Updated the FAQ

[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.

[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.

[capnq]

Atrocities said:
Question:
I only have about 5 planets with a ship yard on them. The problem is remembering which ones have a ship yard and picking them out of the colonies report menu. I realize I could write them down, but I was wondering if there's a way to view only colonies with a specific facility? When you have say 30 colonies and only 5 ship producers its quite difficult to pick them out you see.

Answer #3: Click the Status button on the Colonies report. The shipyard planets will have a shipyard icon.

[Puke]

or go to the construction menu, and only select planetary SYs, and not planets.

[douglas]

All of the following statements have been thoroughly tested. Please do not dispute them without testing them yourself. They also all refer to "ship ID". 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.

The order of repairing ships is completely independent from the repair priorities list. Ships are repaired in order by ID number. Repair priorities only affects the order of components repaired within the ship.

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.

Seek after: Particularly important when all ships involved have the same speed. If a ship with ID 1 is seeking a ship with ID 2, both moving at the same speed, 1 will seek 2's location at the start of the day, and then 2 will get to move away. In this situation, 1 must either get very lucky or the player must deliberately and correctly anticipate 2's movement in order to catch 2. Going the other way, 2 will have a much easier time seeking 1, as 2 will seek after 1's after-movement location.

Minesweeping: Minesweeping, unlike combat, is calculated after each individual ship movement rather than at the end of the day. This means that a minesweeper can only protect a fleet that it's not in if the minesweeper (or the minesweeper's fleet's lowest-ID ship) has a lower ID than any ship in the fleet. This is rarely important, but there have been occasions when I wanted to attack RIGHT NOW and my fleet didn't have a minesweeper, but I did have a minesweeper the fleet could meet up with partway through the turn. I also occasionally have large forces split into multiple fleets travelling together so that I can split the force up without losing the fleet training bonus.

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.

[Slick]

Holy Smokes! That's interesting. Great testing; I'm sure that took some time to figure out. I'm a little confused on ship ID. Does each player have a separate ID list or do all players share the same list? This would be important because if a player I haven't "met" yet loses a ship and the game has a single ship ID list, the next ship produced by anyone will take that spot and that spot may be a very early ID number. If each player has his own ID list then you might kinda know if when new ships will get an older ID. It doesn't seem like you can control this very much.

[douglas]

All players share the same ID list. This makes it very hard to predict whether you'll have trouble seeking after an enemy ship or not unless you have some past experience with that particular enemy ship to go by.

Controlling anything related to ship ID numbers is practically impossible outside of a test game. All you can do is observe the order of ships in the fleet transfer screen and the next-ship list and try to take advantage of what you see.

[douglas]

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.

Now for a list of restrictions on stellar manipulation operations:

Note: "enemy presence" refers to any object that you can detect controlled by a player you do not have at least a non-aggression treaty with. Cloaked enemy ships will only prevent stellar manipulation if you have a good enough sensor in the system to detect them.

Create Planet: Can be issued anywhere, will apply to whatever asteroid field the ship happens to be in when it's executed. Cannot be done when there is an enemy presence in the sector.

Destroy Planet: Can only be issued when over a planet. Stores the target planet, even if there's only one there and it doesn't specifically ask, and will not work on any other planet. This is the only stellar manipulation order that can be done in the presence of an enemy.

Create Star: Can be issued anywhere, even in systems that already have a star. Will create a star wherever the ship happens to be when the order is executed. Will fail if there is another star in the system at the time of execution. Cannot be done in the presence of an enemy.

Destroy Star: Can only be issued when at a star. Stores the target star and will not work on any other star. Cannot be done in the presence of an enemy.

Open Warp Point:
Can be issued anywhere. Will open the warp point wherever the ship happens to be when the order is executed. Restrictions such as only one warp between the same two systems allowed and the maximum of ten warp points in a system are checked at time of execution. Cannot be done in the presence of an enemy.

Close Warp Point:
Can only be issued when at a warp point. Stores the target warp point, even if there's only one there and it doesn't specifically ask, and will not work on any other warp point, not even the other side of the same warp point. Cannot be done in the presence of an enemy.

Create Storm:
Can be issued anywhere. Will create the storm wherever the ship happens to be at the time of execution. Cannot be done in the presence of an enemy. Will give an erroneous log message about lack of supplies when attempted in the presence of an enemy.

Destroy Storm:
Can only be issued at a storm. Stores the target storm and will not work on any other storm. Cannot be done in the presence of an enemy.

Create Nebula:
Can only be issued at a star. Does not store the target star, but does require that a star be present in the sector when executing the order. Cannot be done in the presence of an enemy.

Destroy Nebula:
Can be issued anywhere. Will apply to whatever nebula the ship happens to be in when the order is executed. Cannot be done in the presence of an enemy.

Create Black Hole:
Can only be issued at a star, but no star is necessary when the order is carried out. The star the order was issued at will be deleted even if it is not in the same system as the new black hole. This deletion will not affect anything else in the system - the star just disappears. Cannot be done in the presence of an enemy.

Destroy Black Hole:
Can be issued anywhere. Will apply to whatever black hole the ship happens to be in the same system with when the order is executed. Cannot be done in the presence of an enemy.

I have not tested ringworld/sphereworld construction in the presence of an enemy.

[Fyron]

Does the ID number exploiting really need to be in the FAQ? It really doesn't matter, and it greatly detracts from the "game" aspect of SE4... There is a point when over-analyzing the minute details of the game takes any possibility for fun out of it. Of course, whether this point has been reached or not is a matter of personal opinion...

Perhaps this should be moved to a new thread if it is going to spark lengthy discussions...