Do I understand correctly that the game is designed for about 300 game years? That is, the engine will die before resource scarcity becomes an issue? Is Corundium really such a rare ore, or am I just unlucky with generation? I thought about exponential growth of resource extraction, but it seems pointless given such a time limit. And since planets have resources for thousands of years, the only motivation to look for neighbors is to seek trouble (for fun) and a desire to finally test my designs in battle. ⌠Well, and xenocide for (fun) the sake of performance improvement, I suppose. A kind of âCrisisâ whose goal other races cannot understand.
Is it possible to optimize the game when creating a world?
Is it possible to arrange gladiator battles between my own ships without SM mode?
Is there any plan to port the game from a single core to multiple cores? Although thatâs quite a pain in the ass.
As I understand it, technologies are limited by some cap, and you cannot research them indefinitely? So if the engine doesnât die, the technologies will run out.
Overall, as I understand it, this game is like a sandbox or a roguelike, which allows you to entertain yourself under specific conditions. Does it make sense to set 1000 systems during generation, or will 100 systems not cut down the game in any meaningful way?
I donât know about it being designed or optimized for 300 years, but the longest game Iâve had got to around 200 before my empire collapsed. Partially user errorâŚmostly user error. And that game took me several months irl to play out. Hell, my current play through has taken about 12 hours irl and I havenât even advanced time at all yet.
Corundium is not any more or less rare than any other mineral (except duranium which had a bonus to itâs spawn rate) as far as I can tell. It really does just come down to rng, which is why space master mode exists. You can reroll minerals to your heartâs content or specify exactly what you want.
Exponential resource gathering is always something I aim for even if my empire wonât survive long enough to reap all the benefits. Itâs less an issue of abundance and more an issue of logistics. Moving minerals across Sol is easy, but when your newest god-tier mining world is 5,6,7,8+ jumps from Sol and you just NEED to have it⌠things get a little more complicated. Plus the extraction rate itself poses an issue. Even a top tier loaded world is useless without the population and/or industrial mobilization to produce and ship the mines out there. Minerals are worth zilch if they stay in the dirt.
Not sure what you mean by optimizing a world, but SM mode is always there to tweak things. I usually play with house mercy rules to avoid missing out on minerals for too many surveys. Ill reroll minerals if I say scan 10 systems and find 0 deposits of some mineral, the next system Iâll guarantee some for myself. However, that doesnât mean I get it without a fight though.
You can flag ships and fleets to be seen as targets for fire controls. Iâve never fired at my own ships, but you can in theory setup a gladiator fight like this. I donât recall exactly what the box is called, but it is definitely in the fleet screen. I believe nuclearslurpee commented somewhere else on the forum and said where.
Idk about cores and multicore threading, but Iâd doubt it. This whole thing is less of a game and more of a passion project story generator that aims for realism shared by its benevolent creator to us. Donât expect many, if any, major fundamental changes to its operation. It took a long time to change to C#.
Iâve never gotten to the end game tech, so idk on that. I usually play on slower research speeds so that every tech feels meaningful and Iâm not refitting/redesigning every 5-10 years.
100 systems is not enough in my opinion. Thereâs a pretty good chance youâll end up with half of those being useless. Although, if you play with Known Stars on, the system limit doesnât actually do anything. If you untick known stars, Iâm pretty sure the spawn chance for more habital world increases (I believe Steve mentioned that years ago), but that doesnât necessarily mean more minerals. Habital worlds are essential, but if the population has nothing to mine youâll still end up in mineral shortages. My last âfullâ length playthrough (if you want to call it that) lasted around 80 years and I had well over 200 systems discovered with several NPRs and spoilers running amok. 200+ was a lot for my laptop to handle, but itâs more on the NPRs and spoilers.
Edit- Also systems donât generate until discovered, so if you were to set systems to 10,000,000 the game would still play out the same as 100 up until that number is reached. New jump points can link to existing systems too, so not every link will result in another system generated. They arenât pre-determined, so itâs more of a limit to how much you want yourself (and NPRs) to explore.
Iâve played for 81 years. And in three neighboring systems, Iâve found every type of resource. Yes, some have a yield of 0.1, but hey, the game doesnât push you to rush excavations. If you end up getting ten times fewer resources from the map â so be it. The problem is that I realized a third of the game has passed, and Iâm sitting in three systems, with aliens next door who couldnât care less about me. And the game is already running extremely slowly. Youâve only just started to get on your feet, and itâs already the mid-game. This is extremely disappointing. I was honestly expecting something like a 10,000-year period, judging by the resource deposits, so that the neighbors would have a reason to clash with each other.
The idea of reducing research speed is interesting. Itâs annoying that a ship becomes two generations obsolete already at the stage of being built at the shipyard. Especially the constantly dying scientists who just drop projects, and you have to figure out what they were even working on.
How does the game actually load? As I understand it, all NPC actions are calculated honestly. There is some main enemy that is generated right away, and secondary NPCs that are generated as the game progresses. So, if I havenât explored beyond three systems, where do such terrible processing lags come from? It turns out the game has nothing to process. And also the save file grows endlessly, even if you delete all previous games.
You can change the number of starting NPRs, 1 is just the default. Iâve played lot of games with 0 to start and 0% chance to spawn until I get a couple extrasolar colonies, and then I crank the spawn rate up to 40-50%.
Part of your slowdown will be due to the NPR itself exploring. Even if you only surveyed 3 systems out, that NPR is constantly surveying and exploring. You may have dozens or hundreds of systems and not know it. NPRs LOVE to explore and will spam survey ships. Plus with the default settings they can also spawn other NPRs and you would never know until they also surveyed out to you. Think of a branching out effect and youâre hanging on to one branch instead of growing too.
