Guide to base building for the small SG, part 1
By
BadStorm,
Posted on: 2007-02-06 03:04 in Player Guides
Fantastic! You've put into words most of the things I have discovered and done myself in my many 1-person groups. This is really nicely detailed for the first-time base-builder, and it is simple to grasp quickly. The only thing I would add near the beginning is a suggestion to visit the Base Building Forum here for any questions they may have, or to learn more about bases in general.
Another thing I would add is that if they can coalition with a more established SG, they can then access the coalition mates TP's, which means they can put off building their own if they are short on influence or salvage.
Bring on Part II !!!
Again, thanks for the encouragement. I'll respond to your suggestions:
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The only thing I would add near the beginning is a suggestion to visit the Base Building Forum here for any questions they may have, or to learn more about bases in general.
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My assumption was that if they found this guide, they know about the forums. That said, I have put in a link to the base-building forums in part 2.
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Another thing I would add is that if they can coalition with a more established SG, they can then access the coalition mates TP's, which means they can put off building their own if they are short on influence or salvage.
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Aye, great suggestion. I'll add this in at the end of part 1 in the next update, and as an addition to part 2.
Thanks again for the support and suggestions.
@Bonker Guide to Base Building for the Small SG
Present project: Solo Everything Project
Remaining: Lusca, Sewers, Eden, Kahn, States, HeroSpec2&3, Apex, Tin Mage, Moritmer Kal, Tesseract, Recluse, 'Cuda, Quarry, Stropharia, Thorn, Arachnos Flier, Deathsurge, Caleb, Seed of Hamidon (Villrespec2&3, Hami, CoP, Incarnates)
Great guide - EXACTLY what I was looking for.
Cant wait for part 2 & yep please do include relevant links. I will have a go at this over the weekend & no doubt post some questions.
PLEASE keep this info coming. The changes on base rent means this kind of guide is invaluable to people who will be playing with bases for the 1st time.
Part 2 is up now. Really hope this will prove helpful. I broke down my base to the bare minimums and walked through building the base one step at a time as I wrote the guide, so I'm fairly certain it will walk you through the porcess in a fairly linear fashion, but if you come up with problems, please let me know.
@Bonker Guide to Base Building for the Small SG
Present project: Solo Everything Project
Remaining: Lusca, Sewers, Eden, Kahn, States, HeroSpec2&3, Apex, Tin Mage, Moritmer Kal, Tesseract, Recluse, 'Cuda, Quarry, Stropharia, Thorn, Arachnos Flier, Deathsurge, Caleb, Seed of Hamidon (Villrespec2&3, Hami, CoP, Incarnates)
Hey, I've been trying to find part 2 of this guide, and for some reason can't find it. My search fu is severely lacking, could someone post a link to it for me please?
And, btw, great guide! 
Part 2
Still on the boards but not picked up in the guides to guides section. I might have to repost the revision as a single guide, or at least in one thread, to make it at least easier to find.
Thanks for reading, hope it helps.
@Bonker Guide to Base Building for the Small SG
Present project: Solo Everything Project
Remaining: Lusca, Sewers, Eden, Kahn, States, HeroSpec2&3, Apex, Tin Mage, Moritmer Kal, Tesseract, Recluse, 'Cuda, Quarry, Stropharia, Thorn, Arachnos Flier, Deathsurge, Caleb, Seed of Hamidon (Villrespec2&3, Hami, CoP, Incarnates)
Guide to base building for the small SG, part 1: "Getting the most out of your start up base for under 300k"
(version 1.0, Feb 2007)
This is a guide for base building for the small SG. It will be in two parts, part 1 here will cover the different options you can start out with using only the 300k maximum start up bonus you can get on the very first day of your new SG (I'll cover the explanation of this *bonus* in just a moment).
Part 2 picks up where this leaves off and will take you through the steps beyond the initial 300k basic base, to a very complex and fully functional base that fills the entire basic 8x8 plot size, and allows you to get the most function out of it that you possibly can.
There are lots of reasons to want to keep it simple and have a small SG with just a few friends. Or the much talked about private lair, where it's just you (and yer alts) by your lonesome. With recent changes to base rent and the introduction of some cheaper items for smaller SG's, it is quite possible to have a very nice viable and functioning base, in a fairly short amount of time.
