Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread: C# Edition

[db48x]

That was quick. Thanks!

Anyway, I don't quite get the command HQ system - if I can just enter any number (max. command tonnage), what's the point then?

Larger HQ units are more expensive to build and research, but can apply their commander’s bonuses to a larger amount of troops. You want to have different sizes, but at the low end the wasted minerals might not be worth bothering about. That is, if you have formations of 1kt and 5kt, you could give them both an HQ unit for 5kt without caring about the extra cost. You wouldn’t want to do that with 5Mt army HQ units though.

11) With no water on a planet, terraforming is kind of pointless, right?

If there is no water then the minimum cost is 2.0; it might still be worth terraforming the planet, but it will never go lower than that.

12) Are missile-based planetary defenses possible?

No. Tow a monitor into orbit.

14) Can I stop e.g. fighter factories from employing millions when I don't build any fighters, other than shipping them all to the next moon?

Nope.

[Migi]

The index of changes, which is easier to look through than reading every single changes post, is here:
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=10666.0

4) I've been neighbors with an alien race for ages. Language is understood and diplo ships are there. But our relationship is still 0. Are there some (non-spoiler) races which don't ever feel like getting friendly?

Very high xenophobia will essentially prevent diplomatic relations from increasing, so check your race stats.

Anyway, I don't quite get the command HQ system - if I can just enter any number (max. command tonnage), what's the point then?

For Ground units, if the HQ size is lower than the unit it commands then the commander bonuses are reduced proportionally.
Larger HQs cost more to research and build than smaller HQs, but provide their bonus to more units. They are also larger, up to 250T max.
A chain of HQs provides a portion of their bonus down the chain. Also you can use the "Load all sub-units" checkbox to load a whole formation with one order. Finally it cleans up the ground window.

10) Leftover damage (after destroying a ship component) is applied "sideways" to other components, or wasted?

AFIK left over damage gets applied to the next component, as determined by the DAC. Components with 0 HTK can get chain exploded, ie all the damage keeps transmitted.

11) With no water on a planet, terraforming is kind of pointless, right?

It takes longer. First you add water vapour, the water vapour slowly condenses out of the atmosphere and the hydrosphere increases.

12) Are missile-based planetary defenses possible?

There are no missile based PDCs or STOs. You can build stations, but you need a Naval shipyard because 'no-armour stations' can't have military components.

13) Can I scrap ground units and get minerals back?

In 1.13 and lower you can delete formations but you get nothing back. In 2.0 (aka 1.14) scrapping will give you 30% of the cost and minerals back.

14) Can I stop e.g. fighter factories from employing millions when I don't build any fighters, other than shipping them all to the next moon?

No, you need to move them. If it's any consolation, they do generate you wealth.

[Zook]

Thanks for all the answers!

7) I suppose there are no good tips on how to increase increment calculation speed, other than "get a REAL computer"...?

Delete civilian ships, muck around with automatic detection settings.

If I feel bad about deleting civvie ships - what about combining them in fleets (I just found out it's possible per drag & drop)? That should speed up things a little, no?

[Droll]

Thanks for all the answers!

7) I suppose there are no good tips on how to increase increment calculation speed, other than "get a REAL computer"...?

Delete civilian ships, muck around with automatic detection settings.

If I feel bad about deleting civvie ships - what about combining them in fleets (I just found out it's possible per drag & drop)? That should speed up things a little, no?

Having multiple civie ships in one fleet can cause weird behaviour as they are not made to handle more than 1 ship in a fleet.

[trabber Shir]

Despite always clicking either 5 or 30 days, my game has been on 2 hour or shorter increments for almost 2 years. What should I be deducing from this about the NPRs?

[xenoscepter (OP)]

Despite always clicking either 5 or 30 days, my game has been on 2 hour or shorter increments for almost 2 years. What should I be deducing from this about the NPRs?

 --- Fear. Because you're next.

[Garfunkel]

Despite always clicking either 5 or 30 days, my game has been on 2 hour or shorter increments for almost 2 years. What should I be deducing from this about the NPRs?