Another reason could be civilian shipping. How many shipping companies and how many ships do you have - also what version are you on? Steve has reworked civilian companies a few times to tackle their bloat and spawn rate. You may need to turn off their spawning and delete a few lines.
Game version 2.7.1. I have two civilian companies shuttling between two colonies. And they seem to be transporting colonists, because I transport everything else myself. Most of their fleet hangs around the planetâs orbit. I donât really see much point in colonies. After all, you can always drop autonomous mining rigs if you have Corundium, and if you donât â the inhabitants will be digging even one colony for a thousand years. Iâve never had any problems with âwealthâ.
Overall, Iâm not very interested in sector exploration. In Stellaris there was a point to it â to seize black holes and ore, but here there isnât. So Iâll really try setting 100 systems, or even 30.
If youâre not getting into combat, that may be why youâre not feeling resource constrained. Combat consumes your ships and missiles (and ground troops), and replacing those costs LOTS of minerals. Losing colonies to enemy also consumes minerals.
If youâre finding the pace of play too slow to be enjoyable, I suggest you increase the difficulty in your next game at setup by increasing number of starting NPCs to 3 or 4, turning on some of the spoiler races, and/or increasing the difficulty modifier and NPC hostility. Fair warning that this will likely result in you getting wiped out within 50 years if you arenât already comfortable with the game controls and ship design for combat. But thatâs part of the fun⌠fighting valiantly against overwhelming odds to the best of your ability.
I never run a game with research higher than 50 or difficultly lower than 200. If you are having performance issues, it might be due to large civilian shipping lines that have nothing to do. When civilian shipping lines dont have orders to fulfill, the game will spend every cycle looping through all your colonies looking for work. If you arent expanding, they might not have anything to do.
It isnât designed for any specific period, as the game can be customised for many different scenarios. I donât think I have reached 100 years in any game in the last 20 (real) years.
I have had shortages of many different minerals. There is nothing special about Corundium in that respect.
SM mode is there for things like creating gladiatorial battles.
The game isnât really suited to parallel processing. Besides, it would add a minimal performance improvement in exchange for making it much more difficult to code, comprehend and debug. Optimization is not the only consideration.
I have never even got close to running out of technology to research
I have had games over 500 systems that were entirely playable.
Which computer do you use? How much RAM? Which CPU?
IIRC, the game runs entirely in memory, with almost no access to disk. So, it is beetter to run with 8+ GB RAM at least.
After such statements, I really feel my playing style is turtle. It takes me about a hundred years (conventional start) just to start exploring other systems.
My largest empire was about 200 known systems with approximately 30 systems actively colonized in my empire - I played about 175 years on that save. I was maybe halfway through the tech tree and by that point of the game, it kind of stopped being fun because I was spending so much time executing logisitics for the next âpushâ of the borders. That game was played at point before we had raiders and before the AI was coded to do actual invasions so honestly, I wasnât face with enough compelling reasons to contine. It is a bit different now with more powerful and aggressive spoilers and NPRs that will under the right circumstances actively come after you.
AMD Ryzen 7 2700 + 32RAM
My apologies if I am misunderstanding you but it seems that you are complaining that there is nothing to do because the game is not actively pushing and/or forcing you to do something. But that is your choice as a player, that you are not doing anything. You say youâre happy to keep mining bodies even if their accessibility is 0.1 because you can always drop more mines on it. Eventually you will either run out of Corundium or Wealth if the only thing youâre doing is building automines. But whatâs the point of mining anything if youâre not using those minerals for something useful?
As pointed out, while industrial expansion does use up bunch of minerals, the real hungry beast is the military machine. Usually the gameplay loop is thus:
- Explore to find good âstuffâ
- Run into NPRs and spoilers
- Fight them
- Explore to find more good âstuffâ to pay for your military
And so on.
There is only one hard limit in the game - the year 9999. If you want to maximize your gametime, start on year 0001. Otherwise, you can keep exploring and expanding and exploiting and exterminating, your patience being the only limiter.
Yes, you misunderstand. The point is that the engine stops being able to handle the game after 300 years. Iâm perfectly fine with hanging out in my own systems and dealing with economics, terraforming, and engineering.
This is false, the âengineâ does not stop being able to handle the game after 300 years. The bigger your database gets, the slower things run but the game will not just stop or permanently crash after 300 years.
Iâm not talking about the engine crashing â Iâm saying that the time it takes to process one tick drops to the point where the game becomes extremely uncomfortable to play.
That aspect of the game is not dependant on the calendar at all. It entirely depends on how âbigâ your game is:
- The size of your civilian sector
- The number of active NPRs
- The number of active spoilers
If you start with 10 multi-system NPRs and set the options so that they can spawn spoilers and other NPRs, then the game will slow down massively after a year or two. If you start with 0 NPRs, toggle all spoilers off, and donât spawn any TN-capable NPRs, while also keeping civilian sector off, then you can easily play those nine-thousand nine-hundred ninety nine years without massive slowdowns.
But also, whether the game is unplayable or not is purely subjective. Those of us who played VB6 Aurora extensively are more used to it and thus donât tend to think C# Aurora almost ever being too slow to play.
To give some context: Back in the VB6 days, the usual recommendation was to keep a book besides the computer and read a few pages between increments. Times have changed âŚ
Good times.
VB6 days were horrid in the processing time - those coming at this game in the current era just have no clue how different it is now in terms of processing. The processing time in VB6 was what ended most of my games back then.