Well, I say mine... I stole elements of a couple of other ones to actually do the work, but I did weld them together all by myself.
It's a replacement for the Probe and Excavator scripts. Instead of sending Excavators to systems where I've probed, I've written it so that it sends direct to planets based on the coordinates. That means that I can bin the Probe script completely.
It's definitely helped; before I switched over, I was regularly hitting the 10,000 RPC limit. Now, it's coming in at about 6,500, so it's saving over 3,000 calls per day. I'm rather impressed by that.
I'm currently working on getting one Shipyard up to level 27; that'll mean that I can build an Excavator in 15 seconds. What I shall be doing then is decommissioning a lot of the other Shipyards, and switching to building Excavators manually there. The idea is that once I have a few, I can transport them off to other planets, which can send them out, leaving the shipyard world free to build more. It looks like now, when you send a ship out, it's transfered to the receiving planet immediately, which will help no end.
So now the limit to how many Excavators I can send in one day will be limited by how many I can support in Shipyards, rather than my production.
Wooo.
Wednesday, 27 July 2011
Wednesday, 27 April 2011
Wow. Just.... Wow
It's currently 2pm, GMT, and I've just been informed that I've used my allocation of RPCs for the day.
So, fourteen hours into the day, and I can't do anything else for the rest of the day.
This is as a result of the overnight update that changed the RPC limit back to 5,000 per day and 50 per minute. Well, unless you pay 25 Essentia a week and get back to what we had yesterday.
I can't help but think that this is an incredibly short-sighted decision; if you've got a decent sized empire, you're going to be able to burn through your allocation in no time at all, even if you're not using scripts. So it's essentially targetting the high-end players - you know, the ones who've put time and effort into building their empires, and who have been supporting the game already. And now they're expected to pay more, just to carry on. That doesn't seem like a good idea.
I've already been losing a little interest in the game, and this really isn't going to help. It's one thing to voluntarily choose to pay to get an edge, and quite another to have to pay.
Oh, and the dumbest part? I went to log on to sign up. But logging in requires an RPC call, and so I'm effectively locked out of the game for another ten hours.
Well done. You've even made it impossible for me to give you money.
So, fourteen hours into the day, and I can't do anything else for the rest of the day.
This is as a result of the overnight update that changed the RPC limit back to 5,000 per day and 50 per minute. Well, unless you pay 25 Essentia a week and get back to what we had yesterday.
I can't help but think that this is an incredibly short-sighted decision; if you've got a decent sized empire, you're going to be able to burn through your allocation in no time at all, even if you're not using scripts. So it's essentially targetting the high-end players - you know, the ones who've put time and effort into building their empires, and who have been supporting the game already. And now they're expected to pay more, just to carry on. That doesn't seem like a good idea.
I've already been losing a little interest in the game, and this really isn't going to help. It's one thing to voluntarily choose to pay to get an edge, and quite another to have to pay.
Oh, and the dumbest part? I went to log on to sign up. But logging in requires an RPC call, and so I'm effectively locked out of the game for another ten hours.
Well done. You've even made it impossible for me to give you money.
Tuesday, 12 April 2011
Two months?
It doesn't seem like two months since I lasted added anything. In part, it's been because I've been on holiday, but truth be told, I feel like I'm in something of a rut.
I've been keeping everything upgrading, and I think my last planet is colony number 10 - my empire is now safely ensconced in the top 25 - but I'm really not sure what to do now. Colony number 11 will take a little over two billion happiness, which is going to take a while to accumulate, so I may start working elsewhere. I've got the capacity to start building Space Stations, so I might have a go at that; but apparently it takes Happiness to launch them, so of course it's going to take a little while before we get anywhere. Dammit.
Other than that.... I've been upgrading the PCCs everywhere, which has been very impressive, really - I initally started bumping up the PCC on my shipbuilding world, so I could start sending out the larger Supply Pods; and realised that at high levels, it's a very impressive resource producer - the main reason being it's not limited to 15, as the other resource buildings are, so by the time it's up to level 20 or so, it's significantly outperforming the rest of my resource buildings.
And finally... Thanks to a level 21 Stockpile, my capitol is now producing over 2 million units of everything per hour; and recycling just over one million. Though thinking about it now, it's actually quite tempting to demolish some of the recycling buildings and replace them with resource producing buildings instead. Hmmmmmm.... I should be at a point where I can level up my university again in a couple of days, though it's incredibly tempting to get the Stockpile up to 24 and then do another round of upgrading resource buildings instead.
