Author Topic: 3rd Eden Level  (Read 6212 times)

Offline Halo Buff

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« on: February 10, 2007, 09:51:23 PM »
I am having troubles keeping my scientiests and childeren around in the third level. The damned blight always shows up too soon. Any sugguestions? I have tried medical buildings, tons of nursuries, everything, but I am alway's too short on children and scientiests, as they die off just before the blight shows up and I cant get any more to replace them.

Also, the difficulty buttons dont show a change when I click on them in the menus, is this a fault and how can I tell what setting it is on?
« Last Edit: February 10, 2007, 09:54:02 PM by Halo Buff »

Offline TRIX Rabbit

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« Reply #1 on: February 10, 2007, 10:35:13 PM »
As a tip, you only need one nursery. And to get more workers, you need one university. Before you concentrate on the population, accomplish the other objectives first. If you need more time, slow the game down, this will give you more time to react. Now, your population is dying off most likely because your morale is low. Build enough residences so that the demand is under 100%. Do the same with other buildings, like med centers. Train a little more scientists then you need, because those are the only people who you can determine the amount. Workers are made on a semi-regular rate, and children are born randomly.
I hope this will help, I will go play the mission and get you more help
 
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Offline Halo Buff

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« Reply #2 on: February 10, 2007, 11:16:32 PM »
Thanks. I'll have to try that.

Offline Tellaris

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« Reply #3 on: February 11, 2007, 02:59:34 AM »
Here we go.
Eden Mission 3
As you did NOT specify a difficulty....

