Ship destroyed during 30 day hop?

[CAPFlyer (OP)]

So, another question that popped up today - I've now had 2 survey vessels get destroyed during a 30 day time jump.   How am I supposed to have a chance to get them out of danger if they "detect" a new race, move to the planet, and get killed without the time jump being stopped as *soon* as they detected the new species?

Seems kinda a big problem that I just lost one of my best Survey ships because I encountered a hostile race I didn't know existed and had at least 3 days of contact (based on detection rules and the ship's speed) where I should've been able to get them clear if the game had stopped when one would expect it would.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I would avoid 30 day turns in general since construction cycles are 5 days that is what I run.

The minimum time for 30 days probably simply is to long so this can happen. You probably should be able to detect planet sized populations far enough away so you can reduce the time for each turn. Did you have any decent passive sensors on the exploring vessel?

[nuclearslurpee]

I've never pressed the 30 day button even once out of a dread fear of something terrible happening, so I salute your bravery.

Unfortunately, these things are prone to happen on long increments because the game can't really predict what will happen in a future sub-increment let alone adjust accordingly. Your best bet is to manually set the maximum sub-increment to something lower (the sub-increment for 5 days is two hours, IIRC, maybe try that?) and hope that is sufficient. Bigger/more powerful passive sensors may also help in some cases.

[CAPFlyer (OP)]

Guys, I'm running 30 day hops, not sub-increments.   I have auto sub-increments set, so it should be "stopping" when it determines something happens within the bigger increment.   That's what I'm not getting because for most things it does stop, but now twice I've lost survey ship because of it not stopping.

[Zap0]

30d increments should have 6h sub-increments by default, I believe. The manual setting for sub-increment length gets ignored if it's above a certain threshold (100 sub-pulses per increment, I believe, with perhaps some exceptions for the 30d one).

As for the general topic of the post: Welcome to Aurora. That's unfortunately just how the game works, and you often end up with situations where enemies are right on top of each other if you don't select small increments carefully. Sometimes you just have no warning.

If you should have had detected them for three days already and it didn't interrupt, then my guess is you met them before (as the "new alien race" event interrupts) and didn't set them hostile. Neutral encounters don't trigger interrupts.

[mike2R]

There was an attempt to resolve this with the 2.0 version according to this post.

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. The latter case is because NPRs sometimes use waypoints to mark hostile ship locations. If the moving ship will move within 500,000 km of the destination, the increment is reduced to the length of time it would take to each that point. This is then rounded to an increment length which is a multiple of a standard sub-pulse length.

This may not be 100% accurate, due to the wide variety of situations that can occur in Aurora, but it should massively reduce the chance of the unexpected, point-blank encounter.

EDIT: Testing has shown that a situation can occur where one fleet is chasing another but not catching it, in which case the shortened increments can repeat for a long time. Trying to calculate all the relative movements of the respective fleets would be one option, but would be complex and hit performance. Therefore, I've added a simpler solution. After five shortened increments of the same length, another shortening of the same length will be ignored.

It's definitely happened to me too though with 30 day increments - I guess these were either a "wide variety of situations", or I'd just got unlucky with the five shortened increments cut off.  To be fair, it doesn't happen all that often, even on long increments I normally get interrupted pretty close to where I'd expect to detect the enemy.

[Garfunkel]

Since "auto-turns" tick box exists, I would recommend sticking to 1 day turns. The game will churn them out at a rapid pace and will stop when anything noteworthy happens. And the sub-pulses for 1d turns are short enough that generally nothing bad happens. However, it is prudent to use smaller turns when your survey ship gets close to a habitable planet just so you don't miss anything. In fact, it is generally helpful to check the system information window once you jump into a new system. If there are any habitable planets, pay close attention to surveying them - designing sensor drones or even survey drones for just this purpose is a tactic that some players prefer - even if they aren't CC0 to you. Yes, this slows exploration down but this way you might be able to save a survey ship.