Noob here - best way to get science from ai planets?

[test]

Hi,

long story short, i havent played this game in ages so im kinda noob at this.

I have an AI planet i dont care/need to capture (ive destroyed the warp gate and almost everything in here except for the command station).

Any way to get science from here? I remember there being a science lab that can "steal" science from AI planets but I cant find it here, been removed or something ... what now?

EDIT: Ive used the hacker and done the "Covert Knowledge Extractor" hack but im wondering if there are other, better ways?







EDIT: An unrelated question, is there a way to tell a ship or a group of ships to hold position? I have auto kite enabled but ive had several situations where I would prefer for ships to hold position.



Thank you in advance

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

I can't really remember how the science labs wound up working in the latest versions of AI War Classic -- we went through so many iterations and I've spent so long on AI War 2 now. But my best recollection was that basically you couldn't get science from enemy planets without destroying their command stations first, because otherwise you could get a bunch of science for free (of AIP), and that was both tedious as well as a balance nightmare. I could have sworn we made that change pretty fast after 1.0, if not earlier.

In this game, there's no science lab unit required; your command stations automatically gather science for you on planets you control. If you want to capture a neutral planet's science, you can hack it for science (hacking sidebar) for a cost that depends on a few factors. That's the way to do it -- essentially there's no "free lunch" in terms of getting science.

If there was, the optimal way to play would be to boringly micro a science lab or whatever onto every enemy planet and then wait for it to gather stuff, wasting your time on something repetitive and easy or penalizing those people who DON'T micro things around in that way.

The goal here was to make it so that there are interesting choices everywhere (where do you capture things, where do you spend hacking points, etc), but not any obvious-but-tedious things that can be exploited in a way that isn't fun over the long-haul.

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For holding position, I don't think there's a way to do that if auto-kiting is on. That would be an interesting addition, I agree. Hasn't come up before now, amazingly!

[test]

Originally posted by x-4000 (Chris Park):

I can't really remember how the science labs wound up working in the latest versions of AI War Classic -- we went through so many iterations and I've spent so long on AI War 2 now. But my best recollection was that basically you couldn't get science from enemy planets without destroying their command stations first, because otherwise you could get a bunch of science for free (of AIP), and that was both tedious as well as a balance nightmare. I could have sworn we made that change pretty fast after 1.0, if not earlier.

In this game, there's no science lab unit required; your command stations automatically gather science for you on planets you control. If you want to capture a neutral planet's science, you can hack it for science (hacking sidebar) for a cost that depends on a few factors. That's the way to do it -- essentially there's no "free lunch" in terms of getting science.

If there was, the optimal way to play would be to boringly micro a science lab or whatever onto every enemy planet and then wait for it to gather stuff, wasting your time on something repetitive and easy or penalizing those people who DON'T micro things around in that way.

The goal here was to make it so that there are interesting choices everywhere (where do you capture things, where do you spend hacking points, etc), but not any obvious-but-tedious things that can be exploited in a way that isn't fun over the long-haul.

---

For holding position, I don't think there's a way to do that if auto-kiting is on. That would be an interesting addition, I agree. Hasn't come up before now, amazingly!

I vaguely remember there beying a cloaked science lab that could get science from enemy planets ... anyway, doesnt matter now.

Thanks for the reply!
Glad to see you guys still around here with the second game coming and all that :)

[Hasefrexx]

mk2 lab is cloacked and can get science but only from neutral planets as far as I understand it.