Post reply

Warning - while you were reading 110 new replies have been posted. You may wish to review your post.

Note: this post will not display until it's been approved by a moderator.

Name:
Email:
Subject:
Message icon:

shortcuts: hit alt+s to submit/post or alt+p to preview

Please read the rules before you post!


Topic Summary

Posted by: Caesar
« on: Yesterday at 11:56:02 PM »

Also, try using 1-day increments with auto-turn on. They go pretty fast and this reduces the chance of something like that happening.

The thing is that the contact is always shown on top of Earth, with a trail to where it actually is. So it's almost like an inverse trail (expect that it's never been on Earth).

For instance: if the ship is orbiting Mercury, it will show a trail from Earth to Mercury, and the contact will be shown on top of Earth.
That is really weird. Could you upload your DB for us to check it.

I attached it. You'll see the hostile contact showing up on top of Earth. (Dubbed the XX Vigo 001 by the African Union). But if you check the contacts tab on the map and click it, its real location is 33m km from Earth at bearing 119 degrees. Which is where the line is. If you increase the time by minor increments, you can see them moving around, so it's definitely not a movement trail.
Posted by: Garfunkel
« on: Yesterday at 07:53:54 PM »

Also, try using 1-day increments with auto-turn on. They go pretty fast and this reduces the chance of something like that happening.

The thing is that the contact is always shown on top of Earth, with a trail to where it actually is. So it's almost like an inverse trail (expect that it's never been on Earth).

For instance: if the ship is orbiting Mercury, it will show a trail from Earth to Mercury, and the contact will be shown on top of Earth.
That is really weird. Could you upload your DB for us to check it.
Posted by: nuclearslurpee
« on: Yesterday at 12:57:22 PM »

Do you have a DSTS at the colony in question? If not, you should, as even at base tech level a DSTS should be able to spot the most likely ships to cause this issue on the sub-pulse of a 5-day increment (sub-pulse length is 7200 s in this case) in most cases. Given the limitations of the sensor and sub-pulse models I consider a DSTS mandatory for any colony except perhaps a small automated mining operation.
Posted by: skoormit
« on: Yesterday at 12:39:23 PM »

Does the auto-interrupt logic allow for fast-moving small ships to complete movement before the auto-interrupt occurs due to a new sensor contact? I've had some spoiler races going after one of my small colonies from time to time, so I have a small FAC fleet posted there to drive them off. My sensor FAC has an R200 sensor that detects out to 230m km, and an R1 sensor that detects out to 11m km. I've had twice now where I'm doing my normal 5-day time increments because of no contacts, to finish one 5-day where all of a sudden a spoiler race is on top of my colony, has destroyed my sensor FAC, and then the spoiler ship itself is destroyed by automatic STO fire. The spoiler race ship is small so the shorter-range R1 sensor would be required to detect it, but in other similar situations of the game, in most other cases the time increment stops advancing when the R1 sensor detects the approaching spoiler race ship, allowing my FACs to engage it off-colony.

After the first time this happened I clicked "Select Sub-Pulse Length (Auto)," although normally I don't change this setting. After a few other spoiler race fights I had the above situation issue happen a second time, where even though the R1 sensor was active the spoiler race was allowed to make it all the way to the colony before the time increment ended and destroyed another sensor FAC.

Is this normal behavior for large time increment advancements? My assumption was the game would automatically stop advancing point if it calculates a Hostile contact would be detected prior to the time increment completing. For now, I'm working around it by putting a lot of DSTs on colonies without better low-res active sensors available.

Ship detection is checked for after each sub-pulse.
The default sup-pulse length for 1-day increments is 30 minutes (source).
It stands to reason that the default sub-pulse for 5-day increments is 3 hours (being the nearest option to 5 * 0.5 = 2.5 hours), but it is possibly 8 hours.


You can select a shorter sub pulse for your increment length (via that second row of buttons, just below the buttons for increment length).
There is some logic that ignores manual sub pulse selection if it is below a certain percent of the increment length, but I can't find the details. Maybe Steve can remind us?

So, you can either play with shorter increments or shorter sub-pulses, or you can deploy additional sensors to account for the full movement range possible for an enemy fleet of a given speed in the span of a given sub-pulse length.
Posted by: Caesar
« on: Yesterday at 12:38:49 PM »

The thing is that the contact is always shown on top of Earth, with a trail to where it actually is. So it's almost like an inverse trail (expect that it's never been on Earth).

For instance: if the ship is orbiting Mercury, it will show a trail from Earth to Mercury, and the contact will be shown on top of Earth.
Posted by: db48x
« on: Yesterday at 12:22:57 PM »

The “movement trail” of any ship, whether one of your own or a contact, is simply a line drawn from where it was detected last time to where it is now. It doesn't try to show the real path the ship actually took.
Posted by: Andrew
« on: Yesterday at 12:04:02 PM »

It is probably the movement trail of the ship in the last impulse that would be a line apparently pointing somewhere
Posted by: Caesar
« on: Yesterday at 11:22:25 AM »

You can't delete spoilers. Use SM mode to design and spawn some warships of your own.