This guide will walk you through the very first steps of base building, suggest some possible floor plans (with screenies if I can make them work) and end with some ideas on how to make the very best use out of the smallest plot size, since with the new base changes, the 8x8 plot will be free from rent, allowing a small group to maximize its savings, while still getting maximum utility from their base. I'll be trying to cover both Villains and Heroes base building, in the few instances where they might differ.
This guide is aimed at maximum function and therefore covers none of the decorative items or rooms. I will not be covering how to get a raid-ready base. Both of these are covered elsewhere quite nicely.
I'll be using mostly tech items in my examples. The reason for this is that for a few notable items, the footprint of certain tech items is smaller than the corresponding arcane items. Also, for crafted items (like the porters) tech salvage seems much more easily and quickly attainable. It is worth noting though, that for every single tech item, the corresponding arcane item costs exactly the same and provides the exact same utility and fits in exactly the same amount of space (except for a few notable items where the corresponding arcane item has a larger footprint, the only arcane item that has a smaller footprint than the tech item is the raid porter, but I will not be covering raid items in this guide).
First things first, head inside city hall at Atlas (Heroes), or the large building with Arachnos flags all over it in Port Oakes, just south of the Marconeville waypoint (Villains). There you will find the person who let's you start up your SG. Once you've got the naming and the colors and the SG chest emblem all picked out, talk to the same guy again and start construction of a base. *important note, you must have COV on your account in order to be able to access bases* There are base porter locations in most zones that will allow you access to your base. Find one, and pop inside.
You'll have the smallest plot size (an 8x8 grid) and the entrance that takes up 2x2 squares. Assuming its just you in the SG at this point, you'll have 20k to spend. Sadly, umm, not alot you can do with that prestige, except decorate your little entrance. But, for every new toon you add to your little SG, you'll get another 20k prestige (for a maximum of 15 toons, or 300k prestige). If its just you and yer own lil private lair, find a kind soul that is willing to join your SG for a the time it takes you to invite all of your alts and you could be talking about a good lil pile of starting capital. If you're starting your SG with at least one other friend, you could maximize that 300k *boost* of start up prestige by each of you inviting all your alts.
The great thing about base building is that you can sell items for exactly what you paid for them, so you are free to mess around and try new things by placing something, and then selling it and placing something else. You are never penalized, in other words, by buying items. The one exception to this is the *personal items* like the teleporters or other items created using salvage. While all prestige spent to place these *personal items* is returned to the SG if you delete them, the salvage used to generate or craft them is gone forever.
So now you have to kind of decide what you want to be able to do with your base, from a planning and playing perspective. Will you want a teleport factory? Will you want the medical bay? Do you want to maximize your storage abilities for inspirations/enhancments/salvage?
These goals/aims will shift over time, of course, but I'll try to offer suggestions based on the very most bang fer yer buck as far as functionality goes. You're going to be swapping priorites as time goes on and the prestige starts piling up, so I'll try to go from cheapest to most functional on the first building plot. Space will soon become a premium, and you'll really have to choose one thing over the other, eventually. You'll be selling rooms, moving them around, deleting and restarting often, so try not to go too nuts with decorations early on, as it's sometimes painful to spend hours decorating a room just the way you like it, only to realize a few short days later that you have enough for the next functional upgrade and that room simply has to go in order to get the most bang fer yer buck. Also remember you might have to sacrifice some function or another of the base as you go on, in order to gain more function later; trading down in the short run, to go up in the long run, in other words.
So, starter base. Base 1: Med base: 210k (1st med room and the reclamator, oversight room and the combo unit, insp storage)
If your first goal is to get a rez unit or *basic reclamator* in your base so that if you die, you can choose to go to your base instead of the hospital, well, we can start there: The first med bay room (found under the medical tab) costs 50k to build, and the reclamator (under place item) is a measley 10k to place. You'll notice quickly though that this just ain't enough. The reclamator consumes 50 energy and 25 control, neither of which we have produced yet. So we need to build an oversight center first, for 50k, and then place the combo power and control unit in it for another 25k.
