There a reason to not sit in SETA and let traders rack the dough?

[incarnyte]

Is there any negatives to letting the game run with you in space somewhere and SETA active while your ST/UT collect the dough?

[pjknibbs]

Well, two main issues:

a) Trade and Combat ranks drop after a period of time with no user input--this is about an hour of game time, which would be 6 minutes real time at 10x SETA. Your ST/UTs might be able to offset this because their activities are constantly increasing your trade rank, but there's no such method for preserving combat rank.

b) Since you're not present at the keyboard you can't react to anything that happens, so you really have no-one but yourself to blame if you come back to your game to find all your UTs blown up and a massive hole in your finances!

By the way, I notice that you're asking an awful lot of questions this morning--could you just add questions to your existing thread if you're asking another one so quickly, please? Thanks.

[incarnyte]

Thought about just adding onto a thread but the questions usually are not connected in any way. I really wouldnt expect a question about ST/UT to be answered under a combat or station building thread. At least that is my experience.

[bonalste]

There's a third reason, but it might not apply to you.

I did this when I first started playing Reunion. Just once. After leaving it on SETA overnight I woke up to 30 million credits, after having struggled for days just for the 9 million I bought my Centaur with. Basically I felt like I had completely cheated. I never did it again. I started a new game in Terran Conflict and now I only use SETA when travelling to a specific point. If ever I leave my ship somewhere while I do somehting else it is outside of SETA, because otherwise I feel like I haven't achieved anything.

As I say, this may not bother you but I thought I'd mention it in case it does.

[aka1nas]

SETA also has to take a lot of shortcuts, and you may have some negative outcomes like more ship losses than usual OOS.

[EmperorJon]

About adding questions to threads, come on devchat and spam us instead!

Yeah, I think that sums it up anyway:

1. Not at keyboard.
2. Increased losses.
3. Cheating feeling.
4. Rank drop.

Oh,

5. Computer left on for too long. Don't like it.

My mates leaves his on all the time... even when he's sleeping... I don't understand. It's been on constantly for a month now... it crashed just to get some peace and quite I think.

[TTD]

@ Emp...

There are many thoughts about leaving on or off when not using .Just a few...

Continually switching on and off causes expansion and contraction of the circuits and thus shortens the life .
But many people change or upgrade there PC before this would happen.

Leaving on ,if connected to internet,leaves it as an unmonitored target for hackers etc.

Leaving it on wears out the cooling system quicker.

I usually switch off when I go to sleep ,as it's connected to the internet and I don't sleep well with extra noises.(PC in Bedroom).

[Evil Prodigy]

On SETA and complexes: my first complex had a badly positioned hub, where ships would need to go around the hub when coming in from the direction of the gates.

This meant that any time I left SETA on longer than 20 minutes (at 10x) some ship would eventually plow into it and blow up the hub. Bad news.

SETA leaves me feeling dirty, too.

[Spychotic]

Continually switching on and off causes expansion and contraction of the circuits and thus shortens the life .

Not of any of the processing components. CMOS logic only draws power when switching, hence there is no heat generation unless the device is performing computations.

The only things likely to be damaged by thermal expansion are under-designed wires and interconnects in a badly designed power distribution system. Any device should be able to manage at least a trillion on-off cycles before succumbing to any thermally-induced degradation, probably a quadrillion. If you turn your computer off and on a million times a second for four years you might start to notice problems...

More of an issue is inductive transient voltages, though again it would take a badly designed system for transient overvoltage to cause a problem.

</electronic engineering mode>

On topic, loss of combat rank can be advantageous as it makes plots easier to complete, but also a bit less fun!

Spike

[Gazz]

Is there any negatives to letting the game run with you in space somewhere and SETA active while your ST/UT collect the dough?

None that you need to worry about if letting the game play itself is what you enjoy most.

[rpetiger]

Something about SETA, is that if it is set to a high speed, your ability to fight is severely hampered. Even if you are at the keys, having 10X SETA on, and getting a message that one of your ships is under attack, the battle can be over in under a second.

[garv222]

My first game, I used the SETA on over night a few times due to not understanding better ways to gain cash. The more of the universe you explore and the more assets you have, the greater the risk will be in my experience. If you deal only in a small local economy, you might be able to SETA safely for hours on end. I believe during the first 2 weeks of gameplay, I might've gone possibly 20-30 hours of AFK SETA and I didn't lose a single ship.

I was pretty much limited to the north western section of the universe of Argon space and didn't have to worry about many pirates let alone xenon. If I was on the eastern side of the map, I suppose things could've gone much worse.

One other thing that can happen if you SETA over so long a time is that, sectors can get leveled by hostile races. For example, it's not too rare to see Corporate HQs getting leveled over time, which may or may not cause the player trouble.

[pjknibbs]

Thought about just adding onto a thread but the questions usually are not connected in any way. I really wouldnt expect a question about ST/UT to be answered under a combat or station building thread. At least that is my experience.

If you edit the first post you can also change the thread title to something like "Incarnyte's X3 questions" and thus make it obvious the thread is not all going to be about the same subject. We would prefer you did that than to have half-a-dozen threads on the front page of the forum at the same time.

[Triaxx2]

I also notice that that cheating feeling is gone from TC. Partially because the direct trading profits don't seem as big. And partially because the universe is so much more dangerous, the UT's don't survive as well.

Unless you're runnning a massive Fuel/Weed Plex in Elysium with a massive defense fleet and sitting in sector, it just doesn't seem as worth the effort.

[Bobucles]

There's a better reason, I think.

It's so much easier and faster to make credits without using SETA.

[Gazz]

I never understood the motivation behind setting up 30+ UT and going AFK for a game week.
If you want credits for "not playing", why not script the credits?
It's just one line and the outcome is the same.

[Spychotic]

People want money and ranking for minimum effort, ranking which you can't get for going *modified*. That's the rationale, Gazz.

Spike

[devilham]

I've done this plenty (well, not SETA per se, but letting the game run overnight while I am docked), and don't feel too dirty about it. I bought my ships, I gave my orders, they do there things, and when I let them run overnight or while I worked, I came home to a nice chunk of change. Downside is, you get to a point where the amount of sectors you have opened (I am playing X3:R vanilla) changes this dynamic, and you can't do it past 20 or so UT's, as they start going into hostile/invaded sectors (Scale Plate Green I am shaking my fist at you!!!! ....ah, but you are clean now due to my two titans). I guess it depends on how you want to play....I run a trucking business (with a small military presence to protect my interests), so the concept of letting my truckers do their jobs is not very foreign to me in the end. Your mileage may vary, so to speak.

[Lyth]

You'll find as many opinions on the use of SETA as their are players.

Play it how you want too in as many different ways. Only real limiter to over-use is the fact you won't achieve the trade/combat ranks of X-treme. For this you will need to be active and/or doing missions.

(You can get close on the Trade but have achieved the highest trade rank 4 times now and getting the last one has always required a final active push when I've played an RTS style game.)

[kotorone1]

i dont use seta personally, mainly because all my nividium miners would fill up and i wouldn't make any money. Oh, my game hates me so id lose 5-6 cap ships if i used SETA overnight.