Imperium of Man - Comments Thread

[Vasious]

Those are NPR designs and the AI doesn't care about micromanagement and seem to need unloading every 6 months which isn't too bad. But since they have a refuelling module, NPR combat ships probably just visit them to top up when they need it.

The NPR does not care, no. But Steve will and it makes more sense IMO to design things as if they care about micro.

it is only a short time/micromanagement to players who can skip time in 2 week increments in a few seconds.
6 months isn't micro management in Universe, and maintains verisimilitude

[db48x]

You're encountering a lot of Necrons, I've explored 80 or 90 systems in my game without finding any, what determines if they spawn or not?

Precursor fleets are often guarding ruins, so increasing the ruin generation chance in the game settings will do the job.

[Ghrathryn]

Out of curiousity Steve, is there any chance of seeing the tech set up for the start of the game? By which I mean which techs were researched from the free tech points and what units/modules were designed for the starting ships/ground forces.

It's one thing to see your ship designs have an 'Astaroth AK-10 Weapons Battery' or some such, but it's another to figure out off the design what that means (though this particular example is one of the easier ones) in terms of parts setup, like your Ravenor Drive Systems RJ-150M Jump Drive, I can only guess is first techs on each needed field, meaning that it's a 75HS, baseline military jump engine, but I don't know whether that's true or whether there's been more efficiency techs researched to make it smaller.

[nuclearslurpee]

Out of curiousity Steve, is there any chance of seeing the tech set up for the start of the game? By which I mean which techs were researched from the free tech points and what units/modules were designed for the starting ships/ground forces.

It's one thing to see your ship designs have an 'Astaroth AK-10 Weapons Battery' or some such, but it's another to figure out off the design what that means (though this particular example is one of the easier ones) in terms of parts setup, like your Ravenor Drive Systems RJ-150M Jump Drive, I can only guess is first techs on each needed field, meaning that it's a 75HS, baseline military jump engine, but I don't know whether that's true or whether there's been more efficiency techs researched to make it smaller.

I actually took a stab at recreating these a while ago, as part of a test setup to see what kinds of things were realistic for a start-of-game setup, and I think I got pretty close if not exact matches for the warships. For example:

Code: [Select]

Endeavour class Light Cruiser      15,000 tons       410 Crew       2,133.9 BP       TCS 300    TH 1,500    EM 0
5000 km/s    JR 3-50      Armour 6-54       Shields 0-0       HTK 72      Sensors 2/3/0/0      DCR 12      PPV 24
Maint Life 1.96 Years     MSP 1,111    AFR 144%    IFR 2.0%    1YR 379    5YR 5,689    Max Repair 396.8 MSP
Captain    Control Rating 2   BRG   AUX   
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months    Morale Check Required   

Ravenor Drive Systems RJ-150M Jump Drive     Max Ship Size 15000 tons    Distance 50k km     Squadron Size 3

Ravenor Drive Systems RD-750M (2)    Power 1500    Fuel Use 32.66%    Signature 750    Explosion 10%
Fuel Capacity 536,000 Litres    Range 19.7 billion km (45 days at full power)

Astaroth AK-10 Weapons Battery (8x4)    Range 30,000km     TS: 5,000 km/s     Power 3-3     RM 30,000 km    ROF 5       
MK II Weapons Battery Secondary Fire Control (2)     Max Range: 64,000 km   TS: 5,000 km/s     84 69 53 38 22 6 0 0 0 0
R-12 Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor (2)     Total Power Output 24.2    Exp 5%

MK I Small Torpedo Detection Augur Array (1)     GPS 6     Range 3.4m km    MCR 304.7k km    Resolution 1
MK I Light Cruiser Active Augur Array (1)     GPS 7200     Range 52.8m km    Resolution 120
MK I Small Thermal Augur Array (1)     Sensitivity 2.5     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  12.5m km
MK I Small Electromagnetic Augur Array (1)     Sensitivity 3     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  13.7m km
Copied from my test save, not Steve's intro post. My general approach was:

• From a later post where Magneto-Plasma Drive was discovered I determined that Steve probably started with ion drive tech, which seems to have mostly been correct (one of the designs, I think the survey frigate, used INTE tech for some reason)
• Knowing this, the engine is not hard to work out, it's a size-60 ion drive (750 EP) with 0.8 fuel efficiency (play around with the tech until you match the fuel use number) and 100% EP modifier (10% explosion chance).
• Fuel capacity was the hardest part obviously.
• As you noted, the weapons are not too hard to figure out either as each sub-component correlates to a statistic in a simple manner.
• The fire control is a bit tricky; from the larger one for the AK-15 (not shown here, see the Dauntless class for example) you can readily deduce a base range of 64,000 km as this is the minimum needed for the 256,000 km range and higher tech levels are too expensive for a starting setup. The tracking speed is trickier as you can get the same stat line with 2,000 km/s and 4,000 km/s base tracking speeds; I assumed the latter because it's what I would do frankly, FC tech is never a bad investment.
• Reactor can be pinned down based on the explosion chance (to fix the boost level) as well as power output, fairly simple.
• Passive sensors are straightforward due to the 5-6-8-11 early tech level progression and the 0.1-HS mass increment at the smallest sizes, so there's only one design that works assuming no electronic hardening.
• The active sensors are a bit guesswork-y since there's sometimes multiple combinations of strength and HS that will give the same product. Here I assumed strength-12 as more sensor tech is never bad in a starting setup.
• You can set armor, deployment time, and add Engineering Spaces equal to the DCR to fill in most of the remaining mass.
• With only the jump drive left, I found from playing with tech levels that Jump Eff 5 gave one that would fill the remaining ship mass once crew was accounted for. The squadron jump size and distance are on the info card, and with efficiency fixed the mass is easy.

