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Author Topic: How to better micro-manage colonies while doing other things? (Nexerelin,mostly)  (Read 4200 times)

shoi

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With Nex, the best you can do is launch defense fleets to make sure they're protected. If I had to guess, what happened is that one of the "elite" fleets that nex gives factions rolled up since you weren't around to immediately stop their disruption fleet and steamrolled what was in system.

Not sure how effective turtling up a single system is, since that would just lead to the following invasions scaling as well.
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idiotekque

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With Nex, the best you can do is launch defense fleets to make sure they're protected. If I had to guess, what happened is that one of the "elite" fleets that nex gives factions rolled up since you weren't around to immediately stop their disruption fleet and steamrolled what was in system.

Not sure how effective turtling up a single system is, since that would just lead to the following invasions scaling as well.

I do need to figure those bits out, I forgot you could do that. How long do those last? Because as far as I know, you still have to go to x colony to spawn something like that in person, right? And then that fleet factors in for auto-calc battles while you're away?
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Phenir

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With Nex, the best you can do is launch defense fleets to make sure they're protected. If I had to guess, what happened is that one of the "elite" fleets that nex gives factions rolled up since you weren't around to immediately stop their disruption fleet and steamrolled what was in system.

Not sure how effective turtling up a single system is, since that would just lead to the following invasions scaling as well.

I do need to figure those bits out, I forgot you could do that. How long do those last? Because as far as I know, you still have to go to x colony to spawn something like that in person, right? And then that fleet factors in for auto-calc battles while you're away?
I think they last about 2 months but also take a month or two to launch. You can press Z to launch fleets from anywhere.
The way I look at it, an expedition being successful isn't that big of a deal. If you have multiple colonies, the rest of them are still giving you full income so you should barely notice the drop in income. Obviously, invasions are different but you asked for that if you are at war with a faction.
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idiotekque

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I think they last about 2 months but also take a month or two to launch. You can press Z to launch fleets from anywhere.
The way I look at it, an expedition being successful isn't that big of a deal. If you have multiple colonies, the rest of them are still giving you full income so you should barely notice the drop in income. Obviously, invasions are different but you asked for that if you are at war with a faction.

Huh, I will have to play around with that more. Thanks for the tip.

To be fair, of course, "asking" for war in Nex tends to be out of your hands a lot of the time. Declarations of war feel like a monthly occurrence regardless of what I do. It's manageable enough to not fight a war on three fronts (Hegemony/Sindrian/Church alliance, fun) with operatives, but still, is what it is without console.
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Histidine

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Quick stuff:

Quote
a Tri-Tachyon fleet came to disrupt one of my mining/refining colonies
Was this a raid (which is added by Nexerelin) or a punitive expedition sent due to market competition (a vanilla feature)? But either way, the autoresolved event saying it's failed while having caused disruption to anything sounds like a bug that shouldn't be possible. (The opposite seems more likely; there are ways it can report success while not having done anything more than kill the orbital station).

It honestly feels like you're just forced to micro-manage every last aspect of colony business yourself, with your personal fleet. Got a shortage? You have to pull from stockpiles yourself, with your personal fleet, to move to address said shortages, or your colony is hobbled for x amount of time (when you should just be able to tell your colonies to move those stockpiles around themselves). Some kind of shipment going somewhere? Better escort it personally, lest you risk a high rng rate of losing it, leading to more shortages (for multiple cycles, it feels like I've had "-2 stacks from a lost shipment" active on at least one colony at any point).
Personally I don't bother fixing shortages or trade disruptions at all, except when stability drops to dangerous levels. Unless compounded with other problems, the most they can do is cause some loss of income, you may as well do whatever stuff you were planning to do.

Nex prides itself on launching fleets at you that are guaranteed to be stronger than your defences, iirc without a cap.
Invasion fleets are capped (albeit the hard cap is 2000 FP, which is more than what it considers enough for some of the toughest modiverse star systems like the Legio home system, but a player system's defenses can exceed even that). They do scale based on the target system's defenses and target market size, but the defense numbers go up faster than the invasion size.