There's war going on somewhere if it has really been 2 in-game years. Though it's possible that there's a fleet stuck in a loop somewhere and/or sensor detection loop as well.

[nuclearslurpee]

Despite always clicking either 5 or 30 days, my game has been on 2 hour or shorter increments for almost 2 years. What should I be deducing from this about the NPRs?

Probably that there is a NPR caught in a jump logic loop and it is time to crack open the DB.

One of these days Steve will actually fix the AI logic that leads to these jump loops, shortly before this we will have peace in the Middle East.

[Zook]

See here:
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=12322.new#new

[trabber Shir]

Thank you. Looking at FCT_FleetHistory it seems there are loops involving 13 fleets that jump every 2 hours between 3 different pairs of systems and one fleet that just logs "Abdiel-A II - Moon 4: Refuel from Colony" every 2 hours. None of the 5 systems involved in the loops are ones I have discovered. I randomly changed the x and y coords of most of the offending fleets in the database and that didn't seem to have any effect.

Considering the number of stuck fleets and that this has now been going on for the better part of 3 in-game years, I am not sure how or if I can fix this, and more importantly I don't see how to stop it from recurring since it seems to have happened multiple times in this game.

Any advise on what to do (or not do) in game setup to avoid this in the next game?

I assume this should be the expected result of how I set this game up (5 starting NPRs with a min distance of 20 hoping for at least one big mid-game challenge and lower than normal NPR generation chance to reduce early game encounters).

[Garfunkel]

The only way to completely avoid it is to play completely without NPR's.

Alternatively, there's only a small chance of it if you play without game-start NPR's and only have them be randomly generated as you explore. These issues can still pop-up if you don't kill the NPR fast but odds are on your favour.

Third and final option is to fiddle with the DB and try to fix these issues - delete the fleet causing problems if moving it doesn't help.

[nakorkren]

Per Steve:

For C#, the ground forces signature is equal to the total signature of all ground formation elements on a planet, divided by 100.
The signature of each element is equal to (unit size * unit number) / (fortification level * dominant terrain fortification modifier).

My current scan of a planet shows an alien ground forces signature of 2,900tons.
Is my scanner compensating for the division by 100, or is the total signature of the ground force formation elements on the planet actually 290,000tons?

The latter. The total ground force signature is equivalent to 290,000 tons. However, the actual number of ground forces may be several times that due to fortification levels, and you may be looking at over a million tons of enemy ground forces.

Good luck.

Sorry to resurrect a "settled" discussion, but I'm running into a situation where the numbers above don't make sense, specifically the 100x divisor on signature for ground forces. I'm seeing a Ground Forces Signature of 445,600 tons, on a Jungle planet. If that 100x divisor is still present in the signature per Steve's original post which was referenced as recently as April of 2021 in the above explanation, then I'm looking at an actual sig of 44 million tons, which accounting for fortification is probably more like 280 million tons of troops, which is... not believable. If the 100 divisor is no longer in use (and I'm not sure why it ever was, seems to just confuse the issue), then I'm looking at an army likely in the 2.8m range, which seems totally believable. Hence my question is... did that 100x divisor get removed at some point since 1.0.0?

[nuclearslurpee]

Sorry to resurrect a "settled" discussion, but I'm running into a situation where the numbers above don't make sense, specifically the 100x divisor on signature for ground forces. I'm seeing a Ground Forces Signature of 445,600 tons, on a Jungle planet. If that 100x divisor is still present in the signature per Steve's original post which was referenced as recently as April of 2021 in the above explanation, then I'm looking at an actual sig of 44 million tons, which accounting for fortification is probably more like 280 million tons of troops, which is... not believable. If the 100 divisor is no longer in use (and I'm not sure why it ever was, seems to just confuse the issue), then I'm looking at an army likely in the 2.8m range, which seems totally believable. Hence my question is... did that 100x divisor get removed at some point since 1.0.0?

