Aurora 4x
New Players => The Academy => Topic started by: Repulsion on September 26, 2011, 07:33:44 AM
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So, I was gonna make another topic to ask a few more questions when I thought, why not just make a huge topic just to ask questions, instead of spamming the forums? So here we are. (I'll use this topic for any further questions that I
might will have.
Q1: Why did I start with Ion Engines and some other advanced stuff in my new game? The only real difference between this game and my others is that I started in 2010, instead of 2025.
Q2: What does 'picket'ing at 1km/s do, or what is it used for?
Q3: What does activating a ship's transponder do?
Q4: What kind of sensors do you guys typically use, and how do you design them? I know for Anti-missile fire control sensors you want a resolution of 1, but I have no idea for any others, and I really don't want to play a guessing game.
Q5: How do you drag something/transport it between different places?
Q6: How do civilian mining colonies and shipping lines pop up?
Q7: How do sub-pulses work? As far as I know, you can choose to pass the time with time intervals everywhere from 5 seconds to 30 days. Does the sub-pulse just determine how fast these intervals pass, or do they determine when actions happen in time intervals?
Q8: On my mining/maintenance tab, Corundium and Duranium are orange. What does this mean?
Q9: HOW do ground units work? As of now, I have absolutely no idea, and I can't seem to find any tutorial (yet, that is. )
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1)There's an option to start with tech and ship designs at game start I believe.
2)No clue.
3)No clue.
4)I generally design 10-15 res sensors up to size 20 on my combat designs.
5)For installations you need freighters, for minerals you need freighters or mass drivers. You can issue an order to load installations/ore if the fleet you are ordering has cargo holds in it.
6)You start with one line, try dropping some colonists on Mars with some infrastructure, that should give the civs a kick in the pants and make them do stuff.
7)Not sure.
8)If I had to guess, it may be something used for maintenance. Just a guess, though.
9)If enemies are on whatever rock your soldiers are on, you can initiate ground combat. At the bottom of the "Ground Units" tab is a dropdown to select hostile units, pick a target and hit the button to attack them. Combat is played in rounds, much like boarding. Eventually, one side will die, generally leaning towards the side with better units and better tech.
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orange stands for: you are going to consume more than your annual production+stockpile can give you in the year. so unless you stop building something, eventually you will reach 0 in that material. and will have to wait for more to be dug out from mines.
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1. Depends on the random assignment of your initial tech points - sometime you'll find that your way ahead on sensors, but Lasers & Missiles have been utterly ignored, the next game could be quite the reverse.
2. Speed 1 means that your thermal signature is very low, and therefore will be difficult to detect. I frequently use it with the Gate Builders (they're no going anywhere for 3-6 months, why scream come and eat me to any presursors/swarm/invaders/NPRs that you may have missed?
3. pretty much the reverse of 2 - transponders say HERE I AM to anyone in system - usually used by civs.
4. Res depends on what you want to find - as you say res 1 is for missiles, I usually have another series of sensors at res 100 to pick up fleet units (5Kt+), sometimes a res20 (1000t) to pickup gunboats, as I often use this size of unit extensively . NPR created ships also often have an anti-fighter series at res 4 (200t). I Have experimented with res 400 purely for picking up capital units, but frequently find this less useful as it loses the 5000t until quite close in (its not bad as part of a fleet of other sensors tho)
5. Tugs with ship-to-ship tractors have the option of picking up individual units, moving them to a new location and dropping them.
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1. You probably clicked the option that tells your game to research the starting techs for you.
2. I'm not sure what the difference between a move to option and a picket is besides that fact that it turn your ship speed down to 1km/s
3. It sends out a signal that can be seen by anyone. Useful if you want to attract the enemy.
4. Make the anti missile sensors sensor strength twice that of your longest range antimissile defense vs size 6 missiles. If you use missiles, make the anti-ship sensor at least twice the distance vs 5000. If you use beams, make it a decent size, but don't do it too small or too large.
5. You mean something like a construction factory? You use a ship with at least 5 cargo holds. Or do you mean a shipyard? You use a ship with a tractor beam.
6. I'm not sure what's required for a shipping line, but a colony needs a certain number of population and at least 1 body in the system without a colony on it.
7. Certain things will happen more often with shorter sub-pulses. What exactly? I'm not sure.
8. It means that you are using them faster than you are mining them.
9. I've never even used ground units before. But I do know their ability in combat is dictated by their combat readiness. So a unit with 50% combat readiness will be at half strength.
EDIT: I got Ninja'd
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Several other contribs ninja's my previous post, but a few points in the remaining Qs.
6. The pseudocode for generating a civ mining colony was poated in the last week or so - try a search for CMC. Its possible to create additional shipping lines manually on the cntrl-L window in SM mode.
7. Sub pulses are used to carry out checks (particularly detection) within your chosen time interval. There IS a significant processing overhead so you will get a warning if you try to run a long interval with short sub-pulses. The idea is to try an avoid the situation where two units suddenly reach short range when (in the real world) they would normally be expected to have spotted one or another at much greater range.
8. anwered
9. Too long to anwer in the time i've got avalaible tonight sorry
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Thanks guys. Wasn't expecting this many answers at (what is for me) 6 in the morning. Anyways, I must have enabled the starting tech thing. . .
And I'm sure I'll figure out the sensor thing soon enough.
Edit: Also, it appears a comet is heading right towards my sun. There aren't any. . . collisions in this game, are there?
Edit 2: Also, my Shipyard 1 can't retool/get a class assigned to it, for some reason. Nothing is different compared to the other shipyards, except that it's slipway capacity is 24000 and it's 'Ty', instead of showing N, shows C.
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Thanks guys. Wasn't expecting this many answers at (what is for me) 6 in the morning. Anyways, I must have enabled the starting tech thing. . .
And I'm sure I'll figure out the sensor thing soon enough.
Edit: Also, it appears a comet is heading right towards my sun. There aren't any. . . collisions in this game, are there?
No collisions in the game between objects. Some npr races have a bit of code to permit ramming but this is not something that a player can order.
On a previous post the orange color for your mineral useage says that what you have qued up is going to use more than the minerals you are mining in one year. One important point however is that you could easily have more than one years production qued up and while it will turn orange, you might still be having a net increase in minerals. To see what I mean just que up something really ridiculous like 1000 shipyards. There is no way that you can build that in one year, but the program will show that you are building more than you can support with the minerals that will be mined in one year. Also note that the program does not care if the availability of minerals is going to change, or how many minerals or on the planet when it makes this calculation, just what the current rate of mining is.
Brian
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Most've already been answered, but I'll throw in my two cents anyhow.
Q3: If I'm recalling correctly, this also serves as a means by which to establish diplomatic contact. Note that contact is established in two directions: Them -> you and you -> them, if that makes sense. Activating the transponder will count as the former if they have a presence in the system. Having a recon vessel discover one of their colonies with an active sensor counts as the latter (Among various other possibilities).