You can do this with most posted ship designs as long as you get a full info card and not just a one-line summary (most of Steve's commercial ships elude me and I suspect he added some techs after building them). The Tempest-class survey frigate for example uses some markedly-different techs and components so may be worth a look for practice.

[Ghrathryn]

I actually took a stab at recreating these a while ago, as part of a test setup to see what kinds of things were realistic for a start-of-game setup, and I think I got pretty close if not exact matches for the warships.  For example:

Code: [Select]

Endeavour class Light Cruiser      15,000 tons       410 Crew       2,133.9 BP       TCS 300    TH 1,500    EM 0
5000 km/s    JR 3-50      Armour 6-54       Shields 0-0       HTK 72      Sensors 2/3/0/0      DCR 12      PPV 24
Maint Life 1.96 Years     MSP 1,111    AFR 144%    IFR 2.0%    1YR 379    5YR 5,689    Max Repair 396.8 MSP
Captain    Control Rating 2   BRG   AUX   
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months    Morale Check Required   

Ravenor Drive Systems RJ-150M Jump Drive     Max Ship Size 15000 tons    Distance 50k km     Squadron Size 3

Ravenor Drive Systems RD-750M (2)    Power 1500    Fuel Use 32.66%    Signature 750    Explosion 10%
Fuel Capacity 536,000 Litres    Range 19.7 billion km (45 days at full power)

Astaroth AK-10 Weapons Battery (8x4)    Range 30,000km     TS: 5,000 km/s     Power 3-3     RM 30,000 km    ROF 5       
MK II Weapons Battery Secondary Fire Control (2)     Max Range: 64,000 km   TS: 5,000 km/s     84 69 53 38 22 6 0 0 0 0
R-12 Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor (2)     Total Power Output 24.2    Exp 5%

MK I Small Torpedo Detection Augur Array (1)     GPS 6     Range 3.4m km    MCR 304.7k km    Resolution 1
MK I Light Cruiser Active Augur Array (1)     GPS 7200     Range 52.8m km    Resolution 120
MK I Small Thermal Augur Array (1)     Sensitivity 2.5     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  12.5m km
MK I Small Electromagnetic Augur Array (1)     Sensitivity 3     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  13.7m km
Copied from my test save, not Steve's intro post.  My general approach was:

• From a later post where Magneto-Plasma Drive was discovered I determined that Steve probably started with ion drive tech, which seems to have mostly been correct (one of the designs, I think the survey frigate, used INTE tech for some reason)
• Knowing this, the engine is not hard to work out, it's a size-60 ion drive (750 EP) with 0. 8 fuel efficiency (play around with the tech until you match the fuel use number) and 100% EP modifier (10% explosion chance).
• Fuel capacity was the hardest part obviously.
• As you noted, the weapons are not too hard to figure out either as each sub-component correlates to a statistic in a simple manner.
• The fire control is a bit tricky; from the larger one for the AK-15 (not shown here, see the Dauntless class for example) you can readily deduce a base range of 64,000 km as this is the minimum needed for the 256,000 km range and higher tech levels are too expensive for a starting setup.  The tracking speed is trickier as you can get the same stat line with 2,000 km/s and 4,000 km/s base tracking speeds; I assumed the latter because it's what I would do frankly, FC tech is never a bad investment.
• Reactor can be pinned down based on the explosion chance (to fix the boost level) as well as power output, fairly simple.
• Passive sensors are straightforward due to the 5-6-8-11 early tech level progression and the 0. 1-HS mass increment at the smallest sizes, so there's only one design that works assuming no electronic hardening.
• The active sensors are a bit guesswork-y since there's sometimes multiple combinations of strength and HS that will give the same product.  Here I assumed strength-12 as more sensor tech is never bad in a starting setup.
• You can set armor, deployment time, and add Engineering Spaces equal to the DCR to fill in most of the remaining mass.
• With only the jump drive left, I found from playing with tech levels that Jump Eff 5 gave one that would fill the remaining ship mass once crew was accounted for.  The squadron jump size and distance are on the info card, and with efficiency fixed the mass is easy.

You can do this with most posted ship designs as long as you get a full info card and not just a one-line summary (most of Steve's commercial ships elude me and I suspect he added some techs after building them).  The Tempest-class survey frigate for example uses some markedly-different techs and components so may be worth a look for practice.

All fair enough, though for a newbie like me, it would likely require that we have a game where we have all techs researched to figure out the ships for a new start should we want to 'follow along' to some degree with a let's play/story that someone else has posted.  I'd done a bit of playing on my own, and as mentioned in my previous post, you can make a jump drive that matches on efficiency 4, but it's obviously larger than the efficiency 5 variant you built, likewise you can make a size 40 Ion drive with 150 power, but it's nowhere near as fuel efficient given you need a 150% power boost, so it's sometimes figuring out the 'minor' details that really throw a wrench into things for new players trying to follow, and that's obviously when you've got the stat cards and where you can see what components are what, when you haven't ala Steve's civilian ship designs or his ground forces (both units and formations) it can be a lot longer of a period to work things through.