I've done a bit of checking in an old campaign with a conveniently-located sensor frigate, and you're actually correct, the 100x divisor does seem to have been removed at some point, as I detect a signature of ~540,000 tons for a force which I estimate from a DB trawl masses not more than 4 million tons as an absolute maximum. I think when I originally answered Skoormit's post I was assuming that the force he detected was on an alien home planet and assumed the difference was made up by the 100x factor (many players are surprised to learn how much it takes to invest an alien home world!).

I think the other half of the change was that ground force signatures now have resolution 1 regardless of total size, as the only reason for the 100x factor was to bring the sensor signature down to a reasonable amount for smaller formations that prefer to remain undetected at long range. Actually I was not aware of this nuance back when I typed that answer.

The moral of this story is to never fear resurrecting a "settled" discussion when there is always more to learn about Aurora! 

[trabber Shir]

So, I decided to try to salvage the game. Just deleting the fleets unsurprisingly gave me a spam of null reference exception popups. So, I tried making a script and still got a similar volume of spam. That script is as follows:

Code: [Select]

DELETE FROM "main"."FCT_ShipyardTask" WHERE "ShipID" IN (SELECT "ShipID" FROM "main"."FCT_Ship" WHERE "FleetID" IN (SELECT FleetID FROM ProblemFleets));
DELETE FROM "main"."FCT_DamageControlQueue" WHERE "ShipID" IN (SELECT "ShipID" FROM "main"."FCT_Ship" WHERE "FleetID" IN (SELECT FleetID FROM ProblemFleets));
DELETE FROM "main"."FCT_DamagedComponent" WHERE "ShipID" IN (SELECT "ShipID" FROM "main"."FCT_Ship" WHERE "FleetID" IN (SELECT FleetID FROM ProblemFleets));
DELETE FROM "main"."FCT_FireControlAssignment" WHERE "ShipID" IN (SELECT "ShipID" FROM "main"."FCT_Ship" WHERE "FleetID" IN (SELECT FleetID FROM ProblemFleets));
DELETE FROM "main"."FCT_MissileAssignment" WHERE "ShipID" IN (SELECT "ShipID" FROM "main"."FCT_Ship" WHERE "FleetID" IN (SELECT FleetID FROM ProblemFleets));
DELETE FROM "main"."FCT_ShipCargo" WHERE "ShipID" IN (SELECT "ShipID" FROM "main"."FCT_Ship" WHERE "FleetID" IN (SELECT FleetID FROM ProblemFleets));
DELETE FROM "main"."FCT_ShipWeapon" WHERE "ShipID" IN (SELECT "ShipID" FROM "main"."FCT_Ship" WHERE "FleetID" IN (SELECT FleetID FROM ProblemFleets));
DELETE FROM "main"."FCT_Survivors" WHERE "ShipID" IN (SELECT "ShipID" FROM "main"."FCT_Ship" WHERE "FleetID" IN (SELECT FleetID FROM ProblemFleets));
DELETE FROM "main"."FCT_WeaponAssignment" WHERE "ShipID" IN (SELECT "ShipID" FROM "main"."FCT_Ship" WHERE "FleetID" IN (SELECT FleetID FROM ProblemFleets));
DELETE FROM "main"."FCT_WeaponRecharge" WHERE "ShipID" IN (SELECT "ShipID" FROM "main"."FCT_Ship" WHERE "FleetID" IN (SELECT FleetID FROM ProblemFleets));

DELETE FROM "main"."FCT_MoveOrders" WHERE "FleetID" IN (SELECT FleetID FROM ProblemFleets);
DELETE FROM "main"."FCT_ShipyardTask" WHERE "FleetID" IN (SELECT FleetID FROM ProblemFleets);
DELETE FROM "main"."FCT_Ship" WHERE "FleetID" IN (SELECT FleetID FROM ProblemFleets);
DELETE FROM "main"."FCT_Fleet" WHERE "FleetID" IN (SELECT FleetID FROM ProblemFleets);
What tables am I missing that I need, or including that I should be skipping? More generally, where would I find documentation for how to "properly" delete the problem fleets?

[Zook]

Maybe just change the systemID for those fleets and send them all to an arena system where they can duke it out?