Offshore Rig

The Offshore Rig is the Metal Extractor built out at sea: a deck on pilings over a metal deposit in open water, with a derrick drilling it. It pays exactly what an extractor pays at every level, 1.4 metal a second, and draws the same power. The only difference is where it stands.

Deposits at sea are marked by a buoy over a patch of ore on the sea floor. On open water no Engineer can reach them and no transport can set one down there, so the Engineer Boat builds the rig. Where the sea is frozen, an Engineer can walk out over the ice and build one, and the rig stands on the ice as it would in the water. On the naval maps most of the ore is out there: the Santa Barbara Channel, Pacific Storm and Wake Island keep three deposits at each seat and put the rest at sea.

How to use

Buy a Naval Yard early and an Engineer Boat with it: on a naval map the ore at home runs out fast, and every deposit at sea is one your opponent can take instead. A rig sits outside your headquarters' building area like an extractor, so it can go on any free field the boat can reach.

No turret can be built on the water, so what guards a rig is the fleet anchored near it. Ships shoot back at aircraft, so an enemy that went for an air force alone has to fly into your ships' fire to reach your rigs. Naval guns, missiles and bombs hit a rig; torpedoes do not, since it is a building standing on legs, not a hull. At night the flare and the red lamps on the derricks give it away.