Beginning the Ascent to Transcendence: When you can do it.

[Yitzi]

Turns out, you can set production to the Ascent to Transcendence if and only if 3 conditions are met:
1. It is not a custom scenario set to "no secret projects may be built".  The Ascent is a secret project, after all.
2. The Voice of Planet has been built.
3. Higher Goal (the rule allowing victory by transcendence under Custom Rules) is on.

There are a few things in particular that are notably not in there:
A.Not being the Caretakers.  The code has a section "Caretakers cannot build the Voice of Planet or Ascent to Transcendence", but that section does not apply to the Ascent.
B.The Ascent not having already been built.  If the Ascent has already been built (and you kept playing anyway), you cannot complete it again, but you can select it from the build menu.
C.Having the technology marked as its prerequisite.  No matter where you are on the tech tree, once someone builds the Voice, you can build the Ascent.

Now, A and B are clearly bugs.  C is less clear; however, if the executable is changed so that you do require the prerequisite technology, the current system can be restored by setting that technology to None.  (Alternatively, it can be placed elsewhere on the tech tree, so that you need some tech but not all the way.  Or the Voice can be moved down and the Ascent kept at the top, to make it so that there's often some time between finishing the Voice and starting the Ascent.)

Therefore, in version 2.1 of my patch, I will be adding A,B, and C as additional requirements to build the Ascent, but changing the prerequisite to None so that C doesn't actually apply unless you mod it.

[Petek]

Item C is documented in the manual (p. 144):

TRANSCENDENCE
The highest form of victory is the Ascent to Transcendence, the next step in
the evolution of humanity. In order to ascend, you must complete an extraordinary
Secret Project—the Ascent to Transcendence—which can be started only
after at least one faction has completed the Voice of Planet Secret Project.

[Yitzi]

Item C is documented in the manual (p. 144):

TRANSCENDENCE
The highest form of victory is the Ascent to Transcendence, the next step in
the evolution of humanity. In order to ascend, you must complete an extraordinary
Secret Project—the Ascent to Transcendence—which can be started only
after at least one faction has completed the Voice of Planet Secret Project.

The manual isn't clear; it says that you need the Voice of Planet; it doesn't say that you don't also need to have researched Threshold of Transcendence.  That's one of the reasons I'm setting it up so that C, unlike A and B, can be changed or left as is (the default will be as it currently is) by modifying alphax.txt.

[Petek]

Fair enough. Since you're looking at Ascent-related issues, here's a question: What, if anything, does the option Stop for delay in Transcendence (under Warning Preferences) do?

[Buster's Uncle]

I've never seen it happen, but that's got to be one of those pop-ups at the beginning of the turn that give you the "Zoom to base screen" option.

[Petek]

Thanks BUncle. I didn't phrase my question correctly. Let me try again: What, if anything, triggers the event "Stop for delay in Transcendence"?

(The same question was my first post on 'poly nearly 13 years ago (!))

[Buster's Uncle]

Good Lord.

Yeah, I've seen the option on the warning preferences screen a million times, and I can't for the life of me think of anything to trigger it that wouldn't trigger another option - I mean, something happening to cause your mineral production to go down to zero or less would delay Transcendence all right, but there's already an option for negative minerals.  -Hey!  That's gotta be it - zero minerals wouldn't trigger the latter, but certainly would delay Transcendence...

[Yitzi]

Fair enough. Since you're looking at Ascent-related issues, here's a question: What, if anything, does the option Stop for delay in Transcendence (under Warning Preferences) do?

No idea; the part about when you can begin the Ascent is in the rules for when you can build a project/facility, not warnings.

My guess, though, is that it will stop for drone riots or starvation (which also prevents production, due to factories being abandoned) in a base that is building the Ascent (and maybe even the Voice), even if you have it set to not stop for riots/starvation in general.