As shown in the screen shots below, I have an incoming raider which is well within the passive detection range of Earth and the MFC range of the responding survey vessel. However it doesn’t seem like I have any way to target the track of RD Backfire 004. This class of survey ship has taken down Backfires before so it shouldn’t be a design issue. SRV Akademik Lazarev is undamaged as well.
To shoot at a ship you need
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Contact with an ACTIVE Sensor (MFC , Beam fire control, passive sensors don’t matter)
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It has to be hostile (the one I forget)
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then it has to be on range of the weapon and FC
Not shown in original screen shot is the active search sensor which matches the range of the MFC. (It was on and continues to be so)
They have been set to hostile since a violent first encounter and the ASS on the Survey Ship is tuned to a resolution significantly smaller than the size of the Backfire.
You don’t have an active sensor contact.
If you did, you would see the tonnage of the ship in question.
There are devices that reduce the effectiveness of your active sensors.
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Thank you both for the quick response. I’ve discovered the Active Only check box in Contacts as a result.
“It has to be hostile.” So do I take it that I cannot shoot first and ask questions later? That I have to be attacked before I can return fire? That seems awfully hard on my poor xenophobes.
– Mal
“It has to be hostile” in this case means “Your empire treats the contacts empire as hostile.” If you go to the empires screen you can set whether you treat any empire as Hostile, Neutral, or Friendly/Allied (Forget exact terms). If you go and change the empire of the contact to be considered Hostile, all their contacts will now appear red and as valid targets, assuming all other targeting requirements are met.
They can shoot at you without becoming hostile. The only thing that matters is setting them as hostile
“They can shoot at you without becoming hostile.” Sounds like some women I’ve known.
But this leads to another question. My first run was kind of ruined by having some raiders wander into the system right next to Earth (only 20 years into the game!) and shooting everything that tried to move through the system. I’d thought about using SpaceMaster to delete them, but when I pulled down the “Races” menu, I could only see my own race and not the bad guys. I even sent one of my “warships” (I use the term very loosely; as I said, I was only 20 years in and had no “warship” worthy of the name) into the system to see if I could even shoot at them, and couldn’t shoot at them (presumably because they weren’t marked as “hostile.”) My current run has no aliens while I mess around with stuff, but I do wonder how I’d go about deleting them when I do turn them back on. If, you know, it becomes necessary.
– Mal
Edit the database. Or live with them
You can turn them off on the game settings menu and they will stop attacking, although you will need to deal with any ships already in your systems.
You can only see player races in the Races menu. For aliens, you need to look at the Intelligence window for any data you have on that alien race.