What about the weird way in which the contacts are displayed? Do you have any idea what might be causing that?
Posted by: JacenHan
« on: Yesterday at 11:22:11 AM »

Is this normal behavior for large time increment advancements? My assumption was the game would automatically stop advancing point if it calculates a Hostile contact would be detected prior to the time increment completing. For now, I'm working around it by putting a lot of DSTs on colonies without better low-res active sensors available.
The auto sub-pulse length gets longer for longer time increments, to keep the game from running too slowly. IIRC for a 5-day increment the auto sub-pulse length is something like 8 hours, so it is possible that a small, fast contact could get past short-range sensors with some (un)lucky timing.
Posted by: ChubbyPitbull
« on: Yesterday at 09:17:16 AM »

Does the auto-interrupt logic allow for fast-moving small ships to complete movement before the auto-interrupt occurs due to a new sensor contact? I've had some spoiler races going after one of my small colonies from time to time, so I have a small FAC fleet posted there to drive them off. My sensor FAC has an R200 sensor that detects out to 230m km, and an R1 sensor that detects out to 11m km. I've had twice now where I'm doing my normal 5-day time increments because of no contacts, to finish one 5-day where all of a sudden a spoiler race is on top of my colony, has destroyed my sensor FAC, and then the spoiler ship itself is destroyed by automatic STO fire. The spoiler race ship is small so the shorter-range R1 sensor would be required to detect it, but in other similar situations of the game, in most other cases the time increment stops advancing when the R1 sensor detects the approaching spoiler race ship, allowing my FACs to engage it off-colony.

After the first time this happened I clicked "Select Sub-Pulse Length (Auto)," although normally I don't change this setting. After a few other spoiler race fights I had the above situation issue happen a second time, where even though the R1 sensor was active the spoiler race was allowed to make it all the way to the colony before the time increment ended and destroyed another sensor FAC.

Is this normal behavior for large time increment advancements? My assumption was the game would automatically stop advancing point if it calculates a Hostile contact would be detected prior to the time increment completing. For now, I'm working around it by putting a lot of DSTs on colonies without better low-res active sensors available.
Posted by: Garfunkel
« on: Yesterday at 12:06:50 AM »

Yeah old 'training command' was a commercial space station in Earth orbit and you would have your new ships join it's TG until their Fleet Training hit 100%, for free.
Posted by: nuclearslurpee
« on: June 19, 2024, 11:22:34 PM »

Sounds like a huge indirect malus for FACs and the like.

It used to work the opposite way - fleets in training would fly around at random using the speed of the slowest ship in the fleet. This had easy exploits where you could put a very slow ship (or possibly one with no engines, I don't remember if this worked) into a training fleet and have very little fuel consumption, bypassing the usually high fuel consumption of fighters and FACs. The old way was exploitable, the new way is not really exploitable but as a trade-off is rather inflexible, costly, and annoying to micromanage.

So far it seems that Steve has not found a good solution, and the training admin command is so awkward as it is that many players just avoid it. Personally, I dislike using fleet training since it defies verisimilitude in many ways, and because a fleet with 100% fleet training has no fire delays, making the commander's Reaction bonus (and particularly the Flag Bridge component) pointless.
Posted by: Jovus
« on: June 19, 2024, 08:16:43 PM »

Sounds like a huge indirect malus for FACs and the like.
Posted by: nuclearslurpee
« on: June 19, 2024, 04:07:49 PM »

How can I train fighters or other parasites? I've moved a carrier full of parasites into a training command, and what I've accomplished is to go through half a million litres of fuel every day, because apparently despite being docked in the carrier the fighters want to burn their engines constantly during training.

Ships under a training command use fuel as if they were moving at 10% full burn. This has to include fighters, otherwise they would not be doing any training so how would they get a benefit?

If you really want to train fighter crews, you might have some luck doing it by building "dummy" fighters that replace their fuel tanks with MSP bays, training them up to 100%, and then refitting them (at a shipyard) with fuel tanks. This seems time-consuming, annoying, and a bit wasteful to me, but it should work in principle. Note that MSP is not consumed by fighters in a hangar even though fuel is consumed (weird, but okay...).
Posted by: Jovus
« on: June 19, 2024, 01:06:14 PM »

How can I train fighters or other parasites? I've moved a carrier full of parasites into a training command, and what I've accomplished is to go through half a million litres of fuel every day, because apparently despite being docked in the carrier the fighters want to burn their engines constantly during training.