Q4: I'm looking at going for a massive R1 sensor on my flagships with a smaller (1/3 to 1/4th the size of the R1) R60 for ship detection. Any ship with PD will also get a small R1 sensor as backup.
I'll be skipping over the anti-FAC sensor as I'd need to make it over a quarter of the size of the R1 to get any benefit out of it at all.
Q6: For a shipping line to start constructing ships you need the following: A place for them to ship colonists/trade goods to and have a set of commercial freighters/colony ships designed for their use. The easiest way to get civilian construction started is to simply drop a batch of infrastructure on Mars.
For the commercial mining colonies, you need a body with at least 15k+ duranium and/or sorium with 0.7+ accessibility that has not already been flagged as a colony. You can establish a colony there after the initial CMC development and it will not interfere with further CMC development. I might be wrong with some of the details here, but I'm pretty sure this is accurate.
Q9: There's a thread that I remember reading that went into extensive detail here, will spend some time looking for it and edit it in instead of typing out pages worth of material that already exists.
Edit 2 response: Shipyards are of two types, naval/military and commercial. Commercial ships ignore maintenance but have many restrictions placed on potential designs, the largest being that no weapons capable of offensive attacks can be mounted (So only CIWS). I'm pretty sure, however, that commercial ships can be built in naval shipyards, just not vice versa.
Edit for Q9: The original post has some out of date info, but the quoted part applies currently. There might've also been some tweaks to the calculation (You will, for instance, inflict more casualties the higher your offensive combat ratio gets. That mechanic was introduced to prevent small garrisons from holding out for extended periods of time when faced with overwhelming opposition).
Combat
Any race with GCU on a planet can choose to attack ground units or PDCs of another race on the same planet. Note that attacking and defending are two different actions so the attacked race may decide to remain on the defensive and not counter-attack. If both sides attack each other, two separate combats are calculated. As the combat is potentially covering the entire planet, each combat round takes place during the five day increment. If time is advanced by more than five days, one combat round takes place for every 5 days in the increment.
Attacking ground forces will have the option to concentrate their efforts on a specific PDC (based on sensor contacts) or fight a general action against enemy ground forces outside PDCs (if there are any). This is accomplished by choosing which PDC or Population to attack on the Ground Units tab of the Economics window. If a PDC is under attack, only the defenders of that specific PDC are able to take part in the defensive battle. However, troops can emerge from other PDCs to fight an offensive action against the attackers in the field and try to destroy them. Obviously this won?t be a good idea if there are enemy spacecraft within weapon range. If the attackers are concentrating on a specific PDC, the defenders are able to move around between other PDCs but are not able to reinforce a PDC under attack. In addition, the PDC under attack may not reload its magazines from the planetary stockpile.
If a PDC is captured (i.e. all ground forces within it are eliminated), it becomes part of the attacking player?s forces. He can move troops in to garrison it and the defenders may try to recapture it. There may be a chance the defender will attempt to blow up the PDC or damage its systems before it is captured, depending on his racial characteristics.
Combat Ratio and Casualties
When an attack is carried out, the total attack strength of the attacker is compared to the total defence strength of the defender to create the Combat Ratio. For example, if Race A had an attack strength of 300 and Race B had a defence strength of 200, the Combat Ratio would be 300 / 200 = 1.5. Although defenders do have an advantage, this is already built into the attack and defence strengths of each unit type so the combat ratio is unaffected unless a PDC is involved. If the defenders are in a PDC, they gain a defensive multiplier equal to one third of the PDC?s armour. For example, defenders with a total defence strength of 50 within a PDC with 8 armour would have a modified defence strength of 50 x 8/3 = 133.33.
Each defending unit has a percentage chance of being destroyed equal to the Combat Ratio multiplied by 10. For example, if the Combat Ratio was 2.7, then every defending unit would have a 27% chance of being destroyed.
Each attacking unit has a percentage chance of being destroyed equal to 10 divided by the Combat Ratio. For example, if the Combat Ratio was 2.2 then each attacking unit would have a 10/2.2 = 4.5% chance of being destroyed. If the Combat Ratio was 0.4 then each attacking unit would have a 10/0.4 = 25% chance of being destroyed. Note that for a combat ratio of 1.0, both sides will have a ten percent chance of losing each unit.
HQ units have only half the normal chance to be destroyed as they will tend to be behind the lines. There are no damaged ground units in Aurora. They are either at full strength or they are destroyed.
Morale
Each GCU starts with a Morale of 100. As long as its morale stays at this level it has no effect on combat. If the morale is increased or decreased, it affects both the attack and defence strengths of the unit. The modifier is equal to Strength x (Morale/100). For example, a unit with 110 Morale would have attack and defence strengths 10 percent higher than normal. A unit with 80 Morale would have attack and defence strengths 20 percent less than normal. In addition, when the roll is made after combat to determine if a unit is lost, the chance of being destroyed is divided by the unit?s Morale/100. For example, if a unit with 120 Morale has a fifteen percent chance to be destroyed, the modified chance = 15% / (120/100) = 12.5%, so this unit has now only a 12.5% chance of being destroyed. This simulates that lower morale units are more likely to be destroyed than higher morale units.
Commanders
Officers may be assign to command a division or headquarters unit in the same way as they command a ship, a population or a fighter group. An officer?s Ground Combat Bonus improves the attack and defence strengths of any GCU to which he is assigned. In addition, the Ground Combat Bonus of the most senior HQ commander within a PDC will modify the combat strengths of all other units in that same PDC and the Ground Combat Bonus of the most senior HQ commander outside a PDC will modify the combat strengths of all other units outside of PDCs.
Supply
Ground Combat Units do not require any type of supply.
Occupation
If all PDCs and defending ground units are eliminated, the attacking player may be in a position to conquer and occupy the defending population. The required garrison strength is based on the defence strength of the occupying force. The garrison strength required to force a surrender is equal to:
Pop in millions * Racial Determination/100 * Racial Militancy/100
For example, if the defenders have a population of 400m, a Determination of 60 and a Militancy of 50, the required garrison strength will be: 400 * (60/100) * (50/100) = 120. Note that this is a minimum amount required to force a surrender. It may be desirable to station a larger force on the planet to avoid disruption to its production facilities.
When a population is conquered, there is a chance some tech will be recovered by the occupying forces. A check is made against every background tech known by the conquered race but not the conquering race. The percentage chance of learning each tech is equal to Pop in million/5. For example, conquering a pop of 200m will yield a 40% chance of learning each background tech known by the conquered race.
Steve
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Also, my Shipyard 1 can't retool/get a class assigned to it, for some reason. Nothing is different compared to the other shipyards, except that it's slipway capacity is 24000 and it's 'Ty', instead of showing N, shows C.
Do you have any commercial vessels?
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Do you have any commercial vessels?
Do you have any commercial vessels with a tonnage less than or equal to the shipyard tonnage?