Easy Level
Mission Objectives
You must have a minimum population of 28 Children, 22 Workers, and 15 Scientists.
You must research these topics:  Emergency Response Systems, Health Maintenance, Cybernetic Teleoperation, Large-Scale Optical Resonators*, Mobile Weapons Platform*.
You must have the following structure kits in storage at Structure Factory:  Agridome, Command Center, Common Ore Smelter, Structure Factory, Tokamak.
You must have at least five Cargo Trucks loaded with Common Metals and three Cargo Trucks loaded with Food
You must have enough Evacuation Transports for your population.
You must build a Vehicle Factory*.
1)You must have at least five ConVecs, one Robo-Surveyor, one Robo-Miner*, two Scouts*, and four Lynx*.
Objectives marked with an asterisk (*) are added during the course of the mission as other objectives are achieved.
Tips from the Test Labs
This mission requires close attention to Morale to help meet your population goals.  Build an additional Residence and Agridome as soon as possible; this will help build Morale.  Start training all but two Workers to be Scientists at the beginning of the mission.  This will increase the number of Scientists (increasing the speed of your research) and also reduce the number of unemployed Workers.  Continue to train small numbers of Scientists throughout the mission.
Put all available Cargo Trucks on an ore-hauling route between the Mine to the northwest of the base and your Common Ore Smelter.  If the Trucks get too bunched up at the Smelter’s dock, move a couple of them out of the way to clear the jam.  After the rest are moving again, unload them at the Smelter and reroute them.  Trucks must be unloaded to accept programming for an automatic mine route.
Research topics which aid morale.  Starting with Environmental Psychology, then proceed to Health Maintenance, Seismology, and Emergency Response Systems in that order.  Build a Medical Center as soon as Health Maintenance is completed, and build a DIRT as soon as Emergency Response Systems has been researched.  This will require 3 Workers and 2 Scientists to staff, so plan accordingly.  Do not research Metals Reclamation until it is the last topic available.
After the Morale issues have been completed, research Cybernetic Teleoperation, Large Scale Optical Resonators, and Mobile Weapons Platform in that order.  Start building your Vehicle Factory kit as soon as you have completed Cybernetic Teleoperation.  The other two are required to let the Vehicle Factory produce Laser Lynx tanks.  While they are being researched, build the Vehicle Factory, 2 Scouts, and a Robo-Miner.
Normal Level
Mission Objectives
You must have a minimum population of 28 Children, 22 Workers, and 15 Scientists.
You must research these topics:  Emergency Response Systems, Health Maintenance, Cybernetic Teleoperation.
You must have the following structure kits in storage at Structure Factory:  Agridome, Command Center, Common Ore Smelter, Structure Factory, Tokamak.
You must have at least six Cargo Trucks loaded with Common Metals and three Cargo Trucks loaded with Food
You must have enough Evacuation Transports for your population.
2)You must have at least five ConVecs, one Robo-Surveyor, one Robo-Miner*, two Scouts*, and four Lynx*.
Objectives marked with an asterisk (*) are added during the course of the mission as other objectives are achieved.
Tips from the Test Labs
Research Seismology first.  This will give you warning of the quakes coming and let you move any vehicles out of the way.
Very soon after that research Cybernetic Teleoperations. Then place a Residence, Vehicle Factory and a Medical Center on the map as quickly as you can.
Hard Level
Mission Objectives
You must have a minimum population of 26 Children, 20 Workers, and 15 Scientists.
You must research these topics:  Emergency Response Systems, Health Maintenance, Cybernetic Teleoperation.
You must have the following structure kits loaded into ConVecs:  Agridome, Command Center, Common Ore Smelter, Structure Factory, Tokamak.
You must have at least six Cargo Trucks loaded with Common Metals and three Cargo Trucks loaded with Food
You must have enough Evacuation Transports for your population.
3)You must have at least one Robo-Surveyor, one Robo-Miner, three Scouts, and five Lynx.
Tips from the Test Labs
This is one of the hardest missions in the game.  You do not have very many people and the quakes and microbe make it a very difficult scenario.
At the beginning, focus almost entirely on building your Morale.  Do Health Maintenance immediately.  This is the only way to keep enough Workers and Scientists alive since your Morale starts at such a poor level that your death rate will be high.  Also, do not train all of your Workers into Scientists at the start.  Workers contribute twice as much to the birth rate as Scientists.  If you convert them, you will not be able to produce enough Children to succeed.  You may only have a few Scientists doing research at a time, but getting more Children is the critical challenge.  Do the vehicles and weapons research near the very end.
Remember that you can Idle some structures to free up Workers for others, so once your Structure Factory has finished all the kits you need Idle it to get those Workers into other structures.
Do not worry about the mining beacons in the south and southwest.  These will get hit by a lot of quakes and you will lose a lot of Cargo Trucks that way.  Send all of the Trucks to haul ore from the mine in the west.
Most of the quakes hit to the west of your base but there are a couple that can be north and south.  If you have researched Seismology, move your vehicles out of the way when you get the warning and Idle the structures near the epicenter until the quake is over.
As you complete the vehicle requirements, move your vehicles out of the way to the northeast corner of the maps... no quakes ever hit there.
You may wish to build a GORF and recycle some of your structures at the end to get enough Metals.  If the only thing you have left to complete is the Metals requirement, forget worry about Morale and recycle as many structures as you need to finish.
Build Storage Tanks near the end to avoid a botteneck at the Smelter.
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Offline Savant 231-A

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« Reply #4 on: February 11, 2007, 03:19:50 AM »
lol, did you write that alone or did you copy it?
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Offline White Claw

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« Reply #5 on: February 11, 2007, 07:43:23 AM »
That's straight out of the "strategy guide".

Halo Buff - The buttons do not show which difficulty level you have chosen (a known bug) but they still work otherwise. (i.e. you click on "hard" and you get "hard")
« Last Edit: February 11, 2007, 08:29:07 AM by White Claw »

Offline BlackBox

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« Reply #6 on: February 11, 2007, 09:44:00 AM »
The button question has been asked numerous times:

If you push "alt" at each screen, the buttons will become visible. If you want a more permanent fix, see this:
http://wiki.outpost2.net/OP2_Button_Fix

Offline White Claw

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« Reply #7 on: February 11, 2007, 09:59:09 AM »
I don't think the wiki fix is available for Win98, or at least it's not on mine. (for those of us living in the stone age)

Offline Halo Buff

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« Reply #8 on: February 11, 2007, 01:21:05 PM »
Wow. Thanks guys. And sorry for not clarifying the difficulty, Couldnt figure out what one it was on.  I have XP Media Center Edition btw. I'll try that button fix...

