New Player here - questions mostly about automation!

[acantoni (OP)]

Greetings!
I've been lurking for a week or so and been playing in the last few days and wow.. what depth!!!

I tried to read all i could and tried a new game and after some years of playing (2041) i have a few questions especially about automation to reduce micromanagement.

1) I have a geosurvey and a survey fleet that search their thing with their rispective orders (survey next 5 system bodies - Survey nearest survey location) and the condition to return home when fuel is < 30 %
This works well but it would be useful to have the option to send the fleet back to where it was when the fuel condition triggered.. can it be done ?

2) In my sol system i already have plenty of civilian colonies and some minimg going home on my own., i'd like a way to automatically pick up minerals and drop them to my homeworld, how can i do that?
There is a "move to mineral location" but it doesnt seem to get the work done.
Also manually selecting all the colonies and go in circle can be done but its highly inefficient and end up breaking up some time for the "there is no mineral " error which breaks the chain

3) Can i save orders so that i can easily reassign them

4) In year 2030 i encountered an alien race.. or at least so i discovered after a few years.
The race is called Ross 154 Aliens #986 so i believe i encountered it in Ross 154.. i sent multiple fleets there with sensors (active+thermal+em) and moved around all the system bodies and couldnt find them.. is there a way to survey the system as a whole?

5) Leaving this civilization siding aside is 2041.. never seen a combat or alien ship.. is usual to have a so flat game?

6) I cant really figure out the Task Force Organization panel or the "Sectors" panel which is always blank

7) I tried to go on SM mode and see if there are other empires around.. i couldnt the only race i ever see is mine , did i do something wrong?

Guess many questions here are very dumb

Fabio

[UnLimiTeD]

You can automatically send minerals from a mining colony to whatever planet in the system via mass drivers. Build them, drop them off, designate a target.
Make sure the target world has a massdriver aswell, or it will be bombarded by 500 ton mineral packets.
If you actually buy civilian mining output (Check the civ tab on the moon/asteroid in question) they should actually send them home automatically, however, I don't know about that.

Aside, I'm in a similar situation regarding aliens, after about the same, I made contact to one race, which doesn't even seem to by space capable, and I don't know how to interact with them.

Btw, you can attempt communications and assign a diplomatics team to the aliens even if you don't know who and where they are.

Never saw events aside my own in the events aswell, I think it still only tells you about races a playerrace has already discovered, I got stuff like "possible fleet interception" or "possibility of two NPRs fighting" several times, and never any clear information of it.

Also, NPRs may be generated when you visit discover new systems.

[Venec]

If you actually buy civilian mining output (Check the civ tab on the moon/asteroid in question) they should actually send them home automatically, however, I don't know about that.

Not quite, you need to specify CMC mass drive destination (they come for free with mining colonies) on mining/maintenance screen.

[sloanjh]

2) In my sol system i already have plenty of civilian colonies and some minimg going home on my own., i'd like a way to automatically pick up minerals and drop them to my homeworld, how can i do that?
There is a "move to mineral location" but it doesnt seem to get the work done.
Also manually selecting all the colonies and go in circle can be done but its highly inefficient and end up breaking up some time for the "there is no mineral " error which breaks the chain

Build mass drivers on the colonies and on your home world (this is important - otherwise you'll be dropping rocks on Chicago), then set their destination for your home world.  As someone else mentioned, CMC come with their own mass drivers.

If you don't like mass drivers, then you can avoid the problem with the circle route by giving your freighter a "load M when X available" message, where M is a mineral and X is an amount.  Do this at the start of the circle with one mineral, then follow up with a "load all minerals" at all of the worlds (including the first).  Don't forget to refuel at your home world when you drop them off. :-)  How many NPR do you have?  What's the NPR generation probability?  It's not uncommon to visit 20-40 systems an not find any NPR (although you'll usually have run into precursors by then).

6) I cant really figure out the Task Force Organization panel or the "Sectors" panel which is always blank

For task force, you need to make some task forces (use the icon that looks like a triangle near the top middle of F3 screen).  Then use the buttons in the top row to create a tree structure beneath each task force.  Steve posted the rules for task force organization a month or two ago in Mechanics.
For sectors, you need to research advanced command and control (IIRC), which allows you to build a sector capital, which allows you to assign systems to your sector capital.  The more levels (times) of sector capital you build, the bigger the radius of the sector - the radius will be roughtly the sqrt of the sector level.

7) I tried to go on SM mode and see if there are other empires around.. i couldnt the only race i ever see is mine , did i do something wrong?

Computer-controlled NPR do not show up in SM mode.  The ability to view them is password protected, since if you make changes to them you can screw up the NPR logic, which could result in Steve wasting a lot of time on spurious bug reports.

John

[acantoni (OP)]

Thanks you very much for all the help ) howver after a very few years i'm starting getting tons of errors
Error in updatewealth
Error 3421 was generated by DAO.Field
Data type conversion error.

Error in GetPopulationSignature
Error 6 was generated by Aurora
Overflow.
and other errors that reading the bug forum seems to be related to npr activity

Mm considering atm i'm playing with all the defaults except 3 npr , 150% difficulty and 100 max system can u suggest a nice starting conditions to have a challenge (=losing badly ) so i'm forced to improve?

[Brian Neumann]

From the errors you listed it sounds like the population got to big somewhere.  This is a known bug that Steve is aware of.

For a more difficult game try starting with a population of around 1 billion and then change the actual population down to 500 million along with the industry that goes with it.  This will automatically give the npr a big initial boost, but as it explores and discovers new systems the additional npr's will be based on your size/tech.  When you eventually meet the initial npr it should have been able to grow quickly and easily.  You on the other hand will have had a lot more trouble growing and this should help ballance things out.  You will find in combat that a human mind can just be trickier than the computer can manage, so you will always tend to have the advantage.

Brian

[UnLimiTeD]

Well, actually, a perfect combat AI would be able to beat any competent aurora player in real time, thats just not the case.
Ultimately, the AI has to be programmed by a human, who just happens to have better things to do, it needs to run on current machines, and then the player can think over every possible action a half hour if need be.
Plus he probably focuses his tech better.

[Brian Neumann]

Well, actually, a perfect combat AI would be able to beat any competent aurora player in real time, thats just not the case.
Ultimately, the AI has to be programmed by a human, who just happens to have better things to do, it needs to run on current machines, and then the player can think over every possible action a half hour if need be.
Plus he probably focuses his tech better.

You got it right.  Especially the focused tech part.  I have noticed a real tendency for me to focus on only a couple of weapon techs, and push reasearch on engines and reasearch speed as fast as possible.

Brian

[AndonSage]

For sectors, you need to research advanced command and control (IIRC), which allows you to build a sector capital, which allows you to assign systems to your sector capital.  The more levels (times) of sector capital you build, the bigger the radius of the sector - the radius will be roughtly the sqrt of the sector level.

Just in case it took a while for anyone else to figure out what research was needed to build a Sector Command, the actual research is called Improved Command and Control, located in the Logistics/Ground Combat category.

[sloanjh]

For sectors, you need to research advanced command and control (IIRC), which allows you to build a sector capital, which allows you to assign systems to your sector capital.  The more levels (times) of sector capital you build, the bigger the radius of the sector - the radius will be roughtly the sqrt of the sector level.

Just in case it took a while for anyone else to figure out what research was needed to build a Sector Command, the actual research is called Improved Command and Control, located in the Logistics/Ground Combat category.

GIDRCBIWC.

(Guess I Didn't Recall Correctly But I Was Close)

John