Star Sonata/Bases

Bases in Star Sonata are a solid investment in acquiring five things. These things are: Points for your team score, Profit from trade routes and/or colonies, Rare Ruin Items from a colony, building certain blueprints, and/or ultimately a claim to Emporerhood. Unfortunately, most of these ventures require a large amount of money to start before they are ready to produce for you.

Skills required
The most important skill needed for bases is Station Management. This increases the number of bases you can build plus allows access to bigger bases at level 3, 6, 9, 12, 14, 16, 18 and 20. Presently, Station Management can be found in these locations...

Sol          to 3  for no items. Prism        to 9  for 5 Promethium each level. Absolution   to 12 for 8 Promethium each level. Ruby Steppes to 16 for 1 Aqua Nuzzle each level. Handel's Cove to 16 for 2 Ariadnites each level. Biologique   to 20 for 1 Microbes Amoureuse each level.

Each skill level needs 1 point plus the present skill level that your character is at. The number of allowed stations are determined by the tech level of the station being built and the Station Management level. The only thing clear about these station slots are that you can build only 6 bases of the same tech level as your Station Management. For example, you can build only 6 Tech 9 bases at SM 9 and only 6 Tech 12 bases at SM 12.

Next important skills are those that allow you to equip better items onto your base. Weapons, Shields, and Radar are the primary skills for keeping your base well-defended from attacks while Items will reduce the damage plus a myriad of other useful things. These need as well 1 point plus the present skill level of your character to upgrade. Recommended skill levels are Weapons 9+, Shields 9+, Radar 7+, Items 10+. It is possible to keep a base defended with less than those skill levels.

There are a few specialist skills available for use to a base builder.

The first is called Station Mastery. This skill increases by 5% per level the shield, energy, damage, shield recharge, energy recharge, capacity, tracking, firing rate, radar, range and cloaking of every base that you build uncompounded. Free Market galaxy has a station to learn this skill up to 20 for 5 skill points. If you take Station Mastery, you will not be able to learn Beserker or Fighter Ace (and any secondary skills related to those two). However, this skill can either open up Colonial Administrator or Extraction Expert with Merchant.

The second is called Extraction Expert. This skill increases the speed of acquiring resources from collectors. To be put simply, you will get commodities faster. You will need Station Mastery 1 and Merchant 1 in order to start on this secondary path. The place to learn it changes with every universe, but it will always be at a base in an AI protected galaxy.

The last is called Colonial Administrator. This skill increases suitability of a colony you own by 4% per level. It has been confirmed that suitability does increase past 100%. What this skill does is increase the growth rate and the colony peasant prices (3 credits more per % suitability) relative to new percentage. Again, this skill can be found in Free Market for 10 skill points up to a maximum of 20. You will need Station Mastery 1.

In order to increase Extraction Expert or Colonial Administrator, the prerequisites (Station Mastery and Merchant, or just Station Mastery) must be half of the level of these two. Which means, in order to have Extraction Expert of 6, Station Mastery and Merchant must be each at level 3. However, any rounding is down, so this means you only need Station Mastery of 2 in order to get Colonial Administrator of 5.

Important notes about bases in general
Do not put up a base in a protected galaxy of any kind. AI-protected galaxies will shoot you and your base on sight, causing grief and potential loss of ship and money. In Player-protected galaxies, the team that owns that galaxy will shoot you, whether it be their base, their drones, or their ships.

Get some sort of defense on or around a newly built base as soon as possible. There are aggressive AI ships who love to kill bases before anything can be done with them. Or keep a friend around to intercept those ships before the base shields go down.

A base tech level determines the maximum level of technology that can be equipped on that base. You may have Weapons 12, but you will not be able to equip a Crimson Fist (tech 12) on a Tech 9 station. Other than using the low-end tech upgrades or some higher ruin base tech upgrades, there is no way to increase this tech level limit. Please note that this does not affect blueprints; they fall underneath an entirely different category based on player's Station Management skill levels.

Placeing a Stationary base
This is the easier of the two bases to start, but there is hardly any profit to be had from this type aside from selling augmenters, ruin items, mining, and finished products from attached bases. To drop a base, all you have to do is find a clear spot of space and double click the Station item. It will then drop from the center of your ship which is now available to you can enter it and add equipment. This means you cannot drop a base on top of any galaxial object which includes suns, planets, moons, wormholes and possibly other ships. Secret Caches seem to be the exception; they can be dropped wherever which makes them useful to skip through the Steppes galaxies Warp Drone-guarded wormholes.

