I'd like to see the numbers for refineries all put together. It says that Advent have difficulty with trade, but it's difficult to find the direct comparison of resource income.

The nice thing about the Advent "refining" process is I can switch between Trade and Refining at a flip of a switch, depending on what I want/need.

If i'm not wrong trade port income increase by 30% doesn't come until 6 civic research stations. I usually never build more than 3 with advent, so throw in an extra 3 trade ports, and unless it's a lottttttt of tradeports it wont be much of a difference.

I kinda think that the advent is at a disadvantage right from the get go but it seems to even out for me later in a longer game. what I mean is that resources seem to take longer to gather than the other races and seem harder (i.e. take longer) to upgrade. pretty much what CommanderAdama said,

4 tact. slots and all those money and energy for the same reward as a new extrator

So instead of building a refinery, one should build six extractors? Cool! Or it would be cool, if one was not limited in the number of possible extractors by the number of available asteroids.
Since six extractors cost 1500 credits, the same as a refinery, the actual cost of the refinery is in it's 125 metal and 175 crystal. It is worth building when there's no more room for expanding.
And I still don't get where exactly is Advent given the short end of the stick here...

Regicide, building a refinery is the same as building *one* extractor (at 100% allegiance), *if* the refinery has 6.3 extractors to service in its domain. More realistically, one would put a refinery at a place with, say, 9 extractors. Then each refinery is like "building" ~1.5 extractors. If you roughly consider metal and crystal to be worth 3x credits (e.g. 100 metal = 300 credits), then TEC refineries cost 2400 credits. So a well-placed TEC refinery costs about 10 times as much as an extractor (250 credits), but only has the output of 1.5 extractors. I'm not sure just what point you were making. Boco's point is that refineries aren't worth it; it's better to spend money on ships to take more planets and extractors, than to spend it on refineries.

As for Advent getting the short end of the stick, please look at the last few lines of the wiki Refinery page, and read up from there to see how the conclusion was reached. (No reason for me to repeat it all.) Let me know if you think Resource Focus is better than refineries, and why.

Cykur, I've heard others say endgame Advent fleets are the best; I've been spending more time experimenting than playing tough games, so I'll take that as a given. I guess the bottom line point is just that Advent is a bit economically weaker for a long time (all through the mid game), and their earlier fleets are weaker too, I've also heard ... I'd say that in the theoretical example of entirely evenly matched tough players in a long-term brawl, they would always lose due to economics. It will have taken them some time to get to Allure, as well as to max Resource Focus (if they're even going to try), during which time an evenly-matched player should have already been beating them down with their better ships and mid-game economy, swinging the pendulum irreversibly... these other races would've eaten away at them, as they fought with weaker ships and paid for their high tech that has lower payoff (as least for refineries, and lack of trade research). Allure is definitely nice if you have lots of fringe worlds (the +10% is an absolute 10%; it's not 10% relative to a given planet), but Advent won't have many fringe worlds left - in this *theoretically* evenly-matched game.


But of course, the real world is never so theoretically evenly matched... if the Advent player is better than the other player, the other player will lose. No question. Still, Advent is a bit weaker through much of the game. I'm thinking "crippled" is too strong a word.

As for refineries, don't you think 30 minutes is a bit long for them to break even? I just started typing something about "In fairness, on a huge map, you might be approaching an average allegiance of 50% ... which would effectively make the refinery twice as productive and pay off sooner" ... but in thinking about it more, the cost of the refinery doesn't go down while allegiance is ... it still takes 30 minutes to pay off its fixed cost, anyway you slice it. And maybe that expense could be better spent conquering more worlds - which also has the advantage of taking money away from the enemy?

One could say I'm arguing fine points that only matter in a fairly evenly matched (i.e., tough) game. But then, that's when things really matter ... easy games don't count.  

Yeah, I have posted several times over the last couple weeks that refineries are not as bad as people make them out to be. When well placed, they are actually more profitable than tradeports. And they are especially valuable if someone is playing an epic sized single player game that takes hours. I almost never build them for multiplayer, the games are too short.

That said, you have to understand where to put the refinery...if it isn't carefully placed, it is a waste of credits and slots.