Autopause-Klaxon for combat

[plasticpanzers (OP)]

Sometimes you can hit the timer wrong and lose a number of ships before you know your in combat (unless there
is a pause somewhere I do not see).  An option for an immediate pause of the game when an enemy ship is detected
with a 'battlestation' klaxon sound so a player can react before the hammer falls on some poor ship you have not been
watching while hitting the 5 day button instead of the 5 second one....

[Erik L]

While it would be nice, it's not really possible.

Say you have a ship tootling along. There is an enemy ship nearby but undetected. With 5s turns you go your 2500km and the enemy moves its 2000km. Everyone checks for detection.

Now with a 1 day turn, you move your 43200000km and the bad guy moves his 34560000km. Then you check for detections. You don't actually move between the two. You pop from here to there. The turns would be that much longer if it travelled between the two spots.

[sloanjh]

What Erik said.

This is in fact the source of the much-maligned 5-second increments - the game is taking smaller time steps in order to do what you suggest.  The situation you describe means that the mechanism didn't work and the game took to big a jump in time.  The intent is that the game should behave as you described - it pauses at the moment something (bad) comes into detection range so you can go to battle stations.

The way I work around this is to save the game often whenever I'm in a situation where I suspect combat might occur (e.g. probing a new system, or heading into a missile engagement).  If the auto-sizing mechanism for time steps fail, then I restore the last save point and do exactly the same thing I did the first time, except I take smaller time steps (i.e. push the 1 hr button instead of 5 days).  This is another example of the Space Master (you) helping the computer to get things right - the computer wasn't smart enough to advance the clock slowly, but you are.

One other thing:  5 days is probably too long a jump to use if you're in a situation where combat is likely.  You're making it harder for the game to get things right.

John