Hey guys
I am a new player and have been reading the forums for awhile now and just now registered cuz I had a couple of questions that arose from playing last night.
I had my main fleet set up and I would construct reinforcements for said fleet, but I didn't see a rally. Can you rally shipyards?
Also, how do you know how much money you are getting from trading with any one empire? Is there an information screen I am missing for that?
Btw I was on the fence about actually buying this game for a long time, but I am really glad I have because it's really amazing and blew my expectations of what I thought it was going to be out of the water! Still learning it and i have a long ways to go, but I can see myself playing this game for a long time. The combat reminds of the Escape Velocity series. anyways I will quit rambling.
Welcome, of course the game is fun, even if it has some minor issues. The time you spend before they may annoy you are gigantic.
To my knowledge you can see trade volume on the diplomacy screen. It is the number at each nation's power bar. The word is how much they like you (this is for your empire selected, which is default).
Cautious 5k
Would mean they are cautious with you, and you share 5k of trade. If you click their nation you can see what your people thinks of them on your bar. I am not sure if this number is trade income to your coffers, or trade that improves the civilian economy (which you can tax).
I am sorry, but I can't understand your question about "rally shipyards", but I can come with some random answer related to strengthening a fleet.
If you want to add new ships to a fleet, you can start building them and then go to the ship list and locate the new ships there. Ships under construction have different colors, and if you filter military ships and sort by system they are usually quite easy to find as a group. You can set their fleet from a pulldown in the ship list.
You may not want to have them added until they are built (I have seen fun effects where half done ships sail off if the fleet they belong to get an order to move). You may then want to add the ships under construction to a temporary fleet (new fleet) and set the fleet's home colony to the one where the shipyard is. That way the ships will start in a fleet under your control, and not go away on automatic missions. The ships in a fleet will go to the fleet's lead ship as they are completed (and will do that, always, unless told otherwise), and if the lead ship is done with construction/refit it will go to the fleet's home colony.
Good luck on your games, I hope you will enjoy them as I do mine.
ahh ok well as I understand it then there is no direct rally point for shipyards and the only way to really "rally" ships to a specific location would be to have ships under construction join a pre existing fleet or temp. fleet? I had no idea you could set a home system for a fleet. Very useful thanks!
Thanks for answering the trade question also [:)]
Atuuk's soldiers suuuuuuuuck btw. Last night I was trying to capture a lizard dude's homeworld and I had at least 3x's the amount of troops he did and I STILL did not capture it.
Also multi player and LAN support for this game would be the bomb.
Ah, rally point like that. Sorry for being daft. The home colony or location of the fleet's lead ship, yes.
If you want to be sneaky, you could pick one ship, a lowly escort, for instance, as the rally point. You make this the lead ship in a new fleet by doing a right click option, or having it as the only ship or first ship to be added to the fleet. You move this ship to your super secret location rally location in the middle of nowhere, and wait. New ships built which belong to the fleet move to their escort leader. In the tips-thread on this forum, you can see a tip to use a cruiser as the rally points for your transports.
I would keep an eye on the first new ships to see that they bothered to grab fuel before they leave, if you try to have them go away when they are new. You may be out for a slow move if the station runs out of fuel while they are built, for instance.
Notice another thing with this behavior. Your fleet is in a hurry to get going, but one ship is out of fuel (they ran their refueling point dry). Giving the fleet an order will give the order to all ships. But fleet ships that are "done" will go to their leader. So order the fleet on their way, and select the low fuel ship (you see the fuel level as the green bar in the fleet box when selected), and give them individual refuel orders. They will refuel and follow. This is also useful even if you don't move, as you may not want to give the fleet another refuel order and clog the poor gas mine with 30 ships doing yet another docking to top up. One play style of mine makes this relevant. I leave empty troop transports on auto outside fleets to gather their troops from... somewhere. Every now and then I filter my troop transports, and add the full ones to a new fleet (say hi to Invasion 2, 3, 4, north, whatever). I ask this fleet to move to my wanted location. But the ships are all over the place, and may not have enough fuel to reach that location. So After telling them to typically refuel at my given point, I give the stragglers single orders to refuel first.
