How does Transcendence work?

[Minor Annoyance]

I know what you do it win Transcendence but I don't know all the functions behind it.
Looking at the script file I get that building the mind flower starts a 30 turn countdown to victory, with each transcendence building you have subtracting one turn. What I'm not sure of is if those buildings have to be in place when you finish the mind flower or if you can build them after the countdown has started to speed it up. As far as I can tell from looking at the script, you need them in place first, before the countdown starts. Adding new buildings afterwards doesn't help.
Is that correct or am I missing something?

 

[Alkaid]

I believe that's correct. Buildings made after the Mindflower is already complete won't affect the countdown.

 

[Ryika]

Yes, the number of turns is saved once the moment the mind flower is finished, after that the countdown is fixed. New Buildings after that won't reduce the timer and losing cities with the building does not remove the bonus you got from that building.

Not sure if there's anything in the core files that prevents the number from being updated dynamically, but looking at the Lua the method they used looks a lot like laziness (or shortage of time) to me.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

Possibly also an issue with preventing a situation where you could lose a city, gain it back and build another mind stem and get a additional turn taken off. Or selling them and building again.

 

[Ryika]

Well, you could just add a turn if you lose a building to prevent that. ^^

But of course, that would be a lot of situations to cover - losing a city in combat, selling buildings, selling cities, etc. (although that all could probably be worked into a global check at the beginning of the turn) - for just this tiny "inconvenience". I can understand why they didn't do it, but I think it would surely be possible to do by just adding code, without having to re-write too much of what is already there.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

The game doesn't make it clear how it works anyway. The mind stem and xeno sanctuary says "Adds one point per turn to Transcendence Victory progress" which isn't accurate. I subtracts turns not add points per turn. So it seems like it worked differently before and it possibly didn't work right so they had to compromise with this.