Not sure how effective turtling up a single system is, since that would just lead to the following invasions scaling as well.
I'd expect it's still beneficial, since
- it negates non-scaling threats like vanilla expeditions and Nex remnant raids
- as mentioned above in this post, defenses scale faster than the attack strength
- scaling a Nex invasion/raid up costs the faction more 'invasion points', so they'll come less often


General advice
If you don't have a strong station on your key planets, build one, and install an alpha core on it if available. Stations are very strong in autoresolve (a level 1 station is rated roughly 3.33 times as much as an unofficered Paragon), and can be even more powerful in actual combat when supported by the player fleet. It also gives some nice stability, is cheaper to run than a military base and doesn't take an industry slot.

How autoresolve works, tl;dr version
When a raid or other such event is autoresolved due to the player being far away, it works broadly as follows:
  • Compare total strength of attacker faction's fleets in the system to defenders', plus any station the target market has*
  • If defender strength exceeds attacker strength, raid fails
  • Else, the station (if any) is disrupted, and the attacker gets to roll against the target market's ground defenses to actually do anything here**
*This is based on each fleet's FP (not DP, although the difference doesn't matter to player decisions), modified by things like D-mod count and officers.
**Also based on attacker fleets' FP when autoresolved, except for Nex invasions which have a different calculation I won't get into here.

-Additional note: For pirate and factional raids, which target the whole system, the above process is done once for each market it decides to target, with diminishing attacker strength for each successful 'round'.
« Last Edit: July 30, 2021, 12:55:26 AM by Histidine »
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idiotekque

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Was this a raid (which is added by Nexerelin) or a punitive expedition sent due to market competition (a vanilla feature)? But either way, the autoresolved event saying it's failed while having caused disruption to anything sounds like a bug that shouldn't be possible. (The opposite seems more likely; there are ways it can report success while not having done anything more than kill the orbital station).
This was a raid to disrupt an industry, yes. It's been a week or so, so I forget the exact industry (it was either mining or heavy industry, fairly certain), but the way it played out was:
  • I'm notified of the raid
  • I stay in system, a few fast pickets immediately kill the tiny raiding party before I can reach it
  • I reload, leave the system, since it's clear my help is unnecessary, especially since ...
  • The raid says it's likely to be defeated in orbit, yet it winds up being defeated on the ground
  • I check the colony, and the targeted industry is still disrupted for a couple weeks (forget exact number)
So, I'm not really sure. It wasn't a big deal, but it was silly imo for it to have to go to the ground in the first place, with a battlestation in orbit, a size 5 and 6 colony, clearly no troubles killing it in space without my assistance when I'm in system, yet a near failure when I left the system. Maybe they "failed" to disrupt the industry, but due to the fighting on the ground it was still... sort of disrupted, for a shorter period of time? I don't know, either way, it seemed incredibly nonsensical and had drastically different results when I left, which is why I mentioned it all.

Personally I don't bother fixing shortages or trade disruptions at all, except when stability drops to dangerous levels. Unless compounded with other problems, the most they can do is cause some loss of income, you may as well do whatever stuff you were planning to do.
I will totally admit this is true. It isn't a huge deal, it's just a seemingly constant occurrence that lends to my feeling that unless there is a constant, personal player hand in most matters, there will be consistent failure mixed in. Certainly not a hill worth dying on due to the minor impact it has, I admit, just a side detail.

Invasion fleets are capped (albeit the hard cap is 2000 FP, which is more than what it considers enough for some of the toughest modiverse star systems like the Legio home system, but a player system's defenses can exceed even that). They do scale based on the target system's defenses and target market size, but the defense numbers go up faster than the invasion size.
One thing I do want to ask regarding this, does the market size and/or alliance size of an invading fleet have an impact on invading fleet size? Because Hegemony is the big boy in my current game (they "won" in the first two months, so y'know), they're in a three-way alliance with the Church and Diktat (it's disgusting), and they have certainly consistently sent fleets that make everything else look pathetic by comparison (outside of, again, player fleet interference).

