Noob questions (part1)

Anyone can help me please ?
I hoped these were simple questions...

I'll take a stab...

1. I don't think there's a "convenient" way to check and see which ships still have movement points. What I do is make sure I have the autopilot toggle for the minimap on so at least I have a sense of where my ships are heading. That way, if I need to make a change, I'll do it before ending the turn and let the ships I missed move automatically.

2. Can't help you regarding arrow keys. I stick to the classic mouse for that.

3. There is no "cost" to building something. The cost associated is the length of time to build it. Well, that is oversimplified. What you pay for is the number of "hammers" of the industrial output. So the more factories you have, the more money you're spending, but you build it faster. That is controlled from the economy/industry sliders. But simply, no, there is not straight-up "cost" to build naturally...only when you finance/rush buy.

4. No, you cannot idle factories in the way you speak. In fact, I would recommend against destroying anything because when you are in the black, you'll have to waste time and resource to rebuild your infrastructure. If you are in a cash crunch, you can: 1) raise taxes, 2) lower output from 100%, 3) adjust sliders shifting away from military to social or research.

5. I think I've noticed that too. Could be a bug though I minor one at that. If I recall correctly, it happens more often with galactic achievements or trade goods. But since it shows the time to build once selected - and you can obviously change your mind - it has been a non-issue for me.

Hope this has been of some help, Faber75.

- is there a way to see what ships have avaliable movements before passing my turn? have i to rotate all ships at every turn to see if it can move ?

Try the Tab key.

- is there a way to disable ship movement with arrow keys ? I'm used to use arrows to move my view and i keep moving ships

I don't know, I use only the mouse not the arrow key. Zooming out/in and grab the map to move is really nice

- i see the mantainance cost of a factory but i'm unable to see how much it will cost to build it (except if i buy it, obviously); has the action no cost ? or i miss it ?

Not sure to understand you. Have you try to put the factory in the queue to determine how many weeks it wil require

- still about structures, is there a way to set it offline (while in a fund crisis) without destroing it, and setting it back online later ?

What do you mean? if you are in fund crisis, no social spending will be made. The best proof is that the remaining tim is set to 'never' for all items in the queue. But if you want to avoid maintenance cost, forget it: it is a very bad move since building them again will take more time that the time you have gained by avoiding the maintenance cost.

- While in a planet i click on a spot to build something, i see the time it will need to be built; as i select it for building this time changes (usually from never to some weeks). Bug, delayed update or i miss something ?

Well, I suppose you are experiencing 'never' when your social queue was empty, meaning that all social production were redirected to military production. But as soon as there is an item is in the social queue, social production is used again for building improvement and value are calculated.

In any case, building a factory as the first improvement when colonizing a new planet is generally a good thing to do.

Thanks to both of you, you've been helpful and cleared my mind.
Now, on to build a more decent empire

- still about structures, is there a way to set it offline (while in a fund crisis) without destroing it, and setting it back online later ?

This is actually a good question. There is a 700% factory bonus tile, and if you build a factory on THAT tile, if you aren't careful you can bankrupt your economy.

In that situation I have used the 700% bonus factory to build my first few colony ships and intentionally destroyed it, leaving the tile blank and using a few other factories to build things until my economy was humming and I could afford the insane cost of so much production.

Most of the time, if you want less production sucking your money away, you need to carefully adjust the Spending: Industrial Capacity slider to less and less production. It's in the F4 menu. Be sure to set it back to 100% as soon as you can afford it! Most players spend a LOT of time micromanaging the sliders on the F4 screen every turn in the beginning game.

Don't worry too much... As you play the game over and over you'll get a feel for how to make an economy that doesn't suck you into bankruptcy.

- i see the mantainance cost of a factory but i'm unable to see how much it will cost to build it (except if i buy it, obviously); has the action no cost ? or i miss it ?

Well, there are a couple of things. You can try to outright buy the item, and that will give you a cash cost, and I find that useful to know roughly how much the thing I'm trying to build will cost... it gives me a rough idea of how expensive the item is. Mostly I just try to build it, it adds into the queue. Then I can use the arrows on the right hand side to move it up and down the list of things I'm trying to build. Move it all the way up to the top and you can find that it'll take two weeks, three weeks, whatever. Then if you don't want to build it on this planet because it will take too long or be too expensive you can just highlight it and click the X to remove it from the queue. There isn't any real cost until you actually start building the item.

The wiki has the actual (base) production points needed to build various things, but the modifiers can have a serious effect on how fast and how expensive something is to build, so generally I try not to worry about the actual base production cost.

What I REALLY need to know is how long is it going to take to get the item built. Then I can move other things ahead of it, or after it. This is all done after you've told the planet to start building.

Again, play a few games. You'll get a feel for how to make a successful build order, and you'll probably be following a pattern of how you make every colony work for your empire without even having to think about it after a while.

- While in a planet i click on a spot to build something, i see the time it will need to be built; as i select it for building this time changes (usually from never to some weeks). Bug, delayed update or i miss something ?

I dunno.

Most of how you assign your empire to build things is through the F4 menu, and you set your research rate, social rate and military rate sliders to various percentages.

One thing you might be doing is if you've got your empire with 0% assigned to social, and then you go to a planet and click on one of the three buttons up top to 'focus your production on planetary improvements', your build times for items will suddenly go from never to some weeks... you've just told your planet to take a little away from the empires focus on research and military, and put it towards social (planetary) improvements, which means that they start building. This is normal behavior.

The other reason that you might go from build times of never to suddenly switching to a number of weeks is because your treasury might be at that -500 point... At -500 your treasury puts all production on hold and uses a turn to generate nothing but cash. If you have an economy that is really sucking away your cash reserve you might get a few hundred in cash, and then (without your doing anything but clicking the turn button), you use up that cash and drop again below -500, which shuts off production again until you get above the -500 mark... This can be pretty confusing for a beginner.

This is a fun game!

If you are getting frustrated, try playing on an easier setting, on a smaller map. A quick win will boost your spirits, and you'll get more of a feel for how the game flows... Experience will tell you at which points you need to be doing which things. It only takes a few games to get the feel of it.

Good luck, and keep asking questions!