Stellar manip and movement in simultaneous game

[douglas]

The information on when stellar manipulation happens currently in the FAQ is incorrect. I have tested it pretty thoroughly and posted my results in the Updated the FAQ thread a little while back. Here are the most relevant parts to this discussion:

douglas said:
A ship's ID number is a unique identifier assigned to ships when they are built. It is not visible to the player. The first available ID is the one assigned. When a ship is destroyed, its ID becomes available again.

Within each day in a turn's movement, ships move in order by ID number. This matters for certain stellar manipulations, seek after orders, and minesweeping. Fleets move all at once when their lowest-ID ship moves.

Stellar manipulation: Whether trying to open a warp point and go through it at exactly the same time works or not depends on whether the warp opener has a lower ID than the moving ship. Also, destroying and recreating a planet in one turn with two different ships requires that the create order be executed either on a later day or on the same day by a ship with a higher ID.

Now for a way to make all this information actually useful: Ships are sorted in the fleet transfer screen by ID number, lowest ID at the top. This sort order is in effect both in the list of ships not in fleets and within each fleet. The order of the fleets is by fleet ID, which is used for nothing else that I can tell, except the order fleets are displayed in the ships screen (F6). The order ships are gone through by the "Next ship" operation, typically accessed by the space bar hotkey, is also by ship ID. Unfortunately, this order is cyclical and your current position in it appears to be stored in the savegame, even through turn execution. Of course, you could try building an escort on turn 1 specifically to keep it around forever as your known lowest-ID ship, but this isn't guaranteed to work perfectly unless you're player 1 - anything players before you build on turn one will have a lower ID, which could possibly be freed later and taken up by another one of your ships.

douglas said:
Another kind of stellar manipulation where ship ID can matter: star destruction/nebula creation/black hole creation. A ship moving on the same day as the scheduled mass destruction order has two possible options if it has a lower ID than the stellar manipulation ship. First, if it is on a warp point, it can warp to safety an instant before the superweapon goes off. Second, if it is one sector away from the stellar manipulation ship, it can move there and prevent the ship from doing anything, provided that you do not have a non-aggression or higher treaty with the owner of the stellar manipulation ship. If it has a higher ID than the stellar manip ship, it can't do anything but wait to die.

All orders that do not spend movement points happen just before the ship's next move action. This means that if a ship runs out of movement with a stellar manipulation or load/drop or similar order at the top of the queue, that order will not be executed until its first movement of the next turn.

[geoschmo]

Douglas, that's a lot of good information. Assuming it is all correct though it doesn't explain the situation that happened here. In this case the star destroyer was faster than the ships sitting on the warp point, so it should have destructed on an earlier day than the fleeing ships moved and Ship ID shouldn't have been a factor.

[douglas]

douglas said:
A ship's ID number is a unique identifier assigned to ships when they are built. It is not visible to the player. The first available ID is the one assigned. When a ship is destroyed, its ID becomes available again.

Now for a way to make all this information actually useful: Ships are sorted in the fleet transfer screen by ID number, lowest ID at the top.

I tested retrofitting's effect on ship ID by building three ships and scrapping the first. The two ships remaining had ID number 2 and 3 (assume for this discussion that ID's start at 1). I then retrofitted ship 3 to another design. It was still listed after ship 2 in the fleet transfer screen, so its ID was >2. I then built two more ships. The order in the fleet transfer screen was then first new ship, ship 2, retrofitted ship 3, second new ship. The retrofitted ship's ID was therefore 3 both before and after the retrofit, even though ID 1 was available when the retrofit was done. Note that each action (scrap, retrofit, build, etc.) was done on a separate turn to make absolutely sure that order of events within a turn would have no effect on the trial.

geoschmo said:
ToddT, your assumption seems to be that retrofit changes ship ID becasue you believe that Joachims ship predated "most if not all" of your ships that got away. However, if Douglas is correct, you'd have to be 100% sure that all your ships were newer than Joachims. Not just some, but all, since according to his info the fleet moves with the lowest ID ship. You are positive that you didn't have any ships in that fleet that had been around for a while in the game? An old LC that you had brought up to date or something?

Once again, I reiterate that relative AGE DOES NOT CORRESPOND DIRECTLY TO SHIP ID. Suppose you have ships 1, 2, 3, and 4. 2 gets destroyed. Another ship gets built. The new ship WILL NOT be ship 5. Instead, it will take 2's empty slot. The new ship 2 was built after 3 and 4, but has a lower ID number.

[geoschmo]

douglas said:
Once again, I reiterate that relative AGE DOES NOT CORRESPOND DIRECTLY TO SHIP ID. Suppose you have ships 1, 2, 3, and 4. 2 gets destroyed. Another ship gets built. The new ship WILL NOT be ship 5. Instead, it will take 2's empty slot. The new ship 2 was built after 3 and 4, but has a lower ID number.

So basically there is nothing you can do to guarantee your ship will have a lower ID number. An older ship might, but you can't be sure it will because of ID# reuse.

So because of this "feature" there is a bit of a random element at play here. You are taking a chance with your stellar manip trap unless you can catch the other guys fleet somewhere other than sitting on a warp point. He might be able to get away, and he might not.

I actually don't hate that now that we know. It was just really frustrating not knowing one way or the other.

[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.