Minister question

[Slick]

Yeah, I know, but I'm experimenting with them anyway to see how they work. Here's the question:

Say I have the colonization minister "on" for a colony ship. If I give the ship orders to move to a given planet (say one with a Resupply Depot), when/how does the minister take control? Will my order be executed first, then the minister controls when there are no outstanding orders? Or will the minister clear orders as he sees fit?

As a followup, how does a generic minister work when you give the ship/planet manual orders?

[Suicide Junkie]

Most common ministers will not change existing orders, I believe.

Resupply and other similar ministers will clear orders so they can send a ship back, though.

[PvK]

It depends on the minister, and whether the unit or planet is set to minister control or not. If something is set to minister control, it might not clear your orders, but it also might. If something is not set to minister control, most ministers won't touch it, though there is at least one notable exception: the supply minister will order any ship to head to the nearest supply depot as soon as it gets down to close to 50% supply. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

PvK

[Slick]

*Beats the Supply Minister about the head with a rubber chicken*

[Slick]

I've found that the Colonization Minister is not too bad in the latter portion of the middle game. Once your borders get kind of established and you aren't too choosy about colonizing those remaining inner, small, unbreathables he does a fair job. You can effectively box him in by smartly using the "systems to avoid" option.

He will not change a ship's orders if the target planet gets colonized before the colonizer gets there, though. And he is inept at using the right breathing population to colonize worlds. He assumes that your native breathables are the best, even if he accidentally loads other-breathing people into the colonizer which will cause a "green star" planet to be domed. He will also load as many people onto a colonizer as it will hold (if the colonizer is empty to start with) when he sets off, so it is in your best interest to load 1M colonists onto a colonizer before turning on this minister. Send them on their way and hope for the best.

[Frederick_d_Ohlmann]

Why loading them with 1M ? If you want them to be full one day or another, you should fully load them (and use them to populate your ring/sphereworld later in the game (cause it's the main problem with stellar construction)

[Kamog]

You load them with 1M because if you let the minister load the ships full of population all the time, eventually your home world could be depleted of most of its population, and your resource production would suffer.

[Frederick_d_Ohlmann]

I never had such a problem with colony ship. With pop tramsport it's true but a 4000m homeworld can spawn a full colony ship every turn without problem.

[Slick]

1M is also lower risk. The Colonization Minister can easily run the ship out of supplies (assuming you are not using the Supply Minister also) and then the ship will take many turns to eventually colonize something. I don't like to have too much population out on colonizers where they don't reproduce.

[Frederick_d_Ohlmann]

As a big user of stellar manip they usually don't run over 1 system in mid game.