Taltherian Planet Tactics
Taltherian Planet Tactics
The Taltherian race is in a unique position for long-term ship strength improvement. Artifact point production is critical for obtaining the artifacts Ship Bot, Android Helmsman, Android Scientist, Durtanium Bracket, Xcharge Cells, Tesseract Container, Mass Storage Pod and Rescued Prisoners, which can boost everything except Scan, Cloak and energy/shield recharge rate on your ship. The only infinitely-available artifact capable of boosting the Artifact point production of a planet barring the ridiculously-rare Terraforming Device and one-time planet transformation artifacts that give only a single boost is the Enumeration Crystal, which is a rather rare artifact obtained at a low chance from opening a Base Crate obtained by raiding a high level base.
The Taltherian Urbanize ability effectively acts like someone handing you an Enumeration Crystal for free every 40 hours, able to work up to 15x Mega Rich which you can then use what very-rare Enumeration Crystals you've been able to collect to that point to boost it up the last five ranks to 20x Mega Rich, really saving you on the crystals.
The choice of world to use this on for buildup is quite critical. If you are a player that puts heavy amounts of money into the game allowing you to buy large amounts of rare artifacts from the Artifact Market such as Quasi-Spacial Expanders and the like this is a bit of a moot point, but for free or close-to-free players the Taltherian race can slowly but surely give you as many Colossal 15x Mega Rich artifact production planets as you want, without having to use a single Enumeration Crystal or even rarer Quasi-Spacial Expander to get them to that point, which can be known as "Taltherian Toys".
The ideal Taltherian Toy planet with the most potential is built the following way:
1) Be in a Legion that has discovered the Phasic Chain-Ionizer artifact and ideally has a large legion bonus
2) Planet scan until you find a Very Massive Gas planet that no one else has scanned (checking by using a Flux Probe on it), with whatever research level you want (really isn't necessary for large research, you'll be raking in plenty of Android Scientists with good arti point production). Other than the ridiculously rare ultra large planets like Dysons, Gas planets are the only planet type that are even capable of being naturally found at a Very Massive size and are transformable to an even larger type with an easy-to-get artifact.
3) Colonize the planet
4) Get the Cloak of the planet up to at least 8000 (keep in mind any legion bonuses) to prevent all but the strongest players from finding it, using as much Passive cloak as possible to save on the space which you can devote to more production buildings. See Planetary Cloaking for more info on this tactic.
5) Get your Urbanize ability going on it to start the process, since you can use it only once every 40 hours.
6) Optionally, use Gas Igniter Rod artifacts on it but your intention is to keep it flat-out hidden; high level players coordinating with legion-mates can break the defenses of any non-invincible planet eventually no matter what you put on it so the 1000 attack you get from the igniter rods won't really amount to much in the end.
7) Use the Ionizer artifact to change it to a Colossal Plasma planet.
8) Build up artifact production structures on the planet and keep using Urbanize on it every chance you get, it is advisable to Flag the planet in your database to make it easy to find as the one you're building up.
Gas and plasma planets have no natural artifact production, so it will take 27 uses of Urbanize to get the planet up to 15x Mega Rich artifact production. At 40 hours per use and assuming the very first Urbanize is already available when you first colonize the planet, meaning 26 are left, this will take approximately 43 days to build provided you don't have any "dead time" of the ability being available and unused. Another way of looking at it, if you are able to avoid "dead time" by always being able to use the ability right when it becomes available again this equates to about 18 uses per month. As slow as this may sound, given the low chance of getting an Enumeration Crystal from a Base Crate and the forced duration of a Legion base lock that isn't sped up after disabling the base this is PROFOUNDLY faster than what it would take to get 27 Enumeration Crystals. The rarity of an Enumeration Crystal is so high that you will be lucky to get the 5 you would need to finish off the planet to x20 Mega Rich in the time it took you to build it to x15; highly active players in a legion that constantly hits bases have reported barely getting 4 Enumeration Crystals within a month of play.
Over time your Artifact point production will get quite massive when you have several of these built up. It is highly recommended to also add a Polychoron Vault available in the Collective Theory Lab of your legion (if researched) to give you the capacity to hold this much production without having any dead time.
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