Questions

[JonasB]

I'm new to this game and I think it has lots of potential, but I find many things confusing. Is there a manual or similar kind of documentation available? If not, I have some questions:

1. Planets produce different amounts of common and rare ore. What unit of time is the figures referring to? This information should really be clearly visible in-game.

2. How do I trade with other players and what are the benefits of trading? In short, how does the trade system work?

3. How does the combat system work? How is the outcome of combat calculated?

4. What are the stats on different ships and orbitals? Warp and normal speed, attack (?), defense (?), cargo? Is there any source of this information?

5. Is there any way to see how big other players empires are? Such as number of planets, income per time unit, number of ships/war ships etc? Can I see what specializations they have?

[Cheerio]

* based on my understanding as a fellow beta tester

1) I'm *pretty* sure its by the hour but i could be wrong or out of date

4) when your in a factory on a colony world, if you select a ship there should be a button towards the bottom that says more information, this will take you to a screen that gives you more than a word based description, i.e. warp speed, system speed (both of which are #/5 = seconds), defense, attack etc.

5) i believe there will ultimately be a tab implemented that shows the standings of other players, for now, you have to ask and hope they are honest with you :)

[Spartanius]

1. 1 hour

2. You and the other player must go to the diplomacy screen and hit embargo to lift the embargo(that is on by default) to be able to trade. After that you send your trading ship(any type of harvester, cargoship, freighter) to his colony and when you arrive there should be a new option to trade, select it and then select what planet of yours you want to deliver resource to. Trading(if it is working properly which I think its broken atm) will then generate resources from that planet(beyond what it normally generates) for both players and your ship will drop off your resources at your planet. It does not generate a full cargohold worth of resources and there are skills you can research that increase the amount you get from trading.

3. I am pretty sure there is a very detailed post on combat by Zark, use search. Basically there are rounds, the initiator of combat selects targets and fires first(unless the defender has mines) and the attack value subtracts from the defender's defense value(defense is actually hitpoints, it think its doubled so 20 defense is 40 hitpoints). Then the defender gets to go and this continues until one side wins. Certain ships are better against another class of ships such as fighters being better than other ships at fighting capital ships. Planets defense/hitpoints is based on population and so is there attack. I think the formula for calculating this has been lost and its probably changed in this beta anyway.

4. Go to a planet with factories, go to the screen where you can select a job to build, for each ship and orbital there is a button called "more" in the description that shows stats.

5. No. You can find out how many planets they have by scouting, but there is no in game way of keeping track of this. Just remember "those 5 planets belong to so and so".

[Spartanius]

5) i believe there will ultimately be a tab implemented that shows the standings of other players, for now, you have to ask and hope they are honest with you :)Yes, and I own galactic sectors 3.3 - 3.2 - 3.1 2.3 - 2.2 - 2.1 and 1.2 :p

[Cheerio]

Yes, and I own galactic sectors 3.3 - 3.2 - 3.1 2.3 - 2.2 - 2.1 and 1.2 :p

now thats funny.... a little birdy told me i rained supreme in a few of those =p

[Spartanius]

I even own that birdy, he tricks people.

[Cheerio]

i knew i should have checked the tag
*made in spartanland*

[JonasB]

* based on my understanding as a fellow beta tester

1) I'm *pretty* sure its by the hour but i could be wrong or out of date

4) when your in a factory on a colony world, if you select a ship there should be a button towards the bottom that says more information, this will take you to a screen that gives you more than a word based description, i.e. warp speed, system speed (both of which are #/5 = seconds), defense, attack etc.

5) i believe there will ultimately be a tab implemented that shows the standings of other players, for now, you have to ask and hope they are honest with you :)

Thank you for the answers!

4: Ah, good to see that this info is available in-game! So a probe has max warp speed 720 and normal speed 100. If I understand you correctly, this means the warp speed is 144 seconds and system speed is 20 seconds? What does this mean? Or do you mean 720 per 5 seconds = 144 per second? This would make sense, but in that case, how many such distance units is each sector?

5: That makes sense. After all, it's just a beta, though I thought that all features intended to be in the final release should be present in a beta. It would be great if they implemented some sort of intelligence system for this.

[JonasB]

1. 1 hour

2. You and the other player must go to the diplomacy screen and hit embargo to lift the embargo(that is on by default) to be able to trade. After that you send your trading ship(any type of harvester, cargoship, freighter) to his colony and when you arrive there should be a new option to trade, select it and then select what planet of yours you want to deliver resource to. Trading(if it is working properly which I think its broken atm) will then generate resources from that planet(beyond what it normally generates) for both players and your ship will drop off your resources at your planet. It does not generate a full cargohold worth of resources and there are skills you can research that increase the amount you get from trading.