And would that factor into non actual "invasion" fleets as well? Is it a normal occurrence for an AI inspection fleet, for instance, to consistently be loaded with 4+ battleship/battlecarriers? Onslaughts and Legions are a cakewalk with a player led fleet, but unless I babysit for all their actual invasions (and inspections, I suppose), my colonies are just kind of boned on a dice roll. And that's in two systems with two large, just about max upgraded colonies in each, 7-10 stability each. Keep in mind they certainly focus on the weaker targets of the two, for good reason, but it just feels like my fleets are an incredibly flimsy impediment to their massive fleets, despite max quality fleets ranging from 150-200% size. I guess that just isn't enough when it comes to the Hegemony in a lofty position in the sector.

Loading everything up with AI cores is certainly an option, but for roleplay (and challenge, I suppose) purposes I have kept actual admin slots to humans (with the ground tactics perk on most if not all of them) and AI cores to industries. I know I can't really complain too much if I'm not using the best possible resources for the task, but I do also feel like that shouldn't be a necessity either, in every case.

I appreciate the deeper dive into how it all factors in.
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Histidine

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One thing I do want to ask regarding this, does the market size and/or alliance size of an invading fleet have an impact on invading fleet size? Because Hegemony is the big boy in my current game (they "won" in the first two months, so y'know), they're in a three-way alliance with the Church and Diktat (it's disgusting), and they have certainly consistently sent fleets that make everything else look pathetic by comparison (outside of, again, player fleet interference).

And would that factor into non actual "invasion" fleets as well? Is it a normal occurrence for an AI inspection fleet, for instance, to consistently be loaded with 4+ battleship/battlecarriers? Onslaughts and Legions are a cakewalk with a player led fleet, but unless I babysit for all their actual invasions (and inspections, I suppose), my colonies are just kind of boned on a dice roll.
Nex has another per-faction invasion/raid size cap, based on the faction's industrial output (which is also used for how frequently invasions and raids occur). This was added so factions that have been reduced to 1 or 2 planets can't launch huge invasions. Output isn't shared between allies, each faction builds up invasions/raids based on its own economy.

The cap doesn't really apply to a small but healthy faction, e.g. in the new game with a vanilla sector I just checked, Luddic Church's cap is 1151 FP, or over half the hard cap of 2K. However, smaller factions take longer to be able to launch an invasion of the same size.

Vanilla fleet types don't use such mechanics. Inspections, for instance, just get larger each time they occur.
First inspection is 50 + 125 = 175 FP
Second inspection is 50 + 250 = 300 FP
and so on.
(yeah inspections are pretty big, they start having enough points for almost six Paragons)

Punitive expeditions work similarly, but the numbers are different (starts at 50 + 50, and I'm not sure if the number of attempts is shared between factions).
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idiotekque

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Nex has another per-faction invasion/raid size cap, based on the faction's industrial output (which is also used for how frequently invasions and raids occur). This was added so factions that have been reduced to 1 or 2 planets can't launch huge invasions. Output isn't shared between allies, each faction builds up invasions/raids based on its own economy.

The cap doesn't really apply to a small but healthy faction, e.g. in the new game with a vanilla sector I just checked, Luddic Church's cap is 1151 FP, or over half the hard cap of 2K. However, smaller factions take longer to be able to launch an invasion of the same size.