Offline Halo Buff

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« Reply #9 on: February 11, 2007, 02:46:21 PM »
Just as an after thought, where do I find that strategy guide? If it's online, could you provide a link for me? And thanks again, I finnaly beat it with seconds to go before the blight took out my university. Had to use the rapid-click cheat on it to beat the bilght's advance.

Offline TRIX Rabbit

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« Reply #10 on: February 11, 2007, 02:56:40 PM »
The Strategy guide is supposed to come with the game. But I am not sure if it comes with the OPU version or not. I know for sure it does however, come with the original OP2.
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Offline Highlander

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« Reply #11 on: February 11, 2007, 02:58:33 PM »
:yawn:   There is no rapid click cheat. Never has been.
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Offline Halo Buff

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« Reply #12 on: February 11, 2007, 03:54:20 PM »
Your shure about the cheat? seemed to work for me. I was watching the numbers go up in the statis indicater, and they started making larger jumps when I was doing it. :op2:

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« Last Edit: February 11, 2007, 03:56:16 PM by Halo Buff »

Offline TRIX Rabbit

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« Reply #13 on: February 11, 2007, 03:56:25 PM »
I think the 'rapid click cheat' works on slower computers. if not, it could just be an illusion
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Offline Highlander

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« Reply #14 on: February 11, 2007, 04:01:09 PM »
The rapid click cheat is just an illusion.

Can't remember the exact definition of it.(Someone on WON had a real good way of defining it  <_< ) Anyways, what it does, is just to skip some numbers or something, or show another set of numbers than usual which gives the impression of more rapid progress in whatever it is.

And also it's a way of concentrating your focus when you build something and have nothing else to do :P
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Offline White Claw

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« Reply #15 on: February 11, 2007, 05:40:25 PM »
The "rapid click" cheat is nothing more than forcing the screen to update faster. If you sit and watch the numbers, they go up at a set rate (like 4-12 clicks per second depending on what it is). If you click faster, all you do is force the interface to update faster than once a second. So you "see" an increase of 2-6 per half second but the end result is the same (4-12 per second).

Try timing something with a stop watch, then try the "click" cheat. You'll see it isn't faster. (It does make you feel better though.  :D )

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« Last Edit: February 11, 2007, 05:41:41 PM by White Claw »

Offline Hooman

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« Reply #16 on: February 11, 2007, 06:10:37 PM »
Population growth and death are deterministic. There is nothing random about it. It is possible to design a population similator that exactly matches the growth and death of your population (given the current morale, which is also deterministic and can be simulated). This is true for all colonist types. The only "random" elements can come from how external factors affect morale or population level. Such as if you're having a battle with someone and killing each other's buildings. Also, for morale to have an effect, it must change by an entire level, not just morale 99 to morale 98 or something small like that. It must cross a level boundary to change how it affects population growth or death.

Now I'm going to assume you're not losing people directly from buildings being destroyed while they are still active and have people in them. In which case, morale is the only variable issue. So if you're doing everything else right, then pay attention to your morale.

More nurseries doesn't really help. You need at least one to have children be born. Also, keep in mind there is a hidden progress to "building children", sort of like how factories work. If the building ever becomes inactive, progress stops. Now, each nursery you have also decreases the infant mortality rate by a little, but only as much as an unupgraded medical center would. Keep in mind that medical centers also decrease the mortality rate of workers and scientists, and they take just as many colonists to staff as the nursery does. In other words, it's sort of wasteful to build more than one nursery. You should build more medical centers instead. The only reason for having more than one nursery, is in case one goes offline, such as when scientists die. This is usually only an issue if you're the sort of person that doesn't notice this sort of thing and let's it stay offline for a long time.

The more medical centers you have, the less of an effect each additional one has. They do however keep decreasing the death rate, even if you're well below 100% usage.

There is no way to increase your birth rate other than keeping morale high. Having a large population also helps birth rate, but you can't just "increase" the number of colonists you have and thereby increase the birth rate. But keep in mind that workers contribute twice as much as scientists do to the birth rate, so if you train too many scientists early on, you'll hurt your long term population growth. If the number of colonists is an issue, try to hold off on training scientists for a while. Especially if your population is already low, since then you'd be decreasing an already low birth rate.


