Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Graknorke]

But then you have to manage two colonies and it gets really awkward. That is a thing that really needs streamlining.

[EuchreJack]

But then you have to manage two colonies and it gets really awkward. That is a thing that really needs streamlining.

I usually resort to SM mode, and avoid creating too large of secondary colonies on the same world.

[foarl]

Well I'm meeting frustration at the hands of bugs. To the point that I'm seriously wondering what's so wrong with my games (these bugs definitely make it near damn unplayable).

Game killer #1 Error 94. It started popping up over my cargo ships. Finally figured out that the culprit is the "refuel when no other orders given" default order. It doesn't work, and it definitely causes bugs whenever they finish a current order. Solution was to spam remove all orders and it'd go away. The bug piled up on a single cargo ship such that it looped the error 94 message and I had to delete that world though.

Game killer(?) #2

First taste of combat was getting a geosurvey ship blown to smithereens by an incredibly hostile alien race (my grav ship with basic passive sensors detected them first, and even clocked their speed with active sensors).  Fine. Spend 5 years rapidely developing tech to roll out some warships. Many mistakes and a couple misclicks wind me up with some very broken warships. Screw it lets send em anyway and try to learn how combat works.

They have sensors and active search sensors. Active search sensors are on at system entry. They see nothing and then the lead ship gets hit with 16 missiles and instasploads. Still blind, the game is *forcing* me to do 5 second intervals, and nothing has happened in the past 45 minutes (540 individual intervals). Furthermore, since the first ship was killed, I'm getting the stupid error 94 again every single turn (ergo I can't even just turn on auto turn and walk away. If I weigh the enter key down for the error message it keeps spamming the turn option even after an interrupt happened).

Is this what actual combat is like? Cause this is horrendous.

[FritzPL]

Maybe you're in SM mode and you're getting the enemy race's errors? I don't know, I never really had that situation.

[foarl]

Maybe you're in SM mode and you're getting the enemy race's errors? I don't know, I never really had that situation.

The bugs are definitely mine (SM mode is off, and enemy races aren't accessible to my SM). Specifically it has something to do with a null value inside a move order that's improperly created. For the cargo ships I figured out what caused it, not clue what happened with my stupid "warship".

But what the heck is with 5second turns and nothing happening? What exactly is the game calculating...? I can click 30 seconds or 30 days and it still only ticks 5seconds over. It's to the point where I'm tempted to just self destruct my stupid warships. But if this happens again? Why would I even want to try combat ><

[Flying Dice]

They have sensors and active search sensors. Active search sensors are on at system entry. They see nothing and then the lead ship gets hit with 16 missiles and instasploads. Still blind, the game is *forcing* me to do 5 second intervals, and nothing has happened in the past 45 minutes (540 individual intervals). Furthermore, since the first ship was killed, I'm getting the stupid error 94 again every single turn (ergo I can't even just turn on auto turn and walk away. If I weigh the enter key down for the error message it keeps spamming the turn option even after an interrupt happened).

Is this what actual combat is like? Cause this is horrendous.

My first guess is that your sensors aren't good enough to pick them up . My second (could use confirmation here) is jump sickness, but I don't remember offhand whether that affects active sensors. I believe it does, though.

As for the situation as a whole, I'm guessing that you were hit by a FAC strike, and that they have RTBed to reload, but a listening station is still tracking your surviving ships, causing delays for tracking/interception, even if you can't see anything.

The relevant cause of generating the error is (judging by what I remember of old bug reports) an order for a fleet to open fire without actually having valid targets.

But frankly, as with a lot of these problems... I never seem to have them.

[foarl]

They're the same ships that killed my survey ship, and same sensors on my war vessels as my survey ship. Not understanding ranges and junk, I'll buy that they probably attacked me from outside my sensor range.

Never heard of jump sickness, but they had jumped via jump ship within the last 24 hours or so.

