Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread: C# Edition

[ranger044]

Just a curiosity question:

Do you prefer known star games or randomly generated?

Pros/Cons?

I don't think I've ever played without known stars turned on, and my potato boat rig can't handle more than a century or two with a few hundred systems anyway. So just curious on peoples' thoughts.

[EclipsedStar]

Just a curiosity question:

Do you prefer known star games or randomly generated?

Pros/Cons?

I don't think I've ever played without known stars turned on, and my potato boat rig can't handle more than a century or two with a few hundred systems anyway. So just curious on peoples' thoughts.

Haven't played that many games, but I think I prefer known stars over randomly generated. This might be due to me messing something up in settings, but in my random stars game, all of the stars I found started with the letter A, which got a little old fast (and then I started using select name for each system after the first dozen or so so that they don't all start with A). Known stars I haven't had to do that so... known stars for me. Known stars also makes sense for me from an rp perspective as I've only been playing/starting on earth/terra, rather than some of those other starts where people spawn themselves in different star system or rp as a fragmented empire.

[nuclearslurpee]

I usually do Known Stars. I do think Random Stars usually leads to more interesting galactic maps topographically, but I prefer the system generation of Known Stars with a larger proportion of red dwarf systems making the map feel more spread out and colonizable systems less frequent. With Random Stars, exploration can feel negligible because you can discover 10 good colonization candidates in 10 systems, plus distances between stars tend to be longer so expansion across the galaxy is overall slower.

[ZimRathbone]

Just a curiosity question:

Do you prefer known star games or randomly generated?

Pros/Cons?

I don't think I've ever played without known stars turned on, and my potato boat rig can't handle more than a century or two with a few hundred systems anyway. So just curious on peoples' thoughts.

I usually play with Random Stars - normally generating a new home system for my player race rather than using Sol/Terra/Earth.

Its more because I got tired of the number of systems that were generated with very similar names in the Real Stars a few years ago (due to the catalogue naming conventions).  With the Random option I found that I was hitting the System rename a lot less often.

While sometimes you do get better survey luck I recently have found a lot more barren or only marginally useful systems in the early exploration phase ... although that may be just a function of the RNG Godz.

[Garfunkel]

Known Systems if I start at Earth, Random Stars if I play as aliens.

[welchbloke]

So I've encountered the dreaded 5s increment issue again. I've had a look in the DB and set all of the NPRs to player races to check if there was a detection or interrupt message I was missing. There isn't anything obvious, not detections by any of the NPRs or my race that I can see. I've checked the fleets for all races and none of them appear to have open fire orders and no contacts (a common cause for this issue IIRC). Any suggestions from the collective on what else to check to see if I can work out what is causing it?

Welchbloke

I'd like to poke around in the db if you don't mind uploading it.

Be my guest. It also isn't being caused by the 4 fleets that are all that's left of one of the spoiler races I encountered. I deleted them and it made no difference.

Welchbloke

I finally worked out what was causing this but not the why. It was a severely damaged warship from the second player race that was on 1% MSP. I turned off auto repair and removed all the repair jobs. It made no difference. When I forced an abandon ship, the error went away and I could advance with longer time incements again.

Welchbloke

[skoormit]

So I've encountered the dreaded 5s increment issue again. I've had a look in the DB and set all of the NPRs to player races to check if there was a detection or interrupt message I was missing. There isn't anything obvious, not detections by any of the NPRs or my race that I can see. I've checked the fleets for all races and none of them appear to have open fire orders and no contacts (a common cause for this issue IIRC). Any suggestions from the collective on what else to check to see if I can work out what is causing it?

Welchbloke

I'd like to poke around in the db if you don't mind uploading it.

Be my guest. It also isn't being caused by the 4 fleets that are all that's left of one of the spoiler races I encountered. I deleted them and it made no difference.

Welchbloke

I finally worked out what was causing this but not the why. It was a severely damaged warship from the second player race that was on 1% MSP. I turned off auto repair and removed all the repair jobs. It made no difference. When I forced an abandon ship, the error went away and I could advance with longer time incements again.