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Er, two are being built, yes. Both the Manticore and the Phoenix are 800 tons.
Also, some more questions. (X represents any given number, just so you know)
Q10: What does the x/x/x/x sensor thing mean for ships? The different sensors it has? And if so, which part represents which type of sensor?
Q11: Maintenance life is how long it needs before a ship needs to resupply at a colony, right? And what affects the maintenance life?
Q12: Also, similar to Q10, although simpler, what does x/x armor and x/x shield mean?
Edit: Oh wait, just realized that most of these are answered in the glossary. What affects maintenance life, though?
Edit 2: More questions
Q13: What does a cargo handling system do? I know a cargo hold lets you carry stuff around, but not sure what a handling system does.
Q14: Would you recommend an active sensor for a freighter, Gravsurvey, or Geosurvey ship?
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Q10: Those are your passive sensor strengths, it's Thermal/EM/Gravitational/Geological
Q12: For armor, it's Thickness / Width. So a 3/10 ship has armor 10 wide and 3 deep.
cQ13: A cargo handling system divides the time it takes to load/unload cargo/troops/etc by its rating. So a standard system with a rating of 5 means you load/unload cargo 5x as fast. You can stack multiple systems to further decrease the required time.
Q14: In order to qualify as a commerical ship, you cannot have any sensors larger than 1 HS which severely limits your active sensor strength. I usually just stick to small passive sensors for all non-combat ships.
edit: Removed horribly incorrect stuff about shields :/
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10. Thermal/Em/Grav/Geo
11. Yes. The overhaul clock and combat. The more time on the overhaul clock, the shorter maintenance life. And combat uses up maintenance supplies at double the normal rate for every damaged system.
12. Armour: Thickness/Width. Every point of thickness represents how many points of damage a location can take and width is how many places the damage can go. Shields: Strength/Recharge. Strength is the damage it can take and recharge is how long it takes to fully recharge.
13. Handling system speeds up cargo loading/unloading.
14. Freighter: Definitely NOT! Gravsurvey ship: Maybe. Depends if you want to explore the jump points with them
Geosurvey ship: No
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Okay, thanks guys. One more. . .
Q15: How do I unlock a design? Say, if I want to modify it to have more engines or some such? And how do I make it so that a design is 'finished' as in I'm fine with it and I want civilians to start using it if they want to. Is it automatic?
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10. The sensor thing is the sensor strength in Thermal/EM/Grav/Geo. The numbers for Therm and EM are the range to detect a strength 1000 contact. The Grav/Geo numbers are points per hour.
12. For armor, the x/x stands for armor rating/armor columns. Armor rating is how many rows of armor protect a single column, and the number of columns is determined by ship size and armor tech (maybe). When damage is applied, it is applied to the outermost row of a random column, and once there are no more rows left for that column another hit to it may cause internal damage.
For Shields, the x/x stands for Shield Strength/recharge time in seconds. So a 8/300 shield level will have 8 points of shield that recharge in 300 seconds (or 5 minutes). These 8 points of shield need to be stripped before damage is applied to armor/internal, and will recharge. I don't remember how partial points of sheilds function when taking damage.
14. Matter of taste: I generally put a small sensor on my grav/geo ships, but only turn them on when they are about to die. NPRs dislike seeing active sensors in "their" systems, even if you don't know that they're there.
To unlock a design, you need to go into SM mode and re-open the Class Design screen. Unlock will then be available. If you modify a design with active ships, you'll need to go to the F6 screen and select the ship to have them update.
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Q10: They are as follows: Thermal passive/EM passive/Grav/Geo
Q11: The expected life should you have "average" luck. Maint. life is, I believe, a combination of your engineering spaces, the overall size of your ship, and the cost of each component. There's probably a bit more to it as I'm going mostly from memory here.
Q12: Armor: Depth/width; Shields: Max strength/recharge time.
More in depth: Look at the "Armor status" menu under the F6 menu to get a visualization of what the armor looks like. The width is determined simply by the size of the ship and the depth is a player adjustable value.
So if you had a 1-10 ship taking fire from a gauss cannon (one damage per shot), the first hit will breach your armor and the second will have a 10% chance of causing internal damage. Or if you got hit with a missile with a size four warhead you'd be guaranteed to take one point of internal damage on the first hit. A fairly basic explanation, but there's tons of info on the wiki.
Shields are slightly different in that they cover the entire ship and must be taken down completely before armor takes damage. The downside, however, is that they will generally provide less overall protection per HS than armor. They also have two tech components: Their max strength and recharge rate. When researched equally, the shield will take five minutes to fully charge.
Q13: The handling rate affects the rate at which the cargo is un/loaded.
Q14: No. Grav/Geo might benefit from a passive sensor (With a bit of a nod going to thermal) in that they might be able to see potential enemies from far enough away to flee before being spotted, but an active sensor will just attract further attention to defenseless vessels. But generally speaking, if you follow a doctrine similar to mine when it comes to exploration (Lone warp capable combination vessels), you'll just eat the occasional survey vessel loss early on.
(Heh, four others posted while I was posting, putting it up as is anyways.)
Edit for Q15: I typically just hit the "Copy design" button on the bottom, make my changes, and then obsolete the old version. Designs are always considered "finished" the moment you close the window, so be careful about leaving a cargo vessel design with 100k capacity and a single engine. Civilians will build any non-obsolete freighter/cryogenic transport/luxury liner. You can temporarily obsolete certain roles if you want your civilians to focus on a specific area.
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15. Go into Sm mode. Civvies build it automagically.
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Q15 -
Designs get locked whenever you retool a shipyard to build them, or if you manually lock the design in the design window. Simply closing the window won't lock your design on you. Once locked a design can't be altered (although you can use SM to unlock a design). If you want to make changes to a locked design it's best to make a copy and rename it something like "Ship Name Mod A", and make your changes to the new design.
Civilian shipping lines will only build locked non-obsoleted commercial designs. As far as I'm aware, they are also restricted to building designs which include a luxury passenger module, cargo hold, or cryogenic hold.
Oh, and be aware that if you do use SM to force unlock a design and make changes to it, this will affect ships of that design which have already been built.
Edit - I forgot to mention, if you want your civilian lines to be able to build your fancy new freighter/colony ship/passenger liner you need to make sure they have enough cash to do so. The civilian lines window will tell you the amount of money each line has, and let you subsidize them to give them money. The cost for a ship is the build points shown in the design window.
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Small correction to the above: Ships do not need to have their design locked as a prerequisite for civilian construction. Due to the earlier commercial shipyard bug, my commercial shipyards had a massive backlog of necessary construction and so I decided to rely purely on the civilian sector for colonist transport. Despite having never manually locked the design, however, my civilian sector slowly built up the colony ships (Took a 30k subsidy, though, heh).
