Turn Interval

[Maltay (OP)]

Do players use 5 or 30 day turn intervals during general gameplay?  I recall reading something about Aurora being desiged for 5 day intervals and I have had a few games freeze, crash, and corrupt their databases using 30 day intervals.  Is there any truth to Aurora being designed for 5 day intervals?

[The Shadow]

It's kind of a moot point, because after the very beginning game, a 30 day interval isn't likely to go through.

Aurora is designed for a 5-day interval in the sense that a lot of things are checked for every 5 days - construction, and so on.  I've never seen any issues from intervals longer than 5 days, though.

[sloanjh]

I use 5-day intervals in the early days (when not much is going on) and 1-day intervals later.  Note that some things (e.g. getting a new list of bodies to survey from default survey orders) only get checked at the interval break, so 30-day intervals can really slow this sort of thing down.

John

[Bobarossa]

Maybe I've been doing something wrong, but I have noticed that Geological surveys will only occur once per turn interval.  When I'm surveying a bunch of asteroids and am running 1 day intervals, only one will get done per day.  If I switch to 8 hour intervals, many of those asteroids will be done in 1 interval while others may take longer.  So if I have asteroid surveys going on, I set 8 hour intervals with the repeated turns checked and just wait for something to stop the looping.

[sloanjh]

Maybe I've been doing something wrong, but I have noticed that Geological surveys will only occur once per turn interval.  When I'm surveying a bunch of asteroids and am running 1 day intervals, only one will get done per day.  If I switch to 8 hour intervals, many of those asteroids will be done in 1 interval while others may take longer.  So if I have asteroid surveys going on, I set 8 hour intervals with the repeated turns checked and just wait for something to stop the looping.

Are you using the "survey next 5 system bodies" (or something like that) default order, or the "survey next xxx", where xxx is e.g. planet, moon, etc.?  This is what I meant - the default order only gets processed if the order queue is empty at the beginning of the interval, NOT at the beginning of the subpulse.

John

[Journier]

It's kind of a moot point, because after the very beginning game, a 30 day interval isn't likely to go through.

Aurora is designed for a 5-day interval in the sense that a lot of things are checked for every 5 days - construction, and so on.  I've never seen any issues from intervals longer than 5 days, though.

Really?

I use 30 day regularly. In all my games, 80+ years into my game on df with 30 day turns generally.

Unless an NPR is being quite active then youll get a few interrupts when he expands out and finds something of interest that wants to fight.

[The Shadow]

Oh, I press the 30 day button regularly, but it almost never seems to go through beyond the very early game.

[Journier]

Oh, I press the 30 day button regularly, but it almost never seems to go through beyond the very early game.

well a way you can get around that is by actually not creating NPR's at start as well,

Obviously you know this, But to make the game still challenging start the game with high population i start with 5 billion then go into SM mode and remove the population down to 500 million or something, or just start with higher pop and drop your population down to your normal amount.

Then randomely generated NPR's you get will find will be very large when you discover them, bringing on the feel of walking into a real NPR that sat for 100 years building up fleets and such.

eta because i didnt finish what i meant to write..... i fail.

[The Shadow]

Huh, hadn't thought of that.  I do tend to start at 1 billion, but you're saying I should go higher?

[Bobarossa]

Are you using the "survey next 5 system bodies" (or something like that) default order, or the "survey next xxx", where xxx is e.g. planet, moon, etc.?  This is what I meant - the default order only gets processed if the order queue is empty at the beginning of the interval, NOT at the beginning of the subpulse.

John

I was using the survey next body order.  I wondered why anyone would use the survey next 5 order.  Thanks, I understand now.

[Father Tim]

Oh, I press the 30 day button regularly, but it almost never seems to go through beyond the very early game.

well a way you can get around that is by actually not creating NPR's at start as well,

Obviously you know this, But to make the game still challenging start the game with high population i start with 5 billion then go into SM mode and remove the population down to 500 million or something, or just start with higher pop and drop your population down to your normal amount.

Then randomely generated NPR's you get will find will be very large when you discover them, bringing on the feel of walking into a real NPR that sat for 100 years building up fleets and such.

eta because i didnt finish what i meant to write..... i fail.

No, they won't.  NPRs check your population, tech level, etc. at the instant they are created.  So any NPRs created at the start of game (which you've just set to none) would be based on your assumed population of 5,000,000,000 but any that are generated by your (or NPR) exploration will be 'normal' sized.

The effect you are trying for would be created if you set the difficulty to 1000% - except that currently that causes some serious bugs in 'SetNPRPopPlanning' because the NPRs burn through their homeworld minerals too fast.  Steve says it should be fixed for the next version.