Vanilla fleet types don't use such mechanics. Inspections, for instance, just get larger each time they occur.
First inspection is 50 + 125 = 175 FP
Second inspection is 50 + 250 = 300 FP
and so on.
(yeah inspections are pretty big, they start having enough points for almost six Paragons)

Punitive expeditions work similarly, but the numbers are different (starts at 50 + 50, and I'm not sure if the number of attempts is shared between factions).
Oof, yeah, it's the vanilla ones that have quickly proved to be more ridiculous than the Nex ones lately, then. The last Hegemony invasion wasn't even terrible, just two fleets with a Conquest or two in each. Inspection fleets are just broken I guess.

Finally figuring out how to launch defense fleets was a massive help, in any case. If a raid or invasion pops up, it's very doable to just split your fleet points launching two medium sized fleets from two colonies in system, so that they're up and flying before the enemies get in system, and they have been pretty effective in just scaring invaders off without much of a battle thus far. Obviously takes some cash to pull off, but at this point my colonies are pulling in 800k a month, so what's budget mean, lol.
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DownTheDrain

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Vanilla fleet types don't use such mechanics. Inspections, for instance, just get larger each time they occur.
First inspection is 50 + 125 = 175 FP
Second inspection is 50 + 250 = 300 FP
and so on.
(yeah inspections are pretty big, they start having enough points for almost six Paragons)

Is there a way to turn that down or at least cap it at a certain size?
I really don't want to wipe the Hegemony, for thematic reasons mostly, but if those inspections keep growing indefinitely...
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Histidine

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Vanilla fleet types don't use such mechanics. Inspections, for instance, just get larger each time they occur.
First inspection is 50 + 125 = 175 FP
Second inspection is 50 + 250 = 300 FP
and so on.
(yeah inspections are pretty big, they start having enough points for almost six Paragons)

Is there a way to turn that down or at least cap it at a certain size?
I really don't want to wipe the Hegemony, for thematic reasons mostly, but if those inspections keep growing indefinitely...
The numbers are hardcoded (though a mod can in principle modify the events' code). But inspections do cap at 550 FP and punitive expeditions at 350 FP.
(Also, as the inspection or expedition gets bigger, the amount of thing-that-makes-faction-angry needed for the event to occur also increases)

Brief code explanation
Inspections and expeditions have a "threshold" figure. When the cumulative amount of AI use or [things that trigger expeditions] exceeds the threshold, the event is launched.
Fleet size is 50 + (threshold/2), threshold doubles after each event.
Inspection threshold starts at 250 and caps at 1000. Expedition threshold starts at 100 and caps at 600.
[close]
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DownTheDrain

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Vanilla fleet types don't use such mechanics. Inspections, for instance, just get larger each time they occur.
First inspection is 50 + 125 = 175 FP
Second inspection is 50 + 250 = 300 FP
and so on.
(yeah inspections are pretty big, they start having enough points for almost six Paragons)

Is there a way to turn that down or at least cap it at a certain size?
I really don't want to wipe the Hegemony, for thematic reasons mostly, but if those inspections keep growing indefinitely...
The numbers are hardcoded (though a mod can in principle modify the events' code). But inspections do cap at 550 FP and punitive expeditions at 350 FP.
(Also, as the inspection or expedition gets bigger, the amount of thing-that-makes-faction-angry needed for the event to occur also increases)

Brief code explanation
Inspections and expeditions have a "threshold" figure. When the cumulative amount of AI use or [things that trigger expeditions] exceeds the threshold, the event is launched.
Fleet size is 50 + (threshold/2), threshold doubles after each event.
Inspection threshold starts at 250 and caps at 1000. Expedition threshold starts at 100 and caps at 600.
[close]

Thx for the explanation.
Good to know there is a cap, though with those values there might as well not be. 550 FP (or 18 Paragons if we're gonna use that as a measurement) is way more than any of my systems could handle on its own.
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robepriority

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Yeeeep.

The Hegemony is canonically the closest to reestablishing the Domain. Most factions are intended to be fully antagonistic or at least separate from them.

A nex playthrough should be either allying with the Hegemony yourself or setting EVERYONE against them and going on a burning crusade.
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