Some New Player Qs
 

Ok, so I've played a couple of games against the AI, tried out stuff in the Simulator, read data and AI files, and lurked about on these Boards for a while. I've still got a few questions that I just can't answer. All questions refer to 1.60 Gold, unmodded or TDM. Apologies in advance if there's a FAQ with these and I didn't find it.

Ground Combat:

• How is militia strength and hp determined? Is it tech dependent? Do they secretly have components?
• How are ground battles run? Everyone fires, clean up the dead, repeat?
• The AIs use them, so Sensors & ECM must have some effect, but what's the base To-Hit%? Shields? Armor? Multiple Weapons?

Weapons:

• Shield Depleters seem to behave inconsistently against units, since units seem to count shield & armor HP together. How does this work?
• Ditto Weapon and Engine Destroyers.
• What do the damage values mean on the Allegiance Subverter?

Defenses:

• Is the order in which armor components take damage random? Does it matter in which order they appear on the component list?
• Does Emissive Armor decrease the total damage done by attacks stronger than it can absorb?
• I heard a rumor that Organic Armor builds up hp even before it is damaged. Is it true in Gold?

Other Components:

• Emergency Propulsion can be put on Bases, but does not seem to work. Can it be made to work? Is there any way at all to move a Base?
• It seems broken to me that you can retrofit expensive, even Stellar Manipulation components into ships, repair them in .1 year, and go, provided you have the resources. If you have spare repair capability, why not build empty hulls and just retrofit them up? Am I missing something?

Ship Combat:

• Do ship and fleet XP bonuses apply to defense as well as offense?
• What are the off/def modifiers for loss of B/LS/CQ/MC components? For combat speed?
• Is the order in which combatants begin random? How is it determined who gets the first shot?
• Is there any way to control/predict where launched ftr/sat units will appear on the map?
• There doesn't seem to be much control over the order of wingmen in formations. You set the leader and the rest seems arbitrary. True, or did I miss something?
• Worse, if you move a ship from one combat group to another, it retains its position number from the first formation, which can cause it to do some ridiculous things, e.g. moving to slot 20 of an arrowhead with only three ships. Former leaders reassigned as wingmen do bizarre things.
  Any way to change this?
• Is there any way to tell how badly you've wrecked the environment of a planet with Radiation bombs during combat?

Strategy:

• You can give strategies to your units, but can you give a strategy to your planets so that they'll launch their satellites?
• How does the strategy system define "Transport" and "Colony Ship"? Is it based on the hull, the components, the cargo carried? Can any strategy change behavior based on cargo content of targets?
• Is there any way to set up a strategy so that my planet defenders will pick on the troop transport 5 spaces away instead of the almost unhittable battlecruiser 10 spaces away?
• Conversely, can I set strategies that will cause my ships to fire on a planet until all its weapon platforms and troops are dead, then stop? That will make my troop transport wait outside range until there is no more threat?

Other:

• Does the Climate Control Facility actually do anything? Is there a way to assign number values to the range Optimal, Good, Mild, Unpleasant, Harsh, Deadly? It just seems to work so slowly!
• If you radiation bomb a planet to Deadly, is there a lower limit to the damage done, or can you just keep worsening things till you overflow the variables?
• Is there any functional difference between the five kinds of scans? Any point to researching/using more than one?
• Can the location of a new warp point, if created by an enemy from a known system, be predicted? My minelayers need to know! :-)

Thanks for reading this long list of questions!

--Kynalvarus

Re: Some New Player Qs
 

I've answered most, and others will surely fill in the blanks.

Ground Combat:
From settings.txt:
Defending Units Per Population := 20
Population Defender Attack Strength := 10
Population Defender Hit Points := 30

Weapons:
Damage values on the A.S. are the percent chance that the ship will be subverted when/if the weapon hits.

Defenses:
- Armor damage is somewhat random, BUT smaller armors are more likely to be hit.
- Emissive causes the hit to do zero damage or full damage. IMO this is unfortunate, and makes EA useless.
You can simulate the logical EA effect by changing the EA ability into "shield generation from damage", and setting "restrictions := One Per Vehicle"
- Verily yes. This is what makes organic armor different from shields & regenerators.

Other:
- Emergency propulsion was a problem on bases. It seems that that has been fixed http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif . Bases are by definition non-mobile. You can try allowing them to have engines by tweaking the vehiclesize.txt file.
- Retrofits only allow a 50% increase in cost.
You can get around this via a "Retrofit Series". A retroseries is a sequence of designs each 50% more expensive, leading from a cheap (poss. one turn to build) hull up to the final desired ship/base.
Doing lots of retroseries can allow you to theoretically construct a sphereworld in as little as three turns.
However, all the retrofitting rapidly increases the total cost of the final product.
Making a Sphereworld via retroseries will cost you $4 million resources over two turns. Doing the same thing normally costs only about $1 million, IIRC.

