Aurora 4x
VB6 Aurora => VB6 Mechanics => Topic started by: Zeebie on February 22, 2014, 02:46:46 PM
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Now that I'm well into an interstellar war, I'm pondering the details of how NPR empires work. Some questions:
- Do NPRs need wealth the same way I do? Do they get that wealth from trade? Will destroying trade ships actually hurt their economy?
- My NPR trading partner has literally hundreds of civilian ships. Does this actually reflect their economic strength and industrial production, or do they just appear magically?
- On a similar note, do NPRs have to use factories and shipyards to build warships, or do they just get them periodically?
- Do they need actual mineral access? I have never seen an NPR mining colony, asteroid miner, or mass driver.
- Do NPR establish colonies? I have never seen a colony beyond the homeworld.
- Do NPR warships follow the general rules for ship movement? I have had NPR warships appear in a place where it is almost impossible for them to have been (four FAC in a system where there had been no base or carrier for several years).
- Do NPR ships need fuel, maintenance, ordnance?
- use SM to see their colonies, ship designs
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As of 6.3 the only difference between NPRs and the player is NPRs don't use fuel and start with 3x the RP you start with.
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As of 6.3 the only difference between NPRs and the player is NPRs don't use fuel and start with 3x the RP you start with.
They start with the same RP as any player race of the same population plus a bonus based on time since game start.
The formula for Players and NPRs is :
Tech Years = Game Years + 20
Research Points = Research Labs x TechYears x 300
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Now that I'm well into an interstellar war, I'm pondering the details of how NPR empires work. Some questions:
- Do NPRs need wealth the same way I do? Do they get that wealth from trade? Will destroying trade ships actually hurt their economy?
- My NPR trading partner has literally hundreds of civilian ships. Does this actually reflect their economic strength and industrial production, or do they just appear magically?
- On a similar note, do NPRs have to use factories and shipyards to build warships, or do they just get them periodically?
- Do they need actual mineral access? I have never seen an NPR mining colony, asteroid miner, or mass driver.
- Do NPR establish colonies? I have never seen a colony beyond the homeworld.
- Do NPR warships follow the general rules for ship movement? I have had NPR warships appear in a place where it is almost impossible for them to have been (four FAC in a system where there had been no base or carrier for several years).
- Do NPR ships need fuel, maintenance, ordnance?
- use SM to see their colonies, ship designs
NPRs work the same as your Empire. They need wealth, minerals, etc. and build installation/ships just as you do. They also create both normal colonies and automated mining colonies. There are four exceptions that come to mind.
1) They don't use fuel (which is possibly why the FACs were so far from home)
2) They don't suffer maintenance failures
3) They don't have to retool shipyards.
4) Minerals from their mining colonies get magically transported home (I will fix that to make it more realistic at some point)
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NPRs work the same as your Empire. They need wealth, minerals, etc. and build installation/ships just as you do. They also create both normal colonies and automated mining colonies. There are four exceptions that come to mind.
1) They don't use fuel (which is possibly why the FACs were so far from home)
2) They suffer maintenance failures
3) They don't have to retool shipyards.
4) Minerals from their mining colonies get magically transported home (I will fix that to make it more realistic at some point)
Thanks Steve. So NPRs will make mining colonies? Any thoughts on why I haven't seen any in 50 years of game time with two very vigorous NPRs? There's no way they could have made their gigantic fleet with just the minerals on their homeworld.
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Perhaps your sensors aren't quite enough to show the mining colonies?
Or possibly their mines are in another system and their stuff is being magically transported.
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NPRs work the same as your Empire. They need wealth, minerals, etc. and build installation/ships just as you do. They also create both normal colonies and automated mining colonies. There are four exceptions that come to mind.
1) They don't use fuel (which is possibly why the FACs were so far from home)
2) They suffer maintenance failures
3) They don't have to retool shipyards.
4) Minerals from their mining colonies get magically transported home (I will fix that to make it more realistic at some point)
Do they suffer or do they don't suffer maintenance failures?
