Ruins Tech

[inigma]

I can't seem to find a list of ruins technology and what they do, anywhere. Does anyone have a list of ruins tech?

[douglas]

In stock, there are four ruins techs. They are:

1. Massive Planetary Shielding: gives the Massive Planetary Shield Generator, a facility that gives 5000 non-phased shield points. Generally considered far too weak to be worth a facility slot, especially when compared to heavily shielded weapon platforms, and does not block Phased Polaron Beams or shield skipping weapons.

2. Massive Shield Depleting Weapons: gives the Massive Shield Depleter, a one-shot-per-battle weapon that does 1000 points of shields-only damage and takes 100 kt of space. Generally considered inferior to normal shield depleters.

3. Massive Engine Destroying Weapons: gives the Massive Ionic Disperser, a one-shot-per-battle weapon that does 500 engines-only damage and takes 100 kt of space. Generally considered inferior to normal ionic dispersers, especially considering that anything beyond 120 damage of this type in one shot is worthless once the target's shields are down, and it's usually shot in the first volley where it usually acts as just a weaker version of the shield depleter.

4. Neural Computer Interface: gives the Neural Combat Net, which is supposed to give any ship that has it the benefits of having the same experience as the most experienced friendly ship in the same battle. If it actually worked, this would be extremely useful. Unfortunately, it doesn't. You'd be better off spending less resources on a fighter bay and never putting any fighters in it.

Which ruins gives which of these techs is determined at map generation.

Ancient Ruins can also give a number of randomly selected normal techs (1-3 in random stock maps). These techs are randomly selected at the time you colonize the planet out of all the techs you have the prerequisites for.

You can tell something about what you're going to get by the description of the ancient ruins on the planet:

1. "There are ancient ruins on this planet from a long dead civilization.": 1 random tech
2. "There are buried alien cities on this planet that have long been deserted.": 2 random techs
3. "Sensors indicate some kind of advanced technological devices left on this planet.": 3 random techs
4. "We have detected advanced technology present on this planet.": one of the ruins-only techs

Mods can change any or all of the details presented above, except the time of selection of techs.

[Fyron]

douglas said:
You can tell something about what you're going to get by the description of the ancient ruins on the planet...

Which is quite unfortunate. FQM (http://fqm.spaceempires.net/) fixes this short-sightedness. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[Kamog]

Hopefully, in SEV there'll be more unique ruins techs which are superior to the regular technologies?

[Makinus]

One cool idea would be to Ruins to give weak versions of Racial Techs...


There is any mod that does this?

[bearclaw]

Makinus said:
One cool idea would be to Ruins to give weak versions of Racial Techs...


There is any mod that does this?



As a matter of fact there is! My Dark Nova 4 mod has several of these. I've also expanded the tech trees for all unique techs so that you get a minimum of 3 levels of research out of each tech. IIRC the 'stock' unique techs have 5 levels and all the racial types have 3... All together I belive I've got 94 possible unique components/facilites. I've also got some ideas to add more to this. Which I think I'll do before the next DN4 game starts on PBW, which will be shortly as the game itself is on PBW now Dark Nova 4 II.

[Fyron]

Makinus said:
There is any mod that does this?

There is a Unique Techs mod floating about for SE4 Classic that adds a bunch of ruins techs, some of which are weaker versions of racial items.

[Ragnarok-X]

douglas said:


4. Neural Computer Interface: gives the Neural Combat Net, which is supposed to give any ship that has it the benefits of having the same experience as the most experienced friendly ship in the same battle.


If it actually worked, this would be extremely useful. Unfortunately, it doesn't. You'd be better off spending less resources on a fighter bay and never putting any fighters in it.






WTF, the neural net is NOT working ? I recently has an event boosting one of my vessels to 40% experience and i have all my ships with neurals nets. Can anyone confirm that it does not work ?

[douglas]

I don't know if anyone else has repeated my testing, but I tested it pretty thoroughly myself and reported it in the known bugs thread (http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/threads/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=174408) 5 pages back. It's number 29 on the latest list Fyron compiled in that thread.

[Randallw]

I am a bit annoyed that the nueral network doesn't work, but It wouldn't surprise me. I am in a war at the moment with fleets of up to 300 ships, each with NN and they got massacred by the enemy with his psychic sensors even though they would have had up to 40% experience.