As for morale, pay attention to the main "core" morale factors such as building usage. Just check the morale report (ctrl+M) to see those factors and try to keep them all satisfied. These give you a base morale value, and in the absence of events, will determine your overall morale (multiplied by some factor that depends on the difficulty setting and colony your playing (plymouth has a bonus), but is somewhere around 0.8 to 1.2). Once that is taken care of, then you can also start thinking about how event affect morale. Events will either add or subtract from the base value, and the event portion of your morale decays to 0 over time, decreasing in absolute value by 1/2 each period. Things like completing research will give you a positive bonus, as will killing an enemy unit. Losing a building, or a disaster occuring, whether or not the disaster hits you will decrease morale. Even killing an enemy building can decrease your morale. So if you're morale is low, it's a VERY bad idea to go killing residences or agridomes, or other similar non combat significant buildings. Kill those buildings is probably the biggest negative impact your morale can suffer, and if you kill enough of them, it can take quite a while for your morale to recover, during which time your population will probably drop significantly, unless it's already huge (at least 100+ to 200+ people) and has a naturally high birth rate.



And would people finally get over the "clicking cheat" nonsense! It's completely false. It does nothing. At best the status display just updates when you click giving the appearance something is building faster, since normally it only updates every so often and makes the progress appear to lurch forward. We've looked into this just to prove how silly it is. We know where in memory to find the current progress at factories, and we've monitored it, and tried clicking repeatedly. We've done many trials just to be absolutely sure. There is absolutely no hidden affects on the progress. It only gets updated during the expected point during the game loop, and the update can not be affecting by clicking. Further, if this did work, it would desyncrhonize the game in multiplayer. There is no command packet that gets sent when you simply click on a building to view it's status, so if it had any effect, multiplayer games would get out of sync, and probably eventually crash. There are no hidden packets sent either. We can monitor this, and even if there was, we already know what all the packets do, and none of them do anything that this "cheat" would require them to do to work. The memory monitoring made use of hardware breakpoints, so there was no way the value could have been modified without being caught by the debugger, and we've searched for other possible code that could have modified that value had it run, even though it didn't run during any of the tests since the hardware breakpoint caught nothing, and we came up with no likely suspects.

Edit: Forgot a test. Two factories had command packets issued during the same game cycle to produce identical units. One factory was clicked on repeadly, the other wasn't. Both vehicles appeared at EXACTLY the same time. As in, the same game cycle, not just appeared at the same time by someone eyeballing the test.

In short, there is no cheat. If there was any such clicking "cheat", it would have to have been hidden VERY well, because any simple oversight or bug would easily have been caught by the above efforts. In which case if it was hidden, and placed there on purpose, it'd likely be much harder to activate than simply clicking repeatedly, since we'd have caught that by now. Further, there is no room to hide anything in the command packets, since we know how they work. In which case, there is no possiblity of it working in multiplayer. If it worked in any game mode and had been activated during the tests, it would have been caught by the hardware breakpoint. Had it not been activate during the tests, and not caught by the hardware breakpoint, then it's more complicated than simply clicking repeatedly. In which case, people probably aren't activating it (if anything is even there). And even if there was still something there that somehow shortened build time, we probably would have at least found something in the code analysis that would suggest a possiblity of some kind of cheat. So until someone finds some evidence of a not just clicking repeatedly activated progress cheat that evades hardward breakpoints, was specifically designed to only work in single player, doesn't use any of the usual offsets anywhere in code, was never activated during any of the testing trials, (but is somehow still easily activated by people playing?) then I'll maintain that any such claims as to the existence or validity of this "cheat" to be about as believable as people claiming they were abducted by aliens and given an anal probe.


