Question about relay stations

[Lugzan]

There is a way to force the dark fog to deploy more relsy stations? I am farming the black hole and meutron star but i may need the neutron star

[josmith7]

Not exactly.
Though the space hives usually launch more relay stations when several factors are met:
1) They aren't at the maximum number of ground bases they can support (seem to vary by game difficulty setting and possibly by hive level) -- this can limit them if you destroy the relays without destroying the bases.

2) They have enough energy -- not usually a problem; they collect unlimited energy from the star. Though their rate of collection can bottleneck things at times.

3) They have enough material -- if you prevent bases from sending back material the hive will relatively quickly run through its reserves and become unable to generate new relay stations

4) There's available unshielded area to land them -- if you've covered the planet in shields they can't land relays; even if the coverage is below 100%. If it shows up at even the lightest blue on the shield overlay that'll prevent a relay from going there.

5) They're not busy rebuilding their defending fleet -- if you've blown away many of the defenders (and possibly infrastructure of the hive) it may focus on rebuilding its defenses before spending resources on new relays

If all 5 are met and they're still not creating relays you may need to blow away the space hive and wait for a new one to be established by a slower-than-light seed coming in from a hive in another system.

[NocheLuz]

This is just my observed result and not by or means the truth or anything. But the Hive will send out a new relay station as long as there isn't a max capacity of relay stations on "Standby" on the hive itself. AFAIK, the Standby relay station will never get sent out again if it gets repelled by the planetary shield. The hive will only build a new one and send it out again.

A new hive from the seed will send out about 6-7 relay stations. But if all of them got repelled by the planetary shield it'll run out of matters and never send anything out again. Even if you try to power them up with Dyson Sphere/Swarm, they'll never recover from this stage. I didn't try to take down some of the shields to see if they'll send out relay stations that are on standby or not (maybe they will). So my observation may not be correct.

As a side note, the hive will try to send out a lot of relay stations if you attack their planetary base. I did try to destroy 5 planetary bases just to have them send out another 2 when I was busy trying to destroy them. Also, you might be able to destroy only relay stations that are on standby in the hive. They are on the tip of the main hive itself. However, controlling your fleets to only destroy them might be too hard, and destroying the whole hive might be easier.