[Ragnarok-X]

man damn now that is really pissing me off. I was actually relying on this for the wars to come.

[Suicide Junkie]

Having just tested it with tactical combat in Stock SE4, i can say that it indeed does work.

The most experienced ship with a NCN device spreads that experience to all other NCN ships in the fleet for matters of hit-chance.

Note that the experienced ship needs an NCN, and every ship you want to give experience to needs an NCN.

[Slick]

Perhaps the description is a little misleading:

"This ship gets an experience level as high as any of your other ships in combat."

This description does not mention that the NCN only applies to ships which also have the NCN.

This description should say "This ship gets an experience level as high as any of your other ships which have a Neural Combat Net in combat."

Do the ships also have to be in the same fleet to receive the NCN bonus?

[Q]

SJ I have different results again in tactical combat version 1.91:

A fleet with three ships all have the neural net, one ship has an experience of 30% the other two have 0%. The displayed to hit chances in tactical combat are 30% higher for the trained ship than for the other two!

I am not the person who originally reported this bug.

[Q]

This bug seems to be more complicated:

The neural net does work or does not work according to the age of the ships (probably the ship ID number)!!!

The experience is tranfered only to ships younger than the trained ship.

Test example:
Ships Nr 1,2,3,4. Ship 1 was the first constructed, ship 4 the last. All have the neural net. Ship 2 and 4 are trained to 20%.
In tactical combat the displayed to hit chances are for
- Fleet 1,2,3:
ship 1 15%
ship 2 35%
ship 3 35%
Therefore ship 1 does not get experience transfered, however the younger ship 3 gets it!
- Fleet 1,3,4:
ship 1: 15%
ship 3: 15%
ship 4: 35%
This time ship 3 does not get experience transfered either because it is not younger than ship 4 who has the experience!

[Ragnarok-X]

Interesting results. So every ship constructed AFTER the one who shares its experience receive the benefits, the ones constructed before dont. Does retrofitting give a new ID, as Q mentions ?

[Q]

I don't think retrofitting changes anything, but I didn't test it.
Unfurtunately the shrapnel server does not accept a file.gam for upload so I had to cheat: change the name from TestNN.gam.txt to TestNN.gam for the attached file. Use the Eee fleet to attack the single Abbidon ship.

[douglas]

Retrofitting does not change ID. This is just one of the many things I tested concerning ship ID back when I discovered it.

Thank you, Q, I hadn't thought of that particular possibility for why we were getting conflicting reports.

Edit: A quick test with your .gam file shows that it seems to work as you stated for the offensive bonus of experience, but the defensive bonus isn't shared at all.

[Q]

Some more results from my tests:

- Retrofitting does not change if experience is transfered or not.
- ships need not to be fleeted to get experience transfed. All ships with the neural net in the sector that are younger than the trained ship will get the transfer.
- Only the offensive bonus of experience is transfered not the defensive bonus.

[douglas]

Ok, so the Neural Combat Net isn't completely useless, but it's far from as useful as it would be if it worked as advertised.

[Fyron]

Q said:
- Only the offensive bonus of experience is transfered not the defensive bonus.

This seems to be a common error (either in the ability or the text descriptions) with "combat bonuses." The Combat Shrines only provide an offense bonus as well, even though this is not what the facility description implies.

Most strange results.

[Ragnarok-X]

Well the 30k component size is at least considerable on big ships now :| I got that even which boosts a ship to legendary status (40%), so i can at least get big parts of my ships another 20% more offense (comparing the trained to 20% with the shared 40%).

thanks a bunch for testing that.

[Slick]

Yikes! So, basically, I have to use the Fleet Transfer screen to find out which ships have a lower ID (lower listed before higher, right?) then strategically retrofit and/or select ships for the given fleet.

[re-asking] Do the ships all have to be in the same fleet for the NCN to work? By the description, this is not addressed, and it is possible to have combat with multiple lone ships and/or fleets on your side.

[Fyron]

Q said:
- ships need not to be fleeted to get experience transfed. All ships with the neural net in the sector that are younger than the trained ship will get the transfer.

[Slick]

Oops. Thanks.