount in the colonist column, and multiply it by the number of weapons of that type you want to build. Go to the Colonist Allocation screen on the planet, and add that many colonists to Weapons Factories. So if it costs 1000 colonists for each weapon and you are building 5 weapons you would add 5000 colonists to Weapons Factories.
You can build as many different types of weapons as you want at a time, as long as you meet all the requirements. Once any of the requirements cannot be met, the planet will stop producing weapons until you take care of it.
Putting
Weapons On Your Ships
Putting weapons you have created onto your ships is easy. Click on Weapons List on the planet screen. It will have a list of the first 30 weapons on your planet(you can then go to the next 30, etc). If you click the name of the weapon, that weapon will be taken off the planet and put on your ship. There will also be 2 links to the right of the weapon, on to Fill Ship and one to Add to Fleet. Fill Ship will fill all available turrets on your ship with weapons of that same type. Note that the game considers weapons of the same type to be weapons with the same name, which is why you need to name each weapon design something different. Add to Fleet adds 1 weapon of that type to every ship in your fleet. In either case, if you run out of weapons on your planet before the turret slots are filled, it’ll stop adding the weapons obviously.