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Q16: Is there a good resizer program to use with Aurora? As of the moment, the taskgroup window is presenting big problems. The whole bottom row of buttons is cut off, which means deleting and making Taskgroups is a real hassle. I've tried resizeenable, but it doesn't really do anything other than screwing up the buttons.
Q17: Is a super survey ship practical? I'm talking about a beast of a ship; jump-capable, geo and grav sensors, as well as thermal and EM sensors. I'll need to advance down some research lines before this becomes really possible, but is it a good idea? Or would the cost of it be out of my league?
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Q16: No idea.
Q17: I'd say no, but I am of the belief that survey vessels should be small and fairly disposable as you're pretty much guaranteed to lose quite a few if you scout aggressively.
Here's my current design that's served me well for the past decade and a half or so:
Victory MkII class Geosurvey Ship 3,000 tons 285 Crew 674.5 BP TCS 60 TH 160 EM 0
2666 km/s JR 3-50 Armour 1-18 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/2/2 Damage Control Rating 3 PPV 0
Maint Life 7.3 Years MSP 422 AFR 24% IFR 0.3% 1YR 14 5YR 208 Max Repair 100 MSP
J3000(3-50) Military Jump Drive Max Ship Size 3000 tons Distance 50k km Squadron Size 3
Magneto-plasma Drive E7 (2) Power 80 Fuel Use 70% Signature 80 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 250,000 Litres Range 214.2 billion km (930 days at full power)
Gravitational Survey Sensors (2) 2 Survey Points Per Hour
Geological Survey Sensors (2) 2 Survey Points Per Hour
I had around 24 working at peak, but I'm now down to around a dozen or so after frequent losses (208 known systems, 85 surveyed). My next generation will feature the next generation of geo/grav sensors, a significantly smaller jump engine, and will be a full 1k tons smaller. I'll throw in some small passive sensors as well if I happen to have some spare room.
My current technique involves sending one survey vessel to each system and largely ignoring them save for when they discover a new jump point, in which case I cancel their current orders and have'em poke their head through to see what's on the other side. This has caused me to lose two ships to black holes though, heh.
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Q18: Wait, so you can send a grav/geosurvey ship to a system and they will survey automatically? Or is there some other command to do it?
Q19: How does one figure out the colony cost of a SB?
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Q18: Under the F12 menu, "Special Orders/Organization" tab, there's two sets of default orders that you can set. If you're going for a type of vessel similar to mine, I'd put "Survey next three system locations" as the primary and "Survey next five system bodies" as the secondary. This setup will cause the survey vessel to do all grav surveys prior to starting work on the geo portion.
Q19: Huh? SB?
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By SB I mean system body. As in, Mars, or an Asteroid. I figured you could figure it out by geosurveying it, but I've surveyed a few asteroids and nothing. Can you even create colonies on asteroids?
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Q19: To find the Colony cost, look at the system, then the planet in the System Information (F9) window. It should be the fourth line of data about bodies. Alternatively, for bodies with existing colonies, look in the colony in Population and Production window, and look at "Planet Suitability (colony cost)" underneath Species.
And yes, you can create colonies on asteroids.
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By SB I mean system body. As in, Mars, or an Asteroid. I figured you could figure it out by geosurveying it, but I've surveyed a few asteroids and nothing. Can you even create colonies on asteroids?
Ah, should've figured. You can view colony costs in the F9 menu. There are a bunch of influencing factors that should be listed in depth in one of the tutorials.
And you can create colonies on asteroids for mining purposes, but you'll never be able to terraform one such that it becomes habitable without an orbital habitat. Note that a "colony" in simply a stellar body that has stuff on it that belongs to you.
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Q19: How does one figure out the colony cost of a SB?
You need to create a species that has a acceptable gravity tolerance as the body. Otherwise it won't list a colony cost. If you do then you will need to take care of the other environmental factors population needs. Gas giants Can't be colonized.
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Small correction to the above: Ships do not need to have their design locked as a prerequisite for civilian construction. Due to the earlier commercial shipyard bug, my commercial shipyards had a massive backlog of necessary construction and so I decided to rely purely on the civilian sector for colonist transport. Despite having never manually locked the design, however, my civilian sector slowly built up the colony ships (Took a 30k subsidy, though, heh).
Had you retooled for the design or done anything that would otherwise result in the locking of the design? I could have sworn it needed to be locked for civvies to build it.
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Had you retooled for the design or done anything that would otherwise result in the locking of the design? I could have sworn it needed to be locked for civvies to build it.
Didn't do anything to lock it due to the backlog of commercial ships that I needed to build. Hell, the design is still unlocked well over a decade after the first civilian vessel was launched.
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Didn't do anything to lock it due to the backlog of commercial ships that I needed to build. Hell, the design is still unlocked well over a decade after the first civilian vessel was launched.
Crazy.
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i can confirm that civvies will buy unlocked designs.
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Q20: I'm not sure if I understand colonies. I know to become a 'colony' you just have to drop some stuff off, but I don't understand how to actually make it habitable, how people get there, what I actually need to drop there, and so on.
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Oh, I can answer that!
For a planet to be habitable, it has to be terrestrial and within the gravitational and temperature limits of the race. Let's use Mars as an example.
In order to colonise Mars, you'll need to put Infrastructure on it, because that makes possible habitation. The more infrastructure, the more population can be supported. The amount of population supported for each amount of infrastructure is modified by the colony costs, which takes into account the temperature and gas composition of the planet. Naturally, you can bring Installations and other products of industry over to the planet with cargo ships. The tutorial recommends a cargo ship with a cargo hold of 5 so it can carry over whole installations like automines.
People get there with colony ships. You can find a starting design in one of the tutorials. You just have to order it to pick up colonists on Earth, and drop them off on Mars.
Strictly speaking, infrastructure is the only thing you need. However, you'll find that having terraforming installations or at least ships with the terraforming module are necessary to bring the colony cost down so that the population of the colony can be increased.
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Q20: The key component to checking to see if a body is habitable is to check the F9 menu (Or F2 if you already have a colony created) and check the colony cost. If it's listed as N/A, you will not be able to colonize the surface of the planet as the gravity is outside your racial tolerance.
If there's a number listed, you'll be able to unload infrastructure onto the surface and start shipping colonists (Once you drop the first batch, the colony will become flagged for civilian lines to ship infrastructure/colonists). The amount of infrastructure required for the colonists depends on the colony cost.
Some more bits re:colony cost: In the F9 menu you will notice various colors on planets/moons. Dark blue indicates ideal (0 cost) where no infrastructure is required, light blue indicates roughly <3, red indicates roughly <6, and purple indicates that the planet cannot be fully terraformed to your racial ideal. Purple is fairly typical for planets/moons with a low base temperature due to how the greenhouse effect works (It's a multiplier for the base temperature). Note that for a similar reason, it's often fairly easy to terraform a hot, atmosphereless planet.
