I play the latest version of Twilight of the Arnor. Two pretty basic things about spaceship movement I find somewhat annoying:
- When I want to give an order to a spaceship to move to some distant square, only *after* I gave the order it tells me how many weeks it will take. -Why not before?
- When I have given an order to a spaceship to move to some distant square and it is on "autopilot", the next turn (initiated by pressing "enter") after I gave the order nothing seems to happen to that spaceship. Only when I press "enter" *again*, the spaceship will move, apparently still in the same turn in which it seemed to be stalled, and then the game immediately with no pause continues to the following turn. This seems only to be the case in the first turn after the order was given, later the "autopilot" orders seem to be taken as normally within the turn, without the need to press "enter" two times. - Why this behaviour in the first turn after giving a long movement command?
I guess the first didn't seem like a priority when they made the game. To get around it, I often use all of a ship's points, then set the autopilot. If you have the game set to automatically select the next ship with points, you'll need to reselect the ship, then choose your destination. This way you can set the autopilot to use movement points to use up all the available movement points. This can often save you a fraction of a turn at the end of a trip - not always important, but sometimes absolutely vital.
The more rigorous answer to the second question involves when your ship moves during your turn. You get control at the very beginning of your turn - nothing has moved, been built, etc. Autopilot movement happens at the end of your turn, after you've done all the manual controlling for that turn. If you start the ship on autopilot on turn 1, you've already moved all that ship can move for turn 1. This means when you hit Turn, the autopilot can't move it that turn. When turn 2 begins, the ship has all its movement points available, but the autopilot won't use those moves until after you hit Turn for turn 2. This gives the illusion of a turn being wasted.
