Should Neutral Contacts cause Interrupts?

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

As the title states, should I set neutral contacts to non-interrupt? In the past I have thought no, because you may want to know if a particular alien race comes calling. However, the amount of interrupts caused by general neutral traffic is quite high so I was wondering if there was any middle ground.

Then I realised that you could simply set a particular alien race as hostile if you want to keep an eye on them. Unlike NPRs, the Military Cooperation Status set by players races has no in-game effect apart from how contacts are treated and the fact your automated point defences will engage their missiles. So neutral could be set to non-interrupt and you could override that by setting a race as hostile for contact purposes where required. How does that sound?

Steve

[Elmo]

Sounds like a good idea to me.  Can't think of any downside to it.

[Kurt]

As the title states, should I set neutral contacts to non-interrupt? In the past I have thought no, because you may want to know if a particular alien race comes calling. However, the amount of interrupts caused by general neutral traffic is quite high so I was wondering if there was any middle ground.

Then I realised that you could simply set a particular alien race as hostile if you want to keep an eye on them. Unlike NPRs, the Military Cooperation Status set by players races has no in-game effect apart from how contacts are treated and the fact your automated point defences will engage their missiles. So neutral could be set to non-interrupt and you could override that by setting a race as hostile for contact purposes where required. How does that sound?

Steve

Sounds fine to me.  That should probably be spelled out somewhere in the tutorial or wiki, though.

Kurt

[welchbloke]

Sounds sensible to me as well.

[Father Tim]

Sure, sounds good.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I have implemented this for v5.0. Neutral contacts no longer cause interrupts.

In my current game, with five player races, there was a huge number of neutral contacts in Sol so eventually I turned off the display of new neutral contacts and neutral contact updates. This worked well until a new neutral alien race turned up and attacked one of my scout ships . The first thing I saw was the ship blowing up. To make hiding neutral contact updates a more viable option, I have added new events for New Alien Race, New Alien Class and New Alien Ship. These are in addition to the contact report and do cause an interrupt. In this way, you can ignore existing neutral contacts or known ships moving about in your territory but the game will interrupt if something new shows up, even if it is neutral, friendly or allied.

Steve

[waresky]

Damn awesome work Steve.
ur work with Multiple "NPR's" in same Solar system drive u in deepest knowledge of "how work my damned Code"



ty for this Jewel program.make me funny every damned day at works return:)))