Help on Corvus.

[n3s]

I found that building a speed booster EARLY, and I mean with only a few collectors built, really helped. That's pretty much true on any map, though - I'll spend the 20 starting energy on a collector and a speed booster, and it pays for the investment and then some in no time, compared to waiting on building speed boosters.

And yeah, Corvus I beat after coming here and reading about building the relay network instead of trying to build up a fighting infrastructure first. After reading some of the posts I island-hopped i with relays, building collectors on large areas (dunno if that really matters, I guess I need to read some more =p), and of course the aforementioned speed booster.

[Karsten75]

I found that building a speed booster EARLY, and I mean with only a few collectors built, really helped. That's pretty much true on any map, though - I'll spend the 20 starting energy on a collector and a speed booster, and it pays for the investment and then some in no time, compared to waiting on building speed boosters.

And yeah, Corvus I beat after coming here and reading about building the relay network instead of trying to build up a fighting infrastructure first. After reading some of the posts I island-hopped i with relays, building collectors on large areas (dunno if that really matters, I guess I need to read some more =p), and of course the aforementioned speed booster.

I don't think so. A speed booster costs about 35 units. That's more than 3 collectors. I think you will find that most experienced players here would rather go for the energy than for the speed boost. Speed boosting becomes critical on longer distances, but by then you have more energy to build with.  Boosting speed for the distance covered by two collectors by about 1/2 is trivial and negligible compared to getting about .3-.5 energy extra.

As for collectors, yes, the larger green area you create, the more energy you collect. Building collectors tightly spaced adds no benefit - you can only collect once for any green area. By definition, a network of collectors will be inefficient, because so much of it overlaps..

Oh PS. Welcome.

[nic nac]

It may be inefficient, but before your streamline with reactors and relays it's handy to serve your doom anywhere to the slime.

[n3s]

I paid closer attention to the effect of the speed booster, Karsten, and I guess you're right. I thought that in addition to speeding up the packet travel rate, it shortened the interval between the city spitting out more packets... but I guess it doesn't, so it is totally wasted energy in the beginning stages of a map. Oops! (I still build them earlier than I 'should' though because I am impatient. =p )

[Karsten75]

I paid closer attention to the effect of the speed booster, Karsten, and I guess you're right. I thought that in addition to speeding up the packet travel rate, it shortened the interval between the city spitting out more packets... but I guess it doesn't, so it is totally wasted energy in the beginning stages of a map. Oops! (I still build them earlier than I 'should' though because I am impatient. =p )

The only thing that speeds up the building rate is one of the upgrades. That speeds up building by 20%. Also the upgrade that reduces costs by 10% of course speed it up since you need fewer packets.