Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread: C# Edition

[nuclearslurpee]

Seriously new player question alert -

If I can ship infrastructure to a planet, transport mines and construction factories too and kickstart the mineral production been fired back to earth - why do I need to terraform a planet?

Infrastructure costs a lot of minerals in the long term. For a typical CC=2.0 world that means 200 infrastructure per 1 million population, that's 400 minerals per million people. Compared to a Mine or Construction Factory, which costs 120 minerals and employs 50,000 people, this is a significant fraction of the total investment. Say you have a colony built up to 15 million population, which has CC=2.0 and therefore 50% manufacturing population (7.5m). This colony can handle up to 150 mines or factories (18,000 minerals to build) and requires 3,000 infrastructure to support the population (6,000 minerals to build). 25% of the total cost to establish this colony (neglecting fuel and freighters) is tied up in infrastructure, and the situation will get worse as population increases and the manufacturing population fraction decreases.

Therefore, in the long term what makes more sense is to build terraforming systems of some sort (surface or orbital) to reduce colony costs to zero and eliminate the need for infrastructure. In practice, this means that you will build infrastructure in the early game, but once terraforming is complete at a colony the infrastructure there can be repurposed to establish a new colony, so you don't need to spend the minerals to build that infrastructure many times over.

There is also an efficiency gain from reducing the colony cost, since the fraction of population dedicated to agriculture is 0.05*(1+C) where C is the colony cost. Reducing the colony cost from 2.0 to zero allows 10% more of the population to be converted to manufacturing workforce, which can be a significant increase particularly for larger colonies with high service worker populations. So not only are you saving minerals for establishing new colonies by repurposing previously built infrastructure, you are also gaining a lot of useful population at existing colonies by terraforming. Since population becomes a bottleneck in the mid to late game, this is another huge reason to terraform.

[Jarhead0331]

^Yes, but one would REALLY have to suspend their disbelief to accept that governments would ever really be that efficient when it comes to expanding across the universe. Think of the pork in those contracts to build and transport all that infrastructure. Sorry, for the digression, but Aurora is all about role play.

[shock]

what causes a hit chance of 0, leading to weapons not firing?

Ran into some star swarm but i can't hit them. 

railguns
range 0, fleets ontop of each other
BCF 15000 speed
ship speed 17000
enemy speed 14000

Are they detected by active sensors?

Yes they have active sensors and are on.   The fleets are on top of each other, and have no passive sensors so fairly sure its the active sensors detecting the ships.

[Rince Wind]

Seriously new player question alert -

If I can ship infrastructure to a planet, transport mines and construction factories too and kickstart the mineral production been fired back to earth - why do I need to terraform a planet?

Adding to what the others have said: you need a lot of cargo space to move that infrastructure. Those transports could be shipping mines instead. And you will need to supply colonies that are otherwise done, if you want them to grow that population.
Or at the very least they not use up fuel. Having 150 million litres of fuel on Earth might sound like a lot, but send out a medium sized combat fleet to clear systems of spoilers a few times and it goes down very quickly if you didn't plan ahead.

[Kiero]

what causes a hit chance of 0, leading to weapons not firing?

Ran into some star swarm but i can't hit them. 

railguns
range 0, fleets ontop of each other
BCF 15000 speed
ship speed 17000
enemy speed 14000

Can you attach database?

[captainwolfer]

Is it possible to transfer people to a habitat without unloading them onto a planet for the habitat to then load itself

[nuclearslurpee]

Is it possible to transfer people to a habitat without unloading them onto a planet for the habitat to then load itself

Not to my knowledge.

[Droll]

Seriously new player question alert -

If I can ship infrastructure to a planet, transport mines and construction factories too and kickstart the mineral production been fired back to earth - why do I need to terraform a planet?

Adding to what the others have said: you need a lot of cargo space to move that infrastructure. Those transports could be shipping mines instead. And you will need to supply colonies that are otherwise done, if you want them to grow that population.
Or at the very least they not use up fuel. Having 150 million litres of fuel on Earth might sound like a lot, but send out a medium sized combat fleet to clear systems of spoilers a few times and it goes down very quickly if you didn't plan ahead.

One thing missing in the infrastructure discussion here is that the civilian economy of colonies that have a low non-zero colony cost will often auto-produce a lot of infrastructure for free, if the CC is low enough they can even produce a surplus.

So you might not actually need to continually ship infrastructure to a colony as it grows and you might not even have to manually build infrasture at a certain point.