Oh, and that 2,000,000 per hour production rate? That's without any high level glyph buildings; the glyph buildings there are all low level, and I only built them because I had the plans spare.....
I've been keeping everything upgrading, and I think my last planet is colony number 10 - my empire is now safely ensconced in the top 25 - but I'm really not sure what to do now. Colony number 11 will take a little over two billion happiness, which is going to take a while to accumulate, so I may start working elsewhere. I've got the capacity to start building Space Stations, so I might have a go at that; but apparently it takes Happiness to launch them, so of course it's going to take a little while before we get anywhere. Dammit.
Other than that.... I've been upgrading the PCCs everywhere, which has been very impressive, really - I initally started bumping up the PCC on my shipbuilding world, so I could start sending out the larger Supply Pods; and realised that at high levels, it's a very impressive resource producer - the main reason being it's not limited to 15, as the other resource buildings are, so by the time it's up to level 20 or so, it's significantly outperforming the rest of my resource buildings.
And finally... Thanks to a level 21 Stockpile, my capitol is now producing over 2 million units of everything per hour; and recycling just over one million. Though thinking about it now, it's actually quite tempting to demolish some of the recycling buildings and replace them with resource producing buildings instead. Hmmmmmm.... I should be at a point where I can level up my university again in a couple of days, though it's incredibly tempting to get the Stockpile up to 24 and then do another round of upgrading resource buildings instead.
Oh, and that 2,000,000 per hour production rate? That's without any high level glyph buildings; the glyph buildings there are all low level, and I only built them because I had the plans spare.....
Tuesday, 8 February 2011
Darned server requests
I now have nine colonies; two of them are fairly new, four very well established, and the remainder needing light work. I'm running four scripts; one to send probes, one to send excavators, one to build ships (feeding the first two), and one to search for glyphs.
And I'm now hitting the 5,000 request limit per day more often than not.
Yesterday, it was almost six hours before the reset; today it was a mere four.
I'm starting to get frustrated by this - I can see it actually being enough to put me off the game. I admit, I do a fair amount of pottering during the day, thanks to being a gentleman of leisure; and I'm trying to build up my university constantly, too (a round of upgrade storage buildings, then production buildings, then the university), so I tend to ship a lot of resources around.
Well, I say a lot; most colonies are a half an hour away from the homeworld, so I can manage a return trip per hour. I wouldn't have thought I was making that many requests doing so (one to load the planet, one to load the trade ministry, one to choose the target world, then one request per ship) which is four per planet per hour; I guess it does add up quite fast.
But I can't see that I'd want to stop using the scripts, really - it's taking a lot of the micromanagement out of the game, and that is, most definitely, a good thing. I really don't want to have to worry about making sure that ship building queues on nine planets are kept up to date - there's little enough capacity in most of them that I can't create a queue that'll last longer than a couple of hours.
Dammit.
And I'm now hitting the 5,000 request limit per day more often than not.
Yesterday, it was almost six hours before the reset; today it was a mere four.
I'm starting to get frustrated by this - I can see it actually being enough to put me off the game. I admit, I do a fair amount of pottering during the day, thanks to being a gentleman of leisure; and I'm trying to build up my university constantly, too (a round of upgrade storage buildings, then production buildings, then the university), so I tend to ship a lot of resources around.
Well, I say a lot; most colonies are a half an hour away from the homeworld, so I can manage a return trip per hour. I wouldn't have thought I was making that many requests doing so (one to load the planet, one to load the trade ministry, one to choose the target world, then one request per ship) which is four per planet per hour; I guess it does add up quite fast.
But I can't see that I'd want to stop using the scripts, really - it's taking a lot of the micromanagement out of the game, and that is, most definitely, a good thing. I really don't want to have to worry about making sure that ship building queues on nine planets are kept up to date - there's little enough capacity in most of them that I can't create a queue that'll last longer than a couple of hours.
Dammit.
Friday, 28 January 2011
A sudden rush of colonies
After nothing for longer than I care to remember, I've founded two new colonies in the last couple of days - I had something like 140,000,000 Happiness on my new homeworld, and figured I probably should.
I'm doing something a little different with both of them.
The first one is my first Gas Giant colony; it's also outside the orbits I can inhabit, so there are additionally Terraforming Ships involved. From a technical point of view, it's quite complicated - all of a sudden, you can't just build whenever you want to. Weighed against that, though, is the fact that there are over 110 plots in total for me to use.
That's twice the size of my second largest planet.
The other downside is that there is no water, but that can be remedied by the use of a Water Reclamation Plant - and that also helps out with the vast amount of waste that's generated by the Gas Giant Platforms and the Terraforming Platforms. The other hitch is that there's only a limited amount of ores available; I intend to remedy the worst of that through the Mining Ministry when it starts to become an issue.
