Upgrading planet infrastructure (emergency facilities) while it is being bombed

Does it help?

from Sins Forums

Does upgrading planet infrastructure while it is being bombed prolong its survival? I mean if you start the upgrade after the bombs started to hit the surface. I've looked in the planet entity files, and while the planet max health obviously increases, there's nothing about its rate of infra growth (self-repair rate) there, unlike the rate of growth for the population, which is specified in those files. (Pop growth is specified at every population level in fact, but those numbers are set same at every level for every planet I looked at; only the asteroids get less than the rest.) So infra growth rate is probably a constant: either in gameplay.constants or hardcoded. Does anyone know how it works? Does it grow at an absolute constant rate or does it grow at a fraction of max infra every second? I can obviously sandbox test these hypotheses, but hopefully someone already knows the answer given that planet glassing is such an important aspect of the game.

A quick update: in gameplay.constants I found the following in the PlanetData section:

healthRegenRatePercWhenBombed .000

considerBeingBombedTimeForHealthRegen 20

So it seems that a planet's infra growth is completely disabled while it is being bombed, therefore infra upgrades bought during bombardment are a complete waste of credits unless you get the bombardment to lift at some point thereafter (but before the planet dies). So you might as well save your credits until you can actually end the bombardment.

But what about the rate of infra growth while not being bombed? It doesn't seem to be spelled out in gameplay.constants at all. The fact that the regen rate during bombardment is specified in percentage (albeit set to 0%) does suggest that planets with greater infra also recover/grow it faster while they are not bombed, but this remains to be tested in actual gameplay. This may matter in a situation where you managed to end the bombardment, the planet survived, but it is obviously less than full health. Assuming it's plausible that it may come under bombardment again in the future, does it pay off to begin infra upgrade immediately or you might just as well wait until it recovers to its maximum health already purchased before spending anymore on it?

Updated: Edited the title to make it less confusing by adding the "emergency facilities" parenthetical, which is what these are called in game (but not in any of the the entity/galaxy/gameplay.constats files.)

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Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

growth rates are specified in the planet entity if I remember correctly

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

For me it seems planets always grow 3 health per time unit, with TEC research level2 4 (sometimes 3), it never increases nor decreases in any other ways. No matter if they have 1000000000000 max health or just 500. These are just my observations from the game, not from any files or something.

While being bombed it never increases, and if bombing cedes, it takes several seconds to reinitiate health growth. So it is useless upgrading the planet IF YOU CANNOT DEFEND IT, in other words you cannot make your opponent leave the planet alone (scare him away or destroy sieging ships), or a Novalith warhead is coming.

BUT if you can stop his siege, and make him go away, and bombardment will not be likely for a longer time as you just made a minor or bigger victory, it worths it if it can go above the original max level before the next round of sieging. But it seems situational, better to upgrade in advance and let it grow to a high value before anyone can siege it, of course if it will be a frontline world that your enemy will surely want to take.

For me it's some kind of rule, never upgrade planet population if a serious amount bombardment is imminent, you just lose those resources if you lose the planet. But this goes for only AI, online I never really cared about planet health ever.

 

EDIT: or does it grow always 4 units and with TEC research 5? Ah I can't remember correctly.

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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

Look in gameplay file under PlanetData....

There is a healthRegenRatePercWhenBombed as well as a populationGrowthPercWhenBombed...there are also modifiers that go with each of these that determine how long the planet has been "considerBeingBombedTimeFor...."...

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

I'm not sure if you're talking about planet population or health..... "Infrastructure" upgrades affect the former while the latter are called "emergency facilities" in the game. Anyways assuming you're talking about health. It's pretty useless, but the AI is dumb and schizophrenic and can often be lured away from bombing your planet for a bit if it's only using capitals, for example if you jump in a lone colony frigate the AI capital may go to kill it giving you time to regen. This won't work against siege frigates though. Generally speaking I only buy the emergency facilities to survive novalith shots.

In MP, I imagine you would never ever touch the emergency facility upgrades.

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting WJC3688, reply 4
In MP, I imagine you would never ever touch the emergency facility upgrades.

You actually do quite a bit...you obviously don't do it on every planet but you do put them on key worlds so you can go attack somewhere without having to worry about a planet being bombed out before you come back....

Building a turret in range of a siege frigate under control of the AI will usually get it to relocate somewhere else...once there are no safe places to go though it will not be deterred by newly built turrets...

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting WJC3688, reply 4
I'm not sure if you're talking about planet population or health..... "Infrastructure" upgrades affect the former while the latter are called "emergency facilities" in the game.