Placeing an Attached base
The other type requires a planet or a moon to be able to place it. Match speeds with the object you have selected and be at the edge of it. You must physically target the planet or moon before you can drop the base onto it. Then it is a simple double click of the Station item and your base is ready for you to go in.

Inside a base
There are several tabs inside a base. Most you will be familiar with: the General, Ships, Bulletin Board and Commodities Record tabs. If the Base has a Trading Post equipped, there will be a Trade tab like any AI base out there. However, there are three more tabs unaccounted for: Control, Items and Construction (though I will go into more depth with construction later).

Control is the central hub of a player-owned base, where the controls for it are kept. There are several buttons here: Add trade goods..., Set Name, Set Description, Set as Team Base/Remove Team, Transfer Money to Ship, and Transfer Money to Base. The name and description buttons are pretty straight-forward, type in what you wish to call the base and the words that people will see when they first dock respectively. The two Transfer Money... buttons are very straight-forward; click and specify the amount to put on or take off the base.

The Add Trade Goods button is a somewhat difficult thing to use just starting out your first base. Clicking of this button results in a list being generated; all items that can be bought and sold. It is organized by type of item, with Weapons first and then Commodity. We will concentrate on Commodities as this will be the most used part of the list. Select the item you wish to modify prices for by double-clicking on it. This will bring up a menu of four selections: Buy Price, Sell Price, Buy Max, and Sell Limit. The Buy Price is the number you will see underneath Sell in the Trade Tab and the Sell Price is the number you will underneath Buy. Buy Max is the limit of how much of that item you wish your base to have inside, and Sell Limit is the number of items that will not be sold. Take for example Rations. On a colony planet, you will set it to say 10 for the Sell Price, 10 for the Buy Price (if it doesn't produce any rations on it's own), 10 000 as the Buy Max and 600 as the Sell Limit. This means the colony will buy the rations at 10 credits, while the base itself will purchase rations at 10 credits from other ships (most notably, slaves). It will continue to buy rations until it hits the upper limit of 10 000 and will not sell any rations if the number of rations drops to 600.

Docking Privileges are set here as well to either All (anyone can dock, including AI), Team (Anyone on your team can dock) and You (and only you; slaves are not included). It will also show you the Shield strength, Energy strength, Space used and maximum allowed, Workers currently used and number on the base, Credits on the base, the Tech level of the station and a record of recent events that shows what has happened in and to your base.

The Items tab is where the items you transferred over from your ships are located. Any and all items will be found here, whether it is just a simple commodity or a weighty Shield generator. Equipped items are marked with an X.

Outfitting your base (Starting out)
The bare minimum of a survivable base is a regenerating shield, a energy source, items that will increase space of the base, rations and workers. Right now, 1 worker is required for each equipped item on base. However, these workers will not work without food, so you have to feed them .6 rations an hour per worker. Of course, to fit everything onto the base, you will need space-increasing items. Hull Expansion-type items could be used, but only one can be equipped at a time. Newly-started bases can construct station expansion units right off the bat for only 30 metals, but they only increase space by only 100. Other space-expansion items are available to construct, but we'll go into more detail later on in this FAQ.

For Stationary Bases, this is pretty much all you need to start out. As for Attached bases, they can be connected to a planetary object with natural resources to be exploited. In order to get at those resources, you need to equip base items related to it (IE. Metal Drills to get Metals). You will also need additional space in order to store the acquired material.

In order to trade items on that base, it will need to equip a Trading Bay, the other construction blueprint that a new base starts with. Thus players docked at that base will be able to see the Trade tab and any allowed items bought and sold at your station.

Recommended ships to use
To get everything on site quickly, a ship will need a lot of space to hold everything needed to start a base and defend it. The big freighter ships are the ones to use: Bulk Trader, Bulk Trader II, Serenity, Massif, Gelato, Massif II, Leviathan, Thatch and Behemoth. Smaller ships can be used if speed is not required, but only if they have the space available to load a Station kit onto it.

If you have a high enough Remote Control skill level, then all you need is space for the base kit and load up freighter-class ships with the necessary materials and equipment that will follow you to the location of the base construction site.

What can be equipped
Bases can have as many station extensions as there are workers to keep them running. However, they are limited in other items. They have the same item restrictions as ships do: Only one equipped energy generator, one shield, one hull extension, etc. All stations can equip up to six augmenters; weapon limit haven't been fully tried yet. The energy generator, shield, weapons, radar, and certain items also require one worker each.