The second new colony is just a couple of systems away from the Saben homeworld. It's otherwise nothing special, but it's a stupidly far distance away from the rest of my planets; so long that it took the Colony Ship almost two weeks to arrive, while my latest Freighters can do the trip one way in a mere 36 hours.
That one is mainly going to get supported through the SST, I think.
I will add that starting off a new colony with a batch of Plans (one each of the resource generators, plus the Ravine and Interdimensional Rift) helps no end - the bottleneck I'm getting now is for building slots, rather than for resources. That normally took a week or so to get to. So I'll definitely be looking at that for future colonies.
I'm doing something a little different with both of them.
The first one is my first Gas Giant colony; it's also outside the orbits I can inhabit, so there are additionally Terraforming Ships involved. From a technical point of view, it's quite complicated - all of a sudden, you can't just build whenever you want to. Weighed against that, though, is the fact that there are over 110 plots in total for me to use.
That's twice the size of my second largest planet.
The other downside is that there is no water, but that can be remedied by the use of a Water Reclamation Plant - and that also helps out with the vast amount of waste that's generated by the Gas Giant Platforms and the Terraforming Platforms. The other hitch is that there's only a limited amount of ores available; I intend to remedy the worst of that through the Mining Ministry when it starts to become an issue.
The second new colony is just a couple of systems away from the Saben homeworld. It's otherwise nothing special, but it's a stupidly far distance away from the rest of my planets; so long that it took the Colony Ship almost two weeks to arrive, while my latest Freighters can do the trip one way in a mere 36 hours.
That one is mainly going to get supported through the SST, I think.
I will add that starting off a new colony with a batch of Plans (one each of the resource generators, plus the Ravine and Interdimensional Rift) helps no end - the bottleneck I'm getting now is for building slots, rather than for resources. That normally took a week or so to get to. So I'll definitely be looking at that for future colonies.
Thursday, 20 January 2011
Freighters; oh my
So the first Freighters are rolling off the production line, and I'm starting the process of scrapping my Cargo Ships and replacing them. I hadn't realised quite how many I had.
My initial plan is to have two Freighters working at the Mining Ministry, and one for general use at the spaceport for when it's needed to shift resources around. I should have that arranged in the next couple of days.
I'd also like to put Smuggler Ships there, too - not for the stealth, but because they're the fastest ships I've got, and sometimes, you just need to get things to the next planet, like, immediately. Ideally, I'd also like to up my Trade affinity to 7, for added extra hold size, because obviously 450,000 isn't enough.
My initial plan is to have two Freighters working at the Mining Ministry, and one for general use at the spaceport for when it's needed to shift resources around. I should have that arranged in the next couple of days.
I'd also like to put Smuggler Ships there, too - not for the stealth, but because they're the fastest ships I've got, and sometimes, you just need to get things to the next planet, like, immediately. Ideally, I'd also like to up my Trade affinity to 7, for added extra hold size, because obviously 450,000 isn't enough.
Monday, 17 January 2011
Another week gone....
I can't believe it's been a week since the last update.
It's been a fairly busy week; I've spent a little while shuttling resources around to really push development on my new Capitol, so I've finally manage to build a level 20 University. Which means, among other things, that I've now got a Genetics Lab. Sadly, the one spy I managed to capture didn't survive his first run through the lab. Harumpf.
So, where do I go next?
Well, I've dispatched another colony - that will be world number 8. It's quite some way away from my existing worlds, enough that it'll take about a week for the colony ship to arrive. I've stockpiled a few glyph buildings and will dispatch them on a fast courier (well, Smuggler Ship) once the colony is established; that'll take just a couple of days - quite a difference, I should say, from the hour that it takes at the moment to shuttle resources between colonies. I suspect I may be setting up a Subspace Transporter quite early on.
Elsewhere, I've just started off the upgrade to a level 20 Trade Ministry on my shipbuilding world. That'll give me access to Freighters, so I can replace a large amount of my existing shipping fleet with those, freeing up probably a couple of dozen slots over all of my Spaceports. Additionally, the Crashed Alien Ship on the same world will shortly be up to level 7, giving all the ships there a bonus of 35% of base. Now, all I need is a couple more points of Trade affinity....
It's been a fairly busy week; I've spent a little while shuttling resources around to really push development on my new Capitol, so I've finally manage to build a level 20 University. Which means, among other things, that I've now got a Genetics Lab. Sadly, the one spy I managed to capture didn't survive his first run through the lab. Harumpf.
