A quick question if i may...

In order to stop an enemy ship running into a system I've colonised, say while i'm asleep overnight, and recolonising all my planets, do I need to keep a ship present in the system to make the turns stall until I give it orders or will something else hold the system for me...

I cant see why anything else will hold up the turns unless the trade-gate's "turn" counts in this equation, but at the same time holding a small ship in all my systems to make sure they're not killed off overnight is kinda... messy...

Apologies if this is answered somewhere in the manual, I got stuck in a few places there and figured I'd just dive in to play to get a better understanding of the few things that aren't clear to me yet!

I see something from Feburary that kinda implies I need to hold the small ship in the system to make the game halt the processing but just wanted to make sure and see if there was a more elegant way of doing things.

Thanks in advance

No you're correct. The only way to prevent someone from jumping into a colonised system of yours and running through turns rapidly to take out your colonies is to have at least one ship in the system.

Of course if you control all the systems that connect to your colonised system then nobody can jump straight into it without having a colony in one of the linked systems first.

Which means that you can leave some colonised systems empty of ships and have them remain safe. These tend to be the systems at the heart of your empire.

All true.

The design is deliberate - wait until you are on the offensive and want to kill enemy systems. Unless turn process right away then it would be almost impossble - ie the best defence would be to leave the system empty, as it takes 5 days for the turn to timeout. Pretty nasty for an attacker.

Having said all that, if you have better ideas then do mention them, they may lead to changes.

Cheers,
Jonathan

Makes sense and I understand the desire not to have empty hostile systems running on the turn-timeout.

Actually locking my systems vs the rip tides isn't easy, theres a few other home systems very close to mine which I believe I can't do anything about so its not too easy to form a centralised base around my home world, tho if i were to spread north a long way theres absolutely no home worlds up there.

Of course having the single low-cost unit in the system forces everything to be turn based on the global time out anyway, which would really suck if i were to stop playing as people would have to hunt through the systems for a bunch of now silent-running frigate class ships spamming beholders all across the system (which is going to take months to find then kill the ship lets face it).

The only idea I had in mind would be something like a new construct, a "Temporal Protector" or something - come up with a better name - which 'holds' the turn when a hostile jumps in for say 2, 3, 5 days from the point at which the hostile enters (take your pick, 5 day turns are too slow for my liking anyway but I guess you have picked the duration with a particular audience in mind). However the act of 'disrupting' the turn destroys the protector so if you haven't ordered reinforcements into the system within that grace period of 2-5 days the protector will be gone and future turns will proceed at the hostile's leisure.

Think of it like a 'you want this system? come make a stand for it, otherwise you default it' kinda approach rather than my present 'lock the system with a token ship' thing (which i'm not liking )

Just a thought, you did ask

Cheers

I'm not completely sure if you brought up the point that I'm pointing out our current solution to, but here it is anyway.

If a player has not submitted orders for two turns, then their ships automatically jump out no matter where they are insystem. Those that are within 20 hexes of a planet recieve damage, however.

EDIT:
I changed days to turns. Read the next few posts to see why.

It's not two days. It's two system turns.

ya, and system turns automatically go after 2 days, so it's 4 days before ships get sent out...

question though, if you give a ship no orders, and other ships in same system, for 2 system turns, does that still count as the same for that 1 ship, sending it out of system?

Actually it's 5 days.

So, if you send in no orders for 10 days all of your ships will have jumped to the galactic. Not that this is 'any orders in any system'.

I think. i.e. you have to be a dead player for this to kick in. Either way, it's good enough for now.

Jonathan
ps A small fighter costs 1 pt, so leaving them in each system acts as you suggest. The lone guardian kinda thing.

Err... my bad. I meant two turns, but I'll change that from days now to prevent future confusion.