As for the firing suggestion: One of my ships had a bizarre quasi existance missile system on board. It wasn't attached to a fire control, nor was it in the list to attach to a fire control. After deleting the ship it was on completely, the bug is gone! And now I can proceed with more than 5 second intervals. My guess is the game was trying to fire that missile system every 5 seconds, but without target or fire control it was making the bug happen.

Thank you so much!

Edit: The ships ran out of missiles and decided to ram my ships. Never got a single shot off, but won by default of being the fatter fleet. This is not a proud day for me.

Edit2: It seems there was nothing of that "species" except the four ships. Is it possible they were precursors? I haven't seen any colonies (but no ruins either I guess... not sure how those are detected).

[Iosyn]

I have a missile specialist with 65% bonus and 5 labs. I also have a missile specialist with 0% bonus and 50 labs.

I don't know who I should have fighting rabid animals and who should win a nobel extermination prize.

The biologist extermination plan worked. I've got two missile specialists now, so yay.
I'd love it if your biologists could research medical stuff so your leading commanders and scientists don't die
of strange medical conditions though, I've lost a couple of 35 and 40%ers because of them all developing space cancer. At least my defensive specialist cranked out a new armour and shield tech before he croaked. Maybe they're dying from overwork... 

Also the 65% specialist is a real bro. just have him working on side missile projects while your 10-20% guys with 20 labs do main ones. then when the main project finishes, switch the side project in instead. I've been doing that with some of my 40% power/sensor scientists and it works a treat, since each lab is pound-for-pound more efficient.


That said... Dear lord my engines suck. I thought my ion drives were pretty good-- compared with the first few tech levels. Now I'm trying to design a vessel with engines as a percentage of the total tonnage and WOAH I can't even get to 4k/kms without 60% mass devoted to my current ion engines. Then again, all my current engines are skewed towards fuel efficiency, the most powerful one I had was 1.00 to 1.00 EPH, aside from my fighter or missile engines.

Magnetoplasma engines on the way, but a 50HS engine with 2x power for 5x fuel comes to about 1600 power and 2700+ Fuel cost.
That scares the living hell out of me, but of course it would be laugh at my other engines.
Anyone recommend some decent warship engines? I'd like to keep the fuel cost low, but for smaller craft I don't mind blasting the power right up. I'd also like it to be redundant if possible, cos I don't really like the idea of having my 1600 power engines blow up, leaving my ships stranded in space


@foarl: Yeah, after a jump any sensors take a while to activate so you're essentially blind. It works both ways though, if anything comes through to your side your picket forces/missile PDCs could get in a few hundred good hits depending how many missile launchers they mount and how fast they travel. my first plan once I colonize the next system is to drop some kind of missile base ontop of every jump point.

Also unless you have 1 resolution sensors with a decent range some missiles can pass your entire scanner range without being detected. You want something like 1 resolution size 20 depending on your sensor tech level. That will probably give you a max range of say, 10m/km and say something like detects size 6 missiles at...1.5m/km.
Considering the smallest time increment is 5s, a 30k/kms missile would be able to travel 150k/km per tick. So any sensor with the missile detection value lower than 150k/km wouldn't pick that missile up before it strikes. a 1.5m/km missile detection range would therefore let you detect that missile earlier and if you have the tech for tracking vs missiles, give you a better tracking bonus to hit them with your PD lasers.

Resolutions higher than 1 probably won't pick up missiles at all, those are for searching for ships etc. Again, something like a sensor designed to pick up a 6000 ton ship will be hard pressed to find say, a 3000 ton fast attack craft.

[Flying Dice]

If you play with Swarm on, you're pretty much obliged to make all your non-PD active sensors R16. 


But yes, those sound like Precursors. A NPR would have more of a presence, Swarm are very distinctive (and don't use missiles), and if it had been Invaders you either wouldn't have seen a ramming attack or the rammer would be fuckhuge in volume.

[foarl]

Well they've got a thermal sig 5 moon. I'm assuming that'll be some kind of sensor station, but otherwise there's nothing in the system.

They were FACs, 950t and 8.6km/s ships.

