Beta 3E

Fog of war bug is happening a lot... I've been pressing ctrl-r quite a bit. Some tech descriptions (when you're looking at them deciding what to research) get cut off and you can't scroll down to read them... I think that's all I've noticed...

Other than that I've been having no problems with this build!

Pretty good build, although I have noticed a few bugs and quirks.

The sliders on the economic screen don't seem to be working correctly all the time. At one stage in my game I wanted to change my military spending from 33% to 0% but for some unknown reason when my slider was at 0%, my revenue per turn went down even furthur.

Another bug I noticed was when I was happily doing some researching for a few turns when one of the minor races decided to declare war on me. So within a few turns some ships from the minor race started attacking my solar systems. As a result of this, two of the major races sent a message to me saying "You attacked , as a result we shall declare war against you" (something along those lines). Now I assume this is a bug as I was only defending myself from their attacks.

One thing that bugs me about the game so far is that enemy civilizations tend to surrender way to easily. I know with my current game that within 10 turns, 2 minor races surrendered to one of the major races and a major race decided to surrender to a minor race.

Cultural takeover of solar systems also seem to be far to easy as within a few turns multiple solar systems can defect to the opposing side. Perhaps this is how its meant to be?

I've also been getting a few "String not found" messages from other races where I assume would be declaration of war messages.

If I go into the Foreign Policity Menue and haved already the Minor Racees Selected the Race Sign Pictures are missing.

The Arcean acting Strange in the curent game I play.
I found them but dont have them on the Major or Minor Race Screen so that I only can talk to them if I direkt klick on the speak to at the Planet. The Arcean have also only 1 planet and no ships!

The Scottlingas(minor race) have already colonized at last 5 systems in diferent sectors where every major race (except me) have only colonized max 3 planets.

I think it would be best if the minor AIs can colonize outside theyr starting sector if you can select if you whant them in a game or not if you start a new game.

The AIs (at last from the Minor Races) us still the old Techtree witch is a major AI advance.

well the minor races seem to be a bit too strong heh, the alexians in my current game seem to be rolling out Battle cruisers at an enormous rate, i didnt notice till a dozen of them decided to take a walk through my territory heh

The Message that says thet the Cuncile comes together next moth come up after the Voting is done this is 1 month to late .

The Technologic Advancment and Manufacturing Statistic (Graphical View) dont work (at last if you are Evil).

The minor races still don't stay in their own sectors but rampage over the galaxy. Also and I believe this was noted before I will at times find myself in alliances and wars I didnt start and had no message telling me I was in it. Just will either get a message from my ally or get the message that you are at war with such and such we also declair on you.

I haven't had any problems with the minor races expanding. One did have the most powerful military, but it didn't do anything aggressive. In fact, I think this is a nice addition since I've never seen it before, was one gave me a bunch of ships to help fight my war.

On the war note, I noticed a bit of a bug. The Yor declared war on me, but they had a couple battle cruisers that I couldn't attack, nor could they attack me. When I tried, we just occupied the same space as if we were from the same civ.

I've also had some problems with my constructors. Nothing major, just silly. When I send them to upgrade a starbase, they come out of autopilot and stop a couple spaces short of the base. This happens with almost every constructor that I send.

I definitely like the addition of the pirates. I do have a question about them though. Is there a reason why they are only preying on my planets and starships?

I did come across a rather strange glitch too. I was fairly close to the end of the game, and I had been playing for quite a while (say 4-5 hours). I didn't notice anything that started it, but on the main screen the little info panel that either has ship information or planet info, domestic info....etc. When I clicked on a ship it had the gaud and sentry info superimposed on the domestic info. I didn't have any more info about the ship and when I moved the ship, it indicated it was on autopilot, but didn't move it. The ships would only move after I had clicked the turn button. The autoturn was on too. On top of that it stopped tell me when production was finished. This continued for a while and instantly stopped when the topic that I was researching completed. The info panel was fixed, the ships behaved normally and I was again being told when my production completed.