[LuuBluum]

Out of curiosity I was looking into the effectiveness of using fighters for ground combat and... at least given the posts that I've read across the forums, are ground fighters for combat a mess at the moment? I've not read a single good thing going on there, and I don't know what may have changed since the posts were made. The issues, from what I gather:

• AA units are both underpowered (LAA can't even damage the most basic of fighters until well into weapon damage increasing technology) and moot given that STOs can fire at fighters
• Ground-support fighters have to be manually set, per fighter, for the formation that they support
• Non-support missions don't work
• Ground-support fighters die too easily to make them useful anyway

Are there any plans on any of these issues being resolved any time soon, or is it just not even worth thinking about using ground-support fighters in the current state of the game or at any point in the near future?

[Ulzgoroth]

STO being able to fire at fighters on ground combat missions would seem to be a bug if true (I haven't tried) and while infantry AA requires a bit of tech to become at all functional MAA should be usable from quite early on. (You would need a lot to get even HAA damage to go from 1 to 2 though, never mind 3.)

[LuuBluum]

Well, I can't seem to find whatever post I remember reading regarding STOs. It also seems that the discussion I found from back in August regarding someone doing a Flak Suppression mission against an NPR resulting in all of their fighters blowing up without doing anything seems to be functioning correctly? At least, if I'm reading it right, the mission they chose would result in their fighters choosing a random hostile formation and, if it has no AA, proceed to do nothing. In turn, every single AA unit fires back at them. No wonder they just got blown to smithereens without doing anything.

If nothing else that means that STO as far as I can tell cannot be used to target ground support fighters, and that the non-support missions aren't bugged. That just leaves the direct support assignment being tedious (has to be done per-craft, so... lots of dragging, if you use them in any amount of volume), and non-support missions being of dubious benefit (you're gonna need some seriously fast fighters to not just get blown out of the sky). So... potentially useful but mostly tedious?

EDIT: Actually, thinking about it, I don't think they're too unreasonable to use in the right circumstances. The times that you're going to want large volumes will be defensive, in which case you wouldn't assign to individual formations anyway; just set them on a mission to bomb any enemy and due to numbers they'll pretty easily overwhelm whatever forces they have. Offensively, you'd want to assign them to supporting a formation as an anti-air to take out enemy bombers (since they won't be able to be bombarded due to not being a ground unit, and retaliating as anti-air as per the mechanic against non-support missions where every anti-air is triggered against them) since in any other position they'd just be blown to pieces by the defending forces' overwhelming amount of anti-air fire.

[nuclearslurpee]

I think the STOs firing at fighters on ground support missions bug was fixed at some point, but I wouldn't know because I never use them. Fighters are simply too vulnerable to AA fire (when the AA is actually able to do damage, that is), not cost-effective at scale, too much micro, etc. to be worthwhile.

Considering that homeworld invasions requires millions upon millions of tons of ground forces I think the only way for ground support fighters to be remotely viable is to introduce a new airborne ground unit class instead, but every time I suggest this the Air-Space Superiority cabal gets up in arms about it.

[LuuBluum]

I think in terms of invading an NPR homeworld, they're entirely useless since NPRs don't use ground-support fighters whatsoever. Either instantly blown to shreds by AA (non-support mission, since every AA on the planet fires at them while they only get to target one formation, with reduced odds to hit to boot), or hardly any better than just having more artillery (supporting a formation) and requiring a whole lot more micro than they're worth. The only time they're useful is either defensively (invaders aren't going to be able to field enough AA fast enough to make them able to take out whatever absurdly large volume of bombers you can muster on a homeworld, which with the non-support missions will do a whole lot of damage against invading forces without them being able to do much in turn), or offensively for dealing with defensive fighters (since you're unlikely to be able to field enough AA to deal with defensive air support fast enough to avoid being completely taken out, if they're using it in sufficient volume, to my awareness AA fighters wouldn't be targeted by bombarding ground-support fighters but would retaliate as AA units). Offensively the only time they're useful is if you've already basically eradicated the enemy AA, at which point you've basically already won anyway. Better off just doing normal orbital bombardment support (assuming you've taken out all the STOs) and spare yourself the resources and micromanagement.

[LuuBluum]

Actually I made an assumption there that I can't find an answer to at all: do fighters with air-to-air pods equipped work like anti-air units? I would assume so but I can't find any indication as such.

[nuclearslurpee]

Ground support fighters are usually not usable defensively because the attacking side almost always has space superiority, otherwise they would not be able to deliver troops to the objective. Therefore any ground support fighters the defenders might have will be summarily blown up by the attacking space force.

Incidentally, this is something that having an airborne ground unit class would fix, because then defenders could still have an air force even if they have lost control of orbital space.

Actually I made an assumption there that I can't find an answer to at all: do fighters with air-to-air pods equipped work like anti-air units? I would assume so but I can't find any indication as such.

I believe they are intended to function with the combat air patrol mission, which I don't think was ever implemented. Otherwise I think they just work as a bundle of stats like all other ground weapons and fighter pod types. They don't have innate AA fire capability like actual AA components do, AFAIK.