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Im assuming don't judging by the context.
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Perhaps your sensors aren't quite enough to show the mining colonies?
Or possibly their mines are in another system and their stuff is being magically transported.
Well, I went into designer mode to check on this - they had a mining colony with 125 automines in one of my systems. It was actually on a moon around the Jovian where I had a dozen harvesters. That means I had ships with active sensors running going right by them about once a month, with no pings! Moral of the story: it's really easy to hide mining colonies!
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Well, they must have transported the automines there, I think. You could have noticed freighters at such distances with your DSTS. Did you upgrade them
Also I'm not sure if Actives detect anything beside Ground Forces, especially Industrial Sites.
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Well, they must have transported the automines there, I think. You could have noticed freighters at such distances with your DSTS. Did you upgrade them
Also I'm not sure if Actives detect anything beside Ground Forces, especially Industrial Sites.
They must have been transported there before I colonized the system, because I've been blockading the jump points since then. And I actually have both a huge DSTS and a spy ship with big thermal sensors in the system. Apparently I just underestimated how hard it was to find this sort of thing!
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Do they suffer or do they don't suffer maintenance failures?
They don't - fixed the original post.
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They must have been transported there before I colonized the system, because I've been blockading the jump points since then. And I actually have both a huge DSTS and a spy ship with big thermal sensors in the system. Apparently I just underestimated how hard it was to find this sort of thing!
Actually no. Iirc. NPRs also have the full civilian sector INCLUDING civilian miningcolonies that grow magically much like ours.
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Actually no. Iirc. NPRs also have the full civilian sector INCLUDING civilian miningcolonies that grow magically much like ours.
Our mining colonies don't magically grow in systems we have no other colonies in though...
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Our mining colonies don't magically grow in systems we have no other colonies in though...
Ah, I was wondering how an NPR colony and garrison managed to sprout on Luna...
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So the colony with garrison was detectable, but mining colonies are hidden?
Surely they emit thermal for us to detect, and perhaps the game should check who controls the system before CIV mines are added anywhere?
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My mining colonies have 5 TH & EM sig per mine/automine. Edit: Civilian mining colonies don't appear to add TH or EM.
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Civilian mining colonies have single garrison battalion as protection so there should be at least some thermal signature.
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I mentioned this before as a bug. If I have 10 automines on a moon with a mass driver I have a thermal and EM signature of 55. 10 CMCs on a moon has a thermal and EM signature of 5.
It is a bug, they should have 50*num_CMC+5 Thermal and EM signature. It is hardly suprising that a signature of 5 is missed.
Their garrison plus their tracking array also generates no signature.
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Seems simple enough, the number is being divided by 10 instead of multiplied.
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No the bug is that they aren't being calculated correctly at all. No matter how many CMC are on a moon the total signature is 5.
So the EM/Thermal signature of a moon with 1 CMC and its massdriver is 5, the EM/Thermal signature of a moon with 19 CMC and their massdrivers is also 5. The first should be 55 (based on the signature reported by my government mining colony with 10 automines and 1 mass driver. The second should be 955-1045 (depending on how many massdrivers are active). Even the most primative of primative sensors should detect the second mining colony at 1 m km or so.
At the moment they are über-stealthy. My best search platform would pick them up at 125 000 km. A ship with no passives would pick them up at 5000 km. So it is little wonder people have had ships harvesting a gas giant and never seen them. My harvesters would spot them at 25 000 km which is pretty much never.
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NPRs in recent versions also do not use troop transports, I thought they did in v4.xx. That is a shame as it would be nice to capture some. They only appear to magically transport garrison units when setting up a new colony.
In addition I have had four NPR warships trapped in a system for eleven years with no way home to reload. Should they not have surrendered or destroyed themselves after a notional endurance?
As an after thought it would be good if you had to refit captured NPR warships. Since you might leave them running their merchant marine but I can't see anyone allowing a warship to be crewed by a recently conquered NPR.
Ian
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I know this post is ancient, but does anyone know if the stealthy CMCs have been fixed?