Stellar manip and movement in simultaneous game

[Slick]

Not only can you not guarantee the placement of your ship, but it could be affected by the destruction of an enemy ship whose empire you haven't even met yet.

I would think that in the mid-game and beyond where combat is common, new ships are quasi-randomly distributed throughout the list with a tendency to be at the bottom since in general more ships are built than destroyed as the game progresses. A massive fleet battle would open up lots of intermeidate slots, though. I really don't see what a player could do with that information to make any significant difference in a game; especially since you can't know the position of any other empire's ships.

[ToddT]

So its safe say that FAQ isn't really wrong, its just how Stardestroyer works as advertised in theory, but in practice, its essentially irrelevant, leaving a decent window for possible escape.

joachim had 4 ships there that moved once before being vaporized and those designs where built after his SM ship for sure, i had a couple BB's with dubious pedigrees so who knows. there where lots of battles prior to that, so its safe to say ship id's are fairly random.

[Slick]

I'm including all the important points here in the new update. I'd say that since it lead to a problem in a game it at least needs to be modified. Keep in mind that this ship ID concept is a pretty new discovery in the history of the game and nobody except MM really knows the mechanisms behind the game.

Going OT for a moment. Take the idea of fleet experience. Many of us had tried to figure it out by testing and nobody could come up with how it worked. One day Aaron replied to an email question and then we found that: for each kill made by a ship in a fleet, there is a 25% chance that the fleet gets 0.1% experience. [It's in the "Updated the FAQ" thread and it's already included in the new update.] But who would have been able to figure this out by testing??? It is very obscure I remember testing this myself and others posting their results; nobody was able to reproduce other's results. It was a mystery. I'm sure there are other parts of this game that don't really work the way they seem; and every once in a while we all see something that just doesn't look right but can't duplicate it.

[douglas]

ToddT said:
there where lots of battles prior to that, so its safe to say ship id's are fairly random.

Not quite. I have just tested it, and I have confirmed that construction is handled one player at a time in order by player number, regardless of order of colonization of planets belonging to different empires (I didn't test order of construction within an empire). This means that ships belonging to players higher up on the list, particularly player 1, tend to have lower ID's, and therefore have an easier time escaping star destruction death traps but a harder time pursuing enemies in certain circumstances.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

You're all crazy and obsessed.

[NullAshton]

Wow, so 5%+ XP for a fleet is a whole lotta kills?

[geoschmo]

NullAshton said:
Wow, so 5%+ XP for a fleet is a whole lotta kills?

On average a fleet could expect to get 5% XP with around 200 ship kills. That's a couple moderate sized fleet battles. Seems like a pretty good number to me. You wouldn't expect a fleet to pick up much experience running around picking off straglers and unescorted colony ships.

[NullAshton]

Heh, I had my good old Gamma fleet there for a while... I wonder what happened to it?