Building Planetary Defenses

More General Planet Topics

Playing Stars!

Defenses partially protect a planet from bombs and invasion. If you haven't taken the primary trait of Alternate Reality , you should build defenses, especially in a single player game. AIs love to bomb planets. While you can't build a perfect planetary defense system you can significantly reduce the number of bombs and invading colonists. Whether you build defenses in a multi-player game depends on how much you can trust other players to leave your worlds in peace (there's room enough for all in the Stars! universe--isn't there?)

While you can build as many defenses as you wish, you can only operate as many as your population has resources to handle. When commanding a planet, look at the Status tile to see both the current and maximum number of defenses, the type of defenses deployed and the percentage of bombs and invading colonists that can be stopped.

As a game progresses, you can increase the number of defenses and upgrade the technology (and the efficiency) of existing defenses:

♦        Adding defenses increases the number of existing defenses of the type you're currently employing. For example, if you're using Missile Batteries, then adding Defenses to the production queue causes more Missile Batteries to be built. This increases the percentage of coverage.

♦        Upgrading defenses happens automatically. Whenever you learn new technology that applies to defense, all defenses on all your planets upgrade automatically -- for free.

For a description of defense technology:

1.        Open the Technology Browser (press F2) and choose Planetary from the drop-down menu.

2.        Click the Next button until you step through the Scanners and reach the Defenses. Each type of defense is described with a graph summarizing its effectiveness.

Alternate Reality Races and Defenses

Races based on the Alternate Reality primary trait can not build planetary installations such as defenses. Read more about them.