Construction
This is the third and last tab that does not appear in AI stations. This is the place where blueprints installed on the station can be built. Any player-station always has two blueprints already installed in the Construction tab: Trading Bay and Station Expansion Unit. These two are the bare minimum you need for any station to trade with others and to expand. Other blueprints can be either bought at AI stations under the Base Item tab in the Trade Tab or found from DG bosses.

Any blueprint you place on your base will first be found in the Item tab. In order to install it and be shown in the Construction tab, you will have to double-click it or right-click and hit Use. Then it will disappear from the Item list and reappear as a selection in the Construction list. The only limit on the tech level of the blueprint that can be installed is the skill level of your Station Management.

In the Construction list, it will display the name of the item that can be constructed from the blueprint, the amount of metals required for it and the manhours needed to complete building the item. Any other material needed for building will NOT be shown here, and will only be asked for when you attempt to start building the item. Manhours is units of time needed for one worker to complete the item. These units of time come every 10 seconds, so an Extension X blueprint would require 10 000 seconds (2 hours and 47 minutes) to complete if only one worker was available.

Construction items fall under two categories. Blueprints that only need materials all at once at the beginning and blueprints that require cash and metals to start initially, then require credits as it progresses towards completion along with possibly other materials.

Double-clicking a construction item will either display a red warning message telling you require something (metals, other materials not shown in the list) or start building in the In Progress Window. This window shows the item name, whether it is still building or on hold, and the percent completed. If there is no restriction on the number of workers for that item, construction will use all available workers (any worker that isn't being used to power an equipped item) to complete every single item that has been initiated.

Once construction has been finished on an item, the event window in the Control tab will display that it has been completed. The newly constructed item will be placed in the Item tab. If there isn't any room for the item while it is still being constructed, it will freeze at whatever percent it has completed until space has been made.

If you wish to calculate the time, all you have to do is take the number of manhours and multiply it by 6. This gets you the number of minutes for one worker to complete the item. If there is a max number of workers allowed, then use it for the next part; otherwise just use the number of workers available on the base. Take whatever number of minutes you found out previous and then divide that by the worker number to find out how many minutes for your base to construct the item.

Resources on planets and moons
This is where the Attached Stations shine. Depending on the resource available, it will provide profit or construction material to build more items. Yet in order to find out what is on that planet or moon, you will need to scan it with a planetscanner. This device will tell you what resources there is, in what abundance, any ruins on it, and a crude three-type suitability (which I will talk about later on) of the planetary object.

The adundance of the resource is what gives you the upper limit of Drills/Extractors/Collectors/Treecutters/Harvesters that can be equipped at one time on the planet. Here is an INCOMPLETE list: Code:

Smidgen.........1 - 2 Little..........3 - 4 Bit.............5 - 8 Bunch...........9 - 16 A lot...........17 - 32 Plenty..........33 - 64 Loads...........65 - 128

This universe from 1.0.03 on has reduced the resource abundance of planets while increasing the number of planets throughout. This means people are either forced to take Extraction Expert or spread out their bases more. Non-random galaxies, ones that do not change from universe to universe, will have the same abundance values as ever.

Resources found on planets range from none to as many as three or four; moons only none to two. The common ones will be found randomly throughout the SS universe. The special resources are found in only one galaxy each along with their respective extractor. These are the common resources:

Code:

Planets can have... Moons can have...  Space Oats          Silicon Silicon            Metals Metals             Nuclear Waste Nuclear Waste Baobabs

Suitability
There are three variables that determine suitability of a planet. They are Gravity, Temperature, and Atmosphere. So far, there are only 3 differences in each variable in which the medium type is always the best. The three types ranked from high to low are...

Gravity can be either Heavy, Normal, or Low. Temperature can be either Blistering, Temperate, or Frozen. Atmosphere can be either Gaseous, Terran, or Noxious.

High is 50%, Medium is 100% and Low is 75%. In order to calculate the suitability of a planet, one must multiply all three percentages together. So a Low Gravity, Frozen, Gaseous planet would be 0.75 X 0.75 X 0.5 = 28% suitability. Here's a chart showing all the percentages allowable ranked from highest to lowest. Code:

Suitability       First       Second       Third

100%             Medium       Medium       Medium 75%              Medium       Medium       Low 56%              Medium       Low          Low 50%              Medium       Medium       High 42%              Low          Low          Low 38%              Medium       Low          High 28%              Low          Low          High 25%              Medium       High         High 19%              Low          High         High 13%              High         High         High

Suitability has absolutely no impact on non-colony bases. Thus the only way to confirm the percentages is to actually build a colony on that planet.