Note that the higher the colony cost, the greater the percentage of the population that will be forced into jobs in the "Agriculture/Environment" sector. That is to say, don't expect to have a robust industrial sector on planets with high colony costs (Iirc, the percentage that goes into the A/E sector is equal to [(colony cost) x (5%)] + 5%).
Terraforming is relatively straight forward: Either ship land based terraformers that require 250k employees and are 4x the size of mines/factories or design a ship with terraforming modules that simply needs to be parked in orbit of the planet you wish to terraform. Once done, just go into the "Environment/GMC" tab in the F2 menu, select the gas you want to add/remove, and input the max/min amount of said gas.
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Thanks guys.
So, er, what gases SHOULD you terraform with if you are just a normal human?
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Having little experience with terraforming, I'm hardly qualified, but I aim to get to an atmosphere with a similar composition to that of Earth. Mostly nitrogen, some oxygen. Carbon Dioxide is a good greenhouse gas, so it's probably OK to leave a substantial concentration of it in an atmosphere when you need to warm a planet.
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When you look at the System View window (the one that shows a list of all bodies in a selected system) it will tell you if there are any poisonous gasses in the atmosphere of a planet/moon/rock/whatever. You need to remove those gasses, and then add greenhouse or anti-greenhouse gas to bring the body to a livable temperature for your species, then add enough oxygen to make the atmosphere breathable. You also need to keep in mind minimum and maximum atmospheric pressure your species can withstand, although this will only come up in the more extreme cases.
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Aim for having just enough oxygen on most worlds, like maybe .02 atm more than needed so that they can't be hostile terraformed easily, and use safe greenhouse/anti-greenhouse gas for temperature. If you want to role-play, go as close to earths atmosphere as possible.
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Depends on the temperature.
You've got five or so categories to work with (and one example): Inert gases (nitrogen), greenhouse gases (safe greenhouse), anti-greenhouse gases (safe anti-greenhouse), poisonous gases (methane), and the gas your race breathes (oxygen).
Poisonous gases give a flat colony cost should any be present in the atmosphere.
For the default human race, you will need between 0.1 and 0.3 atm of oxygen as well as having under 30% of the total atm consisting of oxygen.
Inert gases are pretty much just that, their only contribution being a small increase in the greenhouse factor.
For the anti/greenhouse gases, they each contribute +/- 1 to the "Greenhouse Pressure" value in the following equation for the greenhouse factor (This is also displayed in the F2 menu under environment): 1 + (Atmospheric Pressure /10) + Greenhouse Pressure (Maximum = 3.0)
Couple example situations:
A planet with 25atm of GG: 1 + 25/10 + 25 = 28.5, which is over the maximum value of 3.0, so the effective value is just that, 3.0. Note, however, that it'll be a pain in the ass to terraform as you'll need to remove over 22atm worth of GG before the temperature starts dropping.
A planet with 0.2atm oxygen, 1.8atm nitrogen, and 1atm AGG: 1 + 3/10 + (-1) = 0.3. Note that, with the way the modified temperature is calculated, this planet will likely experience substantially more cooling than a planet that you were trying to warm up with a similar amount of GG.
The order in which you add/remove gases will depend heavily on the particular setup of your planet.
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There is also a limit of 30% O2 - more than this and the atmophere becomex toxic (in theory this would be true of some of the other gases eg CO2 but only O2 is actually implemented in the game)
argh - ninja'd
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2. I'm not sure what the difference between a move to option and a picket is besides that fact that it turn your ship speed down to 1km/s
That's the difference. If you want to picket a jump point you generally want to move to a waypoint near it and turn your engines down so you don't have a blazing thermal signature. The picket order lets you give an order to do so.
John
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Q21: So, I've started moving people to Mars. Right now there are 0.13 million people on Mars, and I've been getting "Unrest is increasing on Mars due to overcrowding..." I'm wondering, what does this affect, and how does it affect it?
Q22: I'm experiencing some shortages of minerals, with Earth and Mars. I've been trying to get a mass driver up on Mars, but it will take a bit. Do you guys know of any efficient way to get a colony up, or to transport minerals? I've been thinking of designing a mining ship, and then pairing it with a freighter that drags around a mass driver. The plan is, the mining ship mines, the freighter unloads the mass driver, then the mining ship unloads the minerals onto the planet, to get launched by the mass driver out to another planet. Would this work?
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Q21: So, I've started moving people to Mars. Right now there are 0.13 million people on Mars, and I've been getting "Unrest is increasing on Mars due to overcrowding..." I'm wondering, what does this affect, and how does it affect it?
Q22: I'm experiencing some shortages of minerals, with Earth and Mars. I've been trying to get a mass driver up on Mars, but it will take a bit. Do you guys know of any efficient way to get a colony up, or to transport minerals? I've been thinking of designing a mining ship, and then pairing it with a freighter that drags around a mass driver. The plan is, the mining ship mines, the freighter unloads the mass driver, then the mining ship unloads the minerals onto the planet, to get launched by the mass driver out to another planet. Would this work?
21 - Any planet which isn't ideally habitable (0 colony cost) requires infrastructure to keep the population alive. If you exceed the limits of that infrastructure, you'll get overcrowding messages and the colony unrest will start to climb. This affects a few different things, like the efficiency of buildings on the planet, and the growth rate (it will be negative, the more overcrowded the place is, the more people will die annually).
22a - There's no real trick to getting a colony up as far as I've been able to find. Just load infrastructure or terraform it, then ship people/installations there. To transport the minerals I typically put mass drivers on each mining colony in a system and have them fire to a central location, with a freighter set to do the hauling from the central system depot to Sol and Earth. Remember to set the orders on a hauling ship to cycle (including a refuel order) so it can make round trips forever. If you want to keep some of the minerals at the world doing the mining or the 'depot' world, you can set a minimum threshold by clicking on the appropriate line in the mining/maintenance tab of the pop/production window.
22b - Yes, that would work. I've never actually used them myself, but my understanding is that asteroid mining ships will automatically mine from any asteroid they're in orbit of as long as you have a colony on it, and they leave the minerals on that asteroid. The main issue will be finding an asteroid with a worthwhile amount of the mineral(s) you need.
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The plan is, the mining ship mines, the freighter unloads the mass driver, then the mining ship unloads the minerals onto the planet, to get launched by the mass driver out to another planet. Would this work?
Or you could just load the minerals on the ship and haul them wherever you want them :)
I think you'll find that, for useful quantities of minerals, the time it takes to mine out an asteroid will be MUCH longer than the transit times of freighters and other ships.
John
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Q21: Mostly has been answered, but you'll get this message periodically even when you're doing everything right re:establishing the colony. You'll often have situations where you'll see 2.56mil colonists where only 2.54mil can be supported by the infrastructure. In this case, unrest will rise by something negligible, like 0.04%, and can pretty much be ignored.
