Ships and Time

[Scraphound (OP)]

How does time affect a ship's ability to perform tasks? 

For example, I have a couple GeoSurvey ships ordered to scan nearby bodies.   If I advance time by 30 days will the survey ship be able to reach a planet and scan it during that turn, or do I need to "baby" the ship and increase time in smaller increments so the ship can reach its destination and scan? 

[Theodidactus]

if I understand your question correctly then the answer is this:


Virtually everything in Aurora can be done automatically. So in my current game, I have given a survey fleet the order "Go through 3 jump gates, and enter the 61 Cygni system. Once there begin surveying 61 Cygni I, then II, then III, then IV and moons IV A and IV B, then V, then moons V A, V B, V C....and so on. It will take them like, 2 years to do all that.

In that time, I can advance time however I please. I can advance time in 5 second incriments to micromanage a fleet arrangement before battle, or I can advance time by 30 days, then 30 days again, then 30 days again, to quickly advance until i have some technology researched.




If something interferes with your fleet's progress, there's a good chance the game will STOP its operations. Steve has done an excellent job setting it up so that petty much any time you WOULD like the game to stop, it will. So like if my survey fleet suddenly spots a strange thermal signature orbiting 61 Cyngi V during the 5th day of a 30 day cycle, the game will stop its time advance. This will happen pretty much any time a new spaceship is detected, a spaceship blows up or finishes doing something...ect.

[sloanjh]

That being said, if you've got a default order of e.g. "Survey next 5 moons" and it surveys all 5 moons in your 30 day increment, it will not generate a new list of 5 to survey until the interrupt.  Also, it used to be (and still may be) the case that civie freighters on e.g. the Earth-Mars run that could complete a full cycle of moves in one update would get confused.

So an Apollonian approach is favored   You can use fairly big update times, but going to extremes like 30 days can cause issues.

John

[MarcAFK]

I would like a new option for the autoturn button, basically you can have minimum increments where nothing will stop turns, then the game keeps running untill it an interrupt, but i would like oa maximum increments option so i can ask the game to autoturn a certain amount then stop, or stop early if theres an interrupt.