The size of the planet determines what the Gravity will be. As comparison, Low has about a 3cm diameter, Normal about 4cm, and Heavy has about a 5cm diameter. It is fairly hard to distinguish between a Normal gravity and a Heavy gravity planet from the targetting interface as they both are the same size in that small window. However, once you have them on radar it becomes much easier to distinguish the two.

The colour and the make-up of a planet determines the other two characteristics. As a general rule, reddish type planets are Blistering while white or blue are more Frozen; Temperate being somewhere in between with brown and/or green colouring. Noxious tend to be clouded with greyish or brownish (think bleh) colours, while Gaseous are much like Jupiter in the real life. The problem with identifying certain elements of these two characteristics is that they are very much entwined; a planet will have a certain 'look' to it. A Temperate Noxious planet will look very different than a Blistering Noxious one.

What to look for in a good galaxy
In order to start without too much preparation beforehand is a metals planet or moon, a Lot or better. This way the common blueprints can be used to construct extensions and equipment for Tech 9 stations fairly quickly. Next thing that is very important to have is a Space Oat planet. A Smidgen can support a couple of small non-colony bases, but you will need more if you wish to have more bases and colonies maintained. Once these two bases are built, then exploitation of the galaxy can begin. Please note that this doesn't take into account Extraction Expert; you don't need to worry about abundance of resources as much with that skill.

Metals can be bought from AI stations if there isn't any planet with metals that you want to build a base on. However, random AI stations do start in a new universe with NO metals being sold; only certain non-random AI stations will supply at that point. Sources of food can also be bought; ration selling AI stations being the same way as metal selling AI stations but there is another way of obtaining food: Peasants. There is a base item called a Mobile Cannery that will chop up 20 peasants at a time into 10 rations for no cost. Just calculate the number of rations needed to keep a base alive and double that number to find how many peasants you need.

Once you have the foundation down, you will want to look for ways of making profit. Metals are a good starter as you already should have one base on that resource. Nuclear Waste is the next step up, selling for about two or three times more than Metals in an AI base. Silicon can range from bad to the ultimate in cash-making. They can produce Silicon alone, Microchips (slightly better than Metals), Workers (comparable to Nuclear Waste) and Crack Whores (starting at around 950 or so). However to make Silicon the best the start-up cost can be quite expensive; Crack Houses or Crack Dens are sold at 500 000c and 1 000 000c respectively. The last, Baobabs, is only bought at AI stations at it's lowest price. This means it's value only shoots up when colonies come into play.

You may want to look for a highly suitable planet as well. The best ones are those closest to Earth type: Normal Gravity, Temperate, Terran. Colonies built on these planets will quickly increase in population relative to the other suitability percentages. The higher the suitability, the better prices the colony has and the faster it grows, which also expands the maximum amount of commodities it can buy up at one time.

Last thing you should be thinking of looking for is ruins. They provide items to buy, if you set up a colony on that planet. They can be quite expensive to get, but well worth the investment if it is something like Faranji 7 Energy or Vazaha Protector 5. More on ruins later on.

Maintaining your base
In order to keep a station alive, better equipment should be used other than the starting equipment you placed there. For Tech 9 stations, this is easily fixed by building Adonis gear. For lower tech stations, other ways must be used. However augmenters that increase shield capacity and recharge are vital for those stations to survive the onslaught of AIs; their shields do not have enough capacity for it's weapons to kill those ships quickly enough.

Slaveship ration runners could be used to keep a steady stream of rations to a Space Oat-less station, though these are weak links for a marauding pirate to destroy. For this blow to be less destructive, consider setting the limit of rations stored on base to one that will keep the base running at least 24 hours. That way (if you play daily) you can rectify the ration problem before workers go on strike and unequip everything.

With any commodity producing base, you might run into the problems of excess. When space runs out, rations shipped to that base may not be sold there; this runs the risk of letting rations hitting 0 if left too long. Other slave ships are handy in getting rid of that excess by selling it to AI stations, giving you some profit. Another solution is to check on the base daily and transport/toss the excess commodities yourself.