"Population" in the entity files translates to "Infrastructure" in-game, while "Infrastructure" from the entity files (and galaxy files, gameplay.constants etc.) is indeed called "emergency facilities" in the end-user game text. So it's a rather confusing overloading of the term "Infrastructure", but it's not mine... I'm talking about the entity-files "infrastructure" here, i.e. the "emergency facilities" as they are called in game, aka planet health.

 

Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Turchany, reply 2

For me it seems planets always grow 3 health per time unit, with TEC research level2 4 (sometimes 3), it never increases nor decreases in any other ways. No matter if they have 1000000000000 max health or just 500. These are just my observations from the game, not from any files or something.

While being bombed it never increases, and if bombing cedes, it takes several seconds to reinitiate health growth. So it is useless upgrading the planet IF YOU CANNOT DEFEND IT, in other words you cannot make your opponent leave the planet alone (scare him away or destroy sieging ships), or a Novalith warhead is coming.

BUT if you can stop his siege, and make him go away, and bombardment will not be likely for a longer time as you just made a minor or bigger victory, it worths it if it can go above the original max level before the next round of sieging. But it seems situational, better to upgrade in advance and let it grow to a high value before anyone can siege it, of course if it will be a frontline world that your enemy will surely want to take.

For me it's some kind of rule, never upgrade planet population if a serious amount bombardment is imminent, you just lose those resources if you lose the planet. But this goes for only AI, online I never really cared about planet health ever.

EDIT: or does it grow always 4 units and with TEC research 5? Ah I can't remember correctly.

There is actually a per-planet-type health ("emergency facilities") growth rate in the entity files. It's called healthRegenRate and is set to 6.0 for all colonizable planets (although in theory it could be different for each type.) Given what we know about rates in general in this game, it's fairly safe to assume that figure is per second (rather than some other unit of time.) I've actually timed how long it takes for 500 hp to grow on a roid after colonization [making sure it doesn't get hit by any bombs, so I actually timed how long it took from 500 to 1000 hp] and it took 83 seconds... so no surprise there, the rate is per second. The game probably updates the displayed planet health every half-second which is why it seems to grow in chunks of 3.

In the entity files, healthRegenRate is a constant however for each planet type, i.e. it can't be set depending on the max-health of the planet or its development level of some kind (not in straightforward way anyway.) There's only one tech that increases that rate, TEC I think, and it grants 12.5% bonus per research level (max 2) via PlanetHealthRegenRateAdjustment. There doesn't seem to be any [random] planet bonus or artifact affecting that rate.

So, for optimal growth of planet hp in front-line situation, one should begin the emergency facilities when the planet is 270 hp below its present max; that's at the first level of upgrade which takes 45 seconds to complete (270=45*6). Subsequent levels add 15 seconds to upgrade time, so one should add 90 hp per level to the gap from max before upgrade should begin, so 360 hp away from the max is optimal for the 2nd upgrade and so forth. The (rarely researched, I assume) TEC boosters increase the hp growth to the absolute rates of 6.75 and 7.5 respectively, so the optimal point for the first level moves to 303.75 (below max) and respectively to 337.5 for the 2nd level of said research; the extra hp to subtract for the higher levels of hp upgrade also goes from 90 to 101.25 and receptively to 112.5 with these researches, so around 400 hp below max would be optimal for the 2nd upgrade with the 1st research booster and 450 with the 2nd one.

More importantly, on the "faster" ship speed setting, one should not bother beginning to upgrade emergency facilities once an enemy cap has entered the well (and is headed for the planet), because it takes just about 45 seconds for the slowest kind of cap (like a carrier) to close the distance to the planet enough to begin bombarding it. And since planet hp regen is disabled during bombardment (and also because the planet will typically be well below max hp by the time the enemy cap is chased away if that even succeeds), that's money better put to other uses right away... But if you can spot the enemy cap in the next well coming your way (by scouting!) then it normally pays off to begin upgrading the max hp ("emergency facilities") if you haven't done so already. The time for the typical roid to get from 1000 to 2500 hp, thus to maximize the benefit/payoff of the upgrade before bombardment begins is however a substantial 250 seconds (4 minutes and 10 seconds)... so it is better to have significantly more advance notice of the enemy's arrival when starting the upgrade. Typically a cap ship takes about one to one-and-a-half minute per well to traverse, including the jump phase, on "faster". So notice while the enemy is still 3-4 jumps away is needed to maximize payoff/hp from [the] one [and only] level of roid hp upgrade if the enemy is heading toward your roid without pausing.