Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread: C# Edition

[Ogamaga]

For excavation of ruins, is there any difference between a formation with 10 construction points and a formation with 2 points?

edit: If not, is there a minimum? If so, how does it work?

edit2: a quick test with 20 1 pointers vs 20 10 pointers saw the 10 pointers win 22 excavations to 2

edit3: 50 1 pointer beat 5 10 pointers to 20 excavations, barely

[db48x]

For excavation of ruins, is there any difference between a formation with 10 construction points and a formation with 2 points?

Ground-based xenoarcheology is randomized. The total number of points the formation has controls how likely they are to decipher the writing system used by original inhabitants. 10 points means a base chance of 10% per year; 100 points is a base chance of 100% per year. This is divided by the number of construction cycles in a year to find the chance of completing the project in any given cycle. Thus a formation with 100 points will be much faster at the job than one with 10, but it will still usually take longer than a year.

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg111167#msg111167

[Ogamaga]

For excavation of ruins, is there any difference between a formation with 10 construction points and a formation with 2 points?

Ground-based xenoarcheology is randomized. The total number of points the formation has controls how likely they are to decipher the writing system used by original inhabitants. 10 points means a base chance of 10% per year; 100 points is a base chance of 100% per year. This is divided by the number of construction cycles in a year to find the chance of completing the project in any given cycle. Thus a formation with 100 points will be much faster at the job than one with 10, but it will still usually take longer than a year.

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg111167#msg111167

That refers to identifying ruins with xenoarcheology units, I was speaking of excavating ruins with construction units.

[Garfunkel]

Commander bonuses probably affect it more. AFAIK, there's nothing that Steve said that would affect it. There are no breakthroughs, the only thing affecting this sort of thing in ground combat.

[Kylemmie]

No, I'm not. In C#, the only ways to increase temperature are increasing Greenhouse Pressure (which you've already discovered is capped at 3.0) and increasing insolation.

I am however deliberately using a real-world scientific term rather than the in-game term because anyone who tried it might blame me for ruining their game.

LMAO okay yeah I didn't understand the joke you were going for  that would indeed work
if only temporarily

Is this some sort of Scientific hazing that experienced players try on new guys?

Nah bro, don't get upset - he was going for a joke about the Solar Warming catastrophe scenario you can pick at game settings.

That does make me wonder if anyone has done that catastrophe start and remained in Sol. Do the outer planets get too hot in a reasonable time or does it take centuries? I know the usual tactic is to move people from Earth to Mars as a stopgap while you find a suitable extra-Solar colony.

Okay, I was trolled and apologize for falling for it. My mistake for asking an honest question and wasting an afternoon trying to discern the game mechanic a helpful experienced player said was available. Yes, I am aware that I can destroy the Solar system with heat at game setup.  I suppose if the purpose is to discourage new players from learning the game, you could possibly frame an argument that claims this is part of the 'terraforming' process to make a planet more habitable and send  them down a rabbit hole of researching terms that aren't even in the game.

Good job db, you got me.

[TheTalkingMeowth]

No, I'm not. In C#, the only ways to increase temperature are increasing Greenhouse Pressure (which you've already discovered is capped at 3.0) and increasing insolation.

I am however deliberately using a real-world scientific term rather than the in-game term because anyone who tried it might blame me for ruining their game.

LMAO okay yeah I didn't understand the joke you were going for  that would indeed work
if only temporarily

Is this some sort of Scientific hazing that experienced players try on new guys?

Nah bro, don't get upset - he was going for a joke about the Solar Warming catastrophe scenario you can pick at game settings.

That does make me wonder if anyone has done that catastrophe start and remained in Sol. Do the outer planets get too hot in a reasonable time or does it take centuries? I know the usual tactic is to move people from Earth to Mars as a stopgap while you find a suitable extra-Solar colony.

Okay, I was trolled and apologize for falling for it. My mistake for asking an honest question and wasting an afternoon trying to discern the game mechanic a helpful experienced player said was available. Yes, I am aware that I can destroy the Solar system with heat at game setup.  I suppose if the purpose is to discourage new players from learning the game, you could possibly frame an argument that claims this is part of the 'terraforming' process to make a planet more habitable and send  them down a rabbit hole of researching terms that aren't even in the game.

Good job db, you got me.

Hey, he went for a joke in text format and it fell flat because tone in text is hard. I was a little upset at what db seemed to be doing too. But db didn't mean any harm.