Note that you colony *will* demand protection once it reaches 10mil colonists and, should that not be provided for, efficiency will eventually reach 0%. You can also use a garrison force to quell the unrest, although you're probably more likely to do a combination of the two: Engineers to build the low end/nearly useless PDC to give the low amount of protection demanded.
Q22: Early on, I tend to avoid mass drivers for all but far reaching bodies (Titania, etc) that I'm no longer making regular deliveries to. They're an extra 300BP each, which is a significant amount early on. Only once I got my extra-solar mining colonies up and running did I start relying heavily on mass drivers in those systems (Actually, that'll be accurate in half a year once automine production resumes, still mass producing research labs).
The reason for this being that if you're still delivering the occasional automine to Titan, there's no reason your cargo ship can't take back the load of minerals with it.
However, should you have chronic shortages of minerals you're harvesting off Sol, mass drivers do make for a more reliable delivery method.
As far as getting the colony up, subsidizing the civilian sector is one excellent way to jump start their freighters/colony ships. Just note that they never upgrade their ships, so don't drop 50k in subsidies this early on.
Also, asteroid mining modules (only work on asteroids + comets) *only* drop minerals on the surface due to coding limitations in the game.
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As far as getting the colony up, subsidizing the civilian sector is one excellent way to jump start their freighters/colony ships. Just note that they never upgrade their ships, so don't drop 50k in subsidies this early on.
Hah, I've had a really annoying time of my latest game: The two shipping companies that have sprung up keep bringing colonists to Mars, which means I'm forced to continuously build infrastructure for them. Well, if it earns me money...
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Hah, I've had a really annoying time of my latest game: The two shipping companies that have sprung up keep bringing colonists to Mars, which means I'm forced to continuously build infrastructure for them. Well, if it earns me money...
Heh, made a mistake similar to yours, but you won't expect what it actually is:
You don't need to manually build infrastructure except for the first batch that you drop off. Infrastructure is produced as a trade good on all colonies. This not only allows for modest expansion without constant deliveries, but it means Earth has a massive surplus that your civilians will haul as trade goods.
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You don't need to manually build infrastructure except for the first batch that you drop off. Infrastructure is produced as a trade good on all colonies. This not only allows for modest expansion without constant deliveries, but it means Earth has a massive surplus that your civilians will haul as trade goods.
I have noticed that for a month, the population will be at its limit, then infrastructure will magically appear. It annoys me to see the reports of "Unrest rising" and "unrest falling" every I check the news, though. But I imagine things will get better when its population hist 25 million, eh?
Also, sorry for kinda hijacking the thread!
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I'm still getting the unrest messages with Titan despite it being at 34mil, so the messages won't really go away until you either get the colony cost low enough such that the colony will produce enough infrastructure on it's own or you finish terraforming.
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I have noticed that for a month, the population will be at its limit, then infrastructure will magically appear. It annoys me to see the reports of "Unrest rising" and "unrest falling" every I check the news, though. But I imagine things will get better when its population hist 25 million, eh?
Also, sorry for kinda hijacking the thread!
That's most likely triggered by pop growth exceeding infrastructure, then construction/shipping adding it.
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That's most likely triggered by pop growth exceeding infrastructure, then construction/shipping adding it.
Oh yeah, naturally. I meant that the pop growth exceeds the infrastructure, then the shipping lines bring infrastructure there, raising the popcap and alleviating the problem.
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Q23: Do you actually have to split different ships into different taskgroups if you want to give them individual orders? Or is there a different way?
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23. You need to split the taskgroup to give different orders.
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That's unfortunate. Well, if I must have ~25 taskgroups, I will.
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Q24: What is the point of reactors? Longer term power? Or...?
Q25: How exactly do you design missiles? Can't find any missiles in the 'Create Research Project' thing, and I actually really have no idea HOW to design missiles. It would be unfortunate if I designed a missile much bigger than I needed it to be.
Q26: What does fuel efficiency affect? Less fuel used?
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Q24: What is the point of reactors? Longer term power? Or...?
Q25: How exactly do you design missiles? Can't find any missiles in the 'Create Research Project' thing, and I actually really have no idea HOW to design missiles. It would be unfortunate if I designed a missile much bigger than I needed it to be.
24 - reactors are required for most beam type weapons.
25 - F2 screen. Bottom. Should be a Missile button. Click that.
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26: Fuel efficiency is indeed less fuel used. I believe it's backwards though, "lower" efficiency translates to less fuel use IIRC.
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Q28: What do fuel refineries do?
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Q28: What do fuel refineries do?
Make fuel out of sorium.
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24 - reactors are required for most beam type weapons.
Most? Which beam weapons do not require a reactor?
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Most? Which beam weapons do not require a reactor?
CIWS & Gauss Cannon.
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Q29: I keep getting overflow errors and crashes when trying to find anything on the system map. Right now the system map is just a blue screen, for some reason.
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too zoomed in?
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No, it's not zoomed in. I've tried zooming it all the way out; nothing.
Q30: How exactly do mass drivers work? Just set your destination and eventually they'll send some mineral packets?
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No, it's not zoomed in. I've tried zooming it all the way out; nothing.
Q30: How exactly do mass drivers work? Just set your destination and eventually they'll send some mineral packets?
Yep. Every 5-day increment, the MD will launch a mineral packet. You can click a checkbox on the system map to make the packets show, but in my experience, the packets flying in from everywhere soon clutter the map, so I keep ´em off.
Only planetary bodys and only those with a mass driver to catch the load are selectable as targets.
It used to be possible, to remove the catching mass driver which lead to mass destruction (think dino-killer here), but Steve introduced a warning, once you try to remove the last MD from a planet "under fire". (not sure you can remove the last mass driver at all, as I am sticking to an older version atm).
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It is possible to remove the last MD. The warning pops up only after the cargo ship has loaded the MD. If you already have a mineral packet on the way and use long-enough increment that the cargo ship has managed to depart... fun fun fun!
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These 'overflow' errors are really pissing me off. I don't understand what's causing them. I can't see the system map, and if I try to move around with the arrows, it crashes after ~5 arrow clicks.
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These 'overflow' errors are really pissing me off. I don't understand what's causing them. I can't see the system map, and if I try to move around with the arrows, it crashes after ~5 arrow clicks.
What is the exact text of the overflow error and what is the title of the popup box?
Steve
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Have you zoomed too far? I received two sorts of overflow errors regarding the system map. First one when I had over a dozen TGs flying around in Sol and that disappeared when I reduced the number of TG's that the game had to draw on the map. Second one was when I had zoomed really, really far out in another system, which was solved by clicking the "min zoom" button as that focuses on the star, while showing a reasonable zoom.
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Okay, I'll copy the error.
Error in CentreOnLocation
Error 6 was generated by Aurora
Overflow
Please report to http://aurora2.pentarch.org/viewforumphp?f=11
Of course, it is in a little box.
Edit: Also
Q30: How do you switch between different systems? As in, switch between viewing them?
