Beacon bandwidth allocation requirements 6 years ago

I'm trying to figure out how much bandwidth a beacon takes up, because I don't remember the tutorial mentioning this. Sometimes it takes up 10, sometimes it takes up 20, and you don't find out until you've placed the actual beacon from what I can tell.

Now, am I right in assuming that the "price" in bandwidth goes up by 10 for each subsequent active beacon? Not for all of them of course, I mean the first one will cost 10, next one will take up 20 and so forth. 

If so, I'm wondering if there's a bug with that mechanic in that the bandwidth requirements aren't automatically adjusted on your remaining active beacons if you remove one of your earlier acquired beacons. 

For instance, let's say I make a beacon on a special node and it takes up 10 bandwidth. I then make another beacon on another special node that takes up 20 bandwidth. Being the early game, I'm now very short on bandwidth and need to remove one of them to get some bandwidth back, but I prefer keeping the second beacon that takes up 20, so I remove the one from the first special node that takes up 10. But the other one still takes up 20 even though it's the only one left. I eventually think "I have enough bandwidth now for a second beacon" and make a beacon on the special node I initially made the first beacon on which only needed 10 bandwidth, but this new one takes up 20, and so now I have two beacons both taking up 20 bandwidth.

Help for hacking at greater ranges D: 6 years ago

I can't really decide how to go about this, even while playing as the UC.

1. Backdoors is an option but seem pretty lackluster. Creating a backdoor doesn't seem to guarantee that you'll be able to hack through them unnoticed (not that it says anywhere that it will, but at least then you'd be able to build up some speed, right?), it takes up valuable bandwidth, you can't defend the node with defense programs, and if you're traced back to the backdoor both the backdoor and your hack is lost. That 5% hacking speed boost that it's supposed to provide on its neighbors (whatever that means) I don't feel makes up for all the downsides.

2. You can create new colonies or sanctuaries, but it's limited how many of those you can have before penalties start kicking in, and if you're playing as the UC and the sanctuary is on a colonized system, you're again not guaranteed to be able to build up some distance/speed before getting caught in the process.

3. You could try to maneuver around hostile nodes to get to what you want, but that can be really finicky, and if your target is inside a big cluster of hostile nodes, there's still no getting around that.

4. If you're playing as the UC there is the option of switching home systems, but then you have to hack your way to a fitting special node which can take time if where you want to go is far away, and then you still have to wait 15 turns for SOME (correct me if I'm wrong) of the penalties to go away so you can switch, not to mention losing all other existing beacons.

As a side note, those beacons are annoying. They take up bandwidth and don't even allow you to hack from them :<

So I don't know what to do :( Anyone got any hints or ideas, I'd appreciate it. If I'm wrong, tell me. I'm hopefully not the only one having trouble with this.