 
« Last Edit: February 11, 2007, 06:13:57 PM by Hooman »

Offline TRIX Rabbit

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« Reply #17 on: February 11, 2007, 06:31:13 PM »
Clicking it really fast only makes you think that something is being accomplished. Kinda like those pedestrian walk buttons, they don't do any thing, it just makes you feel better by making you think you've done something.
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Offline Nightmare24148

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« Reply #18 on: February 12, 2007, 04:11:18 PM »
Aye, I know the wonders of morale on population...God ever had an over-population? As in like 100 workers milling around? 4 children born at a time? ^_^

Oh and Dan's Dog was once available to help you, but he went away. ;)
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Offline White Claw

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« Reply #19 on: February 12, 2007, 07:02:39 PM »
Holy crap. Hooman had some time on his hands...  :blink: Like he said. Keep morale high and keep clicking away...   :D  

Offline Hooman

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« Reply #20 on: February 12, 2007, 08:53:10 PM »
... keep clicking away?  <_<
Why do I feel like I've failed here.



Anyways, a lot of the info was looked into for other reasons, but after many people kept claiming that was a cheat when it so obviously was not, I just had to spend a day going through exactly why this didn't work with something to point to other than the simple "it's an illusion" answer that left some people unconvinced. I did this a fairly long time ago btw. You can probably find the original post somewhere on the forums, but I'm sure it's buried pretty deep by now and long since forgotten. At any rate, I just find the need to reiterate whenever someone posts about it. Sadly I don't have this kind of time anymore.




So yeah, keep morale up. It tends to have a bigger affect than med centers. If morale alone isn't enough, then look into med centers. Train enough scientists, but not too many. Always make sure you have a nursery and a university active. You can't train children into workers without an active university. It works essentially the same way that the nursery does for producing kids.
 

Offline TRIX Rabbit

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« Reply #21 on: February 13, 2007, 07:54:39 AM »
Quote
Aye, I know the wonders of morale on population...God ever had an over-population? As in like 100 workers milling around? 4 children born at a time? ^_^

Oh and Dan's Dog was once available to help you, but he went away. ;)
I once had over 4000 children born by mark 15... Then they all died in the next second, and I failed. My pop was 4096 at the top of the spike. I think I had just reverted back to my regular SHEETS.VOL when It happened. I called this event, the Big Pop Monster.
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Offline White Claw

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« Reply #22 on: February 14, 2007, 04:53:34 PM »
Med Centers aren't very necessary for keeping the morale up if you don't have it researched. I usually don't build med centers until I have a few extra scientists laying around. (The population is usually low at that point and you don't gain a lot early on with the improved life expectancy from Med Centers.) The morale is easy to keep above 90 without med centers.

But once you research medical centers, you need to build them or your morale will drop off. The population doesn't like it when you research something and don't build it.

Offline Hooman

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« Reply #23 on: February 14, 2007, 09:50:24 PM »
Yeah, not having a building won't affect your morale if you don't have the research to build that building. It only starts counting once you're able to build it. Which makes recreational facilities really worthless. The only way they can help is if you can't manage another area for some reason, then having rec centers will mean it counts for a smaller piece of the pie. But if can't can't manage another area, how would you be able to manage rec centers?

So yeah, once you research something, it starts counting towards your morale immediately, even though it will take time to build the structure kits and deploy enough of them. So when you do research things that are supposed to help keep morale up, it will actually create a dip in your morale when you first get the tech.


The real use in Med Centers though is in decreasing the death rate. It would be interesting to model how Med Centers affect your population levels, and then take into account the fact that you need 1 worker and 1 scientist to keep them running. I guess this is comparable to the morale issue here. Even though Med Centers are meant to increase your population levels (well, decrease the death rate), it initially causes a dip in available workers since it takes away workers to operate it. I would like to know how long you would need to wait for your population to stabilize at 1 worker and 1 scientist above where you currently are when you first make it active.
 

Offline White Claw

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« Reply #24 on: February 15, 2007, 07:02:27 PM »
Not to mention that usually when I get around to building medical centers, I need at least two and sometimes three to cover the population. I do think, however, med centers and rec facilities provide a little more stability to the morale if you faulter at something else. But like you said, if you ran out of scientists for your nursery, then you probably don't have one for your med center either (since it's the first to go).