If a base's workers ever go on strike, they will not work. This means every piece of equipment requiring a worker is unequipped and construction is stopped. This is due to the workers not having any rations to eat. If the base is still around when you see that (the base graphic will be the same one as when you first placed it), just dock with rations in your cargo. When it comes time for the workers to eat, dependent on how many are on that base, they will take a ration from your ship's cargo and become ready to work once more. You will then be allowed to re-equip everything that was unequipped before.

Colonies
There are a few common blueprints that allow the construction of a colony on an attached base. To build it, you will need (depending on the blueprint type) several thousand rations and peasants. The number of peasants required is how many will be placed on the colony initially when it is built. Once this is built, a new tab called Colony is now part of the Station interface. In this tab, it will show you the current population and if it is increasing or decreasing in number from birth/death. Underneath that indicator is another for rations; current number to max. So far, colonies eat between 600-700 rations every hour, depending on the suitability percentage. Lastly, underneath that is the suitability rating for the colony, the only way to confirm your visual/planet scan.

Also on this tab is the colony market, displaying the prices of commodities. On ruins planets, this will also display any available item that is part of that ruin and it's price. In order to sell anything to a colony, the sell price in the Trade tab will have to be a bit lower than the colony's price. And vice versa, to buy the Trade buy price must be higher than the colony's. Items will be bought and sold during at the end of the hour period. The prices are determined by the suitability of the planet; the higher the percentage, the higher the prices are.

This hour period is the stage in time that the colony 'refreshes' itself. After sixty minutes the colony will then eat up several hundred rations and also 'use' up 10% of any other commodity except for Peasants. In order to replenish its stock, the colony will buy up as much commodities as it's population limits it to.

Peasants are the lifeblood of a colony. If you sell them to it, it will increase the population maximum by as much peasants as you have dumped and have set the price for. Right now, population growth is overall very weak so the only fast way of jumpstarting colonies is to buy up as many peasants as possible and dump them into the item bay. Doing this and using a Starter Colony Blueprint is actually less expensive than using a basic or a large colony blueprint.

Once you've decided that you want to make a colony, be sure to see what speed the planet is moving at and if there is an AI station nearby. The slower moving ones can be docked with by freighter-class easily so moving goods in bulk is no problem. An AI station is required to 'pump' the population higher with peasants. Generally, you will be buying at a loss; random AI bases are hardcoded to have the price to buy at 250 at the beginning of the universe and no lower and all but 100%+ planets will buy these peasants at a lower price. Colonies have no limit as to the peasants it can buy up, so the more you can squeeze on to a base an hour and the faster you can transport them the better. This is a strategy that the major teams try to pull off the first few days of a new universe, since they have the funds to support the high expense.

Ruins
There are four types of ruins: Bule, Mzungu, Vazaha, and Faranji. Planets that have ruins on them are indicated in the planetary scan within the resource list. They are distributed completely at random throughout the universe when it resets. The items found on a planet can only be 'uncovered' by a colony and then bought from them for a usually ridiculously high price. These ruin items are not available right off the initial construction of a colony; they must be excavated first. The colony will do this for you and will have them in their market in many 'years' time. As long as a colony is alive, it will continue to excavate items for their market at a fixed rate.

*update*
Colonies will not stockpile items, it seems. There is rather a 'pool' wait time for ruin items rather than a separate wait time for each different ruin item. So at the point of sale of one, the colony checks the available ruin item list from top to bottom to see if one is available and then checks whether the base is buying and has enough money on hand. This availability is determined, it seems, by either the price or the tech of the item. What this means is that if you are trying to extract one certain type, only have the base buying that and no other ruin item. Otherwise the colony will buy the topmost first up to the buy limit before attempting to buy any others lower on the list.

The number of items found from a ruins planet are random, but only 2 to 5 different items can be found on one planet per ruin. The price will always be the same no matter the planet suitability, population, planet, etc. To extract an item from the colony, one must set the buy price in the Add trade goods... section as something equal to or higher than the listed cost in the colony tab. In most cases, it would be a good idea to have a limit of 1 set so that the colony will not go overboard in extracting the exact same thing. The colony will not extract the ruin item until the refresh period occurs and then only if there is enough cash on the base.

These items vary in usefulness and in price. A list of them along with their stats has been made by DeathWarmedOver in the Help Forum of the StarSonata website (the other stickied thread).

This is a GrimSweeper's production, copyright of 2005/2006. Email him at tempmail_night@yahoo.ca