3. I am pretty sure there is a very detailed post on combat by Zark, use search. Basically there are rounds, the initiator of combat selects targets and fires first(unless the defender has mines) and the attack value subtracts from the defender's defense value(defense is actually hitpoints, it think its doubled so 20 defense is 40 hitpoints). Then the defender gets to go and this continues until one side wins. Certain ships are better against another class of ships such as fighters being better than other ships at fighting capital ships. Planets defense/hitpoints is based on population and so is there attack. I think the formula for calculating this has been lost and its probably changed in this beta anyway.

4. Go to a planet with factories, go to the screen where you can select a job to build, for each ship and orbital there is a button called "more" in the description that shows stats.

5. No. You can find out how many planets they have by scouting, but there is no in game way of keeping track of this. Just remember "those 5 planets belong to so and so".

Thank you for the answers!

2: Great description! How much CO and RO is generated through tradin at baseline? Is it a certain fraction of the planet's resource production? If so, can someone who knows share this info? :)

[JonasB]

Another question:

6: Is there a limit to how many orbitals a planet can have? I'm trying to build more shipyards in some colonies and get "your attempt to build orbital shipyard failed to the following reason:" and no more. That I get no more info than that in the error message is obviously a bug, but is there a limit to number of orbitals or shipyards per colony?

[zarkwizard]

Another question:

6: Is there a limit to how many orbitals a planet can have? I'm trying to build more shipyards in some colonies and get "your attempt to build orbital shipyard failed to the following reason:" and no more. That I get no more info than that in the error message is obviously a bug, but is there a limit to number of orbitals or shipyards per colony?

1 Ship yard per planet. This was added because someone (Spartanius) created a ton of shipyards at their homeworld so they could create a massive amount of cruisers to attack everyone. Shipyards are the only orbital that is governed by that rule. Even though you can build multiple things like Science Stations, and Refineries their bonuses do not stack. The other issue we encountered was they hit their ship limits and were unable to build a ship yard at any other planet. So now shipyards do not count to your object total, hence why the restriction was put in as well.

The only orbital that has any benefit having more than one is the Missile Array, Beam Array, and Mine fields. This is because they are basically orbital combat ships.

5) We will have the player details in the next client that show your details. The standings will be implemented in the very near future.

[Cheerio]

trade baseline? pretty please :p

[Spartanius]

Yeah a better understanding of trade would be lovely so explain this.

Cargo ship trades from source planet "rock producing 1000 CO" to destination planet "Terran 1000co 24ro" with zero skills. What happens? Does distance effect it? What would it be with max skills? Can you trade between two mining colonies in the same system?

[JonasB]

I see. Then there is a bug, because I currently have two shipyards in two of my colonies, and two more under way on a third colony. So it seems you can build several shipyards if you don't have any in your colony?

Build of other orbitals such as refinery etc should also be restricted to one if their effects doesn't stack.

[Spartanius]

so you mean when you were building your first shipyard at a colony you queued more than one or built multiple simultaneously?

[JonasB]

Multiple shipyards built simultaneously. I'm going to try building four simultaneously in my latest colony.

I didn't know that you could queue in factories, I always get a message saying "no available factories" or something similar. How do you do that?

Is there still no one who can explain what the warp speed figures actually mean in terms of "number/fraction of sectors per unit of time"?

[Tsagoth]

Multiple shipyards built simultaneously. I'm going to try building four simultaneously in my latest colony.

I didn't know that you could queue in factories, I always get a message saying "no available factories" or something similar. How do you do that?

Is there still no one who can explain what the warp speed figures actually mean in terms of "number/fraction of sectors per unit of time"?

You can't queue in the sense of ordering a yard to build different ships one after another. What you can do is say "Build x of y" and then one factory will build them in order. If you want to build say four cruisers in a rush, do not do a Build of 4 order, instead Build 1 ship and issue that order four times to assign 4 factories.

The speed values given are the length of time a ship takes to move from one position to another. Speed/5 = seconds of transit time. Ships only move one sector per warp movement interval.

[JonasB]

Tsagoth:

Nice feature with the numbered build orders, I had missed that!

OK, I see. So the speed refers to the time it takes to move one sector. Does this mean that diagonal movement takes as much time as horizontal and vertical movement? So that if I send a ship to go from 0,0 to 10,10, this will take exactly as long as moving from 0,0 to 0,10 instead of about 1,41 the time as it "should"?

If so, have you considered to use a hexagonal based tile system instead? As you probably know, it is more "realistic" in this aspect.

[Spartanius]

From what I have seen ships will travel diagonal and it takes the same amount of time as other directions.

[Tsagoth]

As S says, diagonal travel time is the same as horizontal or vertical travel. Originally the game was hex-based but there were difficulties and it was abandoned.