Questions from a 1 month old player

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Daybreak
Vacuum Dragon
Posts: 641
Joined: Mon Aug 13, 2018 10:14 pm

Questions from a 1 month old player

#1 Post by Daybreak »

first - thank you for all the replies to my original questions - could not come back at the time as MB decide to crap itself and took some time to get a replacement.

Second: some feedback, question, or suggestion - is there some way to save your tech queue. I hate the initial start of any new game, going through setting up my intial tech queue. So good if we could save it and edit it before turn 1 (Being able to edit on the fly would be good to but maybe more difficult. The only way I would see it happens is if completed tech in the queue did not dissapear, so you could still move tech around, but completed tech would be ignored.)

Questions

1) Starlane Bore and Nexus: Is there some distance restrictions on these. Set up a Nexus only to find that 3 stars further away did not get a lane. I then built a Bore, and one further one did get a starlane as well, but a repeat of building a Bore did not work for the remaining further away stars.

2) So I played a typical game and won, and maybe I need to play some more, but it seemed a little tame as the AI's let me get away with a lot, so I moved to Agressive AI's. After many games of being punished !!!! My latest game I now have 588 ships and 10k prod, and have basically won. However my question is, do the AI's get some advantages. During thos punishing games, I tried different ways to play. In the previous game the AI after only 155 turns, had so many ships and their tech was extraordinary. I thought maybe they were queuing more ships each time so I tried that. In one game I had 4 times the production and more tech, and they just kept out-shipping me. <br/>
So are the AI's restricted to same game play as us, and lol I just need to get good as my son would say, or do they get some advantages?<br/>

3) Lag - wow, waiting for 1-2 minutes for a turn is not so good. Only happens when lots of ships from what I can see. Currently 4 AI's and myself with 150 systems. However at the moment I have all the ships, most systems (See attached), and I have to wait for AI's (green ticks) and there currently is only 2 of them. My machine is a little old now but should be ok I would have thought (see attached) Any ideas?? Edit: Video card is not great but should be adequate - ASUS EAH5450 Series

4) Generation that affects other systems like Solar Generation - I am trying to understand its exact influence. I am pretty sure that having 2 SolarGens in the same system is useless, as they don't stack, however that is not how it reads. "More than one in the same Supply connected Resource Group do not stack and add no extra bonus. The best bonus applies." It does not say same system do not stack. So what is a resource group? At a late stage of the game a generaton device seems to cover the whole empire, so does that mean i is useless to have more than 1 solar generator for your whole empire?

5) While on the same subject of solar generation, does it matter which planet you place it on? It would make more sense if it was the planet that was closer to the sun.

6) The AI's seem to build stuff like a neutronium forge in a system without a Neuton star, or try to put down a colony of a biological species in an asteroid belt. Are they bugs?

7) I have not once been able to ally with an AI. Does that happen? I never see the AI's ally either, or dont think thye do? It does appear they can become friends, but can't look that up anywhere - be good if you could see relationships.

8) In the empire screen I have a blue cross with a red dot in the middle - what is that> I assume it is a symbol used if allied with someone, and would be different for some allied groups.

Thank you
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Dilvish
AI Lead and Programmer Emeritus
Posts: 4768
Joined: Sat Sep 22, 2012 6:25 pm

Re: Questions from a 1 month old player

#2 Post by Dilvish »

Daybreak wrote: Sun Sep 16, 2018 10:31 pmis there some way to save your tech queue.
Not currently. Support for something along these lines is something I expect we'll get around to eventually.
do the AI's get some advantages? ...I had 4 times the production and more tech...
No. The 'easier' AI's have restrictions & limits to make them easier to deal with, but the tougher AI's do not get any advantages over human players. Were you basing that assessment of relative production and research on the Empire Statistic Graphs (currently always accurate), or the little summary in the empire window (which is currently only based on that portion of their holdings that you can actually observe)? From what you describe it sounds like it probably would have been the latter, although if you allow your overall fleet lineup to get bloated with a lot of (typically low-value) ships then the Maintenance component of new ship production costs can get to be a very significant drag on your production.
3) Lag - wow, waiting for 1-2 minutes for a turn is not so good. Only happens when lots of ships from what I can see. Currently 4 AI's and myself with 150 systems. However at the moment I have all the ships, most systems (See attached), and I have to wait for AI's (green ticks) and there currently is only 2 of them. My machine is a little old now but should be ok I would have thought (see attached) Any ideas??
Here you are clearly referring to the Empires window, which only displays observed stats, not complete stats. We should probably either change the data it uses or update the title/caption for it to clarify that the stats are just 'apparent' stats. Also, you are right in thinking that the total number of ships does have a significant performance effect. My recollection is that there are some ship related effects whose evaluation cpu cost is essentially n-squared in the number of objects.
4) Generation that affects other systems like Solar Generation - I am trying to understand its exact influence. I am pretty sure that having 2 SolarGens in the same system is useless, as they don't stack, however that is not how it reads. "More than one in the same Supply connected Resource Group do not stack and add no extra bonus. The best bonus applies." It does not say same system do not stack. So what is a resource group? At a late stage of the game a generaton device seems to cover the whole empire, so does that mean i is useless to have more than 1 solar generator for your whole empire?
As the Pedia entry for Supply notes, "Planets connected by supply lines form a 'Resource Group' and can share physical resources. " Sometimes you might want to have an extra Solar Generator (particularly in a distant system) to help deal with the potential circumstance that your empire gets split into two or more Resource Groups due to blockades.
5) While on the same subject of solar generation, does it matter which planet you place it on? It would make more sense if it was the planet that was closer to the sun.
That does not matter.
6) The AI's seem to build stuff like a neutronium forge in a system without a Neuton star, or try to put down a colony of a biological species in an asteroid belt. Are they bugs?
The Neutronium Extractor needs to be built in a Neutron start system, but Neutronium Forges are built wherever you want to actually build ships using the Neutronium Armor plates, so that part does not sound like a bug. Putting down a colony of a biological species into an asteroid belt is generally not even possible-- please post a screenshot next time you observe something that seems to be along those lines.
If I provided any code, scripts or other content here, it's released under GPL 2.0 and CC-BY-SA 3.0

defaultuser
Juggernaut
Posts: 854
Joined: Wed Aug 26, 2015 6:15 pm

Re: Questions from a 1 month old player

#3 Post by defaultuser »

You might see a colony ship (I still think AIs build too many of those) at a system with only asteroid belts, but that's probably because the AI either doesn't have a place to use it or the path to the target is blocked so it's waiting there. As noted, you can't even try to colonize a belt with anything but Exobots.

Morlic
AI Contributor
Posts: 296
Joined: Tue Feb 17, 2015 11:54 am

Re: Questions from a 1 month old player

#4 Post by Morlic »

Daybreak wrote: Sun Sep 16, 2018 10:31 pm 3) Lag - wow, waiting for 1-2 minutes for a turn is not so good. Only happens when lots of ships from what I can see. Currently 4 AI's and myself with 150 systems. However at the moment I have all the ships, most systems (See attached), and I have to wait for AI's (green ticks) and there currently is only 2 of them. My machine is a little old now but should be ok I would have thought (see attached) Any ideas?? Edit: Video card is not great but should be adequate - ASUS EAH5450 Series
Could you post log file for the slow AIs or even better a savegame that shows the issue? There are some known slow-downs for the AI lategame but more data points are always good.
If I provided any code, scripts or other content here, it's released under GPL 2.0 and CC-BY-SA 3.0

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