Overall though , I think things are becoming better balanced. The minor races are (as far as I've seen) keeping to themselves and not dominating as they did before. I've won the games I've played so far with 3e (granted only 2 played) but I didn't win them as I did previously because the other races were taken out by the minor races, usually the Bradians. So I'm liking the progress so far.

I have run into a few things that are interesting.

I have noticed that after the second election I my party didn't win and it has a "String not found" in the description and every time after that. This is simmilar to what others have seen, but it didn't seem like they were seeing it in this place.

The other strange thing was one game I played had a Space Shark in it. When I selected it and pressed the info button the game totaly locked up. I had to kill the program to get out of it.

Also, in another game I decided to try to be a member of the technogist party. I didn't seem to notice it helping my reasearch any, but it is hard to tell. I wasn't watching and I ended up going into major negitive in the treasury, which I hadn't had a problem with before. Then I noticed that I couldn't build anything because of no resources avalable. Soon after that the major race ( who was suppost to be a "good" race ) declared war on me. I was pretty much helpless at this point so I decided to stick it out and see if I could work myself out of this mess. Eventually, all my planets were captured, but the game did't seem to end in any way. Not sure if that is the way it is suppost to work or not.

'The sliders on the economic screen don't seem to be working correctly all the time. At one stage in my game I wanted to change my military spending from 33% to 0% but for some unknown reason when my slider was at 0%, my revenue per turn went down even furthur.'

Two possible reasons:

One, reducing military spending to 0%, without putting most/all of that on social spending reduces total production, which seems to affect your income. You can't tax nothing.

Two: Military spending also includes ship upkeep, and thus can't be reduced to 0 bc unless all you have in your fleet are zero maintanence ships.

Found a wierd bug with the pirates. They started attacking my planets, but ignoring my ships. When I tried to attack them, my ships wouldn't attack (similar to the effect when you try and drive a constructor over another race's station).
I have a saved and zipped game that shows this behaviour.

I found a bug with pirates. One of the minor races surrendered to the pirates. The pirate world was a class 31 planet and undefended so I had to have it. Every time I tried to invade the planet the game crashed.

arturus Magi said "Two: Military spending also includes ship upkeep, and thus can't be reduced to 0 bc unless all you have in your fleet are zero maintanence ships."

While this sounds like a good idea that maybe they should include in the game it does not explain the extent of this behavior at the start of the game. And I suspect you missed a post Brad made on this subject recently. As I recall the jist of what he said is that you have differing skills in any society and to shift all spending to take advantage of only one or two of those skills results in wasted resources (the people kind), and is hence reflected in the taxable income of the work force.

Very nice. poor opponents (i mean not aggresive) at default settings. Which is probably right, but I used to struggle at the default levels as they attacked me early. I am either getting better or this has much changed - no view one way or the other, just a report. I must try boosting the AI skills in my next game.

bugs and 'improvements'-

a) overall happiness button on the starmap graphs
bar along the bottom (under icons) showing research progress
c) a way to 'jump to' selected ships destination (and back) quickly (or see it on nav-map)
d) a dot or dash next to planet-side shield (dot-warship,dash-other?) to signify the number of units on station round planet
e) ability to 'mark location' (like in RPG maps) this would be great for returning to interesting spots such as planets anomalies or resources.
f) more interestintg consequences of entering wormholes (simple one would be death or transfer ship to enemy race)

G) Diplomacy - ability to converse with other races to say "do not attack planet/race" with consequences being "WAR" or "cash/trade/culture"
h) please fade the starmap gridlines back into space a bit
i) BUG disband calls up rename ship as does Guard
j) it would be great to upgrade ships at stations/planets with shipyards (1.x?)
k) tri-strontium upgrade etc shows ships as damaged????
l) It would be great to boost planet pop with additional colony ships (1.x?)
m) overlapping coloured circles obscure smaller planet circles for exampel for population PLEASE would it be possible to use translucent colours or rings rather than solid circles? don't know how this would look aesthetically

n) To me this is important. When selecting planetary projects I would LOVE to see a grapghical representation (a construction mini-map) of where that planet is in space. Often when u get a pop-up, what determines what you build is dependent upon where the planet is in space.
o) spacestation upgrades - same as above
p) when u get a series of projects, if you implement one, click next then think 'hang on' and want to go back, the last one is not the last one you looked at (its probably the last one in the planet file order?)

s

I don't know if this is supposed to happen or not, but my ships in one game all of a sudden had MASSIVE sensor range... this coincided with when I had to start hitting ctrl-r to see my ships under the fog... the only resource I was harvesting was the research one. Is it suppost to increase sensor range or anything?