Ship combat:
- yes XP applies to both.
- Having an MC means you don't need any other C&C components: no penalty no matter what.
If you don't have any functioning computers:
> Losing your Bridge means half movement. (An aux. control stands in for a bridge during combat only)
> Having zero crew quarters means half movement
> Having zero lifesupport means quarter movement.
> the above modifiers MULTIPLY together.
- One side goes, then the other. The defender is supposed to get the first turn, but who gets to fire first depends on when the two fleets meet.
- Launched units on the combat map just appear. you can't affect the launch.
- Fleet order is based on the order the ships appear in the list outside of combat. I believe it is usually the order they were built in.
- Since you are using tactical combat, just move them individually. Use the fleets to get everybody in range with a minimum of clicking, then fight it out manually.
- Rad bombs either damage value or conditions, neither of which appears in the status of the planet, so no.

Strats:
- Planets do not launch sats in combat. You have to launch them beforehand, or do tactical. THis was done to avoid the AI launching all of your spysats into a useless orbit when an escort passes by.
- Edit the strategies in your empire options window. Try using "Nearest ship" as a priority, or have them target by type, and wipe out the transports before moving on to the battleships.
- Similarily, edit the strategies. The toggle for "until weapons destroyed" should help.

Other:
- Climate control works very slowly. You can stack 5 of them together on one planet, and the effect will be much greater. At 3% per year, a CC 3 needs about 7 years to go up one "step" from unpleasant to mild, say. Ten on one planet will make your planet perfect in 4 years or so.
- I expect Deadly (0%) is the worst it gets.

The different scanners are only different in price, and cost to research in the unmodded game.
There are mods which differentiate the scanners, even to the point of requiring multiple scanners to be sure nobody is sneaking past with a rare cloaking component.

The warppoints generated from a remote system will come in at the edge sector closest to the proper angle from your star. IE if the generating starsystem is directly above yours, the exit point will be in the top center sector.

Re: Some New Player Qs
 

SJ seems to have it covered but I did discover something about fleet order yesterday. If it is based on the order outside of combat then this might help.

I was setting aside some ships to trade to the neighbouring empire and for the first time I decided to change their names (due to retrofitting I had some ships with the same name and didn't want some other guys ship parked over my homeworld). I renamed them "Gift 1", "Gift 2", etc. to keep them straight and they rearanged themselves in that order (i started from the bottom and went up).

You should be able to use this to put your fleet into the order that you want. Even just renaming them as the appropriate number should do it.

Then again I could be remembering this wrong. At the time I didn't make any connection with fleet composition. Please give it a try and post whether it works or not.

Re: Some New Player Qs
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by Kynalvarus:
Conversely, can I set strategies that will cause my ships to fire on a planet until all its weapon platforms and troops are dead, then stop? That will make my troop transport wait outside range until there is no more threat?<hr></blockquote>

That’s an easy one. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif
Take your attack fleet, put in your troop ship, give the fleet the "capture planet strategy" and you are done. They will do by default exactly what you requested. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

Re: Some New Player Qs
 

[quote]Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:

- Edit the strategies in your empire options window. Try using "Nearest ship" as a priority, or have them target by type, and wipe out the transports before moving on to the battleships.

[quote]
I'm not clear on how "Target by Type" decides which ship is which type. Most are obvious (Fighters, Sats, Mines, Seekers, Bases, Drones, Planets). The ones which seem ambiguous to me are Carriers, Transports, and Colony Ships.

Is a Carrier anything built on a (Light|Heavy) Carrier hull? Anything with Fighter Bays? What about Drone|Sat|Mine Launchers?

Is Colony Ship based on the presence of a Colony Module? I go to CL-based colonizers for long-range colonizations ASAP, would those be recognized as such?

Is a Transport only a Small|Medium|Large Transport Hull? I've never bothered to make a Troop Transport that was actually on a transport hull - you don't usu. need THAT many troops, and you need the speed of the 6th engine, not to mention all the ECM, armor, shields, and PD you can carry.

Thanks for the other answers, you da man! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

--Kynalvarus

Re: Some New Player Qs
 

Yeah I'm not sure either. If the situation was critical, I'd do some combat simulations to see how they get defined.

I would expect that the hull would be the determining feature, but I haven't played much strategic combat.

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>I've never bothered to make a Troop Transport that was actually on a transport hull - you don't usu. need THAT many troops, and you need the speed of the 6th engine, not to mention all the ECM, armor, shields, and PD you can carry.<hr></blockquote>In the games I've played I usually need two or three medium transports full of tanks to win against a homeworld. I had -50% to ground combat, and just threw 700 tanks at em http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: Some New Player Qs
 

Suicide Junkie -

the -50% ground combat is why you need so many troops, you only need about 150 small troops with a 105% - 115% ground combat to take a homeworld from one of the many -50% races

Re: Some New Player Qs
 

well, I like using lots of troops - I make my physical strength ability 90% only, I also make ground combat only Last 3 turns - result? it takes you several turns to capture a homeworld which in my opinion is far more believable

Gold question, does the AI use troops more??