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30: On the left side of the system view there will be this dropdown box. Click on it (It's probably saying "Sol") and choose a different system, it'll drop you into the system view there.
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Q31: I'm not exactly sure how armor works, as of now. I have read the tutorials, but it still seems a bit befuddling. So there is armor coverage/thickness/etc that depends on the size of the ship, and armor depth that can be added on. But what does armor depth help with? How can I see what weapons will do what to armor? Is there something on the weapon design screens that tells me what x weapon will do to armor?
Q32: For active sensors for detecting ships, I understand the resolution thing; X amount of resolution for x sized ship. But, does the resolution have to be spot on to detect a ship? Or can it be kind of near the TCS to detect it on scanners?
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Q31: armour width depends on the volume of your ship, ie it's total tonnage. Higher tonnage, larger volume, bigger ship - more armour width. This just means there are more locations for weapons to hit. Depth is the actual thickness of armour and is the part that really protects the ship. Different weapons deal damage in different formations - for example, lasers make deep gauges that are very narrow, so if the first hit does not penetrate armour, it's highly unlikely to get a hit in the exact same spot again. Missiles, OTOH, create craters, so it's easier to get a second hit on or near the first hit, which helps overall armour penetration. In essence, you need to "sandpaper" the armour away before you get to inside to do some real damage. Check wiki for the exact damage variations of different weapons, it's all listed there.
Q32: No, the resolution means the size of a ship that the sensor is optimized for. It will detect smaller ships but not on the same distance - so smaller ships can sneak closer to your sensor before it picks them up. IRL, a larger ship would be spotted farther away than the nominal sensor range (to a degree), but I think that Aurora has it capped to the nominal size. So sensor with 50HS resolution with the range of 20 milkliks will spot anything bigger at the same distance but smaller objects would get closer.
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Hrrm...
Q34: What does 'Incorporate Sub-fleets' do?
Q35: How can I make it so that my survey ships DON'T survey asteroids?
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Q35: One of the options should set it to survey only moons and planets. Manually order comet surveys.
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Q35: One of the options should set it to survey only moons and planets. Manually order comet surveys.
And where would those options be? Default orders? Orders? I can't seem to find it.
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And where would those options be? Default orders? Orders? I can't seem to find it.
Under conditional orders. It is in the second tab on the TG screen.
EDIT: I'm dumb, it's not conditional orders, ignore me.
EDIT2: it's under default orders.
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I'm getting all kinds of orders to survey different things, but no orders to not survey. (as well as the usual jump/refuel/etc.)
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If you do Survey Planet or Moon, it surveys everything except asteroids/comets.
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If you do Survey Planet or Moon, it surveys everything except asteroids/comets.
OKAY! Seems to be working, thanks!
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Q36: So, I've found hostile life. Or rather, missiles. Two contacts, one quite far away, and the other quite near, which I presume were missiles. Where can I view info about them?
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It all depends on what sensor assets you have. If you've got no sensor equipment on the ship that's found these things, then you're not going to learn anything. However, if you DO learn something, you can go to the Diplomacy menu, then switch over to the Tactical Intelligence tab for what information you may have gathered.
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I had a full sensor suite on my (now destroyed) Jump-capable survey ship. Unfortunately, there is nothing on the tactical information tab, nor in the 'view technology' thing.
All I know is that there WERE two rings around my ship, one quite far away which I presume was the hostile ship, and then another contact that came out of nowhere that were the missiles, I assume (having not been detected from farther away, due to the resolution of my sensors). The missiles were named Kalat Anti-ship missiles. When I detected the Kalat's, they were apparently Strength 48 Resolution 91. They caused 3 points of damage on my ship.
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It takes time for information to be discovered about another ship. I know I spent upwards of an hour in sensor range of an alien just today before I learned anything about it.
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Where your actives actually on?
The "strength 49, Resolution 91" is the active sensor of the hostile ship or the missiles, not the ship/missile itself. The enemy sensor got detected by your own EM sensors.
If there is nothing in tac-intel, it is possible those missiles were launched from a mine. When you say "quite far away", how far are we actually talking about? A couple million klicks is nothing in missile combat.
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Ah, yes, that clears things up a bit. I didn't have them on, and tried to turn them on, but alas. My ship was surveying a planet, and I got the far-away contact at about... erm... hard to figure it out now, but I'd say about... around 2000k. Hard to figure out, as it depends on how zoomed in I am. But I remember that it was something like one or two centimeters on my actual screen. (not like that's any help.)
Unfortunately, whenever I try to pass time it crashes ('not responding'), so not sure what to do.
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That's normal, especially if you don't have a top-of-the-line processor. When I'm about 25 years into a game my "30 Days" wait time goes up to 30 seconds or more, during which time Windows tells me it's not responding. Just give it some time and it should be fine.
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if you queue up 30 days increments it takes a bit less. from the f3 screen, if you're waiting that 4 month to construction to complete or research to be finished, tick auto increment, write 4 in the min inc text, push 30 and after a long wait you're done and at the point you need to take action.
it is slightly more efficient than pressing 30 each time, and leaves you with larger chunk of free time in bulk so you can actually read or something in the meanwhile.
edit:
oh, almost forgot: ctrl+f8 exits from auto increments
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Oh dear. Now when I try to start it I get this:
Error in Form Load
Error 3343 was generated by DAO.Workspace
Unrecognized database format 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Aurora\Stevefire.mdb'
Please report to *snip*
And then I get an 'UpdateGameLog' error window that CAN'T be closed, unless I force restart.
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Oh dear. Now when I try to start it I get this:
Error in Form Load
Error 3343 was generated by DAO.Workspace
Unrecognized database format 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Aurora\Stevefire.mdb'
Please report to *snip*
And then I get an 'UpdateGameLog' error window that CAN'T be closed, unless I force restart.
It sounds like you ctrl-c'd out while it was working, and corrupted you database. Try using your backup copy (you do have a backup copy, right? :) ). There's an FAQ on save strategies if you aren't sure how to do it....
John
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Yeah, I think I can just pull another copy up from Winrar... Ah yes, some zips and... crap...
Oh wait, nevermind.
5.50 does contain 5.53 though, right?
Edit: Nevermind, it does.
Q37. Anyways, if I choose not to let the game pick my starting technologies, how do I choose them? I have this little box that says 'Starting RP' but I see no 'instant' button or anything to let me utilize them.
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37. Turn on SM mode before opening the research window.
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Q38: For a fuel harvester, do you need cargo holds to hold the sorium in? Or...?
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No, it gets processed directly to fuel (so have lots of fuel tanks instead).
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Does that not let you drop it off anywhere? Or are you simply just supposed to somehow make it a collier?
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A collier is for missiles. I'm not sure how that applies to fuel harvesters. ???
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Er, I mean, those mobile resupply ships.
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You would send a tanker to your fleet of fuel harvester ships to bring the processed fuel back to one of your colonies.