After reading how sensors work (obviously something I should have done earlier), my archaic sensor clusters were more or less completely blind compared to what the wiki consider's minimal sensing capabilities. And with those ships being so small, I could only detect them actively when they started ramming me.

>.>

Cheap lesson to learn, and I guess I can go investigate that moon now.

[RedKing]

Yup, sounds like Precursors. They often have listening posts with a single battalion of troops and one DSTS.

[Iosyn]

yeah it's fine foarl, I'm still learning half of it myself lol. Luckily sensors are the one thing I can kinda understand.

Argh... Damn humans. Sure, go ahead and overpopulate mars base while I'm not looking. I already have over 1000 million of ya breeding like LICE on earth... with 28mil unemployed at that. Bloody NEETs.

Also I just scrapped all earth fighters. They were just something to let my commanders train some crew up for a real ship and provide a tiny bit of PPV for earth-- next thing I know some exploded. the first ship to explode on me was a grav survey ship, I'd sent a pair of them out to survey jump points... then when the survey is complete I go to find them and oh dear... Engines damaged, sensors damaged, no maintenance supplies left... I told them to go back to earth, so they start going at 1km/s... next day, KaBOOM.

That said, all the fighters were orbiting earth (without a PDC hanger, another thing I forgot, doh) so I just had them all abandon ship and recovered the lifepods with my local colony ship. Now I've got a good number of commodores, captains and two rear admirals with ~900-1100% Fighter Combat Bonus. There's about 50 450 ton fighter wrecks just waiting to be scrapped by my salvage haulers.


Last thing of note for now: It seems when I sent my colony ship in for a refit (from 25k to 50k colonists) The civilian company ships were upgraded as well. Now I've just got to see if I can refit my very nice 2 cargo bay freighters so the civilian companies stop using 975km/s freighters that only seem to be able to hold 10 infastructure at a time. I never built a design like that, my current freighters go much faster and carry a lot more cargo. Strange.

Also I wonder if how much of a badass my rear admiral with 916% fighter combat bonus is. I'll make a fighter leader with a tiny self-only jumpdrive, shields and cloaking system just for him. I'll call him Maverick and let him wipe out the precursors alone.

[foarl]

Iosyn: Since we're talking general tips/tricks for beginners. Have you increased the intended deployment time for the ships (Box on the top left of the ship design window)? It's auto set to 3months, but if you boost it up to 24 months I find I've been getting a lot less problems with maintenance. Small bonus tonnage is more than worth it imo. And the other obvious idea being slapping maintenance bays on.

Doesn't count for fighters, but I've never had issues with my ships with that advice in mind.

[The Scout]

Anyone know a good way to set 90 fighters to a mothership, other then manually?

[Azated]

That said... Dear lord my engines suck. I thought my ion drives were pretty good-- compared with the first few tech levels. Now I'm trying to design a vessel with engines as a percentage of the total tonnage and WOAH I can't even get to 4k/kms without 60% mass devoted to my current ion engines. Then again, all my current engines are skewed towards fuel efficiency, the most powerful one I had was 1.00 to 1.00 EPH, aside from my fighter or missile engines.

Magnetoplasma engines on the way, but a 50HS engine with 2x power for 5x fuel comes to about 1600 power and 2700+ Fuel cost.
That scares the living hell out of me, but of course it would be laugh at my other engines.
Anyone recommend some decent warship engines? I'd like to keep the fuel cost low, but for smaller craft I don't mind blasting the power right up. I'd also like it to be redundant if possible, cos I don't really like the idea of having my 1600 power engines blow up, leaving my ships stranded in space

I usually use 0.80 or 0.75 power engines for my larger military vessels. It cuts fuel consumption in half (down to 0.57 or 0.49 if I remember correctly) for only a fraction of speed reduction. Anything smaller than about 8k-12k tons isn't going to be deployed long enough for the fuel consumption to matter, so they get 1.00. Nothing in my fleet ever exceeds that 1.00 power, with the exception of fighters and missiles.