Re: Some New Player Qs
 

Atraikius:
Yes, I know. But I had other things I really wanted to spend RPs for.
I knew ahead of time that I would need to bring more troops in order to make up for the 50% modifier, and so I did.
In the end, I sent in a total of about 1700 small tanks. They were all produced using excess resources, so they didn't really cost me anything.

700 of them fought for almost two years of game time (at two GC rounds per turn), and were finished off just before reinforcements arrived.
1000 more attacked shortly after, a third of them were lost in space when the transport fell to Platform Fire, and the remainder captured the planet with minimal casualties two months later.

I believe the reason why my initial force lost, but my second force of the same size won shortly after was that the AI was emergency building troops to fight off my first wave.
By the time the planet started rioting and the troop factories shut down, it was too late for my forces, and the militia were winning.
They then couldn't build any reinforcements against my second wave due to the riots.

That was a very entertaining campaign http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: Some New Player Qs
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
In the games I've played I usually need two or three medium transports full of tanks to win against a homeworld. I had -50% to ground combat, and just threw 700 tanks at em http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif <hr></blockquote>

Providence favors the large battalions, I'll grant you that.

I guess the design decision rests on several factors. First would be your max ship speed. If odd, you lose combat speed on transport hulls. If even, there's no difference.

If you play -50% GC you're probably glassing everything but homeworlds & the enemy's breathables - cheaper and faster to rebuild than to capture when your troops are that lame. In this case you'd have to favor MT over CL and LT over BC/BB. I don't know if it makes sense to make a Troop Transport out of a DN hull.

In my current game, my race is Psychic & 100% GC. I dropped 150 Small Troops (2TxP3+SArmor3) on a 1.46B Homeworld, and trounced the 73 Militia easily, using a CL-based transport. I still had ~110 troops left to mop up the 5 domed colonies in the system, and had 45 left over after doing that and garrisonning them all. All in all I captured three the AI's four main systems in less than a year, using one troopship of 150 troops per, and just received his surrender.

Then, of course, the whole rest of the quadrant declared war on me. :-/ I told 'em all that he broke our TR treaty first, but they didn't care.
Fortunately I have 2 key warp points that I can blockade to lock the Vaxin in with me all alone. I'm going to need that. :-D

--Kynalvarus

Re: Some New Player Qs
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr> Shield Depleters seem to behave inconsistently against units, since units seem to count shield & armor HP together. How does this work? <hr></blockquote> Units don't track individual component damage; they're destroyed when they've taken the combined total of their components.

Re: Some New Player Qs
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>I guess the design decision rests on several factors. First would be your max ship speed. If odd, you lose combat speed on transport hulls. If even, there's no difference.
If you play -50% GC you're probably glassing everything but homeworlds & the enemy's breathables - cheaper and faster to rebuild than to capture when your troops are that lame. In this case you'd have to favor MT over CL and LT over BC/BB. I don't know if it makes sense to make a Troop Transport out of a DN hull<hr></blockquote>
I'm using a QNP mod, so the max speed thing dosen't factor in.
It is all a tradeoff between engines, armor and cargo, but the best balance is probably minimum cargo (50% on transport hull), 5 speed (+1 Racial) and layers of armor.

Actually, I'm not the genocidal type. I take care of the civilians, but mercilessly smite whoever shoots back. (Weapon platforms get the personal ground-pounder's touch if at all possible)

Re: Some New Player Qs
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by capnq:
Units don't track individual component damage; they're destroyed when they've taken the combined total of their components.<hr></blockquote>

Sorta. An exception is shields. A 300 hp, 30kt shield generator (I'm pulling #'s out of thin air here, so please forgive me) would add 330 AUDs (Arbitrary Units of Damage) to the unit it is on.

However, OA's, CA's, and shield regenerator's abilities are wasted on units. I think. ummm... maybe I'd better get back to you on that one...

Re: Some New Player Qs
 

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by dumbluck:


Sorta. An exception is shields. A 300 hp, 30kt shield generator (I'm pulling #'s out of thin air here, so please forgive me) would add 330 AUDs (Arbitrary Units of Damage) to the unit it is on.

However, OA's, CA's, and shield regenerator's abilities are wasted on units. I think. ummm... maybe I'd better get back to you on that one...<hr></blockquote>

Yes, all sorts of regeneration is ineffective on units. So, the shield regeneration of crystalline armor is useless, the self-repair of organic armor is useless, and shield regenerators are useless.

Re: Some New Player Qs
 

Reguarding the -50% GC.
Using 3000 Starting Points
Yes you will need 3 times the number of troops to capturer, (or protect a planet). The 800 points I get for going with -50% Ground Combat Gave me 28% in Happyness. Since Happyness affects your empire every turn and since it impacts Reasearch and Mining, I suspect I will be able to afford the exctra troops required. Since I get a 10 percent bonus to reasearch from the happyness level, I will be able to reasearch stronger troops.
I have not played this out. It looks like it would will be a good trade off as long as I deal with the logistics properly.