New Player Questions

[Ygdrad (OP)]

I have just learned about this game's existence and I am surprised i had never head of it before(found out about it from the Dwarf Fortress forums) and it looks like lots of fun.     The problem is that i am kind of lost as to where to start.     I went through the tutorials on the wiki, and while I know how to create ships and techs, I have no idea what I should do with them.     What are some of the first things I should be doing? I am trying to get some people over to mars to set up some manned facilities there, but i need to send infrastructure first.     I have 3 freighters each capable of carrying 10 infrastructure, but I need 218 of them sent there, do I have to manually command each cargo run or is there some way to automate the ferrying of all 218 infrastructures?

Now that I'm done building the infrastructures on my planet to be sent to mars, what should i be manufacturing? What should my shipyards be doing at the moment?

I'll probably find tons more questions as I go and will probably just add them in here.   

Edit: It seems that mines require people to run them.    Does that mean I have to get people down on asteroids to mine them?

Edit2: Well snap, I wanted to send someone who had bonuses to terraforming to b e the new governor of mars, selected the person in the first box selected mars governor in the second, clicked on the move button, got an error and a crash .  Guess i did something wrong.

[Shadow]

A bit further into your game you'll see civilian shipping companies cropping up and building their own freighters. You can take advantage of them to ferry most facilities through the use of contracts. But for now, you can reasonably automate the transport of infrastructure by simply ordering your freighters to load it on Earth and unload it on Mars. Input a single round of orders and then tick the Cycle Orders box below the current orders panel. That should have them shipping the stuff until they can't load any more on Earth.

[Ygdrad (OP)]

Thanks.  I'll have to figure out how the contracts work.

[Brian Neumann]

     Edit: It seems that mines require people to run them.   Does that mean I have to get people down on asteroids to mine them?

Regular mines require population to work, Auto mines do not need a population.  For asteroids you can either use the auto mines, or develop the Asteroid miner tech.  This is put on a ship and it does the mining for you, the only restriction is it only works on asteroids so you cant use it on moons or planets.  In all cases the minerals are deposited on your colony where they are mined.

Brian

[Ygdrad (OP)]

After that crash, I decided to get some things done better/earlier and I thought that while I was at it i'd play with the starting settings.   Is the government type limited to what's in the list or is there some sort of way to make new ones or create combinations, like having a theocratic oligarchy.

Edit: Does the government type set the government for all my planets or just the main ruling body/first colony? Is it possible to have various types of governments for colonies while having your initial colony or main ruling body be a certain type?

[EarthquakeDamage]

Cycle Orders

Be damned careful with the Cycle Orders toggle.  Turn it off when you don't need it.  Otherwise, you can get short (instantaneous, even) orders cycling, which leads to buggy turn increments that never end, forcing you to kill the program.

[jseah]

After that crash, I decided to get some things done better/earlier and I thought that while I was at it i'd play with the starting settings.   Is the government type limited to what's in the list or is there some sort of way to make new ones or create combinations, like having a theocratic oligarchy.

Edit: Does the government type set the government for all my planets or just the main ruling body/first colony? Is it possible to have various types of governments for colonies while having your initial colony or main ruling body be a certain type?

You can have a different government type if you choose the create SM race starting option instead of the Sol start option. 

I'm not too sure what they do but I know the default starting shipyards, labs and techpoints change depending on which government you pick.  Beyond that, no idea. 

One government for all colonies, no indepedent colonies. 

[Thiosk]

The way you learn this game early on is persistance.  When you figure out the basic systems-- how to mine out the Sol system and terraform mars-- you can restart your campaign and redo that part in 1\3 the ingame time.  Don't worry about it.  Explore til you find aliens.  Learn the logistics of starting an out-system colony.

Its super funtimes!

[Ygdrad (OP)]

well, I was about to go explore the last jump point in the sol system and my game seems to have bugged.   Turns don't happen anymore I can press any increment, time won't move forward.   Does anyone know what could be causing this or a way to fix it?

Edit: after zooming in real close on my ship, it seems that time is not stopped, but rather moving forwards in increments of 1 minute.  Is there a way to get it back to the increments I'm choosing?

[mckamx]

Check the "Event Updates" window - time may be advancing by 5 seconds, but the System window only shows minutes.   5 second advances usually mean an NPR battle somewhere, or may mean that someone is in your system that you are almost close enough to detect.

[Ygdrad (OP)]

I've gone a good 50 1 minute turns without anything happening, is there any kind of way to make it stop? I did make the game start with 3 NPRs is that a bad idea?

[Rastaman]

I've gone a good 50 1 minute turns without anything happening, is there any kind of way to make it stop? I did make the game start with 3 NPRs is that a bad idea?

Engage auto-turns and come back when you have 5000.

[Shoku]

Once you have a 10 mil pop on Mars they will get cranky if you don't have any ships guarding the place so you should work out some design by then.
Seeing as there is a tutorial for making a laser ship that would be the easiest weapon system to put together but the other ones work about the same in ship design.  Missiles also require a magazine which can explode if your ship takes internal damage.

Lasers are comparably short range though so you'll probably need to be faster than your enemy to even shoot at them.

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You need 218 infrastructure per million colonists.  You should probably build another thousand. 
After a point though, companies should start pumping infrastructure onto any rock you've colonized.

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Starting NPRs start exploring systems really quick and if you left the NPR generation % alone that means they're going to make lotsa other aliens pop up.

[Erik L]

I believe task groups/fleets provide their protection value to the system as a whole, rather than just the planet they are currently in orbit.

[Peter Rhodan]

Yes but only Earth has the not actually needed bonus - i.e if you have a big colony on Mars and send the fleet off somewhere to kick butt the Martians will start complaining