So, where do I go next?
Well, I've dispatched another colony - that will be world number 8. It's quite some way away from my existing worlds, enough that it'll take about a week for the colony ship to arrive. I've stockpiled a few glyph buildings and will dispatch them on a fast courier (well, Smuggler Ship) once the colony is established; that'll take just a couple of days - quite a difference, I should say, from the hour that it takes at the moment to shuttle resources between colonies. I suspect I may be setting up a Subspace Transporter quite early on.
Elsewhere, I've just started off the upgrade to a level 20 Trade Ministry on my shipbuilding world. That'll give me access to Freighters, so I can replace a large amount of my existing shipping fleet with those, freeing up probably a couple of dozen slots over all of my Spaceports. Additionally, the Crashed Alien Ship on the same world will shortly be up to level 7, giving all the ships there a bonus of 35% of base. Now, all I need is a couple more points of Trade affinity....
Saturday, 8 January 2011
Quick update
Wow, over a week without a post - how time flies. Anyone would think I was getting distracted with New Year....
Things are still moving. I've finally figured out how to use github, which means that I've downloaded a half handful of repositories to my PC, which is now running constantly doing exciting things like building Excavators and sending them out, as well as searching for glyphs for Halls of Vrbansk. I've managed to upgrade my Crashed Ship Site to level 5, and am working on level 6.
The current projects are:
- University upgrade
- Spy upgrade
- More excavators
After a few days of dithering, I've moved the University to my new Capitol planet. I've got it up to level 18, which is the highest I've managed, and am in the middle of upgrading the planet's storage so I can get level 19 (and which will mean I can make a start on a Genetics Lab.) I could speed this up quite a lot, I suspect, with Essentia and importing massive amounts of resources, but I don't want to spend that much time sat in front of a PC. At the moment, waste, water, and ore are all have one store of 19, and food will be done shortly. Energy will take a little longer (four days or so) so I do foresee an expenditure of Essentia shortly.
I noticed that one of my planets has at least one spy on it - it's showing up on the Defense Ministry page - so I'm spending a little time upgrading the spy related buildings to 15 or so, which is the point where they start to cost a serious amount of resources. I don't know if there are more spies out there, but it'll be nice to see - I note that the one I can see hasn't done anything for a couple of days, so hopefully the defensive spies are high enough level to stop him. Besides, where else am I going to find grist for a Genetics Lab?
I also realised that since I'm searching constantly for glyphs, it makes sense to upgrade the Archeology Ministries to up the odds. And if I can do that, then why not take them to level 15 - again, at the point where it starts to cost massive amounts of maintenance - and start putting out more Excavators? It's not like the resource cost for them will matter that much, and if it'll help me find extra Glyphs and Plans, why not?
Hmmm. Maybe less of a quick upgrade than I thought!
Things are still moving. I've finally figured out how to use github, which means that I've downloaded a half handful of repositories to my PC, which is now running constantly doing exciting things like building Excavators and sending them out, as well as searching for glyphs for Halls of Vrbansk. I've managed to upgrade my Crashed Ship Site to level 5, and am working on level 6.
The current projects are:
- University upgrade
- Spy upgrade
- More excavators
After a few days of dithering, I've moved the University to my new Capitol planet. I've got it up to level 18, which is the highest I've managed, and am in the middle of upgrading the planet's storage so I can get level 19 (and which will mean I can make a start on a Genetics Lab.) I could speed this up quite a lot, I suspect, with Essentia and importing massive amounts of resources, but I don't want to spend that much time sat in front of a PC. At the moment, waste, water, and ore are all have one store of 19, and food will be done shortly. Energy will take a little longer (four days or so) so I do foresee an expenditure of Essentia shortly.
I noticed that one of my planets has at least one spy on it - it's showing up on the Defense Ministry page - so I'm spending a little time upgrading the spy related buildings to 15 or so, which is the point where they start to cost a serious amount of resources. I don't know if there are more spies out there, but it'll be nice to see - I note that the one I can see hasn't done anything for a couple of days, so hopefully the defensive spies are high enough level to stop him. Besides, where else am I going to find grist for a Genetics Lab?
I also realised that since I'm searching constantly for glyphs, it makes sense to upgrade the Archeology Ministries to up the odds. And if I can do that, then why not take them to level 15 - again, at the point where it starts to cost massive amounts of maintenance - and start putting out more Excavators? It's not like the resource cost for them will matter that much, and if it'll help me find extra Glyphs and Plans, why not?
Hmmm. Maybe less of a quick upgrade than I thought!
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