I use Realistic Stars and I've yet to get more than 4 jumps from Sol before encountering an NPR empire.  In the Celtic Redux campaign(TN start with 1 starting NPR)  I've encountered 4 NPRs, Precurosrs, Swarm and Invaders within 10 game years of start (start date Jan 3115 current date Jan 3124).

I should add that I have toggled no NPRs at the start.

I have explored 90 systems, no NPR yet either, and precursors that shoot back only once. No swarm either, nothing. Maybe that has to do with the realistic stars? When 90% of the stars are dim M class, maybe there's not so much opportunity for habitable worlds at 30% NPR likelihood.

I don't use realistic stars.  Come to think of it, I usually put my NPR probability at 70% (or maybe even 100%) - this time it looks like I dropped it to 50%.  So while I'm having a bit of bad luck it's not out of line....

John

I'm aware of all that, and I don't see how it relates to my question.  

I'm just trying to figure out why sloanjh says he gets a good challenge from a conventional start when there is no initial NPR.  If there is no initial NPR, then no systems (and therefore no new NPRs ) will be generated until the player techs up; therefore, there are no NPRs receiving a head start.

Generated NPRs are generated at a tech level that's related to the amount of game time that's passed, whether or not you've done a conventional start.  Since it takes 15-20 years to get out of the solar system and start exploring, the generated NPR are 15-20 years higher tech (relatively speaking) than they would be with a TN start.

The problem with the initial NPR is that, just like the AI isn't sophisticated enough to do the conventional-->TN transition, my experience has been that it's not really sophisticated enough to run an empire for 15-20 years and have it wind up in a good state, mainly because it isn't good at shifting the mining away from the homeworld when the mining crash happens.  So you end up with a crashed NPR who's built jump gates everywhere and "soaked up" a lot of the precursors which would otherwise present a challenge.

In my current game, I've pretty much explored to 3 jumps out and haven't activated any NPR yet - usually I would have found one or two by now.  If this goes on for long, I'll probably either generate one by hand (which would be equivalent to having a "starting" NPR in a TN game (since I'm TN now) but with a 15-20 year tech handicap) or crank up the probability of NPR generation from exploration.

John

This looks like a contradiction to me, which leads me to believe there is something fundamental I do not understand about how NPRs work.

Do generated NPRs end up ahead of you in tech when you explore their systems after a conventional start?  I thought they were always based on your current tech level.

And if there is no initial NPR, then there should be NO NPRs at all until you tech up and go extrasolar.

No,  the initial NPRs are actually based on your population, but are always TN - the application does not handle NPRs going from conventional to TN ( the conventional option was added in to aurora about a year after it was first released IIRC, and only really intended for player use, or easy targets for practising ground attacks)

Is this accurate?  I thought I saw a post from Steve where he said that problem was fixed.

That's why I said "in the past"   I think he might have scaled up their starting minerals to go with their population size, but my experience with NPR are that they aren't that bright in terms of resource utilization.  For example, I've stopped putting an initial NPR into my conventional starts - they usually die off by the time I get to space, after having littered the universe with jump gates.

John

It's a good idea not to mess with the difficulty setting too much (or at all) - in the past it has tended to cause NPR to have a mineral crash.

I like to do conventional starts - that puts the NPR about 20 years ahead of me in tech which is challenging.

You can also turn on all the bad guys (types of "monster") on the setup screen.

John

For experienced players, what is the minimum difficulty setting that you find necessary for the NPRs to provide a challenge for you?