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Its a pretty safe bet that the 3 largest population ocean planets will be the homeworlds of the Ackdarians, Quameno and Wekkarus. You have 1 by default! Scanning the top ten colonies list may also be useful if this is not the case (like if some nasty empire has bombarded these planets back to the stone-age [;)]).

I have never seen any evidence that intelligence effects research - have you? (Yes, I know what it says in the Galactopedia...) Friendliness and aggressiveness effect your chances at colonising independents and recklessness effects how many resources your spaceports stock. Theluins point is a good one also.

Thank you very much. Good tips. In my current game, there are Quarmeno, on the other side of the map, per diplomacy I can see their HW now, and checked it out, indeed ocean. There are no Wekkarus in this game. So simply random searching, I suppose. Does "largest" ocean planet mean the highest quality?

Actually, I have only played one race so far (Ackdarians, was the first one in the list!), and have hence no comparison -- I simply supposed that the Galactopedia was correct. Seems somehow to make a small bit of sense. The Quameno seem to be the only ones with more research than I, and the more stupid races always seems to have less. So if the Galactopedia is wrong, what does intelligence actually do?

I can see how friendliness effects independent colonization, but not sure how aggressiveness does. Is any of this documented anywhere, or are you looking at some files?

I think "largest" in VCs means largest population. Planet quality and size affects the max population, so largest, best quality planets tend to end up with largest populations.

Thank you!

So IF the galactopedia is wrong and Intelligence does not modify research rate, does Intelligence actually do anything then? Thank you.

I have always had that impression that Intelligence gives some sort of small bonus to research. I may remember wrong, and I haven't got Galactopedia handy at the moment. Will check it later and see what it actually says. Will be back if/when I get some updates.

Thanks so much! How would you test that? Use a stopwatch for timing? In any case, I'd be keen to know what you found out and what Intelligence is good for.

People have said here and elsewhere that a colony with >50% quality, you need to expend $$ for its upkeep. But I don't see where. I don't see a slot for that in my F6 screen. If my colony has 51% quality (some of mine do), would it even make sense to tax it? Or am I actually losing money somewhere I cannot see (because there is no slot in the F6 screen to document it) if I manually set my taxes below that which the AI seems to want to have it at on most of my colonies? (Hope I am formulating this question right....)

Thank you very much in advance

Sorry, here is actually another question that is driving me crazy, realize I couldn't wait for the answer to the other one, but....

"Load Troops at nearest colony": IIUC, if you give this order to a FLEET, it will send the entire fleet to that one colony with >1 troops to load them. At least that is what my "testing" has shown me. What it certainly doesn't seem to do is send out all of the troop transports in a fleet to different locations to gather up troops. I had made a fleet of about 8 transporters, called the ... Transport Fleet! ... and sent it to a spaceport in the middle of a dense cluster of my colonies, each with about 2-10 troops on them. I had imagined I could get the fleet full in no time, but alas. Is there a way to queue up troop gathering other than search for planets with troops, click on each individual transport, and manually send them there?

ORIGINAL: onomastikon

Is there a way to queue up troop gathering other than search for planets with troops, click on each individual transport, and manually send them there?

No.

Right, I still can't figure out the difference after starting two games with identical settings except that one race was "very intelligent" and one was not. I cannot seem to find a difference in research times.
Does anyone who knows something about modding or code or just maybe has done some other testing have any information on how the "intelligent" trait affects research speed (or more information on exactly what boni the traits in general offer)? Thank you!

I thought intelligence just gave you more capacity to research rather than affecting the research speed. The amount of research is dependent on the number of research stations - but your actual research is capped. I thought intelligence raised the cap a bit. Could be wrong.

Aha! Thanks much. How would one test that?

Last question: Normally, I play the Nice Guy, but this game I am trying for the first time my hand at Bugs. Part of my VC als Dhayut is to enslave a portion of my total population at my colonies. I have 2 sets of questions regarding this.

Question set 1: In game options, I set "assimilate" to "my race" and its related families and "enslave" as default for other races. So I am actually assimilating a few other bugs, such as Gizurean and whatnot. Fine. I also set "use penal colonies", and the computer automatically chose my second colony fairly early in the game and renamed it to Penal Colony. Although at this time, I had no enslaved population; Q1a: maybe this is a bug (no pun intended)? In any case, I have now in mid-game still that one planet as a penal colony, and no others. I thought it would use penal colonies (with the emphasis on the plural), but that does not seem necessary. Q1b: Can I actually rename other colonies as "Penal Colony" and the computer will treat them as such? Q1c: At first, I had the population control on automated, then I switched it to manual because I thought the computer was screwing up as it had "resettle" on my alien races instead of enslave, and then I think I realized: am I right in understanding that the computer will then "resettle" the unwanted humanoids to the one penal colony world and enslave them there, so that "resettle" on the other planets is correct? Q1d: Am I right then in assuming that the private sector, bizarrely enough, will do the job of resettling these aliens to the slave worlds in private passenger ships? Will the private sector, which apparently believes it will be making money from doing this, take in consideration the amount of passenger ships it needs to buy for this purpose in calculating the number of ships to buy? I ask because I really do not see much population flow.

