Updated the FAQ

Slick · #1 April 28th, 2004, 10:45 PM

Definitely need a link to this on the next update:

http://www.shrapnelgames.com/cgi-bin...;f=23;t=011584

Paul1980au · #2 April 28th, 2004, 11:20 PM

Well it would seem that one of the bugs in v 1.91 is the boarding and SDD situation that said it runs reasonably well and will surfice until we have SE5

Grandpa Kim · #3 May 1st, 2004, 06:54 PM

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 · #4 June 25th, 2004, 04:27 PM

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 · #5 July 29th, 2004, 09:20 PM

Quote:

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 · #6 July 30th, 2004, 04:12 PM

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

Slick · #7 July 30th, 2004, 04:31 PM

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.

douglas · #8 March 12th, 2005, 05:52 AM

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.

douglas · #9 March 2nd, 2005, 01:01 AM

Quote:

Imperator Fyron said:
Unless I am horribly mistaken, the repair priority list is definitely followed. Repair order by ship, not by component. A ship with a damaged component of the hihgest priority will be repaired first. The entire ship will be repaired though, not just the component.

I wish that were true. If it were, my 200+ ship fleet wouldn't be held up an extra turn because the lone minesweeper can't move yet.

In my test game, the ship with a weapon (bottom of the list) had ONLY the weapon needing to be repaired, and the ship with extra crew quarters (top of the list) had ONLY those crew quarters to be repaired. Despite this, whenever the weapon ship was the one that had been built first or replaced the one that had been built first, it was repaired first. Repeating the experiment with the weapon ship being the later-built ship resulted in it being forced to wait for the other to finish repairing all 6 extra CQ.

douglas · #10 March 1st, 2005, 07:50 PM

Edit: Nevermind. I have continued the experiment, and order of construction appears to be the deciding factor. The ship that was built first gets repaired first.

Edit2: Grr. It's a bit more complicated than that apparently. Hold on, this explanation is going to get technical and includes some suppositions about the inner workings of the game. It appears that on construction each ship is assigned a unique ID, possibly an index into an array of ships, that never changes. This ID starts at 1 or 0 for the first ship, and the lowest available ID is assigned to each new ship on construction. When a ship is destroyed (scrapped in my test game), its ID is freed and available for another ship. Repair order of ships appears to be determined exclusively by this ID number, with the lowest ID ship repaired first. In practice, once ships start being destroyed irregularly (i.e. some stay around, others don't; typically happens first when you're regularly building both warships and colony ships), repair order is very difficult to predict or influence with any great degree of accuracy.

Edit: old theory, discredited now. See above. I have just discovered a hidden factor in determining which ships are repaired first: experience. The most experienced damaged ship in a sector will get top priority for repair regardless of what your repair priorities set in the empire status screen are. The repair priorities you set are only used as a tiebreaker when ships have equal experience and to determine the order of components repaired within a single ship.

I discovered this recently when I set repair priorities specifically to repair a damaged minesweeper first (putting Unit Launch at the top, with minesweepers being the only "Unit Launch" components I use right now), only to discover the next turn that the two damaged warships present were repaired first. I then ran a test game with the following series of events: build two ships with just engines; retrofit one with a weapon (moved weapons to bottom of repair priorities) and the other with several extra crew quarters, move both to same sector with inadequate repair ability; the weapon was still not repaired; retrofit both back to base design, send one to ship training center for one turn; retrofit trained ship with weapon (again, weapons are at bottom of list) and other ship with extra crew quarters, send both to repair center; trained ship was repaired first, even though its only damaged component was at the very bottom of the priorities list while the other had six components at the very top of the list (vehicle control).