Aurora 4x
New Players => The Academy => Topic started by: alex_g on January 16, 2021, 06:18:25 PM
-
So I have a few questions regarding NPRs.
I'm going to start with some context, I started conventional and I'm now in an ~200 year old game, with about ~400 systems discovered at 20% research speed and starting NPRs was either set to 1 or 2, I can't remember.
- Does each NPR start at vastly different tech levels or do they just progress very differently? The first 2 NPRs I found in my game were vastly different, one already had military ships with speeds of 11k kms when I was just using ion engines to get out of Sol, while the other seemed on the same level with me. The advanced NPR is not a spoiler, as I was able to form an alliance with them.
- I started conventional, does this affect NPR generation? I ask this because the next 2 NPRs I've encountered were 'primitive', no shipyards, space stations, ships or even ground units. All I had to do to conquer them was have sufficient suppression force. As I said, I don't remember if I started with 1 or 2 NPRs, and I'm fearing if because of starting conventional all the NPRs will be generated as 'primitive' while the first 2 NPRs I met were the ones from the start of the game.
- Do the NPRs not take advantage of the new technology? 80 years after I've met the NPR I was on par with at the beginning they didn't seem to improve their ships at all, they only seem to be producing in bulk the same ships as 80 years ago. Even at 20% research speed they should have gotten better in that time.
Thanks for your time!
Edit: As an off-topic curiosity which doesn't deserve its own thread: Does anyone know why the database stops growing past 667 MBs? It's been like that for a very long time - it seems hard to imagine that even though more systems systems are generated, more design, fleets, etc that it wouldn't grow in size.
-
- I could be wrong, but I believe NPRs on generation (including game start) have starting RP and BP within a percentage range of the player race starting conditions scaled by game time. What you describe is entirely within those bounds, I think.
- No, they will scale based on your starting population same as a TN start. However I believe the game can generate non-TN races with some probability, which exist largely to be conquered as their AI will never advance to TN tech (even if you SM or DB gift it to them).
- They should, I believe there was a bug report about this some time ago that the NPR research sometimes stalls.
- I'm not sure. I know the DB does not free up empty space when something is deleted (e.g. a ship is destroyed, it is removed from the DB but the space used to store those entries are not freed up to reduce the file size), so it may be reaching an upper limit and then re-using that space instead of generating more new bytes. Steve or a SQL person will know more than me.
-
For #3, I vaguely recall Steve mentioning in some post somewhere that NPR’s don’t quite research tech the way we do. While we have granular control in researching individual technologies, the NPR’s research large bulk lots of technology at once.
In other words, we can get individual new techs relatively quickly, while it can take an NPR some time to research anything new at all....but when it does it’s a large package of technologies all at once.
I suspect that with advanced enough tech, and a slow enough research modifier, you might indeed see a century or so before the NPR unlocks it’s next large tech package. That would mean it just keeps building more and more of the exact same ships until then.
Edit: Took some digging, but found the post from a couple months back. Ironically in reply to a bug report about NPR’s seemingly not researching new tech in a quarter speed research game.
The NPRs don't do research projects in the same way as players. Instead, they research groups of projects linked to their design theme. The cost and results of the research is the same and they still use the output from research facilities to generate research points, but it is handled in the background rather than via the UI, which means you won't see any NPR research in the DB. It also takes a while to research a project group, after which they get all the new techs at the same time.
-
No, they will scale based on your starting population same as a TN start. However I believe the game can generate non-TN races with some probability, which exist largely to be conquered as their AI will never advance to TN tech (even if you SM or DB gift it to them).
Good to know. I might increase the NPR generation chance then, the galaxy feels kinda empty right now but I was afraid of doing so before because I didn't want only conventional NPRs. Thanks.
Edit: Took some digging, but found the post from a couple months back. Ironically in reply to a bug report about NPR’s seemingly not researching new tech in a quarter speed research game.
The NPRs don't do research projects in the same way as players. Instead, they research groups of projects linked to their design theme. The cost and results of the research is the same and they still use the output from research facilities to generate research points, but it is handled in the background rather than via the UI, which means you won't see any NPR research in the DB. It also takes a while to research a project group, after which they get all the new techs at the same time.
I feel more relieved now, thanks.
Is there any way I can check their progress? Either with SM or by looking into the DB? Even if in the DB they're not stored as research projects, the information must be present somewhere.