Grand total? 135k to get your small base up and running with nothing but a hospital replacement unit in it and 3 rooms. Needs to be said though that if you choose to rez in your base rather than the hospital, you rez with about 25% of your full health and end, rather than the 100% granted by the hospitals. It can still be worth it, if you're going to be spending time in the sewers for your first few levels, as exiting the base after rez puts you right back in the sewers where you died, or for the opposite end of the spectrum, if Hami's got you down, you can base rez and then exit the base to reappear right where he last got ya in the Hive.
We can make it a little more enticing to rez in the base by adding some storage tables for inspirations by adding an inspiration table, for 75k. You can fill this up with your most needed inspirations (100 of them).
New total, 210k.
So Base 1 is: Base 1 pic
Oversight room 50k
Combo unit 25k
Med bay 50k
Rez unit 10k (135k subtotal)
Insp storage 75k
total 210k
210k, and not a bad lil starter base.
Alternate starter base. Base 2: Porter base
Bit more complicated, as you have to craft the porters on the basic workbenches, and also accumulate enough salvage in order to be able to combine it to make the porters, but entirely within the grasp of a starting SG, within the first day or so of forming. First we're going to need power and control. Oversight room (50k) combo unit (25k), same as above. You'll need to at least temporarily place either the arcane or the tech basic workbench in the room in order to combine salvage. You need 6 tech power (for each tech porters) or 6 foci (for each arcane porter). Either basic workbench can be placed in the oversight room for 25k. Place it, combine what you can, to get yerself closer to the required number of tech power or mystic foci needed, and then combine these again to receive a personal item in the form of a teleporter.
Now, you can combine enough to get one, and there is a transportation room you can place, where you can place one porter and one beacon (the smallest 1x2 porter room) but, consider that you have just spent salvage to make this item. When it comes time to upgrade, and you want to place two porters or more in a room, you will have to juggle this item around by creating temporary rooms elsewhere to hold it, while you delete the room it was in, and build a new room and then replace that item in the new room and delete the temp room. Once space starts becoming more of a premium, the juggling is going to get a bit more precarious, so you really need to start thinking ahead when it comes to placing crafted items. While the SG is young, salvage will be as much at a premium as prestige is. So you COULD build the smallest porter room for 50k, and place a single porter (that you crafted with some double combined salvage) in it for placement cost of another 15k, and then a beacon to some zone for another 10k. Total cost for a base that gets you to one zone?
Base 2a: Base 2a pic
Oversight and combo unit 75k
sml porter room 50k
place crafted porter 15k (and 6 combined salvage)
beacon 10k
total 150k
So, we have room and more prestige, let's place another porter room for another 50k, craft another porter for 6 combined salvage, and place it for 15k, and then a beacon for it for 10k.
Base 2b: Base 2b pic
Oversight and combo unit 75k
2 small porter rooms 100k
Place 2 porters 30k (and 12 combined salvage)
2 beacons 20k
total 225k
So I can continue to make a lil porter factory, adding a new small porter room and one porter and one beacon each time I get 75k and enough salvage to make a new porter, but I'm going to quickly run out of space. Most I could fit on one 8x8 square, taking into account the space taken up by the oversight room, is 8. But well before you get there, you're goin to have energy and control problems trying to maintain that many porters and wasting their potential of 2 beacons a pop. I recommend instead that you hold off and go for the 2x2 porter room that will hold 2 porters and 4 beacons.
Base 2c: Base 2c pic
Oversight and combo unit 75k
1 2x2 porter room 150k
Place 2 porters 30k (and 12 combined salvage)
4 beacons 40k
total 295k
As for a discussion of which beacons to go for? For CoH, I like king's and steel to start, as King's porter drop-off is right by the yellow line, for easy access to galaxy, atlas, sky and steel south. Also it's right by pocket D for easy access to talos, founders and faultline. Steel drop off point gives you easy access to the green line for indy, talos, croatoa and bricks. Talos is also one of the very most used *hub* zones. It contains every single origin enhancement stores located all relatively close to each other, making selling enhancements for their max vaule a cinch. Talos also has direct access to the green line, Skyway, Dark Astora, Founder's Falls, Striga and Peregrine Island.
