hmm, gives a good read and great rememberings!
lets pick up your points SCT
@Basics 5.1 Planetary Assaults/Invasion - Fleet Order
Well, selecting a fleet should make no difference. I really can't remember it ever did.
In the games I played I found the safest way to prevent the fleet sorting from being changed is either to wait a turn and see what changed or to not create any new fleets but just swap ships without removing any (which creates a new fleet as well given code wise also a lonely ships makes up a fleet).
The reason for changing the order of fleets I think is routed in how fleets are saved all together in one single global listing (
http://flocke.bplaced.net/botfwiki/inde ... D_GWTForce ) and that empty fleet slots might get reused when creating a new fleet ( I think I once figured that one comparing the savegames ).
The actual sorting I think is determined by the fleet id and that might differ from what you see in the ui list when you rearrange the fleet sorting.
When you move a lonely ship to another fleet you empty its previous fleet. The next fleet you create might take its place then and it doesn't matter in what sector you create it. Also be aware that the fleet list is shared for the different players and I only can guess on how changes are merged for multiplayer.
A common procedure similar to the one in the guide is to create complete new fleets without removing any fleets in the meantime (in any sector!). That way it is likely that the first fleet you create picks the uppest most empty fleet slot if any. But it is not clear that empty slots are always searched from the start. A common practice in progamming is to keep a list of available free slots that is filled while you remove fleets.
So when in some other sector you removed a fleet with id 0 while in the empty slot list already are 5 and 6, that list becomes out of order and new fleets you create therefore might become out of order as well. If such a list exist it further likely is kept for onfollowing turns.
Therefore my approach usually was to make sure I reuse my existing fleets instead. The order of all newly created fleets is unknown. If necessary temporarily create new fleets to move ships around. But never remove the last ship of an already existing fleet or it becomes an empty slot that you don't know what new fleet is taking its place.
I can't remember a single case where that approach failed unless I failed myself and erroneously gave assault order to a newly created fleet that picked up such an empty fleet slot that comes first.
In addition to that however also comes the sorting of individual ships within a fleet. I think that one works similar in that all ships have an id that is used for the sorting next turn but is ignored in ui while you add and remove ships. Pretty hard to guess what id a ship uses. You only know next turn in what order it is compared to other ships in same fleet. Likely older ships have a lower id and come first, but this is only guessing.
@Basics 5.2 Planetary Assaults/Invasion - Difficulty Level
It is all about ground combat and shield defense I guess. But wasn't there some sort of global defense or ground combat factor by the difficulty level? In addition there is also a portion of luck during system attack. Are you sure the difficulty mode isn't taken into account here?
I have the feeling there was an effect, although I don't have any specific remembering.
@Basics 5.3 Planetary Assaults/Invasion - Cloaked Ships
I got tricked by the cloaked assault a few times in MP till I found how it works. Not sure anymore how shields were taken into account that case. I think it didn't make a difference but possibly the repair of that turn is lessened. Cloaked vs uncloaked repair sounds interesting, never checked on that one.
But whether a romulan destroyer group in T4 has enough shields to survive orbitals is risky for sure. Even more so when you give the AI or your opponents an evolution level in advance.
@Basics 6 Minor Upgrading
Yeah, indeed that is a false advice. Minors do terraform, but not all the system planets at once and not every evolution step. By terraforming them yourself you make sure that next evolution step not only they have max system population but also the system has more buildings.
When you aim to member a minor next evolution step it is a good advice to make sure all planets are terraformed.
@Tricks 2 Edo Training
I always hated that abuse of a trick. Specially in mp when you see your opponent in fight each turn and wonder what he's doing. Not a nice one given it is only applicable to players in range. I actually never tried it myself and therefore can't tell whether it makes any difference when you scratch the edo guardian, but from what I remember being said is you needed to get behind the edo guardian if you want to safely destroy it or continue the "training" abuse. Further I wonder whether cloaking gives you an extra turn here.
And what about the Chodak, didn't it work the same? I think I once attacked it for two turns till it fired back.
@Tricks 3 Phantom Dilithium
Yeah, I think the icon is not of importance. However, as far I recall, when you have more ships in progress that aren't ready yet, I think it failed in some circumstances when as many ships were about to complete as you had dilithium. To get around I think I needed to track in what order the ship building was assigned or started. Code wise this could be explained by the usage counting of the dilithium. When there are more ship build tasks to process after all dilithium is already found to be used, it might not matter whether it is actually needed. Some exception like that easily drives fault assumptions on things like the dilithium icon.