[Veneke]

I encountered an alien population on a random planet. They aren't Rakshas as there's no ground forces or STOs. The EM signature of the planet kept dropping and finally stabilized at around 400. When I finally got around to conquering the planet there were 2ish million aliens there with around 500 infrastructure. They are at the edge of known space but in the decades since first contact and leaving a Diplo ship stationed within range of the planet I've never seen any ships, other installations, or received any communication attempts. I went two jumps beyond to see if maybe this was some sort of outlying colony and there's nothing there.
 
I've never seen this behaviour before. I always thought that were two very definite alien types in Aurora: NPRs and the (now three) spoiler races. This doesn't fit any of those. I checked the settings, just in case I somehow mistakenly clicked generate non-TN races only and that maybe this is that - but that option isn't active.
 
Anyone any ideas what this might be?

[Black]

I encountered an alien population on a random planet. They aren't Rakshas as there's no ground forces or STOs. The EM signature of the planet kept dropping and finally stabilized at around 400. When I finally got around to conquering the planet there were 2ish million aliens there with around 500 infrastructure. They are at the edge of known space but in the decades since first contact and leaving a Diplo ship stationed within range of the planet I've never seen any ships, other installations, or received any communication attempts. I went two jumps beyond to see if maybe this was some sort of outlying colony and there's nothing there.
 
I've never seen this behaviour before. I always thought that were two very definite alien types in Aurora: NPRs and the (now three) spoiler races. This doesn't fit any of those. I checked the settings, just in case I somehow mistakenly clicked generate non-TN races only and that maybe this is that - but that option isn't active.
 
Anyone any ideas what this might be?

This could be caused by spawning on planet that is not ideal habitable world for them, so they were dying, until the infrastructure that is given during spawn was enough to sustain remaining population.

[Veneke]

snip

This could be caused by spawning on planet that is not ideal habitable world for them, so they were dying, until the infrastructure that is given during spawn was enough to sustain remaining population.

Ah. Yes, that's it. There's 0.0006 atm of Sulphur Dioxide which makes the planet's atmosphere not breathable. Odd though that they didn't spawn in with anything else - it's literally just the infrastructure. There are no mines, construction factories, shipyards, not even DSTS.
 
Is there any way to tell if this is the NPR that was spawned at the beginning of the game? I have the default conditions on so the starting NPR should be 25 - 50 LY away and the system in question is only 16.3 LY so I presume that the starting NPR is still out there but I just thought I'd check as I'm here.

[Garfunkel]

There is no way to tell. Usually the game start NPR is obvious because it's the only one that is truly interstellar in size but in your case, that might not have happened.

[Kristover]

So I have a small secondary spaceport in my home world system that I maintain a small amount of fighters to respond to threats from a particular jump point - it has a limited amount of fuel and maintenance capacity.  The giant spaceport at the home world is where I do overhauls and refueling and stuff.  The problem I have is my survey ships who have a conditional order to refuel, resupply, and overhaul want to go to this spaceport automatically (its closest to several JPs) rather than go to the spaceport I want them to go too.  Is there a setting that prevents ships from going there because I'm tired of 25K vessels putting themselves into overhaul at this small facility?

[Garfunkel]

No. You'll have to increase the maintenance capability of that colony.

[jscott991]

I have just had the weirdest thing happen over the course of a year or two in my current game.  I'm about 80 years in and my civilian ships must have exploded in quantity.

At some point in my current year, I must have clicked that Mars (450M people) and Luna (500M people) could be the source of colonists.  I didn't notice this happening, but Mars was completely depopulated.  When I checked, it had ZERO population.  All of its infrastructure was fine.  The population was completely gone.

I reloaded a backup game, turned source off for both Mars and Luna, and then within three months, I saw that Earth had lost about 100M people.  So then I had to turn Earth off as a source (for the first time all game).

Is this common?  Is the civilian AI really stripping my colonies of people at this rate?

[Garfunkel]

Yes, it does happen and it could happen in VB6 already. If your civilian lines are successful, their lifting capability becomes tremendous enough that Earth itself can be depopulated. Best to keep an eye on them and switch all to Stable whenever things look dicey.

[TheTalkingMeowth]

What temperature does water start condensing out of the atmosphere? I see in the Terraforming update post that the boiling point of water is set to -18C, but is there a max temperature above which you can't have any liquid water?

I'm trying to terraform Mercury to human norm and got the temperature cost below 2.0, but there's no water so the cost stopped decreasing. I started adding water and noticed it wasn't precipitating out...which makes sense, because the surface temperature is still like 280C.