Are people actually commenting on Beta 3E?

having read all of above posts properly now.

Please! add a version number onto the startup screen (beta3) is not helpful to testers who have platyed over 5 versions of beta3!). I realise this is a bit late now.

Pirates? havn't seen any and have played for hours! I alway play biggest map available - is that significant?

This game MUST have a slider for negotiation of the cash aspects of trade rather than the numeric input it has. As well as being a pain to input this brings the game down and miss-represents its quality. Anyone else have the slightest interest in this? If not I will give up (as with Fleet bonuses )

S

Well, you know you have the current Beta if there is no "install" graphic in the DGM... now I don't run the game from there all the time, but they make it pretty clear on the boards when a new version is available.

As for pirates I havn't seen them either... but they are random, not suppost to be in every game.

I've played several games with a variety of large and amusing bugs. The last game was the most fun. At some point late in the game, my influence flipped up to 4 digits in most alien sectors. That is, while my best worlds had values like 45, 88 and such, on all alien worlds all over the map it went to 4000+, in one case to 10000+. Needless to say, I won the game as 3-5 planets/turn joined my side.

Related bug: one planet joined me, and the former owner invaded and reconquered it without declaring war on me.

Numerous crashes to desktop, one full reboot of my Win2k system.

Other notes: when there is a window popped up, don't let "return" end the turn, make it close the popup. Very annoying. When I get a "ship finished" message, double click on the message should take me to the ship, not to the construction queue of the planet. If there is a way to see what is already built on a planet, I don't know what it is. It would be nice to see explored/unexplored in the minimap, rather than have I/have I not peeped into a sector. Let me zoom the main map in and out - I don't need the view as close up as it is. I've not seen any pirates either.

Whew! Long post!

Scott

This is terrific feedback. Going to print this out and see what we can do. I need to make a post about the economic formulas because we'd really like to hear your views on this.

Here are some more Beta 3E bugs for your enjoyment

I thought I would mention for what it is worth, that I saw a simmilar thing with pirate ships at "Dtonn" saw. The wierd thing was it seemed like I couldn't attack any other races ( including pirates ) "Battle Crusers" 95% of the time. If I messed around enouph I would sometimes get lucky and be able to attack them , but why I have no clue. Otherwize the attacking ship would just make a invalid like buzz and go into the same tile as the enemy ship. I couldn't be certain if this would have been the case on other types of ships too. I ened up resorting in leting them try to attack one of my colanies in order to get rid of them...

After a long game I somehow got into this state where the information dialog was locked between two states with the help guy with the hat (TV looking screen with text next to it ) instead of displaying the ship dialog you have selected. After this happend I wasn't able to move any more of my ships around. I had to give up the game at that point... OH well.

This other thing I found is minor, but in the screen where you select what Alignment/intelegence ect. If you start cliking on the pictures you can get them to blank out and the decription changes to another race. Continued clicking toggles between this state.

'This other thing I found is minor, but in the screen where you select what Alignment/intelegence ect. If you start cliking on the pictures you can get them to blank out and the decription changes to another race. Continued clicking toggles between this state.'

That's not a bug. That is how you remove races from the game at the start. You can start with as few as one major AI, plus the minors as determined by the size of the galaxy.

Yep you are right about that, my bad... Anyway, I wonder if there should be some text or something indicating that race is being removed from the game to make it more clear. That is my 2 cents anyway. It just seemed wierd to me otherwize.

On the mini map could you please give the Altarians a different color of blue for the sectors they control. It drives me nuts when I start next to them and can't tell with a quick look who owns what sectors.