SShip landing in 10ths of years

From a recent thread:

SWY said:

If you want to win before 1000AD, your space ship must arrive at Alpha Centauri in 20 year intervals, otherwise your space ship will be 'lost' or your victory won't count.

Click to expand...

Right, people have discovered ways to adjust to this civlaw, and we know that early in the game, a year is a fraction of a turn.

But another question in the same vein: if your SS crew reports that they'll arrive in 18.2 years, is there a difference between that and 18.8 years?

The point is, when your SS lands, the game ends. And it always lands during that flurry of upkeep and building units and improvements at the start of your turn, before you get to move your units for that turn.

Does the fractional part of the year determine when, within that flurry, the SS lands?

Here's the theory, and i'd love to see it proved wrong, equally as correct. I know that the flurry of activity happens city-by-city and follows the order of cities on your City Status pages. If you have 50 cities and your SS will land in 18.2 years, then that should mean the end of the game happens during the target turn, right after the first 10 cities take their turn. If the SS has 18.8 years travel time, then on the turn it lands, it should do so after the 40th city has its go.

AFAIR, the game simply rounds (down?) to the next integer, and lands the ship on AC at the beginning of the appropriate interturn: decimals don't count.

tjs282 said:

AFAIR, the game simply rounds (down?) to the next integer, and lands the ship on AC at the beginning of the appropriate interturn: decimals don't count.

Click to expand...

In my games, the landing is usually not the first thing the game does at the start of the final turn. Some cities make their builds or have parades before, while i sit there thinking "What is the point of going through this?" That got me wondering if this delay in landing correlates to the decimal fraction of travel time. If so, the delay can be manipulated for extra civscore points.

I believe the point of cities being processed before landing the spaceship is to provide you with the extra points that turn would give you. Can we confirm that all cities are processed when the spaceship lands, or just a few?

I'd bet cities are processed first just to simplify the code.

After finishing the game, you'll get to see stuff like demographics and score screens and so on. These are impossible to see between turns to begin with, and it's simpler to avoid bugs and write correct code, if you don't have to support that feature.

SWY said:

I believe the point of cities being processed before landing the spaceship is to provide you with the extra points that turn would give you. Can we confirm that all cities are processed when the spaceship lands, or just a few?

Click to expand...

Meh, know i've got a couple dozen games with a SS win, and always make a savegame just before launching and just before landing, but only found 3 of them on this PC. Started one the turn before Alpha Centauri, and made every city build something so i could tell when, in the city-processing order, the SS lands. Unfortunately, this game lands before any cities are processed.

But i know that's not always the case. Maybe, in this game, starting 1 turn before landing does round off the 10th's of a year? Perhaps you have to run the test all the way from launch to landing to have the SS touch down in the middle of a year?

Next discovered (to my horror) that each time i restart and run the penultimate turn, the resulting win knocks another game off my HOF list.

So... not going to investigate the other ones until i finish the current game, also have two others where i stopped play with FutureTechs just shy of the Pollution Bug limit, while i playtested to get control of that clownshow. Once those are done, my HOF should be safe from the intrusions of earlier games.

But i think the methodology of the test is sound. The turn before landing, make every city build either a building or a non-quiet unit, and you can tell how many cities are processed before the landing. Will update thread when i finish some more games.

I wonder if when you've launched SS in-game (without reloading from a save) it keeps track of the city that built the last piece of SS and will process all the cities preceding it, by city ID?

I've not delved into the code like some other people here, nor do I have a save game in a good place, but I might test this next time I'm playing...

dom111 said:

I wonder if when you've launched SS in-game (without reloading from a save) it keeps track of the city that built the last piece of SS and will process all the cities preceding it, by city ID?

I've not delved into the code like some other people here, nor do I have a save game in a good place, but I might test this next time I'm playing...

Click to expand...

That's a darn good idea, thank you. And it might be right. My SS is always full, so they're always 15.2 years flight-time. But now that you mention it, the landing is not always at the same point in the landing year. Sometimes it's the first thing that happens, sometimes have to wade through dozens of cities doing buildings before the SS lands. Sometimes i complete the SS and launch later, and sometimes i'll launch as soon as the last piece is in place.

I think your idea is more likely, than the theory i had at the start of this thread.

dom111 said:

I wonder if when you've launched SS in-game (without reloading from a save) it keeps track of the city that built the last piece of SS and will process all the cities preceding it, by city ID?

I've not delved into the code like some other people here, nor do I have a save game in a good place, but I might test this next time I'm playing...

Click to expand...

Some different savegames of SShip landings are stored here:

980 BC http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=13222921&postcount=3
760 BC http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=13355091&postcount=4
2380 BC http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=13465428&postcount=5
2320 BC http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=14133902&postcount=7
2560 BC http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=14269352&postcount=9
3080 BC http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=14400251&postcount=11

Maybe these help for testings.

Posidonius said:

Next discovered (to my horror) that each time i restart and run the penultimate turn, the resulting win knocks another game off my HOF list.

Click to expand...

Just backup and restore the hall of fame file, is what I do. ctrl c, ctrl v. Or you could just backup and restore the entire \CIV\ directory. Tiny thing!