The Noob asks dumb questions

Player Questions
1

Ah, another noob has spawned! Naturally, the noob has questions. Maybe not the usual ones, I actually understand the systems somewhat. Playing Rule the Waves probably helped there.

So, mostly I’m interested in some of the parameters of the game.

Question: Does Deployment Length matter to commercial ships, especially to OMBs? I’ve been setting my deployment length to 3 months (the default) for my commercial ships, and nothing’s broken on them yet. Does deployment only matter for military ships?

Question: Is claiming a planet enough to keep scavenging civilian corps from mucking around in it, or do I actually have to drop stuff there? I got some love from the RNG and rolled up a near-Earth planet in the system right next door – a system I want to exploit ASAP, of course. But it will be awhile before I’m geared up to drop people on it – what do I need to do to keep the capitalist scum from stealing it out from under me? (Obviously, I can turn off corp generation, but where’s the fun in that? Besides, they have their uses)

Question: Speaking of civilian corporations, I have colonies on Luna and Mars (what a surprise). Luna has nothing, zip, nada; I just dropped a couple of financial centers on it (and some terraformers) so that the Loonies would have something to do. Mars, OTOH, is chock fulla nuts – I’m exploiting it as fast as I can. (The Red Queen may have the floor for me here)
But the civilian corps send all their infrastructure and almost all their colonists to Luna, which currently has about 3 1/2 million or so unemployed of a total pop in excess of 20 million. Meanwhile, they only send colonists to Mars if I first send more infrastructure, whereupon they send so many they overpopulate the planet. Yet Mars still has a worker demand of about 1 1/2 million (and about 10 mil population). Any way I can get those boardroom cretins to send their infrastructure to Mars, which needs it, rather than Luna, where it only creates slums?

Question: I’ve fooled around with SpaceMaster a little, and as far as I can tell, there is no way to edit the stats of leaders, even though the dumb AI of Google insists there is. Except, obviously, to change their names. For role-play reasons (yeah, I’m into that), I’d like to be able to say that oh, leader x has 30 Survey and 20 crew training or whatnot. Hardly a game-breaker, but I’d hate to think I was an idiot and just can’t figure out how to do something so simple.

That should be enough to be going on with for now. More questions will doubtless arise as I fool around with this thing some more. Ad aspera ad astra, y’all.

-- Mal

2

Commercial ships only need the 3 months, so long as they are not damaged or overcrowded (picking vs life pods) they will run forever and only need refueling if they have engines.

For them to build on a body, you need to already have a body in the system with I think 10m population. If you drop a colony marker on a body, and dont put anything on it then they should keep clear on current version. Even if they do go on a body you can still put your own stuff on there and use their maps driver.

If you want to stop them taking stuff to Luna you can mark it as military only. Same window tab where you can mark a colony as a population source, destination or stable once it hits 10m people. You can also make contracts for them to move things from one colony to another like infrastructure. Costs you wealth based on distance, you have to set a source and demand on the colonies.

3

You can always delete the civilian corporation entirely from any system body, and then claim it for yourself. In the meanwhile, spam financial centers and buy the minerals they mine.

4

There’s a colonist push/pull demand mechanic. They’re going to Luna for a number of reasons over Mars. Once you hit I believe 30m population you can mark the colony as stable and they’ll prefer to go elsewhere. The infrastructure will still naturally grow at that point and you’ll still see growth, but the shipping lines should prefer other targets first.

5

After a colony reaches 10m pop, you can do this:

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6

Thanks, that’s useful.

– Mal

7

Deployment length matters not for commercial vessels. The crews are perfectly content to sit in the empty void of space until the end of time. No maintenance requirements either.

Claiming a planet is enough to keep the scavs away. But it also doesn’t really matter since you can still plop stuff down on a planet with civilian mining and buy their output anyways.

Go to the civilian/flags tab on Luna. You can set it to not receiving colonists.

I’ve never seen an option to change stats of leaders using SM. But I’ve found it’s mostly unnecessary as a lot of it is just a numbers game (build more academies and ship them off to empty worlds. No one lives on Venus but I’ll be damned if my FADM ain’t a Venus grad (somehow, I dunno. Builds character)

1 Like
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Haven’t reached that point in the game yet, but I fully concur. :slight_smile:

– Mal