The white route is your longest unbroken trade route. Each link, each gravity well(occupied or uninhabitable), gives a bonus to the rate of all trade ports on that route. This is why its better to have more trade ports on fewer planets, instead of spamming one on every planet. You want to artificially lengthen the trade route by forcing it to snake through a system.

*grr... forum instability...*

1Tiberius1, my understanding from the wiki is it works slightly differently in that your longest trade route determines the income level of *all* your trade ports, not just the ones on the route itself.

Actually, if you were just covering the ice planet and not much else, a tradeport would still be better because you can just buy the crystal off the black market with the money. However, if you could cover a couple ice planets and another neighboring planet or two, then it is very desirable to build a refinery. Refineries become cost effective when more worlds neighbor the location of the refinery.



This is true, but the point 1Tiberius1 is making is that you can actually force your trade route to be longer by not building everywhere. Sometimes excluding a tradeport on a planet forces the route to take a longer, "twistier" path. I've noticed this when I had trade routes that were 7 jumps long, but then I added another tradeport at a central world and "short circuited" the route, turning it into a 5 jump route.

Ah, I see. Yes, I noticed that in my last game (scuttled the offending tradeport to fix it).

The only race that really needs extractors is Vasari. Vasari doesn't get trade routes until tier 4, which means the only reason a Vasari should ever build them is if all their planets are deserts/terrans.

The extractors come in VERY handy for a Vasari player. Their credit rate of income will generally suck, but this will be balanced by the fact that they'll likely be number one or two for both mineral incomes, likely around 4-7 res/sec even in late game. Thanks to the black market buff, the Vasari can live off of selling minerals again. Add in selling during a boom and the Vasari is golden.

Oops, replace extractors with refinery, had the two names reversed in my head