Welchbloke

I wonder if it had a damaged fire control that was stuck on open fire.

[welchbloke]

So I've encountered the dreaded 5s increment issue again. I've had a look in the DB and set all of the NPRs to player races to check if there was a detection or interrupt message I was missing. There isn't anything obvious, not detections by any of the NPRs or my race that I can see. I've checked the fleets for all races and none of them appear to have open fire orders and no contacts (a common cause for this issue IIRC). Any suggestions from the collective on what else to check to see if I can work out what is causing it?

Welchbloke

I'd like to poke around in the db if you don't mind uploading it.

Be my guest. It also isn't being caused by the 4 fleets that are all that's left of one of the spoiler races I encountered. I deleted them and it made no difference.

Welchbloke

I finally worked out what was causing this but not the why. It was a severely damaged warship from the second player race that was on 1% MSP. I turned off auto repair and removed all the repair jobs. It made no difference. When I forced an abandon ship, the error went away and I could advance with longer time incements again.

Welchbloke

I wonder if it had a damaged fire control that was stuck on open fire.

It was a Fleet Scout without any FC, just active sensors, both of which were damaged. I went back to the old DB before I deleted this ship, SM repaired it, then used the external damage button to get close to the same damage it had before. Now the time advances are back to normal - weird glitch but fixed now.

[Langer]

The wiki is down for me, so I'm asking here:

My dominant terrain for a terraformed Mars went from Cold Desert/Desert to Subarctic and I am not seeing any particular reason. Anyone have any idea the difference between the two, or why it switched?

Thanks.

[davidb86]

Are you adding water vapor to the atmosphere?  A small change in the hydrographic % could have pushed you out of desert.

[Langer]

Hydrographic extent is 19.04 at the moment, water vapor in atmo is .0032, which should still be within Desert guidelines.

[Steve Walmsley]

Hydrographic extent is 19.04 at the moment, water vapor in atmo is .0032, which should still be within Desert guidelines.

Mars has a slightly eccentric orbit. It's possible that as the distance from the sun changes, the environment on Mars might change so that previous terrain is no longer supported.

[paolot]

To increase the Intelligence of an ELINT ship, which "Command and Control" module should I add to the ship? or do we need a new one?

[skoormit]

The change made to the fleet detection code for 2.0 states:

In v2.0, for increments of one hour or more, Aurora will check the movement of all ships where the destination is either a hostile ship contact or a waypoint where hostile ships are also present.

I've kind of just assumed that "waypoint" here meant any fleet order destination (a planet, a JP, etc), rather than meaning only literal waypoints.

Is that correct?
Or is it the case that the specialized detection logic won't be in effect when a fleet just happens to be moving to where a hostile fleet is (without having that contact or a waypoint there as the destination)?

[nuclearslurpee]

The change made to the fleet detection code for 2.0 states:

In v2.0, for increments of one hour or more, Aurora will check the movement of all ships where the destination is either a hostile ship contact or a waypoint where hostile ships are also present.

I've kind of just assumed that "waypoint" here meant any fleet order destination (a planet, a JP, etc), rather than meaning only literal waypoints.

Is that correct?
Or is it the case that the specialized detection logic won't be in effect when a fleet just happens to be moving to where a hostile fleet is (without having that contact or a waypoint there as the destination)?

The post you linked goes on to say that the waypoint part is added because NPRs use waypoints to mark hostile fleet locations. In other words, NPRs effectively use waypoints as a "move to hostile fleet location" surrogate in a way players don't really do.

This change I think was mostly meant to handle the problem where NPRs move close to a player fleet and immediately open fire before the player can react. It doesn't really apply for players in practice since players will use short increments when approaching a hostile fleet with ill intent. So I don't think it applies to movement order targets like bodies, etc. because a NPR will move to the target fleet directly if they intend to open fire. In theory, a player could move to a body as a way to cheese this check, but there's no benefit in doing so.