For further porters, I'd opt for hazard zones, but keep it flexible, as the face of the SG changes. The starting SG that needs Hollows and Perez today will need Striga and Dark Astoria tomorrow, etc. Faultline's new mish at about 15-25 and Croatoa's mish at 25+ might make them attractive porter destinations. At some point in the life of a Heroes base, you will reach a space crunch, where you will have to start sacrificing some other function of the base in order to place every single beacon (which is not only not neccessary, but not reccomended). Instead, opt for the beacons that can provide you with access to a zone that is a hub, like the ones mentioned above, and wait until much later to place zones that will be rarely used.
For vills? It's quite a bit easier. Port Oakes is a no-brainer. Throw mercy in there since it will take 2 zonings to get there without a porter. The choice btwn shark, nerva, st. martial and grandville will largely depend upon your aggregate level in your vg early on. Since there are only 7 beacons avail in vills as of this writing, 2 porter rooms will cover all zones. Considering heroes has 21 beacons to choose from, Vill bases are easy by comparison, and there is no real hard choices as far as keeping your base on the basic plot size and gaining maximum function.
That said, beacon choices are never set in stone. You can swap the beacons out effortlessly and for no cost. Sell one, buy another.
Base 3: Combination of choices 1 and 2. This is where choices start coming into play, not just for the prestige, but the energy and control cost of items. Let's say I want a med bay AND a porter to start with.
Base 3: Base 3 pic
Oversight and combo unit 75k
Med bay and reclamator 60k
small porter room 50k
place 1 porters 15k (and 6 combined salvage)
1 beacon 10k
total 210k
Keeping mind that we can swap out the beacon in that small porter room as needed, only takes a few seconds in the base edit screen.
This is the base I recommend starting with, in fact. Keeping in mind that the next upgrade may be a little way's off for the very small SG. To understand why, we need to consider one other aspect we have not yet talked about: the power and control cost of various items.
Our oversight center and combo unit will generate for us +125 energy, and +75 control. The reclamator in our med bay cost -50 energy and -25 control. The porter cost -50 energy and -25 control as well. The beacon merely -5 control:
Combo unit +125 nrg, +75ctrl
Reclamator - 50 , -25
1 porters - 50 , -25
1 beacons , -5
Leaving us with a +25 energy and +20 control surplus. We can use the surplus to temporarily power the workbenches when we place them to combine our salvage.
To understand how these energy and control costs limit our base as much (if not more) than the prestige cost, let's look at the next logical upgrade.
Base 4a: Base 4a pic
Oversight and combo unit 75k
Med bay and reclamator 60k
2x2 porter room 150k
place 2 porters 30k (and 12 combined salvage)
4 beacons 40k
total 355k
It won't take long doing missions before you've gotten the extra 55k worth of prestige (beyond the start up bonus of 300k) required to get yourself this upgrade, but we need to look again at our power and control costs.
Combo unit +125 nrg, +75ctrl
Reclamator - 50 , -25
2 porters -100 , -50
4 beacons , -20
Leaving us in the negative for both energy and control (-25 energy, -20 control) meaning that not all of our placed items will function. Sadly, we cannot simply place another combo unit in our oversight center as the room will only hold one, and no other energy or control items. We can also not simply place another oversight center and a combo unit, as there is only one combo unit allowed in an entire base. We've reached the limit of what we can do with the start up bonus prestige and the energy and control for our little base.
From now, we need to start thinking long term, which I will be covering in the next part of this guide ("Guide to base building for the small SG, part 2: Getting the most out of the basic plot size").
I hope this little guide has been helpful. While I have done my best to check my facts and numbers, I have no doubt made mistakes or missed some little tidbit of information. Please feel free to point these things out to me so I can include them in future updates.
@Bonker Guide to Base Building for the Small SG
Present project: Solo Everything Project
Remaining: Lusca, Sewers, Eden, Kahn, States, HeroSpec2&3, Apex, Tin Mage, Moritmer Kal, Tesseract, Recluse, 'Cuda, Quarry, Stropharia, Thorn, Arachnos Flier, Deathsurge, Caleb, Seed of Hamidon (Villrespec2&3, Hami, CoP, Incarnates)