Continual capacity expansion for free?

[tesapan (OP)]

Hi, i am a long time lurker and player of Aurora, but didn't post until now.  This is a great game, getting better with every patch and i want to thank you Steve for all your effort and for sharing it with us.

Now to the question i want to make.

Recently someone told me that it was possible to give the order of continual capacity expansion to shipyards in planets with no minerals (neutronium for example), thus making it possible to expand for free.
I would like to know if this is the case, if the continual capacity expansion doesn't use minerals like the "expand X" does.  Also the interface doesn't show any mineral consumption by the CCE, but it does show the total consumption for the expand one.

[metalax]

If it is allowing it that is definitely a bug.

I can understand it's consumption not showing under projected usage as that figure is simply the sum of all queued construction at that planet and as CCE has no end point, it has no set consumption that could be added to it, particularly as the cost is variable depending on the current size of the yard at each construction tick.

Edit: Just tried it by SMing a shipyard and population to run it onto an empty world and seting to CCE. It throws up a mineral shortage (duranium, neutronium) in shipyard modification each construction tick and no expansion occurs. So it seem like this should not be possible.

If someone is saying that they are getting expansion in such a situation can you get them to detail exactly how they are setting it up?

[tesapan (OP)]

Thank you for answering.  I agree with you that it shouldn't be possible, in my experience at least.  Just wanted to be sure of it.  Also agree that is understable that mineral consumption don't show up on the interface as it is calculated every 5s pulse.

This player told me that he had a planet with Duranium but no Neutronium, but despite that, he could give the order to continual capacity expansion and it worked.  It was version 5. 2 though, may be it was a bug that was fixed in later patches, but i also play Aurora since 5. 2 and have no evidence of that.

It would be great if other players (or Steve) could confirm that continual capacity expansion uses minerals as supposed to.  That way we would be 100% sure of that.

[metalax]

Just tried it out by SMing a stockpile of duranium onto the planet, no change aside from the mineral shortage announcment only refering to neutronium. Also tried the other way around with neutronium present and same effect occured.

Also tried out SMing duranium into the planet and adding mines, still no effect. As far as I can tell there should be no way for CCE to work unless you have both duranium and neutronium present.