Bay 12 Games Forum

1. there is a green "g", what is it?
2. you see a white dot marked as moving at 2870km/s and has a thermal rating of 1200 that is named Creeper 001, what is it?

1. A goblin. I'm not sure about the specifics since I tend to use graphic sets in DF, but you can't deduce much more from the icon. And in this particular game's case, you don't need to. You don't need to know the exact weapons, armour and clothes a specific goblin is wearing most of the time.

2. The colour of the dot is important as it determines whether the contact's one of your ships, civilian, NPR hostile, neutral, friendly or allied. I don't think white's an option. But anyway:

- I know it's a ship of the Creeper class.
- I know from its thermal signature that it either has lots of engines or poor heat reduction.
- If I combine that last piece of information with its speed, I may consider the possibility it's a fairly large vessel.
- Range to a specific point is also displayed on contacts, so I would know that as well.

As for what the Creeper class is, it depends on who's the owner. You'll be familiar with it if you designed it, but if you didn't actually finding out its characteristics is fairly neat, given you have to observe how it works and behaves in combat. You can also get specific information about the class during prisoner interrogation or, I assume, if you manage to board a specimen.

The civilian companies awaken slowly, but within a few years you'll have an ever-growing fleet of civvie freighters, colony ships and luxury liners, if you've designed any (they're just for flavour, though). I don't think private companies build terraformers nor asteroid miners, though, even if they're classed as commercial vessels (which is the best option considering the sheer size of such ships).

As for advancing engine technology, you generally have to research a new power plant tech before its corresponding drive is unlocked (for research as well).

EDIT: Dammit, beaten to pretty much everything.

While I have run into a bunch of such occasions, I haven't stumbled upon anything so severe as having to wade through 72 hours in 5-second steps. Very short combat skips are usually dealt with enabling auto-turns and hitting the 5-minute increment button. Things return to normal before long.

I did experience quite some time of 60-second skips, though, and that was immensely annoying. Definitely a bug, and eventually I had to use SM mode to teleport some warships into firing range so to eliminate the enemy contact which I had determined was the cause of the problem. I don't know if it was just that particular ship or its entire class (specimens of which I usually vaporize shortly after they jump in). The future will tell, but I've done my best to alert Steve of this glaring issue.

However, overall, forced interrupts haven't been a huge problem in the 45 years of my current game.

Oh, something just crossed my mind. I know the Intelligence rating of the captain of a vessel which captures enemy crewmen from lifepods affects the success of the subsequent interrogations. However, would having an espionage team on said ship help things further? Or are Espionage and Intelligence stats completely different?

I guess I don't trust them since the one time I tried them, shooting minerals from Mercury to Earth, it didn't seem the latter was receiving any. Since sometimes the Sun is between those planets, I was afraid packets were being lost to incineration. That may sound a bit silly, but considering Aurora's depth, I couldn't rule it out.

As for mass driver launch capacity, it's 5000 tons per driver per year. However, a single unit can receive any number of packets.

And by the way, is there any tech that boosts the speed of said packets? 1000 km/s is quite slow. Especially if you're hurling stuff all the way from Dione or Titania to Earth.

1. The wiki designs its freighter as a civilian class ship. I figure that's probably because when I tried to make a military class freighter it had over 5000% chance of annual failure. So how will that work with transporting mines and cargo? Do I need to build something on the planet to load resources, or will they do that automatically? Do I need to build the mines at my production facilities on earth and then request a civilian transport to take them to Luna? Will I need to request a civilian transport to move the materials around?

Commercial vessels are important since they're the only kind civilian shipping companies can build (out of thin air: no resources nor wealth spent by the government). Said ships can only use commercial engines and sensors no larger than size 1. Obviously, no weapons are allowed either. CIWS appear to be the exception to that rule, though. Any violation to these rules reclassifies the ships as military. When you're designing this kind of vessels, you can check a particular box that hides all military-grade components, to make the process easier.

Freighters (along with other vessels like jumpgate constructors and asteroid miners) are best kept commercial since their cargo bays tend to make them pretty big, and building large military ships is a lot more expensive and time-consuming. Besides, civilian companies will likely be in charge of most non-military logistics, so you want them to have commercial designs at hand to use for that purpose. By default, civvie freighters generally ship trade goods back and forth between your colonies, and colony ships and luxury liners transport colonists around, frequently from your most populated worlds to the least populated ones.

When you want them to transport specific installations like mines and infrastructure, you've to set up civilian contracts using the Population screen. Set up supply contracts at the source of the number of items in question (which you'll have to build yourself), and demand ones at the destination. For instance:

[Earth] Supply: x1000 infrastructure
[Mars] Demand: x1000 infrastructure

The civilian companies should get to work then. As for the cause of their appearance, I'm not entirely sure, but it's tied to some extent to the existence of colonies besides your homeworld, and of course commercial ship designs (which have to be functional but needn't have left the drawing board). It can take a while. In my experience, it was a couple of years.

For shipping around minerals, I believe you need to use your own freighters, as civvie contracts don't seem to cover that. There's mass drivers, too, but I don't trust them.

2. How do I set up colonies. According to the game, the only nearby bodies I could colonize are Mars and Titan, and Titan will need a lot of terraforming before it's worth settling. Terraforming I get, you just need to build a terraforming building or have ships with a terraforming module, but I don't know how to set up colonies.

Go to the System View screen (the one with the sun icon), and that'll show a lot of information about the planets in a given system. Select one, and the option to declare it a colony should be among the set of buttons at the bottom of the window. The colony should then appear on your Population screen, along with the rest of your planets.

As for terraforming, make sure you send some infrastructure and colonists to the planet in question first, as the terraforming installations themselves need to be staffed, as opposed to other buildings like automated mines and deep space tracking stations.

Update: The alien ship and its detection (or its own detection of my sensors) is what's causing the reversal to 60-second skips. I used SM mode to remove the tracking stations in the asteroid LP that initially picked it up and sent my missile frigates in while the aliens were off my screens. However, that squadron's SWACS has great sensors, and managed to passively detect it from 873 million km away.

Aaand that cut the interrupts back to 60 seconds, despite they had returned to normal while the aliens remained undetected.

So I've confirmed the source, and it's something that definitely shouldn't be working like this.