Is the time for a Xeno Ground team to examine alien ruins dependent on the ruins themselves? Like, if it's taking forever, does that mean it will be a higher "tech level" or something?
(I plopped my Xeno Team... 38 vehicles... on a Ruined Outpost 30 years ago. I was getting tired of waiting, so I tripled the count, and waited another 20 years. It's getting a bit aggravating ;p )
My "Xenoteam vehicle" is 1Xeno module and 1 construction module.
I'll keep watching... my galaxy has stalled-ish at the moment
Ok, let’s refamiliarize ourselves with the mechanics:
Ground-based Xenoarchaeology
Xenology Teams do not exist in C# Aurora.
Instead, a new ground unit component (100 tons) provides 0.5 xenoarchaeology points. Ground units with this component may be added to ground formations to provide a xenoarchaeology capability. All formations at the same population with a xenoarchaeology capability will combine their xenoarchaeology points.
The annual chance for a race to successfully translate the alien language and symbology is equal to the xenoarchaeology points on the planet. For example, a Xenoarchaeology Vehicle is created with 2 components, giving it 1 xenoarchaeology point (cost about 9 BP). If a formation has forty such vehicles, the annual chance would be 40%. The chance in any given construction phase is equal to the annual chance * (construction phase length / year).
Your vehicles have 0.5 points each, giving your entire formation 19 points. That gives you a 19% chance of successfully exploring the ruins in any given year. But the real mechanic is that you really get 19/73% = 0.26% chance every construction cycle. These checks are all independent of each other, except for the fact that once the ruins are identified they stop looking. Thus we should really compute the probability that the team still has not succeeded after a certain period of time. The formula for this is (1 − P)
N, where P is the probability per construction cycle and N is the number of construction cycles elapsed.
(1 − (0.19/73))^(30*73) = 0.003321195 = 0.33%
So the chance that you would have to wait 30 years for your initial team to finish the job is pretty small. Of course it doesn’t tell you how much longer you will have to wait; they’re not saving up progress from cycle to cycle so the checks are still independent from each other.
Then you tripled the number of vehicles to 114, giving you 57 points. That is 0.78% chance per construction cycle
Still, 67 years after initial Xeno-landing, I finally breached it... and it was extraordinarily not-special. Lame.
What is the probability that you would need to wait another 37 years?
(1 − (0.57/73))^(37*73) = 0.000000000638 = 0.0000000638%
That’s pretty darn unlucky.
I always recommend that people aim for a lot more points than they think is reasonable. The yearly percentages are misleading because breaking it up into multiple smaller checks actually results in a lower chance per year. Of course even then you can still get unlucky.
