Aeson
Posts: 784
Joined: 8/30/2013
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-- The last bit is actually three different things.
The 'abandoned ships' event are the ones found in the hyperdeny zones outside of systems or ones spawned from certain story events.
The 'lost ship' event is a result of finding a 'lost ship' ruin.
The 'foreign species colony ship' event (+frigate & destroyer) is a result of finding a 'beacon' ruin.
Not entirely. There are a handful of abandoned advanced ships present on the map without a ruin-related event even if you have none of the storylines enabled, and sometimes these can be colony ships. They can also be generated as a result of a pirate faction or perhaps an empire going defunct; one of the possible fates of pirate ships and bases is for the ships and stations to go neutral instead of joining another faction. I usually only see this with 'civilian' pirate ships, however.
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And speaking of derelict ships, I'll wrap up my long winded post with this - is there any "trick" to locating them? It's really beneficial to find large/advanced ships early on, particularly when it's a colony ship for an alien race that can colonize worlds that your empire isn't normally able to settle (without much later technology, anyway). Once I get the Gerax Hyperdrive and build a decent handful of scouts, I tend to set each one to explore a full sector (sometimes overlapping, if there are a lot of stars), and if I don't bump right into a derelict ship (or ruin that spawns one), they seem to be very easy to miss.
The easiest way to find derelicts is to develop long-range scanners and install them onto some of your ships or bases, and keep an eye out for light grey ship or station icons on the main map. Those icons are derelict ships or stations. Be aware that long-range scanners are very large components which require a large amount of power, so if you're going to make a mobile scanner you'll probably want to use a dedicated specialist design rather than just tossing it onto your standard escort or something like that. Finding ruins is a similar process; you simply have to keep an eye out for the icon that indicates the presence of ruins and send something to investigate if you don't know what's there.
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5) How many Ion Defense components do I need? I've seen conflicting info on this, with some mentions of them being like armor components, while others saying you only need a single unit to get the full benefit.
I haven't done any rigorous testing of this, but the last time I checked it seemed as though one ion defense component performed about as well as five when the ship bearing the ion defense component was attacked by 5 ships each carrying 5 ion cannons, and the performance didn't seem any better or worse than against 1 ship carrying 1 ion cannon. Having more than one is useful to prevent your ship from losing its ion defense to component damage, but aside from that it doesn't appear to do much.
My guess as to how these work would be that ion cannons can disable components as long as (ion cannon shot strength) - (distance penalty) - (greatest ion defense value of any component on the target) > 0.
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6) Are the benefits of Way of the Ancients/Darkness, and super weapon technology only available for the first empire to find the right ruins? It seems that way to me, but I'd like to know if it's possible to provide the government type to a friendly civilization (it looks like the super weapon techs are tradeable, with a really huge value attached to them). Also, is it possible to steal the technology for super weapons? In one of my previous games the Zenox found Death Rays, and I wasn't able to get them from any ruins that I found. The technology showed up in the list of things I could steal via espionage, and I ran a lot of missions trying to get it. But, since it doesn't show up in the tech screen, I couldn't tell if I was actually making any progress or not.
The only way I know of to share secret governments involves using the editor, so yes, they're effectively only available to the first empire to find the site. I have, however, occasionally seen multiple computer empires which all have Way of Darkness (not counting the "refugees"), so it might be possible for multiple secret government ruins to be present on the same map, or there might be a chance for revolutions to select Way of Darkness (and possibly Way of the Ancients) as a government type when you get a government overthrow event.
As far as stealing superweapons goes, yes, it's possible. It is however a pain, even if you have an exceptional intelligence agent. Just keep running the missions until you run out of agents or it eventually completes the tech; superweapons are possibly the most expensive techs in the game, and even early techs can take several attempts to acquire enough information to develop if you don't have a decent agent, midgame techs are almost not worth bothering with if you lack a good agent, and late game techs are very trying on your patience if you lack a great agent. You're better off kissing up to the guys who have the superweapons so you can buy the techs; I think they'll trade them at 30+ relations, though I'm not sure about that number. I'd suggest paying at least part of the price with disputed bases or colonies, if you have any; those tend to be worth quite a bit, though not usually as much as the superweapons.
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7) What's up with pirate strength? I've played several games now on the same settings (pirates set to normal numbers and weak strength, with game difficulty on normal), but they're vastly weaker than usual in my current game. In the last 2-3 games I've played, I've seen quite a few pirate factions end up with strength numbers reaching upwards of 4k-6k, even in the relatively early part of the game. In my current playthrough, however, the strongest pirates seem to be at around 1.2k, with most having strength < 1k. All of the AI empires seem to be fairly weak as well (far behind me, actually), so I don't think it's that they're keeping the pirates in check. Did I just get lucky this game, with the pirates not finding many derelict ships?
Pirates not finding derelict ships helps, though I really don't think that's a big part of it; I've seen very successful pirate factions which didn't have any advanced ships of which I was aware, and I've seen very unsuccessful pirate factions with two or three advanced ships. More important, I think, is the number and proximity of nearby independent colonies, and how much nearby empires have been paying the pirates to stay away, supply their worlds with resources, etc, and that's going to vary quite a bit from one game to the next. Also, as weak empires generally cannot afford to pay much, and pirates are somewhat reliant on protection agreements to get off the ground in the early game (unless they're lucky with getting good-paying missions early or find several independent worlds to control), weak empires will not necessarily translate to strong pirates.
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I have a few questions. - 
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