Question set 2 What does all this mean for my economy? Q2a: apparently, I am supposed to get some boni in production for my enslaved populations. So I set some taxes on the penal colony. Which seems odd to me -- are the slaves supposed to earn money and pay taxes? Q2b: So now I have a dozen or so planets I have conquered with aliens on them. They are then being set to "resettle" (to the penal colony, I assume) by the computer governor automatically. So ... soon I will be having a dozen or so planets which are EMPTY of population? What am I supposed to do with these then? Q2c: Will the computer automatically send some of my own insectoid folk out to these other colonies, eventually? I have not seen that happen yet! Q2d: How can I simply get them to be enslaved then and there?

Erm, hope my questions were understandable. Sorry and thanks in advance

Hello everyone, this is my first post here.

I have finished both tutorials and now I am trying my 1st gameplay. I have restarted a couple times and I see the same situation always:

I usually let automation configuration as default (trying to learn some basics before going to more advanced stuff). This way ship design and science research are automated. I was observing that at mid-games i still have only the scort as military design avaiable while my opponents could already put some destroyers and cruisers at the field. After some time i figured-out that my max design size was 230 (maybe i need some specific tech) and this was causing the bigger designs not being avaiable to me.

Which is the best solution on this situation?
Science research seemed to me a little bit complex at first look but should i take control of it and try to develop some especific tech that should allow bigger designs?


Thx in advance.

Only Escort? I've never seen that before. You must have advanced your tech quite a long way for only the Escort to be available, or there is some kind of bug going on.

It is quite common for the larger designs to be unavailable (like Capital Ship) because you haven't advanced your construction technology far enough but everything except Escorts is something I have never come across before!

I am assuming you are playing RotS or Legends and not just the base game, in which case you should take over the research from the AI and research your contruction techs a bit to imncrease the ship size that you are able to build [:)]

I am playing Legends and maybe i need to put some attention at research. I was reading other posts and decided to begin a sandbox game tonight, i hope to get more knowledge and resolve this issue.

Research is not that complex and defiantely best handled manually [:)]

It is literally just a case of clicking the tech you want to research on the tech tree. Some general tips for your research would be:

Colonization technologies are very important especially if you are playing on a galaxy settings with less colonizable planets available!
Construction technologies are very important too!
As for weapons, it is good idea to make a choice between missiles and torpedos and a choice between laser based weapons and railguns because the AI designs will use either laser or railguns and missile or torpedo [:)]

The rest is down to experimentation and what you think would benefit you the most.

OK, simple question that I cannot figure out. Does the private sector move components or just resources?

Components are in cargo so that would seem to indicate that they can be transported...

Thanks and v/r
pooner

AFAIK I've only ever seen components built at the destination site where the actual building is being done - e.g. the location/ship that you are doing the constructing at (spaceport, construction ship) - and if resources are lacking to build those components via the plants at that location, then either private sector freighters take resource missions to bring those requested resources to that build location, or in the special case of construction ships - they may turn around and go to the nearest location where they can pick up enough materials to build whatever is in their mission queue to build.

That said, your question is a good one because while the above accounts for all components as basically non-moved cargo - they are built based on resources moved to the plant which in turn uses that resource to build the component - the further question arises of what happens to components if for some reason they are built, but then not used? Would they stay in cargo hold forever?

Thinking on this, I believe the question is moot - because I can't think of a scenario right now (doesn't mean it may not exist, I just can't think of one) where components are built but then not used.

Since we can't cancel a retrofit or build once the order is given, any components fabricated would be used up.
If a build order was started, including fabrication of components, but the build order was interrupted because the builder itself died (spaceport blew up, construction ship killed), then any components on board would also vanish.

So I can't think of a scenario in which components would need to be moved, because a) it seems only resources are moved to the build site plants, where it turns those resources into the components it needs, and b) the build site will never have un-used components it made but then needs to be moved elsewhere because either it finishes the job it made those components for (can't cancel build orders), or it plus any components it had blew up when it died.

It would be pretty useful to think that if one plant location was not able to keep up with component requests, that another part of your empire would build those components and then ship them to the location that needed it, but I don't see it working that way. Like when you see a new colony that says shortage of resources and can't build a spaceport or whatever soon as you colonize it - you'd think if components could be moved by the private sector, then a neighboring system would start building components instantly to ship to that new colony world - but all I ever see moved are freighters moving the raw steel, etc to that new colony world to solve the resource shortage - not components. (although it's not like I've looked at every freighter, but whenever I've moused over one, I've never seen one say carrying X component, it's just a resource name)