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Q38: I'm having some trouble in a lot of games stabilizing my mineral supply. I get a colony on Mars as soon as I can, but everything is so slow to build. I get civilian mining colonies on various moons/planets, but the mineral packets they send are so small, and their mining output is small as well. Is there anything I can do to help myself?
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You just have to explore quickly and find a few bodies with good sources of minerals. I tend to count the total availability of all minerals on a body to determine if I want to put a mining colony there. For example, if there are 4 minerals on it in decent amounts with availabilities of .4 .8 .9 and .7, I'd add it all together and say it's 2.8, which is decent but not great. I try to look for bodies with a total of 3 or more and at least 100k of each mineral it has.
If a body is unsuitable for colonization, I use freighters to ship automated mines to it and put a civilian administrator with a good mining bonus in charge. If it is suitable, I ship some infrastructure to them and then a bunch of regular mines. I use mass drivers to send the mined minerals back to my homeworld, or just put a freighter on a cycle loop of picking up the minerals from my various mining bases. You don't need a ton on infrastructure on a new world for it to support enough civilians to be a valuable mining colony (a few hundred units will do), and your civilian shipping lines will bring more infrastructure to it automatically as trade goods to let it grow on its own.
Anyway, that's my approach. You may find another way works better for you.
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Q38: I'm having some trouble in a lot of games stabilizing my mineral supply. I get a colony on Mars as soon as I can, but everything is so slow to build. I get civilian mining colonies on various moons/planets, but the mineral packets they send are so small, and their mining output is small as well. Is there anything I can do to help myself?
If you havn't been increasing the mining tech then that would also help you. its under the construction and production research tab. It will also help somewhat to have upped the construction rate, but that will end up using more minerals as well.
Brian
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Q38: I'm having some trouble in a lot of games stabilizing my mineral supply. I get a colony on Mars as soon as I can, but everything is so slow to build. I get civilian mining colonies on various moons/planets, but the mineral packets they send are so small, and their mining output is small as well. Is there anything I can do to help myself?
Use the "Geological Survey Report" (6th icon from the left on the system view menu bar). Pick the minerals you're lowest on and make sure to create your mining colonies on the system bodies with the highest availability.
I like to set at least 25% of my initial construction to making a couple hundred extra automated mines. Then when I find a good location for mining, I always put at least 50 mines, 100 if possible on my automated colony. Depending on the number of minerals and availability, you might want to put more than one mass driver there as well.
Finally, every so often, make sure you check the mineral status on the colony every so often. You might find a nice stockpile of minerals building up and a quick freighter trip can resupply Earth for a while.
Don't worry too much about the packets being small. The mass drivers opt for a frequency over size strategy. You might only get a few tons of minerals per packet, but you're getting packets every few days.
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Also with the packets from the mass drivers they try to send an even amount of each available material. If you put a minimum stock amount that is higher than what is currently there the mass driver will not count that mineral in the total. So if there are all 11 minerals being mined but you only need 3 of them you can set it up so only those three are being sent. This will get you almost four times as much of each mineral. The rest will stay on the colony untill you change the minimum or send a freighter to pick it up specifically.
Brian
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A collier is for missiles. I'm not sure how that applies to fuel harvesters. ???
Actually, colliers are for coal. Darn Weber to a fiery afterlife for perpetuating the idea that you call ammunition ships this.
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Actually, colliers are for coal. Darn Weber to a fiery afterlife for perpetuating the idea that you call ammunition ships this.
I've actually been wondering where the collier = ammo thing came from. :P
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Hrrm, the actual process of adding gas to the atmosphere in terraforming is pretty fast but... the process of heating up is SO SLOW HNNNG
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Hrrm, the actual process of adding gas to the atmosphere in terraforming is pretty fast but... the process of heating up is SO SLOW HNNNG
Pretty much what everyone thinks.
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Q39: So, I've been playing around with designing missiles (finally). My first one is an anti-missile missile, and here are it's specs:
Missile Size: 6.5 MSP (0.325 HS) Warhead: 1 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 40
Speed: 11500 km/s Endurance: 17 minutes Range: 11.8m km
Cost Per Missile: 2.25
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 460% 3k km/s 120% 5k km/s 92% 10k km/s 46%
Materials Required: 0.25x Tritanium 5.8x Gallicite Fuel x750
Development Cost for Project: 225RP
I think I did pretty good. Good to-hit chances (I think), and the speed also seems nice, but I'm not sure about the missile size. Aren't AMM's supposed to be pretty small? And, I'm not ACTUALLY really very sure about it's other stats, although they looked okay to me.
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It is pretty much useless an an antimissile or offensive missile
Antimissiles should be size 1 or the rof of the launcher will be too low and you will run out of antimissiles much faster than the enemy will run out of missiles
Also
too slow to be useful against any likely missiles
range is longer than you need.
It looks like you have absolute baseline technologies , at which point effective weapons are unlikely
Typically missiles will have a speed of 20k+ making your hit chance about 20% unless you fail to achieve an intercept at all as your missile is slower than the attacking missile
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Heh, well shows what I know.
I'm not really taking this game very seriously anymore, just trying out random stuff. I suppose if I actually start playing and know what military tech I want to specialize in, then I will get a bit better tech. Also, my tech isn't too bad, I think, but my missile tech ISN'T as big as some of my other tech, and I've really no idea how far up the chain goes, and what the polar opposite of baseline really IS.
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Usually I'd say that it is not particularly effective trying to make anti-missiles until you have researched the first 2 levels in each missile tech (warhead 4, agility 48, missile engine 3, fuel efficency 0.8).
Using those you can make something like
Missile Size: 1 MSP (0.05 HS) Warhead: 1 Armour: 0 Manoeuvre Rating: 23
Speed: 29100 km/s Endurance: 1 minutes Range: 1.1m km
Cost Per Missile: 1.0596
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 669.3% 3k km/s 207% 5k km/s 133.9% 10k km/s 66.9%
Materials Required: 0.25x Tritanium 0.5472x Gallicite Fuel x12.25
Development Cost for Project: 106RPwhich has about a 33% chance of catching a target moving at 20k and 22% of hiting a target moving at 30k.
You can manage to create anti-missiles of size 4 or so using lower level tech but they suffer from the much longer reload rate and the fact that you will be unable to carry very many of them.
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Antimissiles should be size 1 or the rof of the launcher will be too low and you will run out of antimissiles much faster than the enemy will run out of missiles
I've found that PDC anti-missiles can be size-2 instead, since PDCs fire twice as rapidly and you don't need to tech up very far tp reach the maximum (1 launch per 5-sec increment) rate-of-fire. Also, PDC missiles can quickly draw extra stocks from the planet that they are located on, so magazine storage capacity is a minor issue.
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'Quickly drawing from planetary stocks to re-ammunition your units' is generally considered an exploit, but it's one NPRs and Precursors use, so your mileage may vary.