And yes, the Atuuk does not have the best commandos in the world. I am playing with them just now. You can see their strength in the troop list (or when viewing the troops on a location/ship). I think "standard" strength is about 10k, while the Atuuk are 5750 or something when recruited. So if you typically want 2-1 when attacking, the Atuuk is 4-1. Also, troops that win combat gets stronger. So it may be a good idea to watch who are your crack troops, and not pick which 10 transports will attack their home world quite at random. In my current AAR on trying to let the crazed Atuuk AI do diplomacy for me, I now have one lowly atuuk troop that has passed 20k strength, and several are closing in on that level.
Hi RaffleSnaflle and welcome to the communitu
Bingeling has indeed outlined the only way to implement a sort of waypoint functionality but if you check the wishlist you'll see that it's already requested as a new feature for a later patch by more than one of us.
So we should have it at some point.
I have actually been reading you AAR and it's very good! Humorous too with how the AI does things and how you talk about it. Atuuk take the prize when it comes to stupidity witch I find funny how they even got to space travel in the first place. But anyways, they could potentially in the future make the ships a little bit smarter for refueling ect. and actually attacking threats in the system when the ship isn;t on auto and is just sitting there.
Also I have found that even when there is a nearby colony and I right click the transport to re-stock it's troop level, if it's in a enemy's system it doesn't like to carry out that order most of the time. The quick select button or whatever you want to call in on the bottom to quickly give this command also only works half the time for me even when the transport is in the same system I have fresh troops in.
Minor qualms, but would be really nice to see them addressed at some point Would be nice to remove the option to snag constructor ships when you are drag clicking for military ships too.
Anyway thanks for helping me out! I'm off to go read more of your AAR! [:)]
Oh one last thing. Just out of curiosity what has been your favorite/best race so far?
I'm sorry I am so random with what I ask and that I keep asking questions
that's how we like it, check our own posts back in the day....not much difference [:)]
yes, both Elliot and Matrix offer great support and updates regularly - more so considering that Elliot is almost a one man company atm
and yes also, the story mode brings more goodies....but I'll not spoil the fun of discovering them [;)]
Alright cuz I have been just playing sandbox galaxies for now. Next game I start up I'm doin some story mode, tho I have about two other games going on right now too cuz I can't seem to stick with one and only one lol.
Having both the storyline's on at the same time better? Or worse? [:'(]
I can recommend some sort of AAR, it makes you think through things a bit more, and register that they happen. It is a bit of extra work though, but that is minimized if you write proper sentences as you go.
For instance, paying a bit attention makes me amazed at the AI research department. They researched hyperDeny, but don't have Hyper Deny on any ship designs, even not the capital ship that it is far from being able to build.
It starts to research better armor, but don't put armor on the ships (it did wait a long time, though). I don't think I would notice that on full auto without the AAR, the "research completed" would just fly by.
I may or may not be a freak when it comes to details, but I do not sit down and read through the message log after a game
I removed all but the first "power" priority settings on the research to leave it up to its own ends. It seems to be quite "breadth first", that is going for all first levels early, but it also has a tendency to research one specialty component (one new laser type), and then its improvement. But it seems like design uses results from research (takes the best possible, I guess), but that research does not take hints from designs (but they may be done by humans, so that may be a good decision too).
BTW, not sure if it was you, or someone else who commented that they invaded the lizard homeward with twice the number of troops that were defending, and got wiped, anyway. This is because the combat strength of troops is based on, 1) species,and 2) surviving combat = +experience. Lizzy troops start fairly strong. The squirrel species have lame troops.
I wish, 1) there was a way to add air support to ground battles. In Star empires, one could place fighters on the landing craft, and they would help in the battle. Also, i think bases, in orbit should give some support to the defender, and the side with 'undesputed' control of space around the planet should get a positive modifier in ground combat.
"Banging rocks together... thats the ticket to a better tomorrow."
I agree that space ports and defensive bases should help out ground troops more. Maybe troops should take longer to land, so their transports are more exposed.
Half of me says that a troop landing party should be shot to pieces by the space port's arms, while the other half says they would simply land on the other side of the planet...
elanaahova - yes that was me. It was kind of frustrating to be honest heh. Atuuk need more than wooden spears if they want to take someone's homeworld.
Bingeling - yeah having the troop carriers take more time to unload their troops is an awesome idea! Also, if you have your troop carriers or any ship that can carry troops on auto, do they normally stock up on their own?
I find when my empire gets large there are space mining stations and miners and soo much all over the place it's hard to keep up! I am amazed bingeling by your AAR that you can keep up with everything that is going on. I need to pause the game a bit more and take time to digest the situation of things I guess. Cuz it can get quite frantic.
