Hi all,

Started trying out BotE Alpha 7 and I stumbled upon something I'm not sure If it's a bug or if it's just me that's missing something.
In short:

Started game. Membered a minor. After several turns, said minor was stuck at 24 pop on 32. That's when I noticed one of the planet (pop 8) wasn't terraformed.
Built up a colony ship (from that minor's system). Terraformed the planet. After several turns, pop is still stuck at 24 on 32.

Is this a bug or am I missing something?

Thx

Hi Bloodwurm,
short answer: You have to colonize that planet.

Minor races terraform and colonize their planets on their own until they sign a membership treaty.
Thereafter you have to take care of terraforming and colonization in that system.

It is the same for own colonies.
If you colonize a system before all planets are terraformed, then you need a second colonyship to terraform and colonize the remaining planets.
You could use this to start with a bigger population, as every colonyship brings 4 billion colonists with it. (the ships are apparently really big and better ships carry even more colonists)
This is for instance useful to expand faster since a spacedock needs 7 billion inhabitants to be buildable.

I hope this was helpful.

Kind regards,
Vuto

Ok, I'll try that out but I don't understand the logic behind it though...

well...the logic is that terraforming and colonizing is main part of gamer's task

Minor (AI ! of course) only do it themselves to give more realism to the game. (..don't know how long we will last to colonize Moon, Mars and Venus )

MinorAI-Task stopps when a minor is member of an empire. (Then Empire's AI may terraform and colonize until completed).

I totally understand that once a minor gets membered, it shouldn't continue terraforming on it's own. I'm fine with that.

What I don't understand is, once I DO terraform the left over planets, why doesn't the colony simply expand unto those newly available planets? Why do I then need to sacrifice one of my colony ships so that those planets get used?

hi Bloodwurm,
i made a similar mistake when i first started playing.... i auto assumed that if i terraform a planet, that it will become available and help grow the population

now i know better, and i think its a bit more understandable if we imagine that the 1st colony ship had to be dismantled to provide buildings for the first colonists to use, and that they might not have any ships yet to be able to go and land on other planets, so we have to provide it for them

i just wish that i knew this earlier, because i could have generated more credits if i max'ed out my population earlier

btw we're working to add some more information in-game, to help make this requirement a bit more obvious, hopefully in the next update.

(edit: when you colonize a system, the colony ship will colonize any and all planets which are terraformed, so if you left a couple of planets behind, and then terraform them both, then you only need 1 more ship to colonize them)

If I take your argument into consideration, just for the fun of it, then pop should never increase, unless you come in with another colony ship and colonize the planets.

Unless a colony ship, when dismantled, is providing accommodations for the MAX pop cap of the terra-formed planets (at the time of colonization), then what you are suggesting is that the colonists cannot build homes for themselves. As such, it would mean that they should not be able to grow outside of the initial number of colonists. Which makes no sense.

On the other end, you could argue that the colonists do not have access to inter-system shuttles (or something) to let them "jump" from one planet to the other, hence transferring pop, hence automatically populating the newly terra-formed planets. But considering the tech level at which these colonies exists, and considering the easy access to ships that can travel from one star system to another, it's simply ridiculous to think that the colonists don't have access to short range transports.

In the end, it's fine, it's a game play choice and as such, rationalization of the choice isn't required. But I'd be extremely interested in hearing about what led the team to decide that was how the game would behave.

well...I think the most difficult is to recognize how the game works in this point (and you've done it now ).

Except for the turn's time terraforming is free, but colonizing is not: Costs of colonizising is one colony ship with max. 4 bn population. So you're forced to build more than one single colony ship...

Available Strategies:
a) Use one colony ship for the whole system => minimum cost, 4 bn. pop
or
b) first colonize one planet = 4 bn, then second colony ship = another 4 bn. ....much population is the result

as you see, there are some options

atm I don't think that we will change here anything in game mechanics, but never say never

But we have to give more help for this (maybe some time ingame-Advisor will come), until then we try to help via Forum and Wiki http://birth-of-the-empires.de/wiki/ind ... e_Schritte