Crazy Civilians

[SteveAlt (OP)]

Not exactly a wow moment but fairly amusing. After updating the sensor and detection code, all the civilian ships started going crazy and whizzing off in every direction. After an hour of frustration I finally identified the problem. As in v4.0, civilian ships will run away from any hostile contacts. Unfortunately, I had somehow deleted the line of code that makes them check the race of the contact. Therefore any civilian ship that got picked up by the sensors of its parent race was trying to run away from itself

Steve

[rdgam]

You had better have the civilians check what their parent race thinks of the contact race.  (Use the alien race status of the tactical intelligence screen).
Otherwise in a game with multiple races in the home system, the civilians will be running all the time.  This is what is happening in my 4.0 game.

By the way, this would be a nice check for interrupts.  Only break on hostile contacts.  That way my multiple Sol system can have friendly and neutral races and not stop on every sub-pulse because of a new contact.

It would also be nice if a passive contact that had an active transponder would be judged the same way.  When the civilians get close enough to earth to become a passive contact, there is no need to break the sub-pulses either.  This could make using active transponders a postive thing in allied systems.

[SteveAlt (OP)]

You had better have the civilians check what their parent race thinks of the contact race.  (Use the alien race status of the tactical intelligence screen).
Otherwise in a game with multiple races in the home system, the civilians will be running all the time.  This is what is happening in my 4.0 game.

By the way, this would be a nice check for interrupts.  Only break on hostile contacts.  That way my multiple Sol system can have friendly and neutral races and not stop on every sub-pulse because of a new contact.

It would also be nice if a passive contact that had an active transponder would be judged the same way.  When the civilians get close enough to earth to become a passive contact, there is no need to break the sub-pulses either.  This could make using active transponders a postive thing in allied systems.

I have already added all of the above for v4.1. I have created a new diplomatic system which I will post on when it is finished.

Civs will run only from hostile contacts. Transponders are used to determine the status of a contact and friendly / allied / civilian contacts do not trigger interrupts

Steve

[sloanjh]

Not exactly a wow moment but fairly amusing. After updating the sensor and detection code, all the civilian ships started going crazy and whizzing off in every direction.

I'm getting a similar behavior in my campaign  - I'm calling it "bouncing NPRs".  The NPR has 2 construction ships parked on a WP (heading towards their space).  They also put a geo-survey ship into the same system.  In trying to figure out how to prevent the NPR from surveying the system (without blowing up their survey ships, since I haven't been fired upon by them yet) I realized that their survey ship runs away from my active-sensor scout - I parked the scout on the survey location their ship was trying to survey.  Unfortunately, the survey ship doesn't have very good sensors, so it can only detect my scout at ~1 hour travel time.  The cycle starts (I'm doing 8-hour updates with 1-hour increments) with their survey ship far enough away that it thinks the survey point is clear.  It moves to the survey point, realizes I've got a ship there, then runs away until it goes out of detection range.  At the same time, the 2 construction ships (a few hundred million klicks away) realize there's a "dangerous enemy" in the system, so they run away from it as well (and head back to the WP they're trying to park on when the survey ship loses contact).  It's kind of like synchronized swimming....

John

[Steve Walmsley]

Not exactly a wow moment but fairly amusing. After updating the sensor and detection code, all the civilian ships started going crazy and whizzing off in every direction.

I'm getting a similar behavior in my campaign  - I'm calling it "bouncing NPRs".  The NPR has 2 construction ships parked on a WP (heading towards their space).  They also put a geo-survey ship into the same system.  In trying to figure out how to prevent the NPR from surveying the system (without blowing up their survey ships, since I haven't been fired upon by them yet) I realized that their survey ship runs away from my active-sensor scout - I parked the scout on the survey location their ship was trying to survey.  Unfortunately, the survey ship doesn't have very good sensors, so it can only detect my scout at ~1 hour travel time.  The cycle starts (I'm doing 8-hour updates with 1-hour increments) with their survey ship far enough away that it thinks the survey point is clear.  It moves to the survey point, realizes I've got a ship there, then runs away until it goes out of detection range.  At the same time, the 2 construction ships (a few hundred million klicks away) realize there's a "dangerous enemy" in the system, so they run away from it as well (and head back to the WP they're trying to park on when the survey ship loses contact).  It's kind of like synchronized swimming....

I suspect that the scout's big brothers may turn up at some point to evict you

Steve

[sloanjh]

I suspect that the scout's big brothers may turn up at some point to evict you :-)

John

[Steve Walmsley]

LOL.  I've had their home system's WP (in a different system) under observation with AWACS, and all I've seen so far is a few identical twins (who immediately move to the same system and start bouncing themselves) - no sign of big brother yet, and their home WP shows up on the galaxy map as having bi-directional jump gates.  Things are getting a bit hairy in this neighborhood, though - I've got 3 consecutive systems (luckily ~4 jumps from home), the first of which has (had) precursors (the ones I'm playing tag with in deep space), and each of which has ~7 WP, one of which has an NRP behind it.  In addition, the middle system is only a few hours' travel time between WP.  The bouncer is off the middle system; the NPR off the deepest system (who has one on my geosurvey ships trapped behind their WP) just decided to come out and play too - I've counted 4 construction ships (all working on the same jump gate?), 2 geosurvey, and 1 warp survey.  I'm really curious as to when their going to move warships outside their home system.

Oh yes, and all of them are probably about 4-5 tech levels ahead of me, since I did a pre-industrial start (they were all activated by me, not as starting NPR).  I think I'm going to start working on engine tech real soon, so at least I can run away

Steve

[sloanjh]

Interesting about the construction ships as they are suposed to avoid jump points with another ship at work. I wonder if the other construction ships are being assigned during the periods the original construction ships are busy running away - the law of unintended consequences gets you every time

That's part of why I mentioned it - I suspected that this might not be intended behavior.

I'm pretty sure this is not the case - the first I see of them is when I detect them when they do a transit, and at that point they're already coming through as a multiple.  In one case (race) there's a pair that came through; in the other case (race) there's 4.  At first I thought they were big jump ships (and I couldn't understand why they were parked on the WP with nothing else coming through) - it was only after the jump gate magically appeared that I realized they were construction ships (cross-section 176, in case that helps you figure out which design they are), and only after survey ships started coming through that the "bouncing" began - up until then they didn't realize I was there.

John

[Steve Walmsley]

Interesting about the construction ships as they are suposed to avoid jump points with another ship at work. I wonder if the other construction ships are being assigned during the periods the original construction ships are busy running away - the law of unintended consequences gets you every time

Steve

[sloanjh]

and my wife has this strange notion that I should have higher priorities at the moment than playing with Aurora :-)

John