Updated the FAQ

[Grandpa Kim]

Paul, I don't consider that a bug, I consider it a feature. It allows a small and cheap boarding ship to eliminate a much larger ship. At the same time the SDD prevents the capture of a powerful ship. I can't decide if that's win/win or lose/lose...

[Slick]

http://www.shrapnelgames.com/cgi-bin...;f=23;t=011981


I'll get to an update one of these weekends when I am not working, which won't be for at least a month.

Slick.

[Fyron]

6.8.3 Ship moves on different days during the turn depending upon their speed capacity. (The 'movement day' is the day that the ship ends up in a new sector.):
Spd Movement Days

This makes no sense in the "6.8 Simultaneous Combat Specifics" section of the FAQ. It is not really part of combat, but of how the turn is processed. Perhaps it would be better located in the "14.1 Simultaneous" section? Or maybe place it in both, or just a reference to the chart in the section that does not get the chart...

[Ruatha]

There should atleast be areference to it, as it explains WHY combat started....

[Slick]

Sorry about the looooong overdue update, guys. RL is severely limiting my free time; most of my "free" time is spent catching up on RL things. I haven't forgotten about this.

Slick.

[Ruatha]

No hurry.
I haven't thought it very pressing for an update..
so there's no hurry.

[buba]

Trade Adds.

1º tech by now difficult to trade.

2º trade colonizing tech with neutral ai opponents NOT with the others (as they win options), if u cant in a 1 vs 1 add some resources.

3º Use trade as weapon if u have a good storage (even at the begining), mostly with ai opponents, sell them organics and rad resources get minerals, """!!!extremely!!!!!"""" important strategy in finite resources games.

Why? resource convertor looses a 50% in level 1 40% in level 2 20% (not secure about) in level 3, 5 years or more to take this tech.

you can trade ex-3000org+2000rad for 4000 minerals (loose of 20%).

-----

some tricks

puppet parties in enemy colonies they will abandon they empire, declare war on them they will give u the tech of the original empire.

Give this colonies to other empires (after scraping the buildings), mostly in direct or not direct contact, the relations between them will go badly (for contested systems).

Maybe (not secure yet), ruined planets too for this strategy (i dont know if they win the tech of the planet).

Avoid Mega Evil Empire if u can (u can win many with trade and so on), at the begining, u can colonize ruined better.

from a newbie player

[douglas]

All players share the same ID list. This makes it very hard to predict whether you'll have trouble seeking after an enemy ship or not unless you have some past experience with that particular enemy ship to go by.

Controlling anything related to ship ID numbers is practically impossible outside of a test game. All you can do is observe the order of ships in the fleet transfer screen and the next-ship list and try to take advantage of what you see.

[douglas]

All of the following statements have been thoroughly tested. Please do not dispute them without testing them yourself. They also all refer to "ship ID". A ship's ID number is a unique identifier assigned to ships when they are built. It is not visible to the player. The first available ID is the one assigned. When a ship is destroyed, its ID becomes available again.

The order of repairing ships is completely independent from the repair priorities list. Ships are repaired in order by ID number. Repair priorities only affects the order of components repaired within the ship.

Within each day in a turn's movement, ships move in order by ID number. This matters for certain stellar manipulations, seek after orders, and minesweeping. Fleets move all at once when their lowest-ID ship moves.

Stellar manipulation: Whether trying to open a warp point and go through it at exactly the same time works or not depends on whether the warp opener has a lower ID than the moving ship. Also, destroying and recreating a planet in one turn with two different ships requires that the create order be executed either on a later day or on the same day by a ship with a higher ID.

Seek after: Particularly important when all ships involved have the same speed. If a ship with ID 1 is seeking a ship with ID 2, both moving at the same speed, 1 will seek 2's location at the start of the day, and then 2 will get to move away. In this situation, 1 must either get very lucky or the player must deliberately and correctly anticipate 2's movement in order to catch 2. Going the other way, 2 will have a much easier time seeking 1, as 2 will seek after 1's after-movement location.

Minesweeping: Minesweeping, unlike combat, is calculated after each individual ship movement rather than at the end of the day. This means that a minesweeper can only protect a fleet that it's not in if the minesweeper (or the minesweeper's fleet's lowest-ID ship) has a lower ID than any ship in the fleet. This is rarely important, but there have been occasions when I wanted to attack RIGHT NOW and my fleet didn't have a minesweeper, but I did have a minesweeper the fleet could meet up with partway through the turn. I also occasionally have large forces split into multiple fleets travelling together so that I can split the force up without losing the fleet training bonus.

Now for a way to make all this information actually useful: Ships are sorted in the fleet transfer screen by ID number, lowest ID at the top. This sort order is in effect both in the list of ships not in fleets and within each fleet. The order of the fleets is by fleet ID, which is used for nothing else that I can tell, except the order fleets are displayed in the ships screen (F6). The order ships are gone through by the "Next ship" operation, typically accessed by the space bar hotkey, is also by ship ID. Unfortunately, this order is cyclical and your current position in it appears to be stored in the savegame, even through turn execution. Of course, you could try building an escort on turn 1 specifically to keep it around forever as your known lowest-ID ship, but this isn't guaranteed to work perfectly unless you're player 1 - anything players before you build on turn one will have a lower ID, which could possibly be freed later and taken up by another one of your ships.

[Slick]

Holy Smokes! That's interesting. Great testing; I'm sure that took some time to figure out. I'm a little confused on ship ID. Does each player have a separate ID list or do all players share the same list? This would be important because if a player I haven't "met" yet loses a ship and the game has a single ship ID list, the next ship produced by anyone will take that spot and that spot may be a very early ID number. If each player has his own ID list then you might kinda know if when new ships will get an older ID. It doesn't seem like you can control this very much.