Updated the FAQ

[Slick]

That's good enough for me. None of the 1.91 changes should have affected boarding. Thanks.

edit: just ran a little test and boarding ships attempted to board 100% of the time and both ships were destroyed 100% of the time.

Slick.

[ April 26, 2004, 02:55: Message edited by: Slick ]

[Slick]

Definitely need a link to this on the next update:

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

[Paul1980au]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

[douglas]

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]

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).

[Fyron]

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. So if you have engines as the highest priority, pretty much any ship with damaged engines can be repaired first. If there are multiple ships that are candidates for repair, the order of construction then comes into play. The first constructed of these ships will be repaired first.

Incidentally, order of constructin is a very prevelant method used in SE4. You can see this in any screen with an unsorted list, such as the fleet joining screen.