NPR Question

[Maltay (OP)]

Some of the campaign stories make reference to what NPRs are doing before the player has met the NPRs.  For example, NPRs fighting one another.  First, am I correct to assume the player is referring to NPRs created when the game was created rather than generated NPRs?  Second, I have created a game with 5 NPRs and enabled NPR generation.  However, with SM mode on when in game I cannot select any other empires, nor do I see any NPRs when I contrast my empire with other empires.  Any help please?

[Beersatron]

NPRs created by the system (at start and then generated by exploration) are not controllable by the player or SM. This is due to the fairly precise AI code that Steve has created. If you were able to control the NPR you could cause them more harm than good.

You can tell if two NPRs are fighting by entering SM mode and looking at the Events window, it will say something along the lines of 'NPR Combat imminent, time-increment has been shortened'. That is the only way (short of Steve's special access) to tell what is going on 'elsewhere'.

I would suggest that having 5 NPRs at the start may be a bit excessive. I normally play with just the one at the start and have yet to have a boring game as there are other AIs out there other than NPRs

Also, 5 NPRs can slow the game down - Steve is a great programmer but since he is building on an App he has been working on for years the language doesn't scale well.

[sloanjh]

Some of the campaign stories make reference to what NPRs are doing before the player has met the NPRs.  For example, NPRs fighting one another.  First, am I correct to assume the player is referring to NPRs created when the game was created rather than generated NPRs?  Second, I have created a game with 5 NPRs and enabled NPR generation.  However, with SM mode on when in game I cannot select any other empires, nor do I see any NPRs when I contrast my empire with other empires.  Any help please?

Follow-up on Beer's comments:  So the NPRs that you're seeing in the writeups are probably player-controlled NPR.  These are probably from old campaigns (before the NPR AI was built); another possibility is that the author turned off computer-control for these NPR when he generated them.

John

[Charlie Beeler]

To add to John's comments:

Those comparison tools are from when all NPR's were actually player controlled and not AI controlled.  They still function if you build NPR's that are player controlled (ie you can see them under SM Mode).  If the NPR is only viewable under Devoloper Mode the tools won't pull them in.

[Maltay (OP)]

Okay.  Makes much more sense now.

[Bobarossa]

On my computer there is a "Logs" folder (not with Aurora folder) that contains log files (such as 'y6,txt' and yes that is a comma not a dot).  The log file contains info on what you and all the NPR's are doing. I can't figure out when these files are created as my newest one was from two days ago and doesn't have what happened when I played last night.  It does contain about a